Cooking Adventures: Preheating The Oven Like A Boss

Hello! Remember back in January when I said I was hoping to write all kinds of new Cooking Adventures this year? Well, that hasn’t exactly happened. It doesn’t mean that I haven’t been cooking new and exciting things in my kitchen, it just means that not all of them have been worthy tales to tell on the blog. And I’ve been busy; super busy. But I’m not going to get into all that business now. Instead, I’ll tell you the horrifying tale of trying to make this blasted grapefruit pound cake.

Now, the first thing to keep in mind is that this pound cake is delicious and was well worth all the effort it took to put it together. I’d found the recipe on Pinterest not too long ago and was interested in the idea of making some kind of dessert/breakfast crossover that didn’t have any chocolate. My hope was to give my parents some of it and neither of them eat chocolate.

The original recipe comes from FakeGinger. Thank you to Amanda for sharing the recipe with everyone.

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Angel Food Cake and Demons Cooking Adventure

This week we take on the dastardly Illuminati as we pay tribute to Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. I attempt to create a baking decadence that (for all in intents and purposes) probably shouldn’t exist. It’s called the Heaven and Hell Cake. A mouthwatering combination of Angel Food cake layers with Devil Food Cake layers. Smothered in between is an unbelievably delicious peanut butter ganache and dripped over it is a smooth chocolate coating. It has you saying, “Oh my ganache.”

…Well, almost.

My take on this fine cake was ruined by the angel food cake. This is my second attempt trying to make it and I once again failed…miserably. But I had to complete it so I resorted to the wonderful Hannaford’s Supermarket to supply me with a cake that was actually edible.

Somehow, whenever I try to make angel food cake, I always have the same problem. I get to the point in the recipe where I’m supposed to beat egg whites and sugar together until they form “stiff peaks”. And so I beat, and beat, and beat. I beat the heaven out of those egg whites until they are no longer angelic in the least bit. No stiff peaks form. Ever. When I try to go ahead with the recipe, I end up with this strange marshmallowy concoction of God knows what that isn’t even…real. It’s just a brick of gross goo with a hard crust. Eww.

Basically, what I’m saying is that if you want to try this recipe for yourself, you’re going to want to hop over and check out Whisk Kid for this recipe so that you make it the right way. Because by the end of this video…my cake looks ridiculous, even though it tastes amazing.

Stay tuned for the next Literary Cooking Adventure!

~KSilva

DING DONG! The Witch is Bread Literary Cooking Adventure

Wake up, you sleepy-head! Rub your eyes! Get out of bed! Wake up; the Wicked Witch is BREAD!

That’s right. This week on Literary Cooking Adventures, we’re celebrating L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by making some utterly impressive chocolate chunk zucchini bread! Yes, it is as beautiful and delicious as it sounds.

In this episode, I battle a rather bendy zucchini, a mandolin, converse with the furry cat munchkins, and straight up kill the Wicked Witch of the East. Boom. Dropped a couch on you, witch. Didn’t see that coming, did ya?!

I found the original recipe through Simple Bites. The recipe there is a little more in depth with making the bread whole wheat and using freshly ground spices. I cut corners where I felt I could and the zucchini bread still came out well and tasted amazing.

Interested in making this wonderful, magical zucchini bread for yourself? Follow the yellow brick road down to the instructions below.

The Old Pecan and the Sea Literary Cooking Adventure

Once again, we return to the kitchen in a brilliant effort to create another pie. This time, I attempted to tackle the very precarious Butterscotch Pecan Pie. I had some trouble the last time I attempted one several years ago and it almost turned to goo before I froze it, capturing its saccharine essence in solid form. I was hoping that this pecan pie would be a bit easier provided my extensive and disastrous history. I was proven wrong.

As with the banana cream pie, the pie crust decided to be the most obnoxious part of this Cooking Adventure. I had to roll out, shape, pin-prick, and bake 2 in order for it to work. There are apparently very detailed steps one must follow in order to get the perfect pie crust including thawing, unrolling, pressing, pricking, chilling, weighting, and baking…and I didn’t follow them for shit. Sorry, but all of that kagatha just to pre-bake a pie crust seems ridiculous. I should have just done it. Maybe then I wouldn’t have ended up with something that looks like it was made out of sand.

