Pop Goes the Cake Pop

Happy Spring, everyone! There's no better way to ring in the spring season than with a couple inches of snow, right? Oh wait, a better way is with some lovely Spring cake pops!

As background, I have an adorable Christmas cake pop cookbook and my friend and I were toying with incorporating cake pops into our Christmas baking tradition. But since Christmas is so high-stakes, it was critical to do a test run (and just a good excuse for baking in general). We had a few options of springtime cake pops (courtesy of bakerella) to consider but we opted for the easiest one after my cake pop decorating fail a couple years ago. Our goal: Spring Chicken Cake Pops. Based on the picture on the website, they looked so freakin cute! Obviously that will mean that it is an unattainable standard but who cares? Onward!

Step one is obviously to bake the cake. Since the goal was to flex our cake pop decorating muscles, we opted for the easy way out and just made boxed cake. Basically nothing notable there. Once the cakes were ready and cooled and we were caffeinated with Starbucks, we split the cake in half so we each got the relaxing opportunity to crumble the cake into pieces. It's honestly so soothing! I'm not even sure why! We mixed in some chocolate icing with the chocolate cake (mmmmm...chocolate...) and we took some extra care to make the balls very smooth and perfect since our goal was decorating them nicely. After we rolled them up, we stuck them in the freezer to solidify a bit. Sorry, this part isn't that interesting. Let's fast forward to we've already melted some chocolate and stuck the sticks into the balls and re-frozen them.

On to decorating!

The obvious first step was to dip the balls in melted bright yellow chocolate. Let the mindless tedium begin! There's a bit of technique to it though. Basically, it's a dip, a roll, and a tap. Or many taps. As in you keep tapping the lollipop stick against the side of the chocolate bowl until all of the excess chocolate drips off. But don't tap too hard! Otherwise, your cake ball will dramatically fall off of the stick and into your chocolate. Or if you don't rotate as you tap, you end up with thicker parts of chocolate and streaks on one side of your cake pop. It's a very scientific process. About one third of our way through our pop dipping, we both simultaneously had our cake balls fall off the sticks. We determined that this was because they were getting too warm so we threw them back in the freezer. Meanwhile, I fished my fallen soldier out of the chocolate and realized that I needed more chocolate anyway so I melted more in the same bowl. After it melted, I realized, "Hmm, now there are chunks of chocolate cake in my smooth, yellow chocolate. Perhaps that is not ideal if the goal is to get a nice smooth coating of yellow chocolate." So I threw out that batch of chocolate. Womp womp.

Now, dedicated readers will recall that last time I did this, I had issues with the thickness of the chocolate. This time I didn't. I don't know why because it's not like I did anything differently. Somehow, the chocolate just worked this time. Maybe the temperature in my kitchen was different? Oh well. In any case, after about an hour, we managed to dip all of the chocolate balls. Success! There was one harrowing moment where it seemed like the balls were sweating moisture from being too cold when they were dipped in warm chocolate but there were only a few isolated cases and the issue didn't persist.

So those were the easy parts. Now for the actual "making them adorable" part. By now, my mom had arrived and joined in the decorating. To make spring chicken cake pops, one uses different shaped sprinkles (we found a great mixture of sprinkles at Michael's) to glue on (with chocolate) a beak, wings, and feet. Then you use an edible ink pen to add eyes. Aaaaaaaand that's it. Simple, right? Actually, yes. It is simple. Don't get me wrong, it's tedious and slow-moving and annoying trying to pick up the correct color and shape sprinkles but on the whole, it's not too hard. But you know what else it is? Boring. As cute as these are, they are not worth the effort in the least. That said, it was satisfying knowing that we could accomplish near-perfect spring chicken cake pop decorating:

And then we got bored. We made about...6 chickens as we had been directed to and then we wandered off into our own land of crazy. At this point, I literally raided my kitchen for any candies or random things that could be used to decorate cake pops. It was a good way to get rid of Easter candy from last year! (Don't judge.) Now for some insight into our crazy minds, I present for your judgement our collection of insane cake pops!

This was honestly so boring to us that we didn't even decorate all of them. And I'm not terribly creative so while some of those are mine, the vast majority of my cake pops followed the directions and I just kept making chickens. But hey, some of them had BLUE eyes instead of BLACK eyes! That's creativity right there! Or not.

So the grand conclusion is that there will not be Christmas cake pops next year because as cute as they are, they were just too boring and time-consuming to make. On the bright side, these were ready just in time to share with people for pi day!

A Disney Moment: Tangled

Ah, I love that we're watching good movies now. Now, I'll tell you the rating up front (it's a 2/5) because it's a somewhat controversial opinion to rank Princess and the Frog above Tangled. I will say though, they were very very close. Tangled is really funny. But it doesn't have the same emotional hits as Princess and the Frog. Tangled also has the previously discussed "too many sidekicks issue" and errs on the side of slapstick.

All that said, here's what I do like about it: the music (especially since the songs now seem to be crossing back into the intelligent lyric realm), the fun of it, the ending loophole (I love a good loophole that gets the protagonists out of certain death), and the Mother character. She's a great one. And I really do love the somewhat dark undertones of the movie. I remember the first time I saw it and walking out of the theater saying, "Did I really just see a Disney comedy about Stockholm's syndrome?" And the demise of Mother is pretty fantastic. I also liked the somewhat unconventional left turn of the ending not ending in a wedding. Because that's a very Disney thing to do but this movie nicely gives all the power to the women in the movie. Which is a whole other topic that I won't get into. But overall, the movie is really fun and I like it a lot but it gets just barely beaten by Princess and the Frog who wins for its grace, beauty, and complexity.

ThrowBAKE Monday

See what I did with the title there? It's basically the epitome of my cleverness. As you should have gathered by now, I'll be blogging (finally) about a baking project (at last) from way back when. No, seriously, it's from April. That's so many months, I don't even know how long that is! Anyway, get excited because this is something new, something exciting, something trendy. That's right: cake pops! My first foray into the world of cake pops. Are you excited yet? You should be.

