A Valentine's Surprise and a Book Review

Hello all! And a happy belated Valentine's day! Let me preface this by saying that I am not a huge fan of Valentine's Day as a holiday at all. But in the spirit of doing something nice (and cheap) I decided to make the Amish Friendship Bread that my boyfriend loves so much. Followers of this blog will remember that I have talked about this recipe before. However, I didn't just think of baking this bread out of the blue. There's a backstory!

Recently, I read a novel called "Friendship Bread" by Darren Gee. It's your pretty standard chick lit but I needed something light to read to refocus my brain a bit. In the book, the characters receive bags of the Amish Friendship Bread and talk about how baking brings them together and changes lives and whatnot. It actually took some turns that I wasn't expecting so I was fairly impressed considering the genre. Overall, I would recommend the book as a light read and it was on the better side of mediocre. More importantly, when I was reading the book, I was overcome with the desire to bake this bread again. They kept talking about using the starter dough for variations on the original recipe and freezing the dough so you're not baking every 10 days (I didn't know you could do that!) and then, as an added bonus, included actual recipes at the end of the book! So that's all I needed for motivation.

Tidbits: Apparently the Amish Friendship Bread isn't actually Amish. It's an evil ploy by the Girl Scouts or something like that. Also, the novel has a website where people can contribute recipes and tips all about the friendship bread. So, that's where I got my recipe for the starter (www.friendshipbreadkitchen.com) and some tips about freezing the dough for later use.

So, in planning my Valentine's surprise, I had to subtract 10 days from Valentine's to allow the starter dough to do its whole starter dough-y thing. This was almost a problem because my yeast was actually dead (because it was super old) and I really didn't want to go out to the store in the snow to buy some. But I did because I am a good person. The other issue here was that since it was a surprise, I had to find places to hide my starter dough so my boyfriend wouldn't see what was going on. In hindsight, I probably could've left it on the kitchen table and he wouldn't have noticed. So for 10 days, I was hiding a bag of dough in a variety of places including (but not limited to) a big pot with a lid and the oven itself. The oven was a bit of a risk but he never turns it on anyway so I wasn't too concerned.

Things worked out perfectly because on Valentine's eve, my boyfriend had a hockey game that he left for at 9 pm so that gave me a solid three hours to bake the bread, make the house smell like cinnamon sugar, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. Let the baking commence! The last time I made this, I think I really screwed up the ratio of starter to ingredients. This time, I was very careful and did the good math and have 3 bags of starter now chilling in my freezer for future use. From there, it was a simple ingredient adding with no real problems. The dough was a little lumpy and hard to mix but otherwise, I'm practically a professional baker when it comes to this bread.

Observe where my confidence gets me. The bake time and temperature are wrong. After an hour of baking, the bottom was starting to burn but the center of the bread was not fully cooked. Keep in mind, it's nearly midnight at this point and I'm exhausted. Sadly, it took another 15-20 minutes of checking and rotating and generally trying to will my bread to bake properly and I still ended up with a slightly burned bottom. Sad. Also, one of the loaves got stuck to the pan (which has never, ever happened before!) so I lost the bottom of one of the pieces. On the bright side, this meant I got to taste it! So delicious. I used the variation that included French Vanilla pudding mix and chocolate chips and it was glorious. Moist and yummy and mmmmm.... I can't wait to try more variations with the starter dough. In a nutshell, my boyfriend was surprised and delighted and good bread was had by all. Here's some pictures of the final outcome for you to drool over:

Any tips on modifying cook times and temperatures to avoid my problem here would be much appreciated. Sadly, there will be no Disney moment this post because I want a chance to watch a few more before I post more. Don't worry though! Disney is still in my heart. I gave Disney stickers to my students who did well on a worksheet this week.

I'll Give You a Viennese Finger...

The blogger is back! I haven't blogged since September and that's very sad. Stupid life getting in the way. I actually have done a lot of baking lately, including 6 types of Christmas cookies, 2 pies, those damn eclairs, and a few breads. I was just a lazy blogger. I even missed my one year bakerversary! Oh well. Nevertheless, new semester, new year, new baking books, new levels of ineptitude. Hold on to your hats because this one's a doozy!

So, on this frigid Connecticut afternoon, I decided to ring in a new semester of colloquium by bringing in some cookies. I didn't want anything too challenging or with too many steps so I consulted a new book that I got for Christmas called "Cookie Heaven" and found a recipe for Butter Viennese Fingers. There are pictures and these ones are cute. They look like fingers dipped in chocolate at both ends. And there's only 4 ingredients! Perfect!

