Foiled Again!

Why would I make a simple Christmas dessert? Moreover, why would I make two simple Christmas desserts? Simple is way overrated. What better way to celebrate the holidays than with Christmas Tree Brownies and a festively decorated cheesecake? Now I know that Christmas was almost a month ago but since my Christmas tree and decorations are still up, this post totally qualifies as being part of the Christmas season. Onward!

My first mission: Christmas tree brownies for Christmas eve. I was a bit short of time so I decided to go with a boxed brownie mix. Because ya know, that's easy. WRONG. This little box of Duncan Hines almost defeated me. First, I opted for fudgy brownies instead of cakey brownies so that they'd be easier to cut. Then I had to add the egg, water, and vegetable oil. Three ingredients. Just three. How hard is that? As I was stirring my mixture, it seemed really thin and grainy. As if there were way too little to fit in my pan. My solution was to whisk harder to try to make it less grainy. I even triple-checked the box to make sure I had gotten all of the quantities correct. But I had so I said to myself "well, I don't make boxed brownies very often. Maybe the fudgy kind is just really thin?"

So I went about preparing my pan. In my narcissistic re-read of my own past blog posts, I remembered the tin foil sling trick for brownies. This is the trick where you place tin foil one direction across the pan and place another sheet the other direction so that when the baking is done you can just lift the brownies out of the pan and slice them without a mess. This has worked well in the past and seemed critical for cutting Christmas tree-shaped brownies. I made the sling and I Pam-ed the pan and poured my brownie mix into the pan. It barely reached the edges of the pan. I was starting to get a little distressed. I thought for sure these brownies would burn to a crisp! There just wasn't enough batter! I quadruple-checked the pan size at this point (just to be extra sure) and lo and behold, that was correct too! What was going on???

Finally, I threw up my hands, said "if they burn, they burn", and went about cleaning the bowl while the oven preheated. As I was filling the bowl with water, I looked on the counter and sitting there MOCKING me was the measuring cup filled with the vegetable oil. That's right, I measured the vegetable oil but did not add it. Idiot. Now I have a wet bowl, a measuring cup of oil, and a tin-foil sling-ed pan filled with incomplete brownie batter. [Damn, I'm very annoyed because I had written the ENTIRE blog post but for some bizarre reason, it only saved to this point! Let's see how fast I can rewrite it!] Hokay. So. Picture (if you dare) the comical image of the baker picking up the foil sling and ever so slowly letting the batter run from the foil back to the bowl. And then trying to scrape the remaining batter off the foil with a spatula without ripping it because I am just way too lazy to redo the foil slinging process that takes approximately three seconds. Blasphemy! On the bright side, the batter looked much more like brownie batter after I added the oil.

Into the oven, demon brownies.

I'm always amazed at how well the foil sling works. After the brownies cooled, I flipped the whole thing onto a cutting board with no issues at all. It was magical. Then it was time for the cutting and decorating. For those of you who don't know, a Christmas tree brownie consists of a triangle-shaped brownie with a broken candy cane stem, green icing piped in squiggles, sugar ball ornaments, and a sugar star. Did I mention they're small? So this was the sort of tedium that calls for reinforcements. At this point, I had my sister breaking off the curved parts of the mini candy canes, my mom piping the green icing (after I tried and failed to figure out how to work the bizarre piping tip), and me leading the charge of applying the tiny ornaments and stars. Tedious but adorable! Look how cute they are!

They tasted pretty good too, once I scraped all of the decorations off. I can't help it! I'm a brownie purist! Anyway, these were super easy to make if you're not an idiot, and were very festive and beloved by all.

So that took care of Christmas eve dessert. Now to prepare Christmas day dessert! This was my typical exercise in declining expectations. I started out planning to make a peppermint chocolate cheesecake. Then my mom said she didn't want peppermint. Ooooook, I'll downgrade to a regular cheesecake with a chocolate ganache, festively decorated. Oh wait, my mom doesn't want chocolate ganache either. FINE. How about a chocolate graham cracker crust on a standard cheesecake? Nope. Apparently we're on a chocolate hiatus. So we landed on a regular good ol' fashioned cheesecake decorated with mini candy canes (because I already had them) and peppermint bark (as an homage to my original plan).