To set the stage, I was invited to my future cousin-in-law's bachelorette party. I say future because at the time it was future but by the time I'm writing this, they're married sooooooo....whatever. Bachelorette party! And what is better at a bachelorette party than cake pops! And what better time to start them is the night before the party/weekend? That's what I thought too. So, the night before I had to leave for the party, I was up late making cake pops. Which I've never made before. But how hard could they be? I got all the ingredients and I decided that since the color theme of the weekend was blue and yellow that I would make sky blue cake pops with yellow polka dots. See? Nothing crazy. I'm keeping it simple. I even used boxed cake mix and canned frosting rather than make it myself. I'm getting reasonable in my old age.

So cake pops are actually quite easy (in theory). You bake the cake. Let it cool. Crumble it into a zillion pieces. Mix in frosting (about 3/4 of the can). Roll into balls. Put in sticks. Dip in chocolate. Decorate as needed. Easy. I decided to go with chocolate cake (I believe I used Duncan Hines double fudge cake because, of course) and cream cheese frosting. I was hoping to avoid it getting too sweet with all of the chocolate and everything. Baking the cake was a piece of...cake...yeahhhhhh...I couldn't resist that pun but now I don't know where to go from here. I'll just pretend that never happened. You know what's really fun? Crumbling cake with your bare hands. Seriously, I enjoyed it and spent about half an hour doing it while watching an episode of 30 Rock. Next, I mixed in the frosting. I found that the best way to do this was to squish it all together with the backside of a big metal spoon. It was surprisingly good at incorporating the frosting into every bit of the crumbs. Then I rolled them into balls and tossed them into the freezer to harden up a bit.

Here's where things got a little tricky. Dipping in chocolate. I melted my chocolate wafers and the chocolate was really thick. Definitely wasn't going to make dipping easy at all. I read somewhere that you can add some vegetable oil to thin it out a bit and thus began the process of microwaving and stirring and trying to find the right consistency. Also, I should point out that by now it was awfully late. Anyway, I started out with dipping the lollipop stick in the chocolate so that it would be like glue inside the cake pop, stuck the stick into the cake ball, and then gently rolled the ball in the chocolate and let the excess drip off. Doesn't that sound so pleasant and easy? It wasn't. The chocolate was still really thick and sometimes the cake balls would fall of the stick and get stuck in the chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate would drip all the way down the stick. Sometimes the cake pop would hold on just fine until I stuck it into the blocks of styrofoam (which I legitimately have no idea why I had) and then the cake ball would sadly slide halfway down the lollipop stick. Needless to say, it was a little frustrating to have such inconsistency. Plus it was late. Plus I kept running out of chocolate. Plus it was never the right consistency. But whatever, eventually, all the cake pops were coated in chocolate.

Now to decorate them! And keep in mind, all I'm doing is yellow polka dots! Yeah, no. Not happening. I polka dotted two of them and decided they looked stupid so I stopped. They just came out spikey and weird and I didn't like it. Blue cake pops it is! Late night Jen makes the best decisions. Zak got in on the decorating a little bit and made one that said "Hi!" and another with a happy face and a third with a penis (not pictured) because ya know, it's a bachelorette party! Our beautiful work is displayed below for your judgement:

But now that they were all done, how did they taste? Awesome. They were really delicious, albeit a bit sweet for me. But it's cake with frosting and coated in chocolate so it's hard for it to not be sweet. The girls at the party demolished them though. They were a great drunk bachelorette party food. And it was funny because as frustrating as they were, when people were asking me how I made them, my first response was "oh, it's really easy..." Funny how memory works, isn't it?

A Disney Moment: Lilo and Stitch

I remember seeing Lilo and Stitch in theaters when it first came out. It was actually somewhat notable in that it was in the pre-Pixar-rip-your-heart-out era. (And before you say anything, I know Toy Story 2 came out before that but it didn’t crush my soul as much on the first viewing as it does now.) I just remember sitting in the theater and crying my eyes out because I couldn’t figure out what loophole they were going to find to keep Lilo and Stitch together and to keep Lilo and her sister together! I just couldn’t see the way out for these characters! Maybe it was my age or something but it’s the first time I remember really crying at an animated film as an adult-ish person. All that said, this movie doesn’t hold up to that memory that I have.

It certainly has its touching moments and there’s some great messaging about unconventional families but there are some visual and storytelling hurdles that the movie doesn’t quite overcome. The whole Ugly Duckling comparison is extremely heavy-handed, the Elvis bits just feel stupid on the rewatch, and OH MY GOD, LILO’S SISTER’S LEGS! No human’s legs look like that! She has no ankles and her thighs are tree trunks. I’m not even sure she has knees. It’s more than I could handle. This surprised us by not ranking the highest in the group of five and instead landed at 2/5. Soon you shall see why. 

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.

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.

And That's Why You Never Bake After Finals

Hello friends! My next baking adventure (and I really do mean adventure) is a multi-part affair. I am making Ebony and Ivory Truffles from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. There's been far too little chocolate in my life and I seek to amend that. The Ebony and Ivory truffles involve making essentially one semisweet chocolate and one white chocolate ganache, rolling them together (after a complicated process of stirring and chilling that I'll tell you about in a minute), and coating them in cocoa. But wait! There's more! The note from the author suggests getting creative rather than just rolling the truffles in cocoa. He suggests nuts or coconut or the Ultimate Ganache or crumbled up Deep Dark Cookies. Well, I'm super creative so I decided to do all of those! I'm officially nuts. And I mean the crazy kind, not the kind I'm about to roll truffles in.

::groans at own bad joke::

That was Exhibit A for why one shouldn't bake immediately following finals. For those of you not privy to my special kind of hell this week, Thursday I had two final exams practically back to back in two extremely difficult subjects. Additionally, I had other work to do like homework assignments and group papers and other nonsense. Needless to say, there was stress. And how do I relieve stress? Apparently by baking because I'm crazy. After coming home on Thursday and deciding this would be a good idea, I started with banging out the Ultimate Ganache and the Deep Dark Cookies. I figured, "I've made both of these before! In fact, I've made the cookies twice so this should be a cakewalk!" Yeah, no.

