[Inez] 50th Birthday Cake

I flew home to MN for the weekend because my mama Ruby turned 50 (a pretty big deal!) yesterday. She said she wanted a cheese cake and a chocolate compost cake. When I asked her what kind of frosting she wanted for the compost cake, she couldn't pick between our classic chocolate cream cheese frosting and chocolate ganache. So I said, "Why not both?"

(Note about the below picture: I've started using a crumb coat -- a very thin layer of frosting applied to entire cake before frosting it for real -- when frosting cakes, both to keep the crumbs in check and to make it easier to spread the rest of the frosting. I recommend it.)

Anyway, I made a double recipe of Chocolate Compost Cake, which you have seen elsewhere on this blog. Then I made a double recipe of chocolate cream cheese frosting (recipe in the first link above).

A triple layer cake is just so exciting.

Then I made the ganache. I used 1/2-2/3 cup cream, heated in a double boiler. Then I added 8 oz of a combo of bittersweet and semisweet baker's chocolate, chopped into bits.

I turned the heat off under the cream and just let the cream melt the chocolate. I stirred it away from the stove until cool, and went to town!

The top layer was baked in a bundt pan, so I filled the hole with raspberries. Any excuse to combine raspberries and chocolate is a 100% decision in my book.

Ruby was happy with the cake, and with the number of guests we had over the WHOLE THING was gone within 20 minutes of bringing it out. Wow.

[Inez] New Mexico (beautiful)

I just got back from a week in New Mexico, which is beautiful. While I can claim no credit for the beauty, I did do some capturing of it. I'll take full credit for that. Enjoy:

[Inez] Christmas cookies! (delicious)

This one is going to be a long one, because I made several different kinds of cookies. First of all, my mama Ruby is from Ohio. While she may be a slacker on the buckeye front, I'm willing to carry us. The most important ingredients, of course, are butter and peanut butter. Okay so the most important ingredients are actually peanut butter and chocolate, but isn't that picture impressive? It kind of makes you want to fast for a week just looking at it. I love the holidays.

Becca helped with the sugar cookies.

We made a lot of sugar cookies. Oh crud, are you going to want recipes for these? That will make this post interminably long! I'll put them at the bottom so you can skip them if you want.

Sugar cookies with two kinds of toppings. First I made some the traditional Steigerbuss way with colored sprinkles.

Then I took a break from sugar cookies to make peppermint pinwheel cookies, which are pretty much sugar cookies with extras (cocoa and peppermint).

Then I frosted the rest of the sugar cookies with Royal icing! Celeste stayed up until 1 am with me frosting these buggers.

Here's the loot:

(Recipes will come after I get them from my mom.)

[Inez] Christmas hen

I was browsing Tastespotting before heading home for Christmas, and I kept seeing these a

amazing looking roast chickens. If you know me much, you know it's not often I crave meat of any kind, but these chickens were just beautiful. One of them was a butter roasted chicken, photographed with roasted vegetables and a sprig of rosemary balanced across its fat roasted middle. My family doesn't do the Christmas goose or the Christmas ham, but I wanted that Christmas hen.

The recipe is a bit demanding in that you have to baste the chicken every 8 minutes for an hour and 15 minutes and turn it several times, but as long as you simply think of that as an excuse to admire the bird you will soon be eating, it's really not so bad. It's basically a chicken, slathered in butter, stuffed with lemon, rosemary and salt, rubbed with more lemon, rosemary and salt, and basted frequently while cooked uncovered.

The recipe I followed, linked to above, calls for white wine in the basting sauce, but of course my house has no wine to speak of. I used a bit of rice wine vinegar, a bit of cider vinegar, and more water than called for. I think it turned out just fine.

I roasted it with onions, carrots, potatoes, and yams, but oddly they didn't cook all the way through! I think it would be worth the extra hassle to stir the root vegetables a couple of times and maybe cover them with tinfoil for half an hour or so.

I also roasted up some asparagus (rolled in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted for about 10 minutes at 400 or so -- thank you to Alex for my now favorite way to cook asparagus) to go with the chicken. With the lemon from inside the hen squeezed all over it, it was delish.

The chicken, thanks to all the basting, was some of the juiciest, most tender chicken I've ever had. The only modification I would make to the recipe is rather than rubbing it with rosemary-lemon zest rock salt halfway through the cooking, I think I would rub the flavored salt under the skin. I would have liked to have the rosemary flavor infused in the meat a little more. In all, though, a delicious hen.

[Inez] Rosinboller

Sorry this is coming so late, this is the thing we both made from November. Aaaaand just getting around to posting it. When I visited Elise in Denmark, the number one food item I bought were cardamom teboller (tea buns), usually with raisins. Partly I bought them because they weren't horrendously expensive (like most things in Denmark) and partly I bought them because they are completely, delightfully scrumptious. They were lighter than air and just enough cardamom to give them a complex, slightly sweet flavor.

This is my attempt to make the buns. I'm sorry I was slacking with the pictures -- the truth is I was a little disappointed with how mine came out, due partly I think to using 1/4 whole wheat flour. Note to self: when the desired effect is "lighter than air," whole wheat flour is not the way to go. I wish I had put texture and density before healthiness this time around.

The recipe does not ask you to knead the dough, but that seemed silly to me. I kneaded half and left half unkneaded. In the end, the kneaded ones were prettier because they didn't have the slightly knobbled drop biscuit look, but there wasn't a huge difference in flavor or texture.

Though they didn't turn out as delicious as the ones in Denmark, they were pretty good. I think there was too much cardamom in the recipe though, I think the flavor of the Danish teboller was more subtle than the final result with this recipe. It's definitely worth another go, with reduced cardamom and no whole wheat flour.

p.s. Thank you to Elise for giving me the tip that if I use pictures from my Picasa web album for the blog they end up enormous and beautiful!