Not perfect. I like to believe that I didn't magically lose all of my cooking skills but I must have. This was an epic disaster. Step 1: cream softened butter and confectioners' sugar. Easy. Step 2: Add flour. Easy! Step 3: Use a piping bag to pipe 3 inch finger shapes on the pan. Fail. I really should have known better here. As I was scooping the dough into the pastry bag, I knew it was going to be too cold and too thick to ever be able to squeeze through the tube. Did that stop me? Not a chance. I huffed and I puffed and I got a blister on my hand. But not even one iota of dough came out of that pastry bag. Fine. I can be creative. I decided to run the pastry bag under hot water. It seemed like it was starting to work a little so I went through several rounds of this. Finally, I managed to get one teensy tiny dot of dough on the pan. Ridiculous.

I needed a better plan. I couldn't think of one. I tried leaving the bag on top of the hot oven while I went to answer some emails. I tried mixing the dough some more. I tried using a larger tip on the pastry bag (which, by the way, made a complete mess because I had to take all the dough out and then put it back in) but none of these techniques were doing a thing other than frustrating me. And so, with a great roar of frustration and anger, I threw all the dough back in the mixer, took out my cookie scoop and just started scooping round cookies instead of precious finger shaped cookies. Take that, Cookie Heaven!

Of course, this warped the bake time a bit. I took them out when I was supposed to and the bottoms were only slightly browned and the middles were definitely not cooked. So I tossed them in for another 10 minutes or so. At this point, I was beyond caring about the potential for overbaking these cookies. Pretty much massively frustrated. So after baking, there was one step left: Melting chocolate to dip the cookies in.

I apparently forgot how to melt chocolate. This appears to be a running theme in my baking because no matter how many times I melt chocolate (which is really, really often!) I seem to screw it up. So, stupidly, I followed the directions in the book that said I could microwave the chocolate. How many times have I told myself not to microwave chocolate? I could probably look back and find out but it will just make me feel dumb. Nevertheless, I microwaved. Things were looking good. The chocolate was getting nice and smooth and then BAM! It all just congealed. I don't know what happened. Possibly I burned the chocolate but it didn't smell burned. It just had no interest in melting. Yes, I have sentient chocolate.

So I went back to the old double boiler. Except I just got a small pot and stuck the bowl I had been using in the microwave on top of it. Normally this works. Normally it doesn't take 20 minutes for 2 oz of chocolate to melt. But it just wasn't working. Then I thought that maybe I shouldn't use that bowl. So I grabbed a metal mixing bowl from my new 6 bowl mixing bowl set that I got for Christmas from the restaurant supply store that is absolutely magical (sidebar: seriously, that store is AMAZING) and I put the chocolate in the small metal bowl. No luck.

Now I say to myself, "It must be a chocolate problem, not a tool problem. You must have screwed the chocolate up when you microwaved it." So in the garbage went my partially melted, partially congealed chocolate. I grabbed some new chocolate, stuck it in the metal bowl and waited. And waited. And added some more water in my pot because all of the water had evaporated. And waited. By this point, there was cursing and anger. Finally, I just gave up. I seriously contemplated throwing all the cookies in the trash (a notion I had been developing when I couldn't get the dough through the pastry bag) but I decided I'd just make do with what I had. I dipped the cookies in the (somewhat) melted chocolate and noticed that the cookies were practically crumbling in my hands. So, with cookie and chocolate under my fingernails, I finally set them out to dry. They look like this:

I waited about half an hour and then went to check on them and the chocolate was still completely wet. Well then. As if these cookies hadn't put me through enough. So I left them out on the stove and left my house. I have no idea how they taste. I have no cookies for colloquium. I am so massively annoyed by these cookies that it's not even funny anymore. And it's cold out. So much for my first adventure out of the gate. Maybe the next one will be better. Who would have thought that just four ingredients could have treated me so badly? To pick up my mood, I'm going to include a couple pictures of successes from the last few months:

FYI, that pecan pie was fantastic. Until next time, loyal readers!

A Disney Moment: Mulan
Ok, so one of the [many] reasons I slowed down blogging was because we're entering another Disney movie slump. It's hard to summon the desire to watch some of the movies coming up. As a result, I watched Mulan probably 4 months ago and finished Emperor's New Groove (the last in this group of 5) maybe a month ago.  This from the people who would marathon 3 movies in one day. Plus it's a hard sell getting my grandparents (who are now living with my mom and sister thanks to Hurricane Sandy) to watch an animated film. Anywho, on with Mulan!