On the bright side of life, I had an epiphany. I realized that baking chocolate is the same thing as chocolate chips and the latter is cheaper and on sale because it's Christmastime. Yay! Anyway, on to the cookies. I won't describe the details here because as I've said, I've made these twice. There were, however, a few stumbling blocks. For example, the chocolate just wouldn't freakin' melt. Seriously, 45 minutes and I still had chunky chocolate. I need a designated chocolate melter because I so don't have that sort of patience. My good old water bath method didn't work well for some reason (perhaps because my house was cold?) and it was just really really frustrating. So while I was staring at chocolate, waiting for it to melt (which is not unlike watching a pot waiting for it to boil), I decided to at least measure out the chocolate for the Ultimate Ganache. Multitasking! I'm legitimately shocked I got any measurements right because baking after two finals is something akin to baking while drunk. Which I haven't done. Yet.

Anyway, I got kinda lazy and didn't break the unsweetened chocolate chunks in half like I was supposed to. Exhibit B. Big mistake. After checking the progress of my melting chocolate and finding it still unmelted, I decided to just go ahead and finish up the ganache. Maybe it's that I'm scared of boiling heavy cream and I don't let it boil enough but for some reason, it didn't melt the chocolate in the pretty way it did the last time. I don't get it. Most notably, the unsweetened chocolate was particularly resistant to melting. I should be good at melting chocolate by now dammit! Anyway, after whisking the hell out of the ganache, I eventually got it to smooth out but let me assure you, it was a process. After finishing that, I went back to my cookies to find my chocolate still. not. melted. After 45 minutes. Insane. Clearly frustrated, I just chucked the mostly melted chocolate into the mixing bowl and declared that the remaining chunks would be chocolate chips. Told you I'm crazy. Exhibit C, folks.

My mixer did not like this decision. It tried to jump off the counter again and it did not enjoy trying to mix with those chocolate chunks in there. I can't say I blame it. I wouldn't take that kind of abuse if I were the mixer either. Anyway, after adding the chocolate, I had to add the flour and cocoa and I don't know why but when I turned on the mixer to blend them, it was like Hiroshima. Mushroom cloud of cocoa and flour. Pieces of batter were literally flying out of the mixer. It was puzzling. And annoying. And messy. And I so didn't care because I took 2 finals that day. Those were the major hurdles and after that, I just baked the cookies and contemplated writing the presentation I had to give the next day. In case you were wondering, I only contemplated and did not in fact do it that night.

Fast forward to Friday evening. Another long day and the last official day of classes. In a fit of crazy, I decided to make the truffles Friday night and do all of the dipping in stuff on Saturday. Cool. So, again, I had to boil heavy cream and pour it over chocolate. Let me put this in perspective for you. 15 oz of white chocolate in one bowl. 16 oz of semisweet chocolate in another bowl. 1.5 cups of boiled heavy cream. That's it. And, only 1/3 of that heavy cream is designated for the white chocolate. Seems odd, right? Anyway, I boiled the heavy cream and then kind of eyeballed how much had to go in each bowl. I know, I know, not scientific. But what was I supposed to do? Pour the boiling cream into a measuring cup? Seriously, I'm not sure how I should have handled this.

Let stand for 4-5 minutes. Stir with separate whisks until smooth. I only have one whisk. Used a spoon for the other. Alas. The semisweet chocolate was perfection. It got nice and smooth and it was awesome. But the white chocolate. Oh, the white chocolate. The chocolate refused to melt. The whole thing was just way too thick and the chips weren't even close to melting, even after vigorous stirring. So I think to myself, "Maybe you eyeballed the cream all wrong and there's not enough cream." Then I agreed with myself so I boiled another 1/8 cup of cream or so. Basically just enough to cover the bottom of my saucepan. Poured that over the chocolate and let that stand for a few minutes. Returned to stir again and still, the white chocolate wasn't even close to being melted.

WHY CAN'T I MELT CHOCOLATE???

My chocolate may not be melting but my brain sure is. Think, think, think. Ok, I cannot microwave the chocolate because it's in a metal bowl. That would be bad. Then again, it's in a metal bowl...I have a saucepan...I'll make a makeshift double boiler! Awesome. So, I set the bowl on top of my saucepan (being careful to not let the bowl touch the water), boiled the water, stirred my chocolate and voila! It almost entirely melted! There's no way in hell that a recipe with 3 ingredients should have been this difficult. Maybe I just don't have the baking techniques yet to play with the big dogs. Or maybe it's bad luck. Or poor judgement. Next direction: let stand for an hour at room temperature. Good judgement: time for a glass of wine.

After an hour of sitting, I had to refrigerate for 15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Ok. Easy. Nope, not easy. Remember how delightful that semisweet chocolate was being for me before? Not anymore. I don't know what the hell I was supposed to stir it with (possibly a jackhammer) because that stuff was pretty hard. I broke my whisk trying to stir it. Seriously. I'm just as shocked as you. It's not fair, I followed the ridiculous timings to the letter and even set a timer so I wouldn't screw it up. Sad panda. Anyway, I abandoned my whisk and stirred with great difficulty with a spoon. The white chocolate, however, was stir-able. Figures. Then I was supposed to put a heaping tablespoon of the semisweet chocolate on parchment paper and top it with a flat tablespoon of the white chocolate. Way easier said than done. The white chocolate was really sticky. I had much trouble rolling the combined chocolates into balls. They were kinda deformed and I had to rechill the white chocolate several times and it was messy. And frustrating.

And here's the reason why: I should not have been using white chocolate chips. This has been an extremely valuable lesson for me. In frustration, I flipped through the Death By Chocolate cookbook and right there in the first few pages, it informs me to only use certain types of white chocolate and particularly to avoid those with vegetable or other oils in the ingredients. Oh. This now explains the somewhat oily nature of my white chocolate ganache. I know this blog post is getting long but it's an important point to get across. When working with white chocolate (and particularly when making candy), just suck it up and get the good stuff.

