S'More Cookies and a Giveaway

I am such a slacker. I mentioned that I'd be having a giveaway in my last post and then got completely sidetracked by other stuff, well wait no more! I'm officially opening up the giveaway for entry and the prize is a $50 GC to anything your little heart desires from CSN Stores. For example, it could go a long way towards getting a few (and I mean very few, these things are pricey!) of these adorable little guys or maybe a dozen of these cuties. And all you have to do to throw your hat into the ring is:

1. Leave a comment telling me what you'd get with your $50 CSN Stores GC. It doesn't have to be food related, but hey, that's what my blog is about, so let's face it, it probably will be ;)
2. Make sure you leave contact information in your post! Be it your email or a link to your blog/site/profile where I can find your email. If I don't have a way to contact you in 2 days after the contest closes, I'll be forced to pick a different winner...and quite frankly that involves more work for me. Have I mentioned the laziness?
3. Bonus Entry: A friend has recently asked me for gluten and dairy free recipes and while I have one, I'm seriously lacking in that department. So, if any of you have good recipes you're willing to share or great sites you know of (my favorite so far is the infamous Mrs. Tartlette), let me know and I will give you an extra chance to win!

You have until midnight CST on March 7th to get in your entries. Good luck!

Contest is now closed and the winner will be announced shortly. Thank you all for participating!

Whew! And now onto the reason you guys come here, the recipe! There isn't much of a story that goes with these, I felt like making S'More cookies, so I did. I had a box of graham crackers lying around and I whipped up a batch of strawberry marshmallows to fill. Dunked into a vat of melted chocolate and allowed to dry these were pretty good. I might pipe on a lot more marshmallow onto these next time and maybe slip in an extra disk of chocolate, but they were quite tasty as is.



S'More Cookies
Marshmallow recipe from Martha herself

Graham Crackers, carefully broken into squares
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
1/4 cups granulated sugar
1/3 cup seedless strawberry jam or jelly
1/3 cup light corn syrup
Dash of salt
Chocolate for dipping

1. Arrange the graham cracker squares on a flat surface. You want them to be ready once the marshmallow fluff is done or it will start to set before you get a chance to pipe.
2. Pour 1/3 cup cold water into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Sprinkle with gelatin; let stand until softened, 5 minutes.
3. Stir together granulated sugar, jam, corn syrup, salt, and 1/4 cup water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring often. Continue to boil until syrup registers 238 degrees on a candy thermometer (soft-ball stage).
4. Add syrup to gelatin. Beat on low speed until slightly cooled. Gradually raise speed to high, beating until mixture is cool and peaks form, 20 to 30 minutes. You can mix in red food coloring if you like, one drop at a time, to achieve desired shade of pink, but I skipped it and still got a very soft pink hue.
5. Working quickly, spoon the fluff into a pastry bag fitted with a large plain round tip and pipe a square of fluff just inside the edges of each graham cracker.
6. Let the marshmallow set for an hour or so to dry. Melt the chocolate in the microwave in 30 second intervals, or in a bain marie, and start dunking. I only wanted the chocolate on top but you can do whatever you like here. Dunk the top or the whole thing, it's up to you. I also sprinkled a few graham cracker crumbs on top to make it pretty(and cover up my bumpy marshmallow piping job).
7. Allow the chocolate to set either on the counter at room temp, or slide the tray into the fridge/freezer for a few minutes to speed things up.

That's it! You now have perfectly portable S'More Cookies. Enjoy :D

On Creme Brulee and Breakfast Whimsy

Before I start, could I insert a touch of randomness here? The good folks over at CSN have reached out to me about hosting another giveaway! They have basically everything you could possibly imagine, everything from pretty blue dutch ovens to outdoor playsets, so this should be exciting. But you know what they don't have? Sadly they don't carry these adorable egg molds. I got two of them forever ago and due to the chaos that is my kitchen I only found them this weekend. The occasion called for soft boiled eggs for breakfast:



Yep, that's an egg shaped like a fish. Isn't that the cutest thing ever? Totally useless though, not like that certain something special the winner would be able to get with their gift card....but onto the topic at hand!