There's nothing too interesting about making a cheesecake at this point. The only interesting thing was that I was a little bit lazy and procrastinate-y so I was frantically trying to finish baking said cheesecake while also preparing to go to Christmas eve dinner. I kinda forgot how long cheesecakes take to cook. There was also a bit of an incident where the oven decided to say it was preheating and was stuck on a low heat for an abnormally long time. I had to reset the oven halfway through baking. Also, the last step of the recipe involved letting the cake cool in the oven with the door open for 30 minutes before removing. By the time I reached that step, it was time to leave. So I just left the cake in the oven with the door open and called it a day until we got back home. There's a chance it was overbaked. It was a bit denser than usual so who knows?

On to decorating! I planned to press the mini candy canes around the edge of the cheesecake but they would. not. stick. And I didn't feel like destroying my cheesecake. So I just poked them in the top in a circle. And then the middle had very artistically broken pieces of extra artistic peppermint bark. It should be in MOMA. Or maybe you could just judge for yourself:

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering: if you intend to decorate your cheesecake with mini candy canes and then you plan to refrigerate it for several hours before serving, you just might end up with the candy canes bleeding red and white whatever candy canes are made of all over the cake and turning into a sticky mess. Not like I'd know about that or anything. Anyway, Merry (belated) Christmas (but it's still January so close enough!) So ends another holiday baking adventure.

A Disney Moment: The Princess and the Frog

Oh thank goodness for good movies! It's like coming up for air! I saw this movie in theaters when it came out (as an adult with my friend who is also an adult) and I unashamedly cried in the theater. For those of you who don't know, this was the first movie in a looooooong time to bring back the hand drawn animation. And I love it.

And then there's the music which is so fun. And the villain song which is creepy but fun but also smart (something that's been lacking for a while). And the horrifying death of a main character. And a princess that has a can-do spirit! And and and...well, I gush. To me, it's just really beautiful. If I have to go ahead and pick a favorite part though, I've gotta go with the relationship between Tiana and her friend (forgetting the name at the moment). There's something that feels so beautiful about it in the way that it transcends race and class at rare moments. Idealistic, maybe but lovely nonetheless. And did I mention the music? I thought the score was just so original. Especially Almost There.

Gonna stop gushing now and just say that it's 1/5 in this group. And up near the top of our list.

Piece of [Cheese]Cake

I finally had a good excuse to make a cheesecake! Yay! Last weekend, in celebration of my aunt's birthday, I decided to make a recipe from Death By Chocolate that I've been dying to make: White Chocolate Cheesecake. This is actually a fairly simple recipe but it takes quite a long time to make. So, for the party on Saturday evening, I started making this cheesecake on Thursday.

Once again, we have a tale of substitutions. I was supposed to make Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies to use for the crust. I didn't feel like making those cookies for the fourth time. Maybe some other time, but not now. So I decided to substitute a plain old graham cracker crust instead. There ended up being two problems with that. The first was that I needed 2.5 cups of graham cracker crumbs. I ended up only having slightly less than 2 cups. Hmm. I refused to go back out to the store but I found chocolate graham crackers in the cabinet. So, I figured, mixing them couldn't be bad, right? Right. So that's what I did. Not an insurmountable problem but a hurdle nonetheless.

The second, and slightly more significant, problem was that I was following the recipe in the book for the graham cracker to butter ratio. I suppose that crushed cookies have a very different quality compared to graham crackers because the recipe called for 3 tablespoons of butter. After melting the butter and mixing it in, the crumbs should have been able to be molded. Not a chance. I ended up using a whole stick of butter for my crust. Ultimately, I really should have looked for a different recipe for a crust instead of just guessing but it worked out fine in the end and I was too lazy to look up a recipe.

So, the crust goes into the freezer to chill while I make the filling. The filling is basically a ton of cream cheese, white chocolate, and eggs. After measuring out 1 3/4 lbs of cream cheese (and mixing it a little to soften it up better), I set up the chocolate in the double boiler to melt. A bit of heavy cream and EIGHTEEN ounces of white chocolate. That's a lot of chocolate. And, I learned my lesson about using good white chocolate instead of crappy white chocolate so I got some nice Ghirardelli's for the occasion. While that melted, I mixed up the cream cheese, sugar, and salt, followed by a half dozen eggs. Literally. I should point out that during all of this, I was trying to work as quickly as possible because it was already about 4 pm and the cheesecake takes about 7 hours to bake and cool. As it was, by my calculations, I'd still be dealing with this cheesecake at midnight. My calculations were correct.