Let's fast forward again to Saturday now. Time to put the coatings on the candies. I decided on cocoa, cocoa with cinnamon added, Ultimate Ganache, crumbled Deep Dark Cookies, coconut, and walnuts. Cocoa, no problem. Ganache, no problem. The rest though...blergh. The stuff wouldn't stick to the semisweet chocolate parts of the truffles. So I guess that's the good thing about the crappy white chocolate. It was difficult, there was a lot of molding and shaping of the truffles, but it got done in the end. Then, I realized that I had about a quarter cup of heavy cream left and decided to make more because I'm crazy! I didn't want to use the white chocolate again so I consulted Joy of Cooking for a recipe. I found one that included adding liquor to the truffles. Score! So I made another two types with rum added and decided to coat them in Ultimate Ganache and powdered sugar. This post is too long so I won't further elaborate but here they are, my post-finals crazy truffles:

Frustrating as they were, at least they're beautiful. Now, I only tasted one (the Ultimate Ganache one, obviously) and it was really delicious. So so so so chocolatey. I think you have to be a chocolate fiend to enjoy these though because they really are a hefty dose of chocolate. I may have made the ganache coating too thick. Oh well. By the way, my whole kitchen is just a mess of chocolate. In this project, I used almost all the bowls I own and there is chocolate everywhere from my floor to my counters to my refrigerator door. Looks like Sunday will be a good scrub-down of my kitchen. Like I said, I'm a little nuts.

Critical Reception:
People flipped for the coconut snowmen. At first the consumers weren't entirely sure what they were but once I instructed them to turn them so that the hat was on top, they got it. They were described as "sinfully sweet" and "dangerously good because it's hard to have only one". One person commented that this was their favorite thing that I had made so far. One of my officemates declared me Queen of the Sweets after having two coconut snowmen. Man, I guess those mind control drugs I put in the snowmen really worked!

A Disney Moment: Melody Time
The last of the dark times Disney films! And it's about time. I'm ready for some full length stuff again. This is another film that is comprised of seven shorts loosely held together by...a paintbrush? That's just weak, Disney. By the time I got to watching this one, I just didn't care anymore. All of these movies kind of blended together in my mind. The most famous short in this film is Johnny Appleseed which I thought was actually really boring and heavy handedly religious. Honestly, I don't even remember much about it except that I didn't like it.

The highlight for me was a short called "Little Toot". Once again, one of my favorite shorts has the vocals performed by the Andrews sisters. This short features a little tugboat who wants to be just like his father, Big Toot. However, Little Toot is kind of an idiot and causes an ocean liner to crash into what I assume is New York City. Wait, what? No one addresses this obvious disaster except to exile Little Toot in chains to a buoy far out in the ocean and relegate his father to towing the garbage barges and getting covered in seagull crap. Really, folks? A ship has crashed into the city! There are buildings that are literally toppled over! It's like 9/11 times a hundred! Yes, 91,100! You're not even going to address that? The very next scene though, has Little Toot alone in the ocean with terrifying buoys (think of the trees in the forest in Snow White) chanting "Shame! Shame!"

Of course, then Little Toot finds a ship in distress during a storm and redeems himself (with the requisite scene where we think our protagonist has died) by towing the ship to safety. So anyway, I can't get past that ship crashing into the city but at least it's a short that stuck with me. You can find it on YouTube if you want to take a look. This movie gets a 4/5 and I'm glad to be done with these compilation shorts films. Good riddance. Next up, we have a group of 5 films that include some real classics and I cannot wait!

Getting in the Christmas Spirit

Well, I guess I lied about not baking until finals were over. I took a couple study breaks on Saturday to come up with a delightful holiday treat. I specifically chose something that would have multiple steps that involved chilling in between the steps so that I could keep on diligently studying. No, seriously, I was studying! You can put away those skeptical looks now. Feeling very Christmas-y, I decided to finally tackle a treat that I've been dying to make ever since I started this project but couldn't until now because it's very wintery. Coming to you from the cookbook that brought us the Cookie Dough Truffles, I give you....Coconut Snowmen!

The picture for these is SO cute. It's so cute that here is a link to the picture. Basically, they are balls of coconut (like the truffles) coated in white chocolate, topped with a chocolate covered marshmallow to look like a hat, with an adorable icing smiley face. They're awesome. The recipe said that the yield was 4 dozen coconut snowmen but I figured that I was too stressed out to pipe 4 dozen smiley faces so I halved the recipe. So, I turned on the Christmas music station on my tv and got to work.

First step was making the coconut balls. They were just coconut, sweetened condensed milk, confectioner's sugar, and butter. However, it was a lot of coconut and a lot of sugar. As a result, I had a really really thick dough-type mixture. Oh, and I should mention, sweetened condensed milk annoys me. It just pours out of the can soooooooo sloooooooowly. Anyway, after a while, the MixMaster refused to blend any more of the coconut into the dough (and in fact, tried to make a suicidal leap off the counter. Seriously.) so I just started kneading the dough with my hands to incorporate the coconut. Fun fun. Then, I had to roll the dough into individual balls about 1 1/4 inches across. This was actually not too bad. The bad part's coming soon, I promise.

Commence coconut ball chilling!

After chilling, I had to coat the balls in white chocolate. I melted some white chocolate chips in the microwave (easy enough) and then I was faced with the same dilemma I had with the Cookie Dough Truffles. How does one appropriately coat a ball in chocolate without a) making a huge mess, b) getting a really thick coating, and c) getting a spiky covering and not at all the smooth coating that appears in the picture? The answer is that I don't know. Because all of those things happened to me. I tried rolling the balls around in the bowl, I tried putting the chocolate on my fingers and kind of painting it on, I tried swirling the chocolate around the ball and nothing worked. Alas. So, I have some slightly spiky chocolate covered coconut balls. Back in the fridge to chill, you fiends.

After a brief break to regain my composure, I got to what I'm sure will be your favorite part of this process: coating marshmallows in chocolate to look like top hats. I melted some milk chocolate this time and the directions told me to coat the marshmallows and then put them on waxed paper and swirl the chocolate on the bottom to get hat brims. Easy, right? WRONG! Let me paint a picture for you, dear readers: picture me standing at the counter of my kitchen with a bowl of fairly hot chocolate. I have a bag of jumbo puffed marshmallows. Silent Night is ironically playing in the background. Unlike the coconut balls, the marshmallows are pretty pliable. You know what that means? It means that when I try to pick them up out of the chocolate bowl, they are slippery and squeezable. Which means that they slip right out of my fingers. It sometimes took up to four attempts to pick up a single marshmallow. Siiiiiiiilent niiiiiiight....