There are so many things I haven't tried to make because I was afraid of failure, but no more! I have been afraid of Creme Brulee for far too long, so for Valentine's day I invited some friends and put it on the menu. After a brief, and completely irrational, moment of panic about trying something completely new with a whole dinner on the line, I set about finding that perfect recipe with the most fool-proof instructions and with the 115% swoon guarantee. And you know what I learned? Aside from infusing the cream to change the flavors to almost anything from basil to raspberry to matcha, the base recipe stayed basically the same. There were a few ratio differences, of course, but the the core elements were the same, and there were so few of them! Simplicity itself, right? So I used them all. I took notes, I wrote down inspirations, and I came up with this recipe...which I've now made 4 times. I've never gone through this much heavy cream before. And since they say that color means flavor, I just had to incorporate a bit of it in here as well.

Please excuse the crappy picture, I literally took this on my way out the door before work, and if you know me at all, you'll know that I was running late.


Creme Brulee with Color
I pulled ideas from so many places that I can't really give credit to any one, so I'm going to say this one is mine, with the world wide web as inspiration.

1/2 cup vanilla sugar*
6 egg yolks
2 Tbsp molasses (regular, not dark)
1 vanilla bean, or 1 Tbsp of Nielsen-Massey Pure Vanilla Bean Paste, which is awesome
pinch of salt
2 cups heavy cream
extra vanilla sugar for topping

* You can totally use plain sugar here, but I keep a jar of sugar into which I toss in my used up vanilla bean pods and I finally found a use for it!

- Preheat the oven to 350F and place 6 ramekins into a deep baking pan.
- Bring a teapot full of water to boil and keep on the side.
- Whisk first 5 ingredients (not the cream) in a bowl and set aside. If you're using a vanilla bean, scrape out the insides into the mix, let the outside dry out and then start a jar of vanilla sugar for next time :D
- Bring the cream to simmer in a slow pot and whisking the entire time slowly temper it into the sugar/yolk mixture by adding it a little at a time.
- Once all the cream has been tempered in, pour the mixture into the ramekins. Then pour the boiling water into the pan reaching halfway up the ramekin sides, being careful to keep the water out of the cream.
- Carefully slide the pan into the oven and set the timer to 30 min. You want a the custard to set a bit, but still be jiggly.
- Carefully slide the pan out of the oven and allow everything to cool before you remove the ramekins. Let them come to room temp, then cover with saran wrap and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.
- When ready to eat, sprinkle sugar in a thin and even layer on top and go to town with your torch, or slide them under the broiler for a few seconds.
- Don't forget to share!

Caramelized Pecans and a Simple Salad

Ignoring my craft closet, which is quietly busting at the seams, I've decided to pick up two more hobbies. I can't help myself, textiles and design and all things pretty call to me and I want to try making them all. So now I can tack on quilting and letterpress to my "I know a bit about how to do that" list. I bribed a sewing genius of a friend with food to help me with my color circle quilt and it's really starting to take shape, which is making me super excited. Once it looks a bit more like an actual quilt, I'll share pictures with you guys, I promise. And as a belated holiday gift to myself I signed up for letterpress classes at a local studio. It's still too early to tell if I'm any good at that, but you can be sure that next year's holiday caramels will come in pretty hand stamped packages.

As you can imagine, all of this leaves me with very little time for cooking and one thing I've been making a lot of around here is salad. I like making salad, layering the ingredients, balancing the toppings to make it look pretty, but I don't actually like eating it. I don't know, it just seems like so much chewing for not so much flavor or satisfaction. It's good for you though, so in an effort to be healthier I've been trying to come up with ways to make salads more exciting.

The first thing I did was to buy a small bottle of the very best, the uber yummy, thick and syrupy balsamic vinegar. There were days when I used to smother everything in ranch, but ever since I moved past the cheap grocery store balsamic, I haven't looked back. My current obsession is with the aged blackberry and ginger balsamic I bought at the French market a month ago. It's so good, I don't even temper it with olive oil. And on standby I have 18 year aged balsamic from Old Town Oil, which is also fantastic.



