A little comfort dessert for a surprisingly eventful week

I feel like, with my constant burning hunger and my absolute pure joy just to eat, one of my absolute favorite activities is to find new restaurants that actually have good food (because, I find, restaurant food is usually anything but special) and bakeries with new treats I've never tried. I especially like doing this with Megan because she is one of the few people I know who loves to do the same! I’m sure others enjoy eating at new places, but Megan seems to be constantly looking for new and different food stops, which is how I got into it and ended up spending my Saturday in Ferndale.

We had “lunch,” which was really dinner as it was after four pm, at Como's Restaurant and Pizzeria, where I had one of the better chicken dishes I’ve found. It was covered, absolutely covered, in roasted garlic. I didn’t even need my sides and I always need a side. After Como’s, we went off to our real destination, Pinwheel Bakery, where I discovered my complete, unqualified love for macarons. All my life, the only macaron I've ever eaten was this past Saturday at Pinwheel, but I'm totally addicted! They’re little almond-based meringue sandwich cookies filled with buttercream and there are so many different flavors! Megan had a coffee macaron, which reminded her of my mocha cupcakes (I haven’t made them in years and should probably fix that!), and I had a blackberry, which was actually pretty fruity tasting with just the right amount of sweet! They were the perfect size, too. You really only needed to eat one, though I wanted to eat ten J

There were actually a lot of different cookies that I'd never seen in a bakery before too…chai tea cookies (I think like Mexican wedding cookies, but with different spices), cardamom cookies, tiny "cappuccino coins" with equally tiny chocolate morsels, even rosemary cookies! I had to get myself a little cellophane baggy filled with one of each, just in case I’d find a new favorite and because I might discover something I’d like to reproduce at home. Of course, the winner was the macaron and I had only tried one of five flavors.

After our little food outing, Meg and I did some shopping, popped by her boyfriend's fantasy football draft for a drink, which then turned to two, and, finally, I had just enough time to stop by my mom's to pick something up and then drive aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way back home to get Billy so we could drive half an hour in the opposite direction to be late to a friend's apartment for the funniest drinking game of all time, set to The Jersey Shore, that is sure to get you off your rocker.

Having stayed out late for a friend's barbecue the night before, it was definitely a weekend filled with more fun than I'm used to! I was simply exhausted by Sunday and yearning for some comfort food, which brings us to my very first barbecue ribs, which were so tender (thanks to a method I learned from Megan’s boyfriend), we had to eat them with forks because the entire sheath of meat would fall cleanly off the bone when you tried to pick it up…

…and also, my very first clafoutis, made with figs and raspberries.

I got the recipe from my mom's copy of The Best of Gourmet: 1988 Edition...which she just bought for a dollar, by the way...When I saw the dish had figs in it, a fruit you rarely see in recipes anymore, I just couldn't pass! It was so incredibly easy to make too. All I had to do was slice the figs in half, arrange them in a dish with the berries, mix up some batter, and pour it in! 

After that, I let my oven do all the work and spent the next hour laying on the couch with the amazing scent of freshly baked fruit wafting all around me.

When the clafoutis had finally cooled, just enough to serve, I found myself finishing off my small slice so quickly and fervently, I had to take twice as much for seconds. It was everything I was looking for that night...warm and sweet, moist and refreshing...creamy, yet chewy, yet crunchy (from the sugar sprinkled over the top). I'd like to take a piece to work every…single…day this week to warm up in our little toaster oven, but I'm going to at least attempt to behave myself!

Orange-Chocolate Velvet Cake

This past weekend was my boyfriend's 30th birthday (what an old man! hehe) and I baked him a special Orange-Chocolate Velvet Cake to celebrate. 

His absolute favorite flavor combination is orange and chocolate. To illustrate...for Valentine's day, I found a recipe for orange-flavored Milano cookies (his fave) and baked them for him in the shape of hearts. I also made a huge breakfast, which included heart-shaped (of course!), orange-chocolate chip muffins, which are absolutely delectable, if I do say so myself ;)

Even more so, Billy's obsessed with just chocolate, in general, especially dark chocolate (a man after my own heart!). So, how could I not keep with the trend and make an orange-chocolate cake :) 

Anyway, for a while now, I've been trying to come up with, what I consider, the perfect texture of cake. I prefer butter-based cakes over oil (which is generally what's used with a box mix) because I find oil-based cakes too light; I feel like I'm not really eating anything because there's just no physical satisfaction from a mouthful of airy, substance-lacking cake. With a butter-based cake, however, you get a nice thick, dense bite of cake. The problem, though, is they tend to feel more dry, so I always end up soaking my layers with some kind of liquid to add moisture. Now, sometimes I like to add liquid anyway, for flavor, but I prefer not to need extra liquid to make up for a drier cake. 