I wish you could have been there to see it because even in my frustrated state, I remember thinking "This is pretty funny" and I don't feel I am adequately describing the absurdity of the process but it'll have to do. I managed to do some decent swirling of chocolate to get some hat brims, though my chocolate coating isn't perfect and there are some spots of marshmallow that poke through. My caring level was low though because I had chocolate under my fingernails and I hate that. Into the fridge, you heinous beasts!

The final step was the assembly. But first, can someone explain something to me? Why is it that the white chocolate coating does not get all melty when you hold it but the milk chocolate one does? Even after chilling, the chocolate covered hats start melting really quickly while the coconut balls were left out on my counter for like an hour and didn't melt one bit? It doesn't make any sense to me but it makes me sad. Anyway, using the remaining milk chocolate like glue, I attached the hats to the snowmen heads. This was surprisingly painless. Then the only thing left was to pipe on some faces. I was supposed to use orange icing for a little carrot nose but you know what's expensive? Icing. So I didn't. So here they are, for your judgement, my coconut snowmen:

They're not perfect, but they're my screwed up little babies so I love them anyway. I have no idea how they taste. I don't care for coconut or marshmallows really so I figure I'll let someone else be the guinea pig. I literally can't fathom how someone would eat this though. It's too big to just pop in your mouth and you can't really bite it. Maybe you eat the hat first and then eat the jolly snowman? I just don't know. All I know is, I love Christmas.

Critical Reception:
People really loved the butterscotch oatmeal cookies. I even had one person tell me that it was their favorite thing that I had made so far. Yay! I'm thinking of possibly eliminating this segment from my blog because so often I have very little to say in it. Thoughts?

A Disney Moment: Fun and Fancy Free
Next on our list is Fun and Fancy Free which is another one of those compilation feature films but this one has only two segments: Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk. I was pretty excited for this because I've seen Mickey and the Beanstalk and I've loved it. It's such a classic with the goofy semi-retarded giant and the happy valley song and the descent of Donald into cannibalistic madness. Well, more on my viewing of Mickey and the Beanstalk in a moment.

The film opens with our old friend Jiminy Cricket singing a delightful song "Fun and Fancy Free". I actually really enjoyed that and it was nice to see Jiminy again. Then we launch into the story of Bongo, a circus bear who longs to escape to the wild. The beginning of the segment had some Pinocchio overtones similar to when Pinocchio is working for the puppet show but it lost its charm pretty quickly. In fact, the whole segment dragged and I could not understand how the story of Bongo could be stretched to half a film. Yeah, it couldn't. As cute as Bongo was, he couldn't carry the segment. I spaced out about halfway through and when I came back, there were bears slapping each other. Somehow this was a good thing and it was confusing for a while until I realized that if you love someone, you slap them. Excellent message, Disney. Way to go with that one. Pretty much Bongo was a flop.

I forgot to mention, when reading the credits at the beginning, listed for Mickey and the Beanstalk were Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Huh? I don't remember them in Beanstalk. Odd. So we come to the Beanstalk segment and there's some premise with a party and Jiminy crashing the party and Edgar Bergen offers to tell the story of Mickey and the Beanstalk with Charlie's snide comments. Charlie kind of creeps me out. Anyway, as the cartoon portion begins, I recognized Bergen's voice as what I was used to but there were also interjections by Charlie that I did not remember. Very odd. And once or twice, the action cut back to the party, which was another feature I did not previously remember. It's not like the incorporation of Charlie was necessarily a bad thing but it was jarring to my memory of the cartoon. It's like listening to a song you know by heart and it starts skipping at weird times. Not enough to ruin it but just enough to make you feel uncomfortable. I still enjoyed Mickey's adventures (particularly the scene where they're all starving and Donald goes crazy) but it just wasn't quite what I so fondly remembered.

I finally figured out what was "wrong" with the cartoon after reading a book on Disney films that I took out of the library. (Yes, I actually use the library.) The version that aired on tv substituted Ludwig Von Drake for Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. All of a sudden it made more sense to me because I remember good ol' Ludwig now. So anyway, with Bongo being a flop and with me having a somewhat varied memory of Mickey and the Beanstalk, this only ranks either a 2 or 3 of 5. Good, but not good enough. I really can't wait to get back to real films.

My Kitchen Smells Like Cinnamon and Sugar

Welcome back to another edition of "In the Kitchen with Jen"! In this installment we will watch as Jen attempts to make bread from scratch. Some background: There's this bread called Amish Friendship Bread. It basically works like this: After receiving some starter dough in a plastic bag from a friend (there's the Friendship part!), you mash the bag and add ingredients to feed the starter over 10 days before baking the most heavenly cinnamon bread ever. Before you bake it though, you have to separate out 4 bags of starter from your dough to give to your friends. That's right folks, it's a chain letter. With dough. Fascinating, right?

I received some starter several months ago and made this bread and it's really really good. It was so good that I saved a bag of starter for myself each time which meant that I was baking bread every 10 days. This was fun until it got too exhausting. My boyfriend, however, was extremely disappointed when I stopped baking the bread because he loves it. So, I decided to revisit this recipe mostly to make him happy and so I could bring home a loaf of cinnamon bread for Thanksgiving break.

One problem: I have no starter. According to the letter that comes with the starter, the recipe for the starter is an Amish secret and you can only obtain the starter from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from the Amish! Oh no! Aaaaaaaand I call bullshit on that one. A quick Google search revealed several recipes for the starter which were all pretty much identical. So much for your secret, Amish people. So I did a bit of planning ahead and 10 days ago, I went to the store to buy some yeast to make my starter.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble! Oh wait, wrong holiday. Anyway, I let the yeast dissolve in warm water (not hot, so as not to kill the yeast) and then added milk, flour, and sugar. Typically this starter is passed around in plastic bags but I felt like I had a bit more flexibility so I put it in a Pyrex bowl and loosely covered it with a kitchen towel for it to rise. One of the recipes I saw warned against using any metal bowls or spoons because it's bad for the yeast and the dough won't properly rise (?) so I was very careful to use only wooden spoons. I don't really know if this was necessary.

