Archive for March, 2010
Easter is right around the corner, and holidays are such a great time for giveaways that I can’t resist doing one with an Easter theme to it. I’m giving away Wilton’s 3D Bunny Cake Pan and a set of oh-so-cute jellybean potholders. To win, simply leave a comment that mentions your favorite Easter dish (or other spring holiday dish if you don’t celebrate Easter) below! A winner will be selected randomly from the comments below and entries will close at 12 noon (PST) on Friday, March 26th. This leaves plenty of time for the pan to arrive before Easter so you can use it next weekend! Be sure to leave your e-mail address in the comment form (not in your comment) so that I can contact the winner for a mailing address.
There is a little bit of small print with this prize and that is the fact that this pan is not brand new and has been used by me a few times to test it out and bake up an Easter bunny cake. A post about the bunny cake will be coming up in the next day or two and you can double your chances of winning by looking out for that post and commenting on it, too. The cake pan will be all cleaned up and back in it’s box for mailing, ready to use when it arrives at your door.
And as for my favorite Easter dish? It’s hard to choose just one thing, but if pressed I’d have to say that deviled eggs are near the top of the list, followed by Peeps Cupcakes, which are a current favorite. Peep S’mores are very tasty, too, but I’d be hard pressed to call them an actual dish!
Update: The contest is now closed! Thanks for playing everyone. I can’t wait for Easter with all these great food ideas!
Easter eggs are usually the centerpiece of an Easter celebration, as they are bright, colorful and fun to make. The same can be said about a cake made with the Wilton 3D Bunny Pan. This pan bakes a three dimensional bunny-shaped cake that sits upright on a cake stand. It is a great centerpiece for an Easter meal because, unlike the eggs, it really stands out (and up!). You can also eat the cake after it has been on display for a bit – something that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you do with Easter eggs that have been sitting out for a while!
This cake pan is made of aluminum and comes with two halves. Batter is poured into the lower half of the pan, then the top piece is locked into place on top. While in the oven, the cake will rise up and fill out both sides of the bunny, so there is no need to try to glue bunny halves together with frosting to make this cake stand up (although you can use the pans separately and try this method if you prefer. The pan is not nonstick, but the design is smooth with no narrow cracks for batter to stick in, so you can grease and flour the pan and expect your bunny to pop out easily. Once it’s done, you can decorate your bunny as you wish with frosting and brightly colored candies.
Update: For a recipe a results, check out How to Make an Easter Bunny Cake!
These cookies have a great name that promises to deliver a lot of chocolate – and there is no disappointment when you take a big bite, because these definitely pack a chocolate punch. The inspiration for this recipe came from a Sunset magazine article that featured a Portland, Oregon bakery – The Sugar Cube - recipe for Triple Threat Dark Chocolate Cookies. I made the recipe from the magazine, and made a few small tweaks to make it easier and perhaps even more chocolaty. The original recipe made very thin cookies that were good for sandwiching, while this variation makes nice and thick cookies that bake up be very chocolaty and rich inside, and a little more decadent seeming than a thin cookie.
There are three kinds of chocolate in these. The dough starts out with a lot of dark chocolate melted into the batter and held together with not very much flour. I mixed in milk chocolate chunks, to add some sweetness to the dark background, and some dark chocolate chunks to make sure that the cookies kept their richness. Since walnuts are a frequent addition to brownies, they go very well with the dark chocolate flavors of these cookies. They’re not fudgy, like brownies are, but if you want to experiment with underbaking a batch I’m sure you could sneak some in there. Either way, you’ll have a great batch of these intense, rich, tender cookies to enjoy.
The dark chocolate I used had a high cocoa percentage of about 76% (I actually used a mixture of dark and bittersweet Guittard chocolate). I mention this because the amount of cocoa in your chocolate will have a slight impact on how thick your batter is. A higher percentage will yield a slightly drier batter. The mixture will still come together, but you may have to rely on a mixer or give your arm a good workout to blend all those chocolate chips and nuts into the cookie dough.
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There are plenty of kids cookbooks out there, and the ones I tend to like best are the books that have recipes that I am tempted to try myself. This means that the books usually contain “real” recipes and lots of photos, not just variations on peanut butter sandwiches and simple snacks (both of which are good, especially in a kids book, but are not really what I’m looking for in a cooking book in general). Kitchen for Kids: 100 Amazing Recipes Your Children Can Really Make definitely has real recipes. This cookbook focuses on baking, and after a first chapter that covers breakfast, lunch and dinner items, it dives into chapters devoted to breads and crackers, cookies, cakes, pies and pastries, and candies and cool treats.
The recipes in this book are well written and easy to follow. Their instructions are broken down into simple steps that make the recipes easy to complete, and young cooks should have no problems following along. There are even suggestions throughout the book that will make cooking a little easier, like reminders not to touch things when they come out of the oven and are hot. I actually also like the fact that the recipes include optional ingredients for different variations, so kids can start out customizing the recipes as they like right away. And of course, there are lots of great pictures.
The introduction to this book is written for parents, or for anyone else lending a hand to supervise in the kitchen. It tells you how to set up your workspace to make it kid-friendly, and offers helpful suggestions (such as laying all the required ingredients out in advance or pregreasing the pans so they’re ready to use) so that kids can make these recipes on their own. There are some notes that will help out would-be bakers, such as the bits that cover how to measure ingredients and those that describe the most commonly used kitchen tools and their functions. This book is going to be most appropriate for kids who are a little bit older or are a little experienced in the kitchen, simply because some of the reipes (like the yeast breads) might be too complex for younger kids to do on their own. Still, the recipes are very appealing and as long as you don’t mind lending a hand, you should be able to make these with young chefs and bakers of any age.
“My old grandfather made and enjoyed wine for 80 years. He told me the soils in which the vines lived were a layer cake. He told me the soil in which the vines lived were a layer cake. He said, the wine, if properly made,was like a great layer cake, fruit, mocha, chocolate, and hints of spice — and rich, always rich.
‘Never pass up a good Layer Cake,’ he would say.
“I have always loved those words.” (from the wine’s label)
I tried to resist trying this wine when I first saw it in stores a couple of months ago, but it was simply too difficult to resist the tempting illustration on the front of the bottle and the equally tempting description of what a wine should be in the quote above, which is featured on the front of the bottle. Plus, I also like shirazes. So I bought a bottle to give it a try.
Layer Cake Shiraz is made by Layer Cake Wine, and is produced in McLaren Vale in South Australia. It’s a nice, well-balanced shiraz that has a lot of fruity, berry flavor to it. And it tastes very clean, not overly sweet or jammy; it tastes more like fresh berries. I can detect blueberries, blackberries and cherries in there. Keep in mind that I am not an expert wine taster, so I can’t accurately describe all of the other flavors mentioned in the wine’s tasting notes. Still, as a more experienced layer cake taster, I can tell you that this is a lovely and complex wine that would go very well with a chocolate or spice cake for dessert, as well as with a burger or steak at dinner.