I love Mulan. I love the notion of a female character breaking out of a stereotype box a bit (much like Belle does with her READING) and that Mulan is not romance obsessed. I am not saying that there is perfect execution here but I respect the attempt. My sister and I have started doing this fun thing where we re-edit the movies we watch to make them better. For instance, we would say that we don't need the pet dog character at all or they should cut the scene with the ancestors. Again, all in the noble name of pacing and flow. But we still really like Mulan, despite its flaws. The song "Reflection" probably should have been left on the cutting room floor but we get such gems as "I'll Make a Man Out of You" and that matchmaker song right at the beginning. And the sheer devastation and destruction when they come across the town that had been burned to the ground packed a heavy punch.

Overall, we like it and it's the best of this group of five movies. Of course, that's not saying much.

This One Knocked the Stuffing Out of Me...

Welcome back! Stupid productivity getting in the way of blogging. The semester is back in full swing which means that I'm back teaching and doing research and studying for my general exam (October 3!) and trying to find time to do a billion things. So I figured I'd jump start my productivity with catching up on my blogging. I guess I'll start with the adventure that was trying to bake two things at once. Commence chaos!

Oh wait, before I start: apparently the tarelles weren't bad. In fact, people thought they were really good. Maybe my taste buds were scrambled that day or maybe I just don't like them but in any case, I am officially removing the assessment that they are the world's worst cookie. My apologies to the Cake Boss. Except not really because as one of the projects I was making on this occasion, I made his Eclairs. Sort of.

Let me explain. I planned to make eclairs. I figured that it was time to get away from the cookie recipes in the Cake Boss book before completely writing off the cookbook. So the next section is pastries. And the first recipe for pastries is eclairs. Step 1: make the pastry shells. Ok, cool. That was pretty easy. Mix up the dough and put it in a piping bag and pipe out eclair shapes. Easy. I'm getting to be pretty good at piping now. I baked them up and they puffed nicely. Success! Well, short lived success. It was at this point that I noticed that the pastry cream has to be refrigerated overnight. Oops. However, the shells can be frozen and defrosted for use whenever. Awesome! Problem solved. Oh, I should also mention that the way to test if these were done was if they come off the pan easily when picked up with a thumb and index finger. Super scientific. May have ended up with some very hot fingers.

It was about this point that I got a text from a friend informing me that she finally got a job. Yay for jobs! And how should one celebrate a new job? With stuffed cupcakes, of course! So while the pastry shells were baking, I perused my cookbooks for a recipe for stuffed cupcakes. I didn't have one. But hey, I bake a lot. I have the knowledge and the power to mix and match recipes! So I decided to use the dark chocolate cupcakes that I've made previously from America's Test Kitchen and stuff and frost them with cream cheese frosting. Did I mention that I was baking all this late at night with the added pressure that I was going to be headed home to Jersey the next day? No? Well, I was. I may have been a little crazy.

So, the most logical course of action to me was to whip up the cream cheese frosting in Connecticut and bring it to New Jersey where I would bake and stuff the cupcakes. Completely logical, right? Sure. I whipped up the cream cheese frosting quickly enough (though it was actually a huge pain because I kept having to wash all of my materials) and stuck it in the fridge. Oh yeah, and I was simultaneously cooking dinner. Is the imagery of my kitchen mess clear enough for you by now? Yes? Good.

Ok, so where am I? Dinner's done, frosting's done, pastry shells done. Last thing tonight is the pastry cream! Did you know that custard is hard to make? I didn't. If I had, I wouldn't have tried to do this late at night after having baked for hours already. So, for those of you who don't know, custard is a tricky thing. Also, choosing what size pots and bowls to use is a tricky thing. And when I say tricky, I mean "I'm bad at it." I started with my egg yolks, flour, and sugar in a small bowl. Bad idea. I could see immediately that that would be a problem. So I moved everything to the medium bowl. I had to whisk those ingredients together until "they lighten in color." The ingredients didn't seem to combine well. I kinda had lumpy crumbly egg yolk messes. But I figured it would all even out when I combined it with the milk. (It didn't.)