So...I decided to take a chance on Billy's birthday cake and experiment. Thank goodness...it was a success! All I had to do was take a butter-based recipe and cut the butter, replacing half of it with vegetable oil. The result was a dense but super moist cake. Now, that seems like an obvious, easy fix, but baking takes chemistry; remove a certain ingredient and the entire thing may fail. For instance, replacing half the butter with oil caused the cake to rise less. It turned out to be the perfect size for this particular party, but if I'd needed twice as much cake, it would have been a major problem. I'm glad to finally have my perfect base cake recipe, though :) 

I didn't think a cassata cake could get better...until there was chocolate.

This is one of my all-time favorite cakes, so far! It's a rich, but addictive all the same; the cake is chocolatey and moist, the pudding creamy, and the ganache smooth and decadent. Having made it three times in a row, I've used both traditional chocolate ganache and hot fudge as a chocolate shell. The choice is yours, but I believe I preferred the fudge because of the hint of caramel flavor it added. 

If you don't like your cakes as rich, skip the shell and make it like a trifle, with only cake and pudding. You can also play with the amount of chocolate and the type of chocolate, depending on your taste. A nice addition may be to add chopped nuts such as peanuts, hazelnuts, or pistachios. The saltiness would likely cut back the richness of the dessert while adding just the ring hint of another layer of flavor and texture. In the photo above, the cake is topped with toffee bits.

A Double Birthday

The birthday was a major success!

A small group of us had dinner at Black Finn for the first part of the night. Since it was my 25th, I felt free to order myself a few cosmos and a nice steak, which, unfortunately, I wasn't as impressed with as my boyfriend's burger. I actually don't prefer beef and tend toward turkey burgers (homemade only) instead, but this looked so amazingly messy and you know those are always the best! Not to mention, it was actually cooked right -- medium, rather than well-done, which is just gross.

After Black Finn, we headed over to Joe Kool's for the real party. If you recall, Megan didn't know that the party was also for her, so I asked a friend, who she drove with, to ensure she didn't arrive to Kool's before I did because I wanted to be there when she realized what was going on! Since we were going to be at dinner together beforehand, I had (I thought) no way to get to Kool's with enough time to decorate, so my wonderful parents went a little early to set up the balloons and sign. I love how easily a few balloons can alter an atmosphere! 

Anyway, the funny part is that Megan was incredibly late to Kool's because she and her boyfriend made some incredibly long pit stops beforehand. I sat there, with my vodka and lemonade, waiting...and waiting...and waiting...I couldn't even go to the bathroom because I was afraid she'd walk in right at that moment! And when she finally did, she didn't even notice the sign. Having known Megan nearly my entire life, I should have known better, but it was awesome all the same. And she loved her gift, a portrait lens for her camera, which our friends were so generous as to pitch in for. 

You can guess how the rest of the night went. Drinks, friends, good food...what more could you want?

Scroll to the bottom of the page for recipes :)

The cakes!!

Now, for archiving purposes, only the Peach Melba Cake recipe is in this entry. You can find the Cioccolato-Mangiare in the very next.

Happy Birthday!

So, I'm celebrating my 25th birthday with friends Saturday night (though my actual birthday isn't until the 26th) and, while I'm making a Peach Melba Cake for myself, I'm also making my Cioccolato-Mangiare Cake, as a surprise for my best friend, Megan, whose birthday is 15 days before mine, but who has no plans to celebrate!

I've made both of these cakes previously--in fact, I made the Peach Melba last year for my 24th, but forgot to serve it until the end of the night when only three people were left! It was absolutely delicious, though, and I believe I actually did finish the whole thing off myself by the end of that week. Scary...but oh-so good ;)

It was a white cake with buttercream frosting (my aunt's personal recipe), raspberry sauce, and whole raspberries/poached peaches. The peaches were too wet to fill the cake layers (the liquid kept penetrating the buttercream and creating leaks!), so I diced them up instead and served them, with extra sauce, as a topping on each individual slice. The only thing that could have made it even better was vanilla ice cream :)

The Cioccolato-Mangiare Cake is a concept I came up with for my mom's birthday. Usually, we each provide our own dessert (or she makes mine, but I've never made hers). This year, though, she suggested we make each others! I requested Magnolia Bakery's Red Velvet Cake (one of my absolute favorites!), while she requested a chocolate version of a Boston Creme Pie. The version below was for someone at work; it was the perfect opportunity to practice for my mom!

This one is actually a box mix chocolate cake because my mom requested it, specifically (I think mostly to spite my hatred of box mixes, haha). It's filled with a chocolate version of biancomangiare (a white pudding often found in cannolis, in place of sweetened ricotta), which roughly translates to "white food," hence the new name Cioccolato-Mangiare. Then, I covered it in hot fudge and decorated it with toffee bits and chocolate curls. The one problem I found is that, since the cake has to be refrigerated because of the pudding, the hot fudge stiffens into a chocolate shell that's difficult to slice. The flavor is so worth it in the end, though! 

A few of my favorite things...

My...

boyfriend

puppy 

best friend

missed friends

family