Food Mood Life Update
Sep 14, 2011 Food Things, Uncategorized
According to my blog dashboard, this is my 100th post. I don’t feel like it’s been that many but the dashboard doesn’t lie. I’m happy to be celebrating 100 happy posts with all of you.
In honor of the 100th post, I thought I would celebrate by sharing some of my favorite cakes along with some updates about my life. I’ll pair my favorite cakes with the areas of my life according to how I see fit. There really should be a cake for every situation. I hope you enjoy the pairings I’ve made.
Topic #1: Favorite Things: Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Icing
For starters, I thought I would list a few of my recent favorite things. This cake would not really be my favorite (the Pink Lady Cake below is probably my choice), but this cake definitely won in terms of favorites over the past year or two. This cake has been made at least 5 times, and considering the number of other cakes that have also been made that is quite a few times. It is definitely a crowd-pleaser, and that makes it a true favorite.
Some of my favorite things:
1. Playing with Hurley- Pretty self explanatory I think. He’s just so cute.
2. Reading - Lately I’ve been re-reading the Harry Potter series. I’m currently on Chapter 6 of The Order of The Phoenix. If you haven’t read the books but you like the movies you are really missing a great deal of amazing additions to the story until you read the books. I recently read the Hunger Games series too. Any suggestions for exciting and fantastical or science fiction novels are appreciated.
3. Pinterest- if you haven’t joined Pinterest yet I don’t know if I want to encourage you to start. It’s a little bit addicting. Pinterest is a website where you can create “pinboards” on various topics. I have several boards like “home decorating”, “food I want to make”, “favorite outfits”, etc. When you’re browsing the internet you can click on pictures you see and “pin” them to your boards. So when you are logged into Pinterest, you are constantly seeing only super cute and fun ideas and things that other people have “pinned”, and you get caught up in everyone’s wonderful ideas and inspired to create. Pinterest is covered with ideas for using chalkboard paint, and recently I was inspired to turn a few picture frames into chalkboards, which are now hanging happily in my house. Since I started using Pinterest I have also bought and made a plan to use furniture stripper to refinish some old furniture I have. See, Pinterest is inspiring. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do the project as well as the picture I saw, but at least I feel crafty. I think that might be the point of Pinterest.
Proceed to Pinterest with caution, but if you do proceed look me up and follow my pinboards 
4. Music- Lately I’ve been choosing Mumford and Sons over and over when I turn on music. I must love them. I also recently found a classical radio station (yes I use the radio in my car) and have been listening to that a lot lately as well. I played piano growing up and have always loved old classical stuff. I love Rachmaninoff, Vivaldi, and Brahams. I promise, I’m not at all pretentious. I by no means think I am cooler than you because I like Classical music. I really just genuinely love it. I also love Missy Higgins. She’s my best friend I think.
5. Movies- Lately Netflix has been my absolute favorite thing. Instead of canceling when they raised their prices a few months ago, I looked at all my options and ended up bumping up my contract to 2 DVDs/Blu-rays at a time instead of 1, and I haven’t looked back. I love movies, and I don’t know if I really have a favorite except my childhood favorite, Princess Bride (I think that’s everyone’s favorite movie who was born before 1985). Instead of sharing my favorite movie I think I’ll tell you what’s at the top of my queue. 1. The Soloist 2. The Darjeeling Limited 3. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe 4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Price Caspian 5. Pride and Prejudice. Please let me know if I’ll be wasting my time with any of these.
Enough favorites, on to more cakes. Read the rest of this entry »
Home-made Vanilla Ice Cream that doesn’t taste home-made
Sep 11, 2011 Desserts, Food Things
Growing up, I was always the boring kid who only liked vanilla ice cream. I don’t think it was necessarily that I disliked the other flavors as much as it was that I just loved vanilla, and I didn’t see any reason to eat any other kind. I had a friend who gave me such a hard time about it. She and I played softball together, and often after practices or games we would go to get ice cream. She would order really fun flavors and I would ALWAYS order vanilla. Vanilla is so simple and perfect. It’s smooth and creamy, without swirls of goo or hard chunks of candy or nuts. I love it. She did get me to order peppermint once and I did enjoy that, but ordering something different was always short lived and I would find myself reverting back to vanilla time and time again. There’s really no beating it.