The other thing that really set me off was my inability to open the bag of pecans. I wish I was joking. There’s a segment in the bloopers where I struggle with the bag of pecans for almost a full two minutes before succumbing to rage and hacking it open with a pair of scissors. Then, I couldn’t open the bag of butterscotch chips. It wasn’t my day.

As a tribute to Hemingway’s classic novel, I decided to take a break and cast a line, hoping to hook something good. Instead, I managed to capture the rare but ferocious Lemon Jelly, a cat with an insatiable appetite and primal rage.

Interested in the recipe for this disastrous pie leviathan? Scroll down and behold!

The Frost World Jurassic Park Literary Cooking Adventure

Welcome to the Frost World of Jurassic Park! That’s right; this week in celebration of the release of Jurassic World, I decided to do a Jurassic Park themed Cooking Adventure. Michael Crichton is my favorite author and his books are some of the ones that inspired me to start writing in the action/adventure genre.

The Princess Pied – Literary Cooking Adventure

Inconceivable!

On this week’s Literary Cooking Adventure, I decided to pay tribute to William Goldman’s masterpiece “The Princess Bride” by concocting a sweet and delicious Snickers Pie. Watch as I encounter AOUS (apples of unusual size), match wits with an over-sized tub of whipped cream (which is Sicilian at heart), and discover that Snickers candies really are the definition of true love.

Cooking Adventures: A Sign of Petit Four

LITERARY COOKING ADVENTURES

A SIGN OF PETIT FOUR

It’s elementary! I ran across a delicious-looking recipe a few weeks ago for Bourbon Brownie Petits Fours which I couldn’t pass up. I ended up tweaking the recipe a tad by using Kahlua instead of Bourbon and substituted some actual coffee for some of those coffee crystals. I ended up sharing several with people at work who told me “they’re the best brownies I’ve EVER had”. Sounds like it was worth all the work to me!

While the end result on these petits fours was grand, the process to create them ended up taking most of the afternoon (filming certainly added to the time). When I was finished, the entire kitchen was coated in chocolate (as was I), and the sink was piled high with dishes. And then, I discovered I was pronouncing the name of the dish wrong. As I said in the video, “I’m a writer. I took French in school. Pathetic.”

Follow the link for the recipe: http://www.bhg.com/recipe/brownies/bourbon-brownie-petit-fours/

Enjoy and stay tuned for the next Cooking Adventure!

~KSilva

Cooking Adventure: Banff Edition

COOKING ADVENTURE: VIDEO BANFF EDITION

So, we still have about two weeks until the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour comes to the wonderful little town of Camden, Maine. Every year, the Banff Centre in Canada holds a film festival where hundreds of athletes professional and amateur, budding and professional film makers all compete for the chance to be shown in the World Tour. This year, like last year, I was eager to do a Cooking Adventure that was, in a sense, “adventure” themed.

MEMENTO MORI Cooking Adventure Video

VIDEO COOKING ADVENTURE

CHOCOLATE BLACKBERRY CREAM ROULADE CAKE

*Disclaimer* My camera’s audio isn’t that great, so you may need to turn up your volume for this video. Enjoy!

The Peach Pit and the Pendulum

COOKING ADVENTURE #95: Peach Pie

In my mind, fall begins far before the official autumn solstice date late in the month of September. I celebrate my birthday at the end of August, usually doing something that I haven’t had the chance to do all summer long, and then…fall is here, to me anyway. The time between the end of August til the end of November is my time to party, to look forward to all the crafts I’ve been cataloging to do at a later date, to bake a ridiculous number of things… This is my favorite season. Which means more Cooking Adventures for you guys. Oh yeah. Celebration.

I’ve been quite bad with keeping up on blogs this summer. I don’t want to give excuses about work, and writing deadlines and such but that’s really what it all boils down to. And this autumn isn’t going to be any less busy for me. But, now that it isn’t five million degrees outside and a cool breeze blows through the window in my kitchen door, I feel justified in baking and cooking more often now. This season’s baking begins with a stellar recipe for a peach pie that I found from Two Peas & Their Pod. I’m a bit of a pie fiend and I wanted to attempt a fruit pie that I had never tried before. This did end up being more of a cooking “frolic” as it wasn’t very involved, but it was still very fun to make.