This Post Is Brought to You Courtesy of the Unrelenting Heat

The tag-line for this blog is "dispatches from the world's smallest, sweetest kitchen," and I am not joking around about the smallest part.

One time there were four people in the kitchen.  But it wasn't pretty.  It's so small that my baking supplies are taking over my dining room:

And my linen closet:

It's no wonder, given the number of cake pans and baking books that I have.  But it is becoming a bit of a problem.  Earlier this month Strawberry Chic posted this photo from the Better Homes and Gardens website, with a beautiful solution to the storage problems that come with small kitchens:

 Can someone make this happen for me?  I can pay you in cookies.  Seriously.

Dream Life

If only...

Harold: When did you decide to become a baker?
Ana: Um, in college.
Harold: Oh, like a cooking college?
Ana: I went to Harvard Law actually.
Harold: Oh, oh, I'm sorry, I just assumed it was --
Ana: No. No. It's fine. I didn't finish.
Harold: Something happen?
Ana: No. I was barely accepted. I mean, barely. The only reason they let me come was because of my essay. How I was going to make the world a better place with my degree. And anyway, we would have to participate in these study sessions, my classmates and I, sometimes all night long. And so I baked so no one would go hungry while we worked. Sometimes I'd bake all afternoon in the kitchen, in the dorm, and then I'd bring my little treats to the study groups and people loved them. Eat. I made oatmeal cookies... peanut butter bars...dark chocolate macadamia nut wedges, and everyone would eat and stay happy and study harder and do better on the test and more and more people started coming to the study groups and I'd bring more snacks and I was always looking for better and better recipes until soon it was ricotta cheese and apricot croissants and mocha bars with a almond glaze and lemon chiffon cake with zesty peach icing. And at the end of the semester I had twenty seven study partners, eight Mead journals filled with recipes and a D average. So I dropped out. I just figured if I was going to make the world a better place I would do it with cookies. ... You like them?


Bonus, this is some serious romance.

I brought you flours.

The Promised Land

I need to talk to you about something amazing.  Something life changing.  Something so profound, that it may alter how you feel about food forever.  You may never be able to enjoy a coffee shop doughnut or a generic chocolate bar again.  What I'm talking about is cookie dough cream pie. 

This genius invention comes from the folks at Love & Olive Oil and incorporates their cookie dough truffle recipe into a cream pie.  Because WHY NOT?  I have made the cookie dough truffles on a few occasions, including Easter;

 

 and Pal-entine's Day:

My co-workers refer to this treat as "crack" and asked me to stop bringing them into work, because where these truffles are concerned, self-control is nowhere to be found.

I am not sure that words can do the pie adaptation justice. The photos come close.  But if you live in Ottawa, you should come over and get a piece.....

Powerpuff Girl

Is it a pancake, a muffin top, a tinbit?  No, it's an ebleskiver, and it's awesome.  Ebleskivers are traditional Danish pancake puffs, often filled with a jam or chocolate or caramel. You can also make savory elbeskivers, but where is fun in that?


I bought Nordic Ware's Ebleskiver pan and this book of recipes after seeing them featured on a few other blogs. 

 The pan has round divets for making seven little ebleskivers, and though you can't filp them like pancakes, you do need to rotate them so they are cooked on both sides.  Because I don't have the official Eblskiver turning tools, I had to improvise with these drink swizzle sticks.

What's really nice about ebleskivers is the texture - because you beat the egg whites until they are foamy, and then gently fold that into the batter, the little puffs have a nice, light, fluffy feel.  They are almost like balls of crepe.  And, because they are cooked on both sides, they also are a bit like the best part of a muffin - crunchy on the outside, soft in the middle.  

My friends J & E were visiting from Toronto and I wanted to make some chocolate chip ebleskivers for them.  It was the second time making them, and I learned a few lessons the first time.  I had the element way too hot, and some of them had burned, so this time I set the element to medium-low.  However, I am still working on this thing called "patience" because I totally tried to flip the pancakes before they were exactly ready:

But they were still delicious.  Next time: caramel ones.

small town girl trying to bake her way to freedom

There's a lot of ways to escape.  I think baking is one that we can all relate to.

Mail Myself to You

In my international cake pan hunting adventures, I hit a bit of a wall with a particularly lovely cake pan.  No one would ship it to Canada for less than 50 Euros!  No one except my sweet friend Meridith.  She had it sent to her in Wisconsin and then mailed it north to me.  When I asked her how I could thank her, she said, BAKE ME A CAKE.  I think she might have been joking, but it seemed like a good challenge. Our postal workers were locked out, so I couldn't send anything anywhere, but last weekend, I knew I would be visiting the US and it would be the prefect chance to surprise Meridith with her very own cake.

First I consulted some instructions:

But a lavendar cake sounded gross. And two-steps sounded like it took too much planning.  And I was HIGHLY skeptical about whether freezing the cake would do me any favours, especially in the summer humidity - I suspected as the cake defrosted the condensation would just make for a totally mushy gross cake.  I decided to take my chances and bake her the same Paula Dean brown sugar pound cake from my first blog entry, in the Nordic Ware Heritage Bundt pan from Williams Sonoma.  I dragged this cake pan home from Toronto in February when my spinal disc problem was so bad I could barely walk.  And it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Once the cake was cooled, I double wrapped it in saran wrap, and put it in a box, surrounded by bubble wrap:

Friday we raced across the border, and made it to the USPS store at 4:15.  It closes at 4:30.  If I had my own baking reality show there would have been a lot of shots of me anxiously observing the traffic delays due to construction right before the border.   For an obscenely low amount of money the post office stamped "perishable" all over the box and sent it on its way to Meridith's place, where it arrived by Monday evening, complete in tact.  SUCCESS!

i only have eyes for you....

So, for my birthday a sweet friend got me an amazing book of Zombie cupcakes.  The cupcakes looked impressive, if a little daunting.  They called for supplies like gum paste, which I had never used before.  But her boyfriend wanted to make the bloody eyeball cupcakes for his co-workers, so I decided to give it a go. 

I started by baking brown sugar pound cake cupcakes, dyed pink, and while they were still warm, making thumbprints to function as eyesockets. 

Then we rolled dyed some white fondant a few different colours, rolled it out and then cut out circles to cover the sockets.

We mixed white fondant and gum paste and made eyeballs.  They didn't look like eyeballs, so much an as image from a junior high health class text book.....

We made more half and half and dyed it black to make eyebrows (well, it was going to be brown, but following the directions we added a drop of black  food colouring and it turned gray....and no one wants to eat grandpa's eyeballs, so we added more black).

Blue half and half was rolled out to make irises (punched out with the wide end of an icing tip), black half-and-half for the pupils (punched out with the smaller end):

With a red edible ink pen, we drew veins onto the eyeballs.  We mixed red food colouring and piping gel to make blood that we used to fill the eyesockets.