Anywho, here's my second problem. I don't want to have to pass starter dough to 4 people. It's exhausting. So, I found a comment in one of the recipes that shared my feeling on this. This person said that it's fine to just not add the ingredients during the 10 day cycle and just bake with what starter you have and it turns out just as good. So there's gonna be a bit of mystery attached to this cinnamon bread. I really hope it works.

So, for the past 10 days, I've been stirring my starter with a wooden spoon and it keeps rebubbling every time I stir it so I think that's good. Now on day 10, we're ready to bake! It looks like there's so much starter in that bowl. Hmm. I'm starting to really doubt my plan. It looks like almost a full cup too much starter. Too late now though! The recipe itself is really easy and they just list the ingredients all together and pretty much say "Add these." So I decided to use a little of my baking savvy and added all the wet ingredients to the starter first and then added all the dry ones. I don't know if I wasn't adding fast enough or what was going on but the batter got a bit lumpy. That's when I decided that the no-metal rule had expired and pulled out my hand blender. Things got a bit dicey here because seriously, the bowl was almost overflowing with batter. I started to feel better at this point though because I remember having that same problem the last time I made the bread so maybe the starter proportion is ok. I hope. :-/

So after mixing in all the ingredients (I should mention, there is some variability with this recipe. You can use either vanilla or chocolate instant pudding in the batter and you can add nuts or raisins or chocolate chips. I went with the vanilla pudding and can you guess? Chocolate chips, of course!), I had to prepare the pans for baking. What that meant was spraying them with Pam and then coating the sides of the pan with a cinnamon sugar mixture. I'm actually pretty good at that technique because I've had a good amount of practice and my mommy taught me how to tap the mixture around the pan. The final direction before baking was to pour the batter evenly in 2 loaf pans. Did I mention this makes 2 loaves of bread? I probably shouldn't blog when I'm this tired...

Where was I? Right, pouring batter. This is actually more challenging for me than it may seem. See, I have pretty tiny hands. So it's really hard to hold the big bowl with my tiny hands. I can pour two-handed no problem but when we get down to the end and I have to use one hand to hold the bowl and the other hand to scoop the remaining batter out, things get tricky. I could really use a third hand. Or like, 5 since I'm wishing for things. Might as well go all out. Anywho, after successfully pouring the batter (and by successfully, I mean that I finished but did get a bunch on my shirt), I sprinkled the remaining cinnamon/sugar mixture over the tops and stuck them in the oven for an hour.

Oh God, my house smells so good. Even if this bread tastes awful, it would be almost worth it just to experience this smell for a few hours.

So, after the specified hour, the middle still wasn't done so I left it for another 5 minutes or so. As a result the edges got a little crispy. Oh well. Doesn't matter, look how beautiful these things are:

Beautiful. Taste-wise, definitely delicious. It seems a little denser than I remember but maybe that's because I overcooked them a little bit or maybe the starter really was off or maybe my memory is useless. The last one is probably most accurate. In any case, mission accomplished. If anyone is interested in getting a bag of this starter, talk to me and I'll hook you up. I'm thinking that if I make this again, I'll follow the directions and then just freeze the starter I don't use for future use (apparently it keeps in the freezer for at least 6 months). Hehehe, it smells so good in here.

Critical Reception:
Well, the brownie cookies have been well, but not widely, received. I missed colloquium due to a bout of feeling miserably sick so I didn't get to share my brownie cookies. One of my office mates agrees that they're mysterious but thinks they're more cookie than brownie. I'll be taking some home this weekend so maybe my mommy can tell me what they are. Mommies know everything.

A Disney Moment: Saludos Amigos
Oh boy, we've entered into what I'll call the "Dark Times Disney Disasters". Ok, so maybe they're not that bad but the next 5 films in the sequence are not what I would call up to the Disney standard. The first of the next 5 films is Saludos Amigos or as I will call it "An Ode to South America". The very first thing of note about this film is that there are people in it! That doesn't seem right. If movies like Mary Poppins and Song of the South aren't included in the list of Disney animated films, why do we have to watch Walt Disney and his animators board a plane to South America? Crazy.

For those of you who don't know, Saludos Amigos is really just a series of shorts stuck together that all take place in South America. To give you historical context, these were made during WWII. That's all I'll say about that. The first segment is Donald Duck goes to Lake Titicaca. It's boring. The problem with this whole movie is that it seems like it's a Travel Channel special for all of South America with cartoons thrown in to make it more appealing. Except it's not. It's mostly just boring. Grr.

I don't even feel like talking about each of the segments. I will say that the segment about Pedro the airplane who carries the mail over the scary looking mountain was mean. We thought Pedro had crashed in the scary mountain! Jeez, even the narrator said "And Pedro was gone." Disney can be mean. The only other thing of note was that the last segment really just served as an introduction to one of the main characters in Three Caballeros (which is our next film on the list). It's hard to rank the next 5 because I think they're all mostly terrible but I think this one might be the worst. Pedro was the only redeeming quality of the film to me and that was iffy at best. So I guess it's 5/5 (over the next 5 movies). All uphill from here then, right?

Is it a Brownie? Is it a Cookie? I'm So Confused!

Welcome back! For today's culinary delight, I bring you Chewy Brownie Cookies. I've actually had a request for a baked treat sans chocolate. I thought about entertaining that request until I decided that I'm no short order cook. I bake when the spirit of baking moves me and my baking decisions are based on the pictures in my books. So if all the delicious pictures are of chocolate desserts then the request-er is shit outta luck. So there. This is MY kitchen.

So with that bit of aggression out of my system, let's get back to the Chewy Brownie Cookies. This recipe is from an oldie but a goodie, the Bake Sale Cookbook. I'd love to say that thought went into choosing this recipe but the truth is, the picture looked yummy and I didn't want something overly complicated today. The picture makes them look like a lighter version of the Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies. And the recipe didn't call for melting chocolate for once so I was pretty into that. The first step in the recipe was to preheat the oven and place sheets of foil on the countertop for cooling cookies. Huh? Why wouldn't I just use a cooling rack like I have for every single other thing I've baked? I couldn't think of a good reason so I ignored this direction. Plus I just don't have that much counter space.