This is where things get dangerous with custard. You have to be extremely careful to not cook the eggs with the hot milk. To avoid that, you first temper your mixture with one cup of the hot milk and then add the whole mixture to the pot with the milk. It was at this point that I realized that I really could've used a bigger pot. It was also when I realized that the medium bowl wasn't going to be big enough and the big bowl was dirty. Ahhh! Plus at this point, you have to very carefully blend with a hand mixer while moving the pot on and off the heat so that the mixture boils but doesn't cook the yolks. So much multitasking! With one hand, I was mixing and with the other hand I was washing a bowl and at some point I had to add the butter as my "thickening agent" and it was a mess. I was supposed to end up with a mixture that was very thick but was instead pretty thin. Also, the bottom of my mixture totally just cooked. Like, egg yolk omelet on the bottom of the pan. But whatever, I'll just take the non-cooked part and use that and I'll just have a bit less than I wanted, right? Sigh. I think you can all see where this is going.

So, I covered my thin mixture and put it in the fridge overnight hoping that it would thicken up overnight. Apparently that's not how custards work. The next morning I got all excited to fill my eclairs. I sliced my pastry shells and I went to fill my pastry bag with the filling. Not happening. It was a thin drizzle of messy. So I started Googling quick fixes for custards. There really aren't any. They all say to start over except for one which said I could fold in some whipped cream. Hmm. I don't have whipped cream but I'm sad enough about my custard right now to go buy some. So I did. Don't use this quick fix. It doesn't work. Here's a picture of my sad sad attempt to fill eclairs:

It's not attractive. But there are bright sides. The first is that the pastry shells looked good so they went right back into the freezer to be used another day. The second is that the custard actually tasted pretty good so barring my inability to make custard, this recipe probably would've turned out well. So the pastry shells are awaiting a second attempt at custard which will happen sometime in the future when I am not in a delicate mental state.

So with this failure hanging over me, I headed home to make the cupcakes. Baking cupcakes is easy. I had no problem here. Stuffing cupcakes is a different story. I found one thing online that recommended just putting your filling in a pastry bag with a long tip, jabbing it into the cupcake and squeezing. Theoretically, the cupcakes will puff up with the filling and it will be wonderful. There was even a video demonstrating this phenomenon! All that happened for me was getting a very narrow tube of filling into the cupcake. No puffing up or anything. So I tried a different approach. I used a small knife to cut a cone out of the middle of the cupcake, filled the cupcake, cut off the tip of the cone, and returned the rest of the cupcake cone to its rightful place. I referred to that last step as "putting the hat back on" because I was a little slap happy at this point. In hindsight, since I was frosting these cupcakes with the same filling anyway, I really didn't have to put the hat back on. Regardless, these cupcakes were freakin' delicious. The cream cheese with the dark chocolate complemented each other perfectly and when you sliced the cupcake in half, it looked beautiful. See for yourself:

Pretty good, right? They were so yummy. So, one success and one fail and one very very tired baker.

A Disney Moment: Hercules

Ah, the final member of this group of five (finally). Hercules scores a 2/5 and let me just say that I really love it. The villain is fun and sharp. The references to Greek mythology are at times blatant but at other times subtle. I recommend suspending all your knowledge of Greek mythology before watching because otherwise, nothing will make sense and it will only make you angry. I love love love the music (with the notable exception of "Go the Distance") and the Greek chorus narrators and the sassy heroine and Danny Devito as Phil and the cameo of Scar and yay! I just really like this movie. It's quick but it doesn't feel too quick to me and the comic relief characters have pretty minimal screen time (they should have even less but I'm willing to let that go). Overall, I like it. Whew, it took a long time to finish those 5 movies.

World's Worst Cookies

Well, for those of you getting frustrated with my competency in the kitchen, here's a treat for you. As an aside, is there an opposite to "ineptitude"? I'm pretty sure "eptitude" isn't a word. Just wondering if there's a positive root word for ineptitude. Ok, moving on...

So, the Cake Boss is failing me. I know it's been a while since I've baked from the Cake Boss cookbook because I got distracted by the really yummy recipes in Martha and America's Test Kitchen. So I decided that it was time to get back to this book. This is the only cookbook that I am cooking through in order so that meant that the next cookies in the book were Tarelles (i.e. vanilla cookies). Ok, vanilla cookies. Not terribly interesting but I've had good vanilla cookies before so why not? I had a slight problem with these because the recipe calls for pastry flour and I couldn't find pastry flour in any of my supermarkets. However, the recipe does say that all-purpose flour can be substituted so I didn't think too much of it.

First step was to mix together sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Easy. Made a bit of a mess with the vanilla but no big deal there. Next step was to add shortening. This was almost a big problem because I was almost 1/2 a cup short! I say almost because I finished off my container of Crisco and thought I had another but did not. Eventually I found Crisco sticks in my cabinet though. Success! By the way, I'm not a Crisco diva that I need to have the sticks but I had a coupon for them so I bought them.

