Grilled burgers topped with fresh garden tomatoes, cheeses, and grilled jalapeños (Mmmmm). Charcoal grilled and smoked with fresh jalapeño (I dropped one in the coals).
Make room for cow! When you need to clear space for this year's cow, it's time to grill up the T-bone and Porterhouse. The kids didn't complain. This was grilled over hardwood charcoal with hickory chunks for a hefty flavor.
Yes, you read it right - Cherry Chip Cake. The kind that comes in a box and sometimes goes on sale for less than a dollar. Now, before you cast all manner of shame in my general direction, please consider these points.
Cherry chip cake brings back fond childhood memories, especially if you are my wife.
It was Mother's Day and we needed a cake.
The cake can be (and was) upgraded.
If you still aren't ok with it, just look at the picture for a short while and see if you don't start rummaging for an available cake mix.
I know that the blog's been a little bread-heavy lately, but I already lost a significant amount of time in taking these pictures, so now you're going to lose an equally-significant amount of your life reading about them.
I had a difficult time making any good sourdough bread for quite a while (examine the two loaves below on the right). During that period I enjoyed some nice sourdough pancakes and quite a few pizza crusts. The loaves of bread were elusive however. I finally decided to put the jar of sourdough in the corner of the fridge for a time-out until it learned its lesson.
Frustrated, I moved on to some other nice recipes, such a slightly-sweet swedish rye bread (loaves on the left). I baked those loaves mostly just to teach the jar of sourdough that it could be done.
After a sufficient break I decided to try the sourdough again. This time I approached it with some changes. First, I added a significant amount of yeast. I know that a long rise leads to better taste, but I was surprised how long it would take to rise in the past. Sometimes overnight wasn't even enough. I also did away with the recipes, since those clearly weren't working. Below is the resulting loaf. It's a little uneven and didn't rise quite as much as I'd hoped, but at least it's edible this time.
Nothing prettier than a fresh, piping-hot loaf of sourdough bread.
You'll have to imagine the heavenly smell and steam rising from these slices.
All tucked away in its bread bag (thanks, Rachel!) to cool off overnight.
Some of you may remember my indulgent fondness for the 25-cent Little Debbie snacks from Wesco. While the gas tank was happily lapping up gallons of hydrocarbons, I was inside similarly fueling up on my own preferred oil (of the partially hydrogenated variety). So dearly did I love those things (Swiss Cakes were my favorite, although I'd honestly eat any that came my way) that I remember sitting in the car and explaining to Mom that when I began to earn a dependable salary, I would eat at least one of these per day. The primarily limitation with those 25-cent snacks was clearly financial, see.
So it likely comes as no surprise that as I have now fully matured my thoughts have returned to how this declaration made in youth could be best realized. Actually, I borrowed a baking cookbook from Janell recently and I just wanted to post some evidence on here to convince her that I really am using it. (I promise I'm not just gnawing on the pages, Janell!)
I'm not sure what these are called, but they are highly reminiscent of something with which I would have walked out of Wesco. The first step was to make a devil's food sheet cake. It was relatively easy and fun. I'm not sure what differentiates a devil's food cake from a regular chocolate cake. Considering that there's a comprehensive cookbook sitting on my desk within half an arms reach, I must confess that my lack of certainty is crouched entirely in laziness. After baking the cake I flipped it out of its pan, upside-down.
The next step called for taking a very large biscuit cutter and cutting out some cakes that resemble hockey pucks. Tragically, not all of the sheet cake is required to make these cakes. I was forced to eat the scraps, as our trash can was full and I was unable to empty it due to baking duties.
In the next step, I semi-carefully carved out the insides, taking note to save a coin of chocolate to fit back over the top. This was little carving a pumpkin, in a sense. And by pumpkin I mean those little tiny gourds that you can't really carve.
I made some whipping cream, placed it in a ziplock bag and snipped the corners of the bag to make a poor man's pastry bag (because even poor men need their pastry bags). After squirting a toothpastesque blob into each cake, I put the chocolate cover back on the top and got them ready for the weeping and gnaching of teeth.
The chocolate cover was very simple. I took a cup or two of whipping cream (almost boiling) and poured it over a bag of bittersweet chocolate chips. After stirring it around, the chips all melted and it formed a highly viscous slurry that was difficult to prevent from flowing into my mouth. As it cooled, it began to thicken. The trick was pouring it over the cakes while it was still reasonably fluid but not too soupy.
I let the cakes chill for a while outside and the chocolate hardened considerably. Because the chocolate made a molten mess all around the base, I trimmed around the perimeter with a knife and then moved the cakes to their final resting spot.
Toasted and delicious!
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