Next, I got to combine brown sugar, shortening (remember, code for Crisco!), water, and vanilla. After digging around in my cabinet for a bit, I brought out my really really big bag of brown sugar that I bought from Costco. Seriously, this is a huge bag of brown sugar. I almost dropped it on my head. That would've hurt quite a bit so I'm glad I didn't. Anywho, after measuring out the brown sugar and heaving the bag back up to the top shelf of my cabinet, I had to measure out 2/3 cup of Crisco. This being the Brand Name Bake Sale Cookbook, they actually did call for Crisco so that was exciting. On the other hand, Crisco is kinda gross. It's so slimy but firm and I just tried not to think too hard about it as I spooned it out into the 1/3 cup measuring cup.

I miss using the KitchenAid Mixer. My mixer was not inclined to blend these ingredients well. I had to scrape down the sides of the bowl about 6 times and it was just annoying. (Santa, are you listening?) Things got a little easier after adding the eggs but the whole mixture seemed a little grittier than it should've been. After that, I was supposed to combine the flour, cocoa, salt, and baking salt and then add it to my mixture. I don't know why I felt so lazy today but I didn't feel like dirtying another bowl so I just measured the ingredients and tossed them in. I'm sure it'll be fine. Then I had to beat just until blended but this was hard because so much of the batter was sticking to the sides and not mixing in properly. I feel like some parts of the batter were over blended and some were under blended and can you even over blend a batter like this? I don't actually know. Hopefully not. In any case, then I just had to add two cups of chocolate chips. Two cups seemed like a whole lot of chocolate chips for the small amount of batter that it looked like I had. Nevertheless, faithful slave to cookbooks that I am, I followed those directions and stirred in those chocolate chips.

The final step was to, of course, bake. Here are the directions: "Drop dough by rounded measuring tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart." Can someone explain to me what rounded measuring tablespoonful means? I've seen this before and it still confuses me. If I were to actually use my measuring tablespoon then I would have really small cookies and then how would I get the dough out of the tablespoon? It seems inefficient to me. I just use a regular kitchen tablespoon, like the kind you use for eating. I guess it's just one of those unsolved kitchen mysteries that I'll have to figure out in my own good time. Anywho, with a short baking time, these cookies were done pretty quickly. There was one odd moment where, after 3 full batches of cookies, I attempted to make a 4th batch but only had enough dough for 3 small cookies. After staring at it for a few seconds, I decided that would be absurd and turned off the oven. Sorry if I've offended you by wasting batter but...too bad. So, here they are:

They smell delicious. I love the smell of chocolate in my kitchen. They look like cookies. They smell like cookies. But they taste...like brownies? But not entirely like brownies. Like thin chocolate chippy brownies? Like a brownie/cookie hybrid? I really don't know but they do taste good. Definitely strange but I would recommend this recipe for anyone who wants a brownie cookie. In hindsight, I maybe should have been anticipating this outcome. After all, they are titled Chewy Brownie Cookies.

Critical Reception: 
Yummy yummy cookie sandwiches. The best review I got was from a fellow grad student who said, "Holy crap, these are awesome!" Not really sure what else to say. Everybody liked these cookies and people were pretty excited when they realized there was filling between the cookies. Good job, Food and Wine Cookbook.

A Disney Moment: Bambi

It’s impossible for you to understand my reaction to Bambi without a little family history. As a kid, I was more or less ambivalent towards Bambi. I didn’t really hate it but I didn’t really have a desire to watch it either. More or less forgettable. My sister, on the other hand, was TERRIFIED by Bambi. What made it even more comical was the fact that she thought that the bad guy in the movie was The Thicket. Not Man, who shoots Bambi’s mother in another rather heartless move by the Walt Disney Company, but The Thicket. No matter how many times we tried to convince her that The Thicket wasn’t even a person and was in fact where Bambi lived with his mother, she couldn’t be persuaded and lived in fear of the movie until the day that I made her rewatch it with me as an adult.

Now the only thing that’s scary is how boring that movie is. Honestly, the “camera shots” are boring, the songs are dull and can lull you to sleep, and Bambi’s so dumb that you wish that the hunter had shot him instead of the mother. But enough about that. Instead of really giving you my opinions on this film, I will instead describe what watching it with my family was like.

My mom, sister, and I settled in to watch Bambi after basking in the triumph that was Dumbo a few hours previously. About 30 seconds in, it was declared, “This movie is BORING.” That should set the tone for you. We had some extensive conversation about the deadbeat deer dad and whether or not Flower was a boy or girl. Then we got to the scene where Bambi is introduced to the meadow. At this point my sister started cowering a little bit because she’s hearing about how dangerous the meadow is and clearly thinks this is where things start to get real. Maybe the meadow is the real enemy!

Nope, just some deer frolicking around.

My mom had wandered out for some reason and wandered back in just about when Bambi is sliding around on ice. Her contribution: “Jeez, this movie is slow moving. Bambi’s mother is still alive, there still hasn’t been the fire…” “WHAT?? THERE’S A FIRE???” is my sister’s response. She legit had no idea there was a fire in this movie. This then led to my mom telling her “Oh yeah, Bambi gets shot too.” “WHAAAAAT? WHAT IS THIS MOVIE?” When she asked if he lived though, that was my turn to feel a little stupid. I could not at all remember if Bambi lived or died after being shot. And I didn’t care. I don’t much feel like discussing Bambi any further except to note a couple of things. One is that he continues the great circle of deadbeat deer dads which annoyed us. Another is that it’s nonsensical for him to be a prince when his father is a prince. A third is that Faline (Bambi’s girlfriend) should learn to stay put in the thicket where it’s safe until Bambi gets back a split second later. That’s so annoying. Also, there were several moments that Lion King ripped off of Bambi, the most noticeable of which was when the dogs are leaping at Faline when she’s on a ledge. Pretty much the hyenas leaping at Simba in the elephant graveyard. Lastly, where the hell did Bambi get shot? One second he’s lying as if dead on a rock and the next, his father shows up and is all “We have to go! Get up!” and Bambi just wobbles to his feet and runs away with his father. There’s no blood and there’s no indication that Bambi was anything but surprised by the noise of the gun. Dumb. Overall, the movie just annoys me and holds no entertainment value. Definitely the worst of the first five Disney films. 