Then I had to paddle in some milk until "thoroughly absorbed". I disagree with that "thoroughly absorbed" assessment. I was mixing it like crazy but it still looked like watery cottage cheese for several minutes. It wasn't very attractive. But fine, eventually, I managed to get it combined-ish. Add flour and baking powder and I'm all done with the actual combining of ingredients.

Now comes the super fun part. I had to roll out these cookies into rings. There were very specific directions about rolling half the dough into a 30 inch rope and then cutting pieces based on another measurement and then rolling those out and initially, I sort of followed that. It was pretty unnecessary though, as long as you're confident that you can form uniform-sized cookies. So the measurements weren't my problem. My problem was the dough itself. Rolling ropes of dough can be really awful if you've got a super sticky dough or a very crumbly dough (both of which I've dealt with and documented here) but this dough was neither of those things. It's hard to describe though. It didn't stick to the surface and it didn't stick to my hands. It also did not stick to itself which made forming complete rings basically impossible. The other problem is that it kept falling apart as I rolled it. I don't mean that it crumbled. I mean that, as I rolled a rope of dough, if I rolled any piece too thinly, it became two ropes. This made the concept of making a "Twisty Tarelle" completely impossible. To do that, I had to fold the dough rope in half and then roll it against the work surface so it would make a spiral. It did not. It just broke. A lot. After trying this for several minutes, I just gave up and stuck to the regular tarelles.

So eventually, I delicately rolled out two cookie trays' worth of these cookies. And realized that I had barely used half the dough. Awesome. I baked them for the appropriate amount of time and until the bottoms were slightly browned as specified. Pretty sure they were baked perfectly. I put them on the racks to cool while I rolled the rest of the cookies. No big problems there besides those already mentioned. At this point though, I had the sneaking suspicion that these cookies might be a bit bland so I decided to add some sprinkles. The picture shows some of the cookies with sprinkles so why not? I'll tell you why not. Because sprinkles don't stick to the cookies. I tried. The only way to get the sprinkles to stick was to really press them into the dough which destroyed the shape of the cookie so after attempting this with three cookies, I gave up. Here's a picture of the finished product before I give you a taste assessment though:

These cookies taste bad. I had my boyfriend taste one at the same time as me and we looked at each other and he said, "they're not bad..." which usually means they're not good. I was a half step away from spitting mine out. They are so DRY. There's no moisture to them so it's like trying to eat seven saltines or a mouthful of flour or something. I've only had this type of texture once before when I tasted a cookie and it crumbled to dust in my mouth and I almost choked on the cookie dust. At least I didn't make those cookies though. Those may be worse. These are really bad too though. I don't even know how I should have made them better.

So at this point, I'm pretty displeased with Cake Boss. His cookies are very hit or miss. I'm thinking that I'll try to make one of his pastries next to see if he's better with those. These cookies though...thumbs down. So, anyone want some terrible cookies? I have about 40 of them and nobody to eat them! Seriously, suggestions of what to do with these are welcome. I don't know if I want to subject anyone I like to them though. Sigh. What a disappointment.

Oh, and let me just put in a plug for the contest I've entered. I am competing in phdcomics.com's 2 minute thesis contest. If I get enough votes, I will get my thesis turned into a comic which would be totally cool. Voting ends on August 20 so if you would please vote and share with your friends to extend my network of voters, that'd be terrific. Thanks in advance and I promise, if I win, there will be cookie sharing. Here's the link to vote: http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/2minute/#133. The title of my audio clip is "[Intentionally Left Missing]"

A Disney Moment: Hunchback of Notre Dame

There's no way to sum up this movie besides this statement: My sister and I rented this movie from the library FIVE times. That's right. For about a month and a half, we would rent Hunchback and then stare at it and not want to watch it. We really really didn't want to watch this movie. Finally, we settled down to get it over with (I think we may have rewarded ourselves with fast food first) and well, I guess I didn't hate it quite as much as I thought I would. Which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

I don't really know what bothers me about this film. The villain isn't exactly scary. That's not to say that he isn't evil. He's probably the most evil Disney villain what with all the fire and brimstone and wanting to burn gypsies. But unless you're an adult and thinking "he's one amoral SOB" then he doesn't particularly inspire fear. I will always argue that Ursula is a better villain than Frollo is.