I top a bowl of mixed greens with crumbled goat cheese, sometimes little chunks of marinated beets, sometimes dried cranberries, but always with candied pecans. I don't know why, but even a few of these babies never fail to make me actually want to eat the big pile of greens underneath. And there's no reason to spend $10 for a tiny bag of candied pecans either when all it really takes is some sugar and some raw or lightly toasted pecans to make them yourself.

Just set aside a silpat or lightly greased cookie sheet, dump a half a cup of sugar into a pan and set aside a cup of pecans. You can toast your pecans or leave them raw, I've done it both ways and it really comes down to how lazy I'm being at the moment, it's delicious either way.

Try to keep the sugar in the pan in a nice thin and even layer, then crank up the heat and don't go anywhere! I keep the heat on high, but you may want to turn it down a little bit your first few times. It will take the sugar a little while to get going, but once it starts things go pretty fast and burned sugar smells horrible.



It will take a while, but eventually the sugar will start looking like wet sand and then slowly will start to melt around the edges. DO NOT STIR IT! Don't swirl the pan, don't even touch the spoon and for goodness sakes don't go anywhere.



As the sugar starts to melt more you're going to see a bit of color development around the edges and there will still be some un-melted sugar in the middle, but at this point you're still okay, so just stick around and watch.



Once you get here, if you're really starting to get nervous, you can carefully nudge the hot sugar towards the un-melted pile, but don't stir or you'll end up with clumps. If you do get clumps, turn the heat down a bit and keep stirring until everything is even. Just be sure that you don't let the color get too dark. As soon as you reach a nice deep amber color like I have here, take the pan off the heat.

This, by the way, is also the first step to making caramel. If you were doing this in a deeper pot, you could CAREFULLY add cream a little at a time, stirring like mad, and you'll end up with yummy caramel topping. You could also add boiling water, also carefully and also a little at a time and also stirring like crazy, to make a caramel flavored simple syrup...which I'd imagine would make for some fantastic cocktails. Or you could keep going and stick with the salad plan. Up to you.



Working very quickly, stir in your pecans and spread everything out on your Silpat or greased sheet. The cooked sugar will set quickly so the faster you get this done, the easier and less messy things will go. Do not touch the sugar! It's basically boiling lava and it will hurt like nothing else, so don't touch anything until it's completely cooled.



Once the sugar has cooled completely you can break apart the pieces and top your salad...or just eat them straight, but that would defeat the salad point.



P.S. My friend asked me to tell everyone that if something should go wrong during the caramelizing process and you burn the sugar, do not pour the hot bubbly mess down the drain. The sugar will seize and clog the drain. Then you will panic and break your favorite fork trying to chip away the clog, and then fill the sink with boiling water and hope that everything melts before your boyfriend shows up and laughs at you. The best thing to do is to just let the mess cool a bit in the pan and then soak the pan in hot water. It will come right out and then you can try again.

Every Day Quinoa

I wish I could give you some amazing story about what I've been up to this past month that has kept me away from this blog; some grand adventure that taught me the ultimate recipe to living. The truth, however, is much more Anna-esque: I lost the USB cord to my camera and haven't been uploading pics. ***cricket noises*** I know, I know, I'm ashamed. Especially since it ended up being neatly rolled up in my organized box of cords. See? New Years resolutions of being more organized have upset my sense of order in chaos.

Despite the lack of online presence, I have been quite busy these past few weeks. There were cakes and cookies and spreads made, and now that the pictures are on my computer I'll tell you about all of them, but the very first thing I want to share is the dish I make whenever I'm at home in the afternoon. Whenever my fridge declares that if all I put in is celery then what the heck can I expect to pull out, but celery? P.S. I am not a fan of celery and yet the sucker keeps finding it's way into my home. As long as I can convince an avocado to join me for a meal, this dish gets made. It's extremely fast, it's super easy, it's all made in one pot, and I daresay it's even sort of healthy. Sort of.