I’ve tried many different brands and love Edy’s, Haagen-Dazs and the other super smooth and thick varieties. I’ve never really been a big fan of home-made ice cream either. Something about the process seemed so… not worth it. If you are able to go to the store and pick up a tub of insanely delicious and smooth wonderfulness for $5.00, then why go through all the effort and end up with a vanilla flavored ice cup, which is more of a slushy consistency than you’d like? It just didn’t make sense to me. Of course, that was because I had never tried really good home-made ice cream.
That all changed when I met Brian’s family. Brian’s mom has made home-made ice cream on several occasions with great accomplishment. Recently though, Brian decided he wanted to learn how to make ice cream, and I was extremely skeptical that he would be able to pull it off. His mom is great at it though, and I thought maybe with a few tips from her he could, with time, generate something that would be semi-worth the effort. He read through some recipes and decided on Alton Brown’s Vanilla Ice Cream from the Good Eats 2 Cookbook. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention at all to how he did it. I don’t know if it’s hard to do or not, or what the steps look like as you do them, but I do know with certainty that the ice cream he made is one of my favorite vanilla ice creams on the planet. My view of home-made ice cream has changed forever.
In order to make ice cream you need an ice cream maker, which we don’t have. We do, however, have a KitchenAid Mixer and Brian’s mom let us borrow the ice cream maker attachment. I don’t know if the brand of ice cream maker affects the outcome, but whatever the KitchenAid ice cream attachment did was perfect.
Hurley really wanted some. He watched Brian the entire time he ate.
Here is the recipe from the Good Eats 2 Cookbook. The result is a mouthful of joy.
Vanilla Ice Cream- makes 1 1/2 quarts (enough for 8 people to eat it with pie and still have some left over)
Ingredients
3 cups half-and-half
1 cup heavy cream
8 large egg yolks
9 ounces sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions
1. Combine the half and half and cream in a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and set aside.
2. Whisk the egg yolks in a large mixing bowl until they lighten in color. Gradually whisk the sugar into the yolks until smooth.
3. Slowly ladle one thrid or the hot dairy into the yolk mixture, whisking constantly. (This is the tempering part.) Return this mixture to the pot containing the rest of the dairy. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, until the custard thickens slightly, enough to coat the back of a spoon (170- 175 degrees F).
4. Wash the original mixing bowl. When the custard is ready, transfer it to the bowl, stir in the vanilla, and cool at room temp for 30 minutes. Cover and refrigerate until the temperature drops below 40 degrees F. Best to let it chill overnight.
5. Pour into a prepped ice cream maker and process according to the manufacturer’s directions. Within 25 to 30 minutes the ice cream will attain a classic soft-serve consistency. Enjoy it as is or move it to the freezer to harden for another 3-4 hours.
Deep Dish Peach Pie with Streusel Topping
Sep 2, 2011 Crusts, Desserts, Food Things, Peaches, Pies and Tarts
This year has been a slow year for the blog, and I’m really sorry about that. I hope that in the months to come I can remember to take pictures of the food I make and tell everyone about it, but it’s been hard. My job got busier (but I love it), and my dog is so dang cute and playful. It’s hard to stay in my chair when I sit down to write and he comes and looks up at me with a ball in his mouth. I’ve been really happy, but I do miss sharing things on here so hopefully I can get back into it.
I knew I couldn’t let summer pass without telling you about this peach pie though. This pie was amazing. I’ve said before that I’m a big fan of streusel, and pretty much any pie with streusel on top makes me extremely happy. This was really easy to make, and if you are in the market for a peach pie during the last days of summer I highly recommend this one.
Tags: best peach pie, bon appetit peach pie, Peach Pie, peach pie recipe, peach pie recipes, streusel topping, summer pie