I think the movie tries to cram too many plot lines in and I don't really care for the other male protagonist (you know, the one that isn't Quasimodo that I can't remember the name of). The music is ok and the animation is fine but it just never grabbed me. Also, the gargoyles. Are they just Quasimodo's subconscious speaking or are they really alive? This bugged me. I don't mind if we have talking statues but the ambiguity of it made me uneasy. So, in this grouping, it's a 5/5. But at least we're done with it and the librarians can stop thinking that we're unhealthily obsessed with Hunchback.

Wedding Cookies

Hello everyone! Welcome to A Statistician Bakes: Wedding Edition. I was recently a bridesmaid in my very good friend, Laura,'s wedding. To help contribute to the big day, I decided to make some cookies. Because that's what I do. And because we had to be at the venue from 9 am till the ceremony at 4 pm and I figured we'd get hungry. I really wanted to make Mexican Wedding Cookies because, well, that's the cliche thing to do. Then I looked at the recipe and realized there was powdered sugar on them and that seemed like a phenomenally bad idea considering that our dresses were black. So my criteria for these cookies had to be: yummy and no-mess. I landed on the ever-classic Snickerdoodle (Martha's recipe, of course) and Buttery Pecan Rounds. I said no to chocolate because who wants chocolate in their teeth during a wedding and I said no to anything heavy because that would really impede the getting drunk process required for any good wedding.

I won't talk to you about the Snickerdoodles because I've made them so many times before so I'll talk about the Buttery Pecan Rounds. They're super easy. No really, like, 4 ingredients easy. Ok, so it's not 4 ingredients, it's 6 but still, that's pretty easy. May I interrupt for a moment to lament the fact that I haven't baked in my own kitchen for about a month now? I love my mom's kitchen but I think my Connecticut kitchen is crying out in neglect. Makes me sad.

Ok, sidebar over. There's honestly nothing worth talking about with these cookies though. Combine salt and brown sugar. Mix in egg yolk. Add flour and salt. Mix in chopped pecans. That's it. I was supposed to add half pecans for decoration on top but I wasn't feeling that so I skipped it. So...that's basically it for these cookies. These cookies were in the light and delicate section of Martha's book because I figured that'd be good. Oh! I also went to the trouble to buy cardstock to separate my new very large cookie tin. Ok, so maybe it's not a cookie tin and is actually one of those big containers that hold three types of popcorn but it serves its purpose! Here's a picture of the finished product:

As far as the taste, the Snickerdoodles were great as always. The pecan cookies were good but a little too bland for me. If I make these again, I think I'll add a bit more sugar or maybe some vanilla. They were very light and delicate though. Oh, and to round out this entry, congratulations Laura and Pat! Here's a picture of me with the bride (who also happens to be my friend for the past 20 years...which makes me feel old...)

A Disney Moment: Pocahontas

Oh, this movie. I liked it as a kid. I belted out "Colors of the Wind" with the rest of the world. But when I rewatched it...well, let's just say it was an experience. Let me set the stage: my sister and I were all geared up to watch and my mom would occasionally flit in and out to see if the movie was over yet. Apparently she REALLY dislikes Pocahontas. Which I guess is understandable if you have two daughters who watched it obsessively in their youth and sang along (badly) to all of the songs.

First of all, I don't like the character animation in this one. I'm sure this is a controversial point of view. But in my household, this was a rage-inducing experience. "Her ass is HUGE!" and "Why does she have gigantic calves one second and then by the next scene they're gone???" are just a couple of the issues we have with Pocahontas. My personal issue is her hair. It defies all laws of physics. And you know what? If the wind keeps pushing strands of her hair the same direction, eventually she won't have any hair left on one side of her head. It's illogical.

Ok, that aside, the rest isn't too bad. I have mixed feelings about Grandmother Willow. I truly appreciate the background animation which is beautiful. I can't understand how Pocahontas magically understands English all of a sudden. And don't give me that "listen with your heart" stuff because that's crazy. Honestly, I buy characters talking to animals more than I buy a suddenly bilingual protagonist.

Also, my mom had a couple gems to add when watching this movie. Including, "you know why Grandmother Willow's bark medicine works so well? It's aspirin!" I should point out that my mom is a chemist. And my favorite: "She is picking up a baby bear cub! The mother would have mauled her by now! This is just teaching children to pick up bear cubs! Why is Pocahontas stupid enough to pick up a bear cub?" This went on and on during the rest of "Colors of the Wind" and was completely hilarious.

I know there's a lot of Pocahontas love out there but I just didn't feel it. It wasn't a great masterpiece. It was ok. It was a 4/5 in this grouping. I will be bracing myself in preparation for all the people who are about to tell me I'm wrong.