Can I tell you something? Don't laugh at me, okay? Ever since I learned this technique for cutting up avocados, every time I do it I feel like a genius. I know that probably everyone in the universe already knows how to do this, but it never fails to make me feel like I invented the technique. I'm even willing to share:

1. Cut an avocado in half around the pit and twist the two halves to separate.
2. Holding the avocado in one hand (keeping your fingers, palm, etc. as out of the way as possible unless you really like that cute nurse in ER and would like stitches) whack the knife into the pit and twist it out. This part will make you feel like a ninja. Feel free to make "hiyaaaa" noises, I won't tell.
3. Take the knife and slice the avocado flesh while it's still in the shell and then just scoop out perfectly cut cubes with a spoon. No mess, no chasing slimy avocado across the cutting board (or washing said cutting board), nothing but perfect little cubes:



Ta daaaa!

Okay, sorry. I told you I get very excited about cutting up avocados. Lets agree that I'm a dork and move on with the recipe.

I found this recipe over at Tea & Cookies almost a year ago, and I remember immediately going to the store and getting a box of quinoa and a bottle of Ponzu sauce, neither of which have ever stepped foot in my kitchen before that. The recipe comes from China Forbes, lead singer of Pink Martini, whom I've discovered long ago and whose "Dosvedanya Mio Bombino" and "Hang on Little Tomato" have been in heavy rotation on my iPod for years. The recipe itself is warm and comforting, smooth and salty, a little bit sushi-esque, and altogether delicious. Try it, you'll like it.



China Forbes Quinoa with Avocado
via Tea & Cookies

1/2 cup uncooked quinoa (red, black or yellow will work great)
1/2 slightly firm avocado, or more as desired
2 tbs Ponzu (Japanese soy/citrus sauce)
1 tsp sesame oil
Squirt of Siracha chili sauce to taste
Handful of nori strips (or just cut a regular sheet with scissors)

Cook the quinoa in 1 cup water according to package instruction. Basically bring to a boil and simmer for about 20 minutes until the water is absorbed. Yellow quinoa will get soft, black quinoa stays a bit firm and seedy.

Drizzle in the ponzu, sesame oil, and chili sauce right into the pot, stir in and dump into one or two pretty bowls (depending on how hungry or willing to share you are). Cut the avocado in chunks and dump on top. Sprinkle with nori strips. Stir, eat, and swoon.

Brioche Peach Butts Revisited

That's right, I said peach butts. And if you can look at these and tell me that all you see are pastries or peaches then you have a much cleaner way of thinking then me or any of my friends, and therefore are probably not as fun. I made these a few years ago and kept insisting that they were peaches not butts, but after a while I gave in. It's more fun this way anyways.

But back to the pastry, these consist of fluffy brioche filled with peach schnapps spiked pastry cream, dipped in apricot jam and rolled in sugar. After sitting for a while the pastry cream and the jam work at the brioche from inside and out making it even more tender and flavorful. I got the original recipe from Roland Mesnier's Basic to Beautiful Cakes, but it took me a while to figure out that recipes in books can't always be trusted. I had to adjust the oven temperature by a whole lot in order to not burn these:



I was going to pose these beauties and take glamor shots, but they were ordered during the insanely hectic week before Christmas, and when I finally wrapped them all up all I wanted to do was go to sleep. I did save one for myself as a treat, but if you want to see what they should look like, you should go back to my original post. This was the moment I halfheartedly remembered to take a picture of the end product from this batch. As you can see, even photographers need to be fed.



The recipes for both the peaches and the pastry cream are out there online in the book previews, which is why I didn't feel too badly about putting them here, but I'd still recommend you go and get the book. Even if some of the recipes need adjustments, it's full of great ideas and wonderful inspiration.

Brioche Peaches
adapted from Roland Mesnier's Basic to Beautiful Cakes

1.5 tsp salt
5 Tbsp sugar
6 Tbsp warm water
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 oz dry yeast (or 1 oz fresh or about 2.5 tsp)
5 large eggs
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
2.5 cups pastry cream (recipe below)
2 cup of your favorite apricot jam. Preferably one without too many chunks.
Red food coloring
about 2 cups sugar for coating
If you're feeling fancy you can make stems, leaves, ladybugs, what have you out of marzipan to decorate, but it's not necessary and will not camouflage the fact that they still look like fuzzy butts.

