moving on...

After months of working on blogger I decided to move onto wordpress for better usability and design. Plus I bought my own domain! So check the savoury page out at http://thesavourypage.com.

Thanks!

all good things

My mom was the one who introduced me to baking. For bake sales and school events she should would bring out the Duncan Hines Marble Cake Mix and whip up a batch of cupcakes or when the bananas were about to go off she’d make banana bread from scratch. To this day my sibs will allow bananas to go bad in hopes she will bake some banana bread. But most of all she introduced me to rice krispies squares. The gooey marshmallows, hint of vanilla and crunchy cereal were heaven. Even to this day I still go crazy over it and even had a request for them at the recent office bake sale.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across the Peanut Butter Chocolate Crispy Bars. When it comes the classics I’m a purist but the recipe title called out to me. How can you say no to anything Peanut Butter? For starters you have to create a caramel/candy with sugar, corn syrup and water.

Once you’ve created the crispy candied treat, milk chocolate and peanut butter are melted together creating yet another delicious layer and then you top it off with a dark chocolate with a little more corn syrup added for good measure. I understand why this is the top refrigerator treat from Baked and after selling it at the bake sale I know why it should be in the fridge. This super sweet decadent treat was a gourmet option to the rice krispie square from my past. Both are good and I would pare back the layers next time to drop the overt sweetness, but nothing really beats the original.

PS - I am writing, listening and laughing to Tina Fey’s Bossypants audio book. I read the book in less than two days and loved it so much that I had to hear Fey tell her story. I know it’s not a cookbook, but Fey loves food so it’s worth mentioning.

bbe! (best brownies ever!)

I am a stress eater. Whenever anything stressful shows up in my life I instantly respond by shovelling large amounts of food into my small sturdy frame. Recently I had a blondie bar and two kinds of cake all in the course of four hours. Yes I’m that girl quietly eating her second piece of cake in the corner or pockets a cookie for later. It’s taken awhile to accept that I will never stress myself thin. There is comfort in the crackle of a chocolate wrapper or the sweet wafting smell of freshly baked choco chip cookies. So when Japan was hit with the earthquake and tsunami I instantly responded to the call for help by organizing bake sale.

Obviously I wanted to raise money for a good cause, but I also didn’t want to be the last baked good standing. My dad has instilled a competitive nature in me. In order to do that I had to call out the big guns. Having recently just purchased Baked: New Frontiers in Baking I decided to go ahead with the brownie that has made them famous. This dense, deep, rich, decadent treat requires a lot from its baker. Real chocolate, cocoa powder, instant espresso powder, a boat-load of eggs not to mention butter. It’s worth it.  Even a co-worker came up to me later and me that “they really are the best brownies ever!”

I still dream of them and recently during a time of upheaval and stress I thought about them but didn’t haven enough chocolate or eggs and had to settle for quicky rice crispy squares which brings me to my next post. Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito I think I love you….

chocolate chip cookie challenge part one

I swear by Smitten Kitchen's Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie. It has nice ratio between dough and chocolate chips. It's sweet and not overly so and like the recipe name suggests it's chewy on the inside and slightly crispy on the outside. What I also love is that it yields an enormous amount of cookies with very little effort. One batch makes  a dozen to bake and  a couple dozen more for freezing (I love a freshly baked cookie). I love sneaking into the kitchen and heating up the stove for a few warm gooey chocolate chips cookies. This recipe gives me that option and satisfies the craving whenever it hits, which is about once a week. I feel that they are the best chocolate chip cookies hands down.

Recently I purchased Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. They are well known for their Baked Brownies which was voted Best Brownie by America's Test Kitchen. When I flipped through the pages I wanted to make and eat everything even their Chocolate Chip cookies. I couldn't resist a taste test and decided to make these cookies my first go round with this book. The recipe was fairly simple and straightforward and the tip about freezing the cookies for a warm treat later made me love them even more. In order to accurately test I also baked up a few of Smitten Kitchen's cookies. I had to do an honest taste test. 

The second I took the cookies out I instantly saw a difference. Baked's cookie was more cake like and smoother while Smitten's was more rustic looking. I lined them up called J down and we tasted them. While the sweetness and the texture of Baked's cookie was nice I'm not one for a cake type cookie, I like my cakes to be cakes and my cookies to be cookies. I think I'll stick with Smitten's...although I just picked up Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich...I feel another challenge coming on.

discovery

A good friend had a birthday on the weekend and she is gluten free. Gluten free baking is hard. You don't always get the right texture and flavour. I have had a few successes and some failures. But I was determined to make it work. I returned to my cookbooks and came across a beautiful book that J. bought me last year called Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache written by Harry Eastwood. I wanted the book because it looked amazing but never really thought about the actual recipes. What I didn't realize at the time was that it was a gluten free book that is also vegan.  I am a firm believer in eggs and butter but I had all the ingredients so I thought it was worth the try. I decide on the Cherry Brandy Chocolate Cupcakes. Harry (I love a boy's name for a girl) has cheeky write ups to go with each recipe and this recipe matched my friend. Sassy and bold it had a deep sweet richness brought on by quality cocoa powder. Instead of butter I swapped in butternut squash and I used almond flour and rice flour. The cupcake itself had a rich cocoa taste without being too sweet. I made the frosting which is comprised of 90% icing sugar....delicious. I wasn't sure at first but in the end it was the most moist gluten free item I've baked. At the end of the night there were on 2 out of the 12 left. So I guess it was a hit, although I still love eggs and butter in a cake this is definitely an option for the vegan friends.