Please Sir, I Want S'more(s)!

Welcome back! To put this in perspective for you, I baked this dessert for a 4th of July barbecue. Yeah. I've been a blogging slacker. What else is new, right? So, my aunt requested a sweet dessert for the barbecue and I got her to narrow that down to chocolatey sweet (as opposed to fruity sweet) so that was my jumping point for choosing a dessert. After perusing my grandmother's cookbooks (because this adventure all takes place down the shore) I finally found it: Chocolate S'mores cake! How good does that sound? I can tell you're drooling already. Oh, I should also mention that this recipe comes from the Food and Wine Annual Cookbook 2009.

Step 1 was to gather all my ingredients and supplies. I cannot express enough how hard it is cooking in someone else's kitchen. I swear, if I had been in my kitchen, this recipe would've been about 1000x easier. Forget matters like figuring out where the teaspoon measures are kept. No, I'm talking about needing to go out and buy 8 inch square baking pans and a candy thermometer and basic staples like flour and sugar. Let's just say that shopping for the ingredients (on the 4th of July, no less) took a bit longer than expected.

But fine, all materials gathered, I was ready to go. The first thing to do was basically make a chocolate cake. This part was uneventful. There was a slight moment of horror when we discovered that the vegetable oil was being kept in an olive oil container (which made us seriously question what oil we had been cooking with earlier in the week) but we got it sorted out and I'm fairly sure we used the correct oil in the cake.

While the cake was baking, my mom and I set about completing two different tasks. She first thoroughly cleaned the not-so-oft used KitchenAid mixer and then set about removing seeds from a vanilla bean. This requires some explanation. And when I say "explanation" I mean "reason that I was misled by the recipe." The list of ingredients states "1/2 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped." Think about that with me. Doesn't that sound like you want the 1/2 bean sans seeds? It certainly did to me. So my mom was scraping out and discarding the seeds. When I perused the actual text of the recipe though, it referred to combining egg whites and the vanilla seeds. Oops. And when I say "oops" I actually mean "that was really poorly written and was a pain in the ass." Anyone disagree with that assessment? Anyone?

Ok, so while all that was going on, I was in the middle of a sticky situation. First I had to combine gelatin and water in a small bowl and let it sit. No problem there. Then I had to boil corn syrup and sugar together and cook until it was precisely 250 degrees. So I was staring at a candy thermometer for a while. I heated it perfectly and then took it off the heat as directed. I conversed with my mom over the vanilla bean incident and then noticed the gelatin that was still sitting on the counter not doing anything. Hmm. Something about that didn't seem right to me. My mom started beating the egg whites and vanilla seeds to form stiff peaks while I reread the recipe to figure out where the gelatin was supposed to go. Ah, apparently immediately after taking the corn syrup off the heat, I was supposed to mix in the gelatin. Whoops. Easily rectified though. I just reheated the corn syrup to the proper temperature and added the gelatin.

Now things get really ugly. We had to pour in the corn syrup/gelatin mixture while the mixer was still beating. This requires extremely good aim with an extremely sticky substance. We do not have extremely good aim. This stuff got all over the top of the beater, the sides of the bowl, the counter...it was bad. It was also so sticky that spatulas didn't really help with removing it from the pot. It was a very long process trying to get as much of this stuff into the egg whites as possible. By the way, in case anyone was wondering, I was better at pouring than my mom. Just saying.

Eventually we got things to cooperate. By now the cakes were cool and we spread our marshmallow mixture over the cakes. Then we had to toast the marshmallow with the broiler of the oven. Fortunately for me (and for the smoke alarms of the house), I have the marshmallow toasting job every Thanksgiving when we make our sweet potatoes so I'm a pro at not lighting the food on fire. (Yes, it can and does happen quite easily.) I browned the top of the marshmallows lightly (they probably could've gone longer but they were starting to smoke so I declared them done) and then set about the final steps of the assembly process.

We were directed to "insert the [broken] graham crackers into the marshmallow." Sadly, there is no picture of this dessert in the cookbook so we just used our imaginations to interpret what that meant. My mom artistically placed the graham crackers while I melted bittersweet chocolate for some chocolate drizzle. I drizzled like a professional chocolate drizzler (if that were a thing) and we ended up with some pretty awesome looking cakes!