- Combine the salt, sugar and 2 Tablespoons of warm water in a stand mixer bowl fitted with a dough hook. Stir up a bit to dissolve the salt and sugar, but don't worry about it too much. Add the flour and stir to combine.
- In a small bowl, combine the remaining 4 Tablespoons of warm water and yeast and let stand until it dissolves and becomes foamy.
- With the mixer on medium speed, add 4 of the eggs one at a time. Continue to stir for 5-7 minutes, until the dough is smooth and very firm.
- With the mixer still on medium, carefully add the last egg and then the yeast mixture. Turn the mixer down to low and mix for 15 minutes. Everything will look sloppy and watery at first, but don't worry, it'll come together.
- With the mixer still on low, add the butter a few tablespoons at a time, letting each addition get completely incorporated before you add more. Once it's all in there the dough should be glossy and elastic.
- Cover the bowl loosely with a piece of saran wrap and a clean kitchen towel and let it stand in a warm, draft-free spot for about an hour and a half, until it has doubled in size.
- Make the pastry cream while the dough is rising.
- Deflate the dough by flipping it a few times in the bowl, cover it again with the saran wrap and towel and place in the fridge overnight, or no longer then 24 hours. Don't put the saran wrap on too tight or you'll stop the dough from growing. I added it just to avoid a skin from forming on the dough.
- The next day, line one or two baking sheets with parchment or a silpat, and either roll the dough into walnut sized pieces or use a small scoop to make the dough balls (personally I like the scoop because it keeps the sizes fairly uniform) and place the balls on the baking sheets at least 2 inches apart, squashing them a little bit on top with your palm. Lightly drape the sheets with saran wrap and let stand in a warm spot until they've doubled in size. As the dough rises, it might not do so uniformly, so you may want to take a butter knife and reshape the balls a bit before baking.
- Here is where I GREATLY disagree with the recipe given. The recipe says to bake the balls at 425F for 12-15 min, but that seems wildly wrong and when I tried it, everything burned. After several batches and experimentation, I found that baking them at 350F for 11 - 12 minutes produces perfect results, every time.
- Let the balls cool completely and then using a serrated butter knife gut the suckers. Okay okay, carefully cut out quarter sized holes in the bottoms of the brioche balls, pull out and make a bit of room for the pastry cream. The recipe recommends freezing the brioche and using a melon baller, but I found that to be messy and time consuming.
- Fill each half with pastry cream using a pastry bag or a zippy with the corner cut off, match halves to eachother and squash them together, wiping away any filling that oozes out. You want a bit to ooze out because that means the two halves are nicely sealed together.
- Put about 2 cups of sugar into a shallow bowl and keep it close by.
- Bring the apricot jam to a boil in a small pan with a bit of water if it's too thick and push it though a fine mesh strainer into a bowl.
- Transfer 1/4 cup of the jam into a smaller bowl and add one or two drops of the red food coloring into it.
- With a pastry brush cover each "peach" with the plain jam, dabbing a bit of the colored jam on the sides to give it a slight blush, and immediately roll in the sugar. Attach stem, leaf, ladybug if using.
- You can eat it right away, but I find it to be better after it had a chance to sit for a bit. As long as it's in a tightly covered container and as long as you let it come to room temp before eating, you can even keep these in the fridge for a few days.


Pastry Cream
Also from same book with a few very minor tweaks

7 Tbsp sugar
1/2 Tbsp pure vanilla extract
1/4 cup plus 1 Tbsp cornstarch
Pinch of salt
3 large eggs, or 4 large egg yolks
2 cups whole milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled
2 Tbsp peach schnapps (or any other liquor you like)

- Stir together the sugar and cornstarch together in a medium bowl. Whisk in the eggs or egg yolks.
- Bring the milk to a boil in a large saucepan. Slowly dribble 1/2 cup of the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Dribble another 1/2 cup of the milk into the egg mixture, again whisking constantly.
- Whisk the egg mixture back into the milk and return the pan to the heat. Bring to a full boil, whisking constantly until it has thickened. Remove the pan from the heat and pour the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer into a bowl. Stir in the vanilla, salt, butter and liquor. Cover with plastic wrap, making sure that the plastic is touching the surface of the pastry cream to avoid a skin from forming, and allow to cool completely. Refrigerate for up to 2 days.