Anyway, I poured in the melted chocolate and some vanilla extract and voila! That was all the ingredients. I poured the mixture into the springform pan and was ready to bake. Now check out these baking instructions: "Place a baking sheet with sides partially filled with 4 cups of hot water on the bottom rack of the oven. Place the springform pan on the center rack of the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 250° and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 225° and bake for 15 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 200°, and bake the cheesecake until the internal temperature of the cheesecake filling reaches 170°, about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Turn off the oven and allow the cheesecake to remain in the oven undisturbed for an additional 2 hours. Remove from the oven and cool at room temperature for 1 hour. Refrigerate the cheesecake for 12 hours (do not remove the cake from the pan)." Do you understand now why I was in such a hurry? I wanted this cheesecake to be perfect and it had to be pretty constantly monitored.

Sometime around midnight, I moved the cheesecake into the fridge to chill. My boyfriend and I both worriedly noted that the cake still seemed well, not liquidy, but definitely not as solid as one would expect from a cheesecake. I figured that maybe it would firm up in the fridge (since it would be hanging out in there for at least twelve hours).

It chilled longer than twelve hours because on Friday I went to the 2012 USA Curling National Tournament in Pennsylvania. Yes, that's right. I went to watch curling for a full day. And it was awesome. Don't judge.

On Saturday morning, there was one final step to complete. I had to coat the cake with some ganache. I had a ton of Ultimate Ganache in my freezer so I figured that I would substitute the Ultimate for the plain old Chocolate Ganache that the recipe called for. Plus, my crust was a lot less chocolatey than the recipe had specified so it couldn't hurt, right? So, I just have to re-melt my ultimate ganache and...oh yeah, crap, I left it in Connecticut. And I'm in New Jersey. Score. So what does the baker do? She makes more, of course! That process went smoothly so there wasn't much to tell.

Finally, it was time to cut and eat the cake. Sadly, I forgot to bring candles so we had to make do with a tealight placed on top of the cake. Nevertheless, we cut into it and...horror. You could see the fear in everyone's eyes. It did not, in fact, firm up as it chilled. The cheesecake ended up being more like a pudding in the middle than a cake. We passed slices around anyway and I dove right in for a taste. And it was delicious. I mean, really heavenly good. I ate two slices. And you all know that I don't really have a sweet tooth. So pudding or not, the cake was a hit because the taste was so good. My theories on the consistency include a) the huge amount of melted white chocolate just makes it that way and b) my mom's oven temperatures aren't correct. But here's a couple pictures:

A couple of notes: First, I could have used some more graham cracker crust because (as you can see) it didn't make it all the way up the sides of the whole cake. Second, I was supposed to top the cake with white chocolate curls. That didn't happen because I'm lazy and because I didn't have a block of white chocolate with which to make the white chocolate curls. Lastly, on some of my more recent projects: my mom and great aunt adored the pignoli cookies and said they were perfect. That's good because I hated them. There was consensus that the Martha snickerdoodles were better, though the JoC ones weren't bad. And, the highlight of my week: after eating a couple of snickerdoodles at pre-colloquium tea, one of the professors exclaimed that the cookies were not i.i.d. and discussed with another professor whether they were mixture normal or stratified cookies. If you get that, you're a nerd, and you have my pity.

A Disney Moment: The Rescuers
Here we go with a couple of awful movies. The Rescuers had a couple of fundamental flaws and generally was just sort of...there. Nothing exceptional. Nothing to make you remember it. Certainly nothing to warrant a sequel (unless the purpose of the sequel is to give the protagonists a second chance to get it right). The premise isn't bad: a UN of mice rescuing kids. The main problem though, is that you don't even really see the girl they're rescuing until over halfway through the movie. So you can never develop an emotional attachment to her. And then, when you do see her, she comes up with her own plan for her rescue. She doesn't even need the mice! She did everything herself and she was occasionally just really dumb.

Also, why are all the animals the same size??? The mouse, rabbit, owl, turtle, and mole are all exactly the same size! That doesn't make any sense! That fact annoyed me quite a bit so this movie ranks a 4/5.

How to Make Cheesecake Without a Springform Pan

[Edit: This has been my most popular blog post due to what I presume is people googling "How to make cheesecake without a springform pan". If that is how you got here, welcome. While I don't know of any way to make a round cheesecake without a springform pan, I do know how to make Chocolate Cheesecake Triangles which are pretty delicious and I imagine could be made without the chocolate. I talk about them below with a few tips for baking them but the recipe can be found here. If this link was helpful to you, I only ask that you pick another of my posts and read it and decide if this blog is worth your time. Thanks and happy baking!]

Hello all! For this week's project, I decided to deviate a bit from the cookies. I've been craving some cheesecake lately but alas, I have no springform pan. Plus it's harder to bring a cheesecake into the office to share with people. Then I'd have to worry about plates and utensils and that's currently beyond the scope of things I care about. Fortunately for me, the Bake Sale cookbook came through for me. In the bar cookie section (yes, that is a specific section) I found "Swirl of Chocolate Cheesecake Triangles" which was exactly perfect.