As far as the taste goes, that's a bit of a story. You know what doesn't go well with chocolate s'mores cake? White wine. In fact, the combination is straight up disgusting. The problem I had was that when it came time to serve the cake, I was only halfway through a glass of really yummy white wine and I didn't want to put it down. DO NOT MIX WHITE WINE AND CHOCOLATE CAKE! This is your warning people. Red wine, good. White wine, BAD. So anyway, I think that influenced my opinion of the cake a bit. I thought it was a bit too sweet and the chocolate cake part was kinda meh. Everyone else liked it a lot though so it could've been my scrambled taste buds. Overall though, I'd call this a success. Even if it was a huge pain to bake.

A Disney Moment: Lion King


Ok, I feel like I don't even need to review this movie. I didn't even take any notes after watching it. It's clearly 1/5 in this group. It's just generally a great film. I get chills from just the opening notes of "Circle of Life." The music is all genius. It has one of the best villain songs (though I'll still argue that Ursula's is the best) and it's got a range of emotion that's lacking from a lot of the movies. Disney is obviously cruel for the whole Mufasa thing but it really is a poignant moment. The comedy bits work, the evil is scary, and the conclusion is satisfying. Not a single complaint. Is this film the best of the best? Maybe. The plan as it stands is to watch my top 5 movies in a crazy marathon once the mission is complete to assess what the true "best" Disney film is. For now though, let's just say it's in my top 5.

You See, Perry the Platypus...

Welcome people! I'm on vacation (which is today's excuse for the lack of blogging) but I have two baking adventures to regale you with from the past week. Ready? Let's go.

The first adventure you may judge me for. You see, while at the supermarket, picking up groceries for my California relatives who were coming to visit, my sister made an awesome discovery. She started "Ooooh!"-ing and pointing at the section with the Pillsbury place and bake cookies. You know, those holiday themed ones with ghosts or fireworks or shamrocks or school buses (yes, they do have school buses for September). I was quite confused because, while we do make these fairly often, I didn't think the firework ones were very special. Then she looked at me like I was an idiot and pointed out the holy grail of place and bake cookies: Perry the Platypus cookies.

Firstly, am I safe in assuming that people know what place and bake cookies are? If not, they are exactly what they sound like: pre-cut, preheat the oven, place on a pan, bake, and done. Of course, I make them best. No, seriously! My family has a knack for forgetting about them and destroying our pans with circles of burnt cookie. More importantly though, some of you may not be familiar with Perry the Platypus. Perry is from the Disney tv show Phineas and Ferb. I don't care how old you are, go watch this show because it is clever and has more adult humor than kid humor. And the kids in the show have a pet platypus named Perry. Perry is also a secret agent who fights the evil (sort of) Dr. Doofenshmirtz. This probably sounds crazy but Perry is the shit. And that's all I'll say about that so that I don't end up waxing poetic about the show. But go watch it. It's on Netflix instant.

So, before you judge me for not really baking (since place and bake cookies are in no way really baking) let me just say this: I'm on vacation. And sometimes, you need a place and bake cookie. And look how freaking cute they are!

Totally awesome, right? Oh, and they changed the recipe for these cookies! Now they are made with whole wheat flour which may not sound like a big deal but they taste so so much better than they used to (and they were already pretty good to begin with). Case and point: the package had 24 cookies. With 5 people eating the cookies, they were gone in, I kid you not, less than 7 minutes. Really good cookies. And then we all felt sick.

Hmm, I was going to talk about both my baking adventures in this post but now I'm thinking that the sun is shining and the beach is warm and I'll just blog about the other one later. (Read: tomorrow.) So in the meantime, I'll leave you with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRCT30pDtVE

A Disney Moment: Aladdin


We're finally onto a new group of five movies! It took a while, I know. So now we're at Aladdin. Aladdin was one of my favorites growing up, mostly because of the Genie and Jafar was a pretty solid villain. Sadly, I didn't enjoy it as much on a rewatch as I hoped. The whole beginning was really jumpy (which had to do with late changes in the plot but that's not my problem) and I felt like there were way too many comic relief characters. Seriously, we had Iago, Abu, Raja, and the sultan. You really only need two comic characters at most. They're typically pretty flat characters and can be a bit unnecessary. Honestly, I think one of the more complex characters was the flying carpet. I really respect how they got that much characterization out of a non-speaking carpet.

The best parts were definitely the parts with the Genie. I love his songs, his jokes, and especially the flow of his dialogue. He's pretty terrific. Overall, this movie scored a 3/5. It was fine but it didn't exactly knock my socks off. That said, I can still basically recite the movie from start to finish. I'm serious. My sister yells at me for doing it during the movie.