Why Are My Hands Always Covered in Chocolate?

Greetings! This week has been a lazy week (plus my homework started to get the better of me) so this adventure was restricted to whatever ingredients I already had at my house. There were a few possibilities in my usual go to cookbooks but I started idly flipping through Joy of Cooking while watching Glee last night. I came across the section on icebox cookies and was intrigued. Icebox (or refrigerator) cookies are similar to the watermelon slice cookies I made previously in that the dough has to be rolled into a log and chilled for several hours. However, the recipe for vanilla icebox cookies seemed boring. Fortunately for me (and probably for you, dear readers), there was a picture next to the recipe for Pinwheel Icebox Cookies. If you couldn't tell by now, I'm a sucker for anything that is accompanied by a cute picture and two-tone cookies with a spiral pattern seems right up my alley.

For the loyal readers who religiously check this blog for my next great adventure (or who I bully into reading), you'll probably remember that I had a few complaints with my last Joy of Cooking cookie recipe. Most importantly, the cookies were way too bland. Anxious to avoid this disappointment, I compared the two recipes before beginning (because as far as I can tell, icebox cookies are still basically sugar cookies). The recipe for Vanilla Icebox Cookies calls for more butter, more sugar, and more vanilla so I interpret that to mean more flavor. Plus, the second color that is spiraled into the dough is colored by the presence of chocolate. Win. Let's bake!

Step 1: Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Wait, really? Whisk that together? It can't possibly be necessary for me to dirty a whisk just to blend three dry ingredients. So, instead I used the knife that had been used to level the flour in the measuring cup. Yup, stirred stuff with a knife. And you know what? It worked just fine, thank you very much. Sadly, my ability to dismiss stupid directions did not continue through this entire recipe. You'll see.

Step 2: Beat unsalted butter (softened) and sugar. Last time I did this, I don't think that I softened the butter enough and that's why I got the lumpy, crumbly dough. This time, I made sure the butter was soft and successfully got fluffy butter/sugar. Step 3: Add the rest of the ingredients and then stir in Step 1's flour mixture.

Step 4 is where things got interesting. Herein lies the pinwheel part of the recipe. I had to divide the dough in half (that part was easy!) then I had to knead 2 oz of melted semisweet chocolate into half of the dough. Remember how I said I wasn't going to melt chocolate in the microwave anymore? I lied. Since I was only melting two of the little squares of baking chocolate, I figured the microwave could handle it. And it did! It was super exciting that I didn't end up with burnt chocolate. Now that I had melted chocolate, I just had to knead it into half the dough. Uh, knead it? Like with my hands? I've kneaded dough plenty of times before but not with melted chocolate. Now, I don't know what in the world I was thinking when I decided it would be a good idea to follow these directions. A better idea probably would have been to use a spoon, or a mixer, or ANYTHING BUT MY HANDS. However, I'm an idiot so I started to knead half the chocolate into the dough. It made a freakin mess. The chocolate stuck to my hands, the dough stuck to my hands, the chocolate and dough stuck to the wax paper I was kneading on, and it wasn't really blending at all. About 30 seconds into this disaster, I thought to myself "I probably should've coated my hands in flour so it was less sticky" but hindsight is 20/20, now isn't it? I tried everything I could think of to blend the chocolate into this dough including (but not limited to) pulling the dough apart and putting it back together many times, tossing the ball of dough from one hand to the other, and throwing the ball of dough onto the wax paper dramatically. I don't think that last one helped blend chocolate but it made me feel better. Finally, I managed to get a fairly even shade of brown in my ball of dough. Yay! And then I realized that I had only used half the chocolate so far. Awesome. So I coated my hands in flour to diminish the stickiness. It did not help. At all. Stupid Joy of Cooking.

After the frustration of the chocolate, during which time I had to work extremely hard to get all the chocolate off of my hands, I had to roll the 2 balls of dough into rectangles 11 inches long. That was a bit challenging as well as I rolled the dough a bit too thin and got a big hole in the middle of the dough. Sigh. Eventually, through a great deal of effort and cursing, I managed to get two reasonable rectangle shapes. Then I had to put the chocolate rectangle on top of the plain rectangle so I could roll them up together. Given my previous difficulty, I was correct in assuming that I could not accurately place one rectangle on top of the other. Stupid stupid Joy of Cooking. Eventually I had pretty much layered the two doughs and just had to roll them up. The picture shows two disembodied hands picking up the wax paper on one end to magically roll the dough perfectly. HAHAHA. This would've been easier if the dough hadn't been so thin that it stuck to the wax paper. After peeling the dough off the wax paper and filling in the holes, I wrapped the dough up and stuck the damn thing in the fridge overnight.

The morning brought fewer malicious feelings toward these cookies, although I did have a nightmare where the cookies didn't pinwheel properly and were just a white and black mess. The final step was just to cut and bake the cookies. I was supposed to cut the log into 3/16 inch thick slices. That's less than a quarter inch which seems really thin to me. However, I followed the directions and kinda burnt the first batch. The later batches were cut thicker. Oh hey! Apparently I WAS supposed to grease the cookie sheet! Whoops. Oh well, the cookies came out ok. They have more flavor to them than the last JoC cookies but I don't know, maybe I'm just not wild about sugar cookies. And they didn't come out as cute as I hoped. They kinda were flattened and didn't get as many spirals as I wanted. However, you be the judge:

Overall, not the best, not the worst, but probably the most irritating. Oh well, I'm sure they'll be gone at colloquium within less than half an hour.

Critical Reception:
The Chocolate Insanity cookies were amazing. I literally don't care what anyone else thought about them because I thought they were so good. However, I sent some to a friend far away, and I brought some to another friend far away, and I brought some to my sister and her roommate and they seemed pretty much loved by all. The leftover cookies are also in my office. Or at least they were the last time I was there and they may very well be gone by now. They were really yummy. I'd definitely make those cookies again. Maybe I'll make them around Christmas time. Hmm. Now I want one of those cookies...