So, naturally, after choosing this recipe I had to head over to my friendly neighborhood Big Y to pick up some things, namely, graham crackers, cream cheese, and evaporated milk (the recipe called for the brand name Carnation but I bought the cheap Big Y brand). By the way, does anyone else find evaporated milk kind of odd? It kinda creeps me out that all you have to do is add water and then it's supposedly the equivalent of fresh milk. Weird. Anyway, while I was picking up the creepy milk, a box next to it caught my eye. This magical box read: "Graham Cracker Crumbs".  Yes, they actually sell graham cracker crumbs for budding bakers like myself. So, I was immediately faced with a decision to make. Should I do things the old fashioned way and crush up 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs? Or should I pay a slightly higher unit price and save myself the time? While trying to decide, I was reminded of the last time I made cheesecake. In that instance, the person designated to crush the graham crackers took approximately 45 minutes to do so. While I certainly would have gotten it done faster than that, I decided that the time and effort saved would be better spent working on my probability homework. So I took the easy way out and went off to the kitchen.

The first step was to make the graham cracker crust. I know from experience that this is super easy so I felt good about that. I melted some butter and mixed it up with the graham cracker crumbs and sugar and it was a piece of (cheese)cake. The next direction was to press the crust into the bottom of a 13x9 inch baking pan. Who's betting at this moment that I don't have one of those? Well, you'd be WRONG! I have one rectangle baking pan and it is exactly 13x9! How exciting! This recipe seems to be going flawlessly for me.

Spoke too soon. The filling was easy, just combining cream cheese, sugar, flour, evaporated milk, eggs, and vanilla. On a related note, I hit a milestone in my baking. I finally finished my first bottle of vanilla extract! I feel like that means I actually have accumulated some experience by now. Speaking of experience, you know how I have to melt chocolate for pretty much every recipe I bake? Well, I should have used my experience in that area and deviated from the recipe. The recipe told me to microwave the Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels (Hey, a brand name I did use!) and it gave me specific microwaving directions. I followed them and ended up with a lumpy, congealed mass of chocolate in my bowl. After trying unsuccessfully to melt the chocolate further, I threw my hands up and used the tried and true bowl of hot water technique. In a couple of minutes, I successfully melted my chocolate and vowed not to microwave chocolate anymore. Oh, and lest you think something went smoothly, in the process of stirring my chocolate, I managed to splash extremely hot water all over my shirt. Yay.

So, the swirl of chocolate aspect comes into this recipe in this way: I was supposed to combine one cup of the cream cheese mixture with the chocolate, pour the remaining cream cheese mixture into the pan, pour the chocolate/cream cheese mixture on top, and then use a spoon to pull the plain cream cheese mixture over the chocolate mixture. Whew. It seemed needlessly complicated but I guess I did get a nice marble-y swirl. And now, into the oven for 45 minutes. I used the baking and cooling time to watch a couple of episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. Yep, I unashamedly watch bad tv.

One note on the baking: by the time I pulled the pan out of the oven it had risen to slightly above the rim of the pan. But by the time I went back to it after the cooling time, imagine my surprise when I found it had all sunk down back to the original level! Regardless, it still smells delicious. Unfortunately, I have to wait a bit for the cheesecake to chill in the fridge before I can eat it.

::twiddles thumbs::

Yay, they're chilled! Cutting these was a bit of a challenge. Not because they were hard to cut but because the triangles were really big and for some reason the graham cracker crust was really really crumbly. I'm not sure why that is but the crust definitely leaves something to be desired. As far as look goes, you be the judge:

I think they look cute. As far as taste goes, the graham cracker crust is a bit too dry and crumbly for my taste so maybe the graham cracker to butter ratio was off (though I swear I followed the recipe!) and it's actually a bit too chocolatey for me. I guess I'm more of a cheesecake purist and like it the plain way. Also, due to the crumbly crust, this is best eaten with a fork. That should get interesting when I bring these to colloquium.

Critical Reception:


Well, the peanut butter cup cookies were here one second and gone the next. I put them out at colloquium and many of them were gone before I even showed up to get my cup of tea. Overall positive reviews though. One ambiguous review: one person (that I know of) did not realize that they were eating peanut butter cookies. After reading the blog entry, this person wanted to try one, not realizing that he/she had eaten a couple of the cookies two days earlier. Maybe I should start labeling what I put out?