Dimply Pear Cake

This week's TWD recipe was Dimply Plum Cake; however, I used plums in my Summer Fruit Galette and really didn't care for them. So, thanks to my friend Peggy of Pantry Revisited, I made a Dimply Pear Cake. Thank you for this beautiful brain child, Madge! (I know, I know, Madge is not a nickname for Peggy.....I just enjoy harassing you.....Madge). I digress. I worked late on Monday night - which is usually when I find myself cooking my TWD recipe. I am quite a procrastinator. Every week I tell myself I'm going to do better, but as any good procrastinator would, I tell myself I'll just do better starting next week. Anywho, I worked late and got home and was able to whip this bad boy into shape and pop it into the oven in no time. Perfect for the girl on the go!! I used canned pear halves. I think fresh pears may have cooked better - these may have been entirely too juicy. I also used cinnamon as my spice. And lots of it. After it cooked I just set it on the oven and left it alone until today. I took it to work and cut into it and realized that it was not even cooked. About an inch all around the edges was cooked correctly, but the rest was pretty much batter. I still sat at my desk and ate half of it though. WHAT. EV. ER. It's flavor got good reviews though, regardless of it being undercooked. I have discovered that hungry, over-worked, over-stressed people have generally easy-to-please palettes. I think I would make it again. I'll just make sure it's thoroughly cooked next time. My secretary Karen (what up, girl?) suggested that it would taste good with thinly sliced apples on top. I agree. The cinnamon really does wonders for this recipe. And it made my kitchen smell beautiful.

Next week is Creme Brulee - but I will have to opt for a rewind instead as I refuse to purchase a butane torch. And I refuse to eat Creme Brulee without torched sugar. AS IF.

Chocolate "Somebody Has the Trots" Chunkers

This weeks TWD selection was very easy to make and quite tasty. Now, I must regrettably inform you that I have a very vocal 12 year-old that lives inside me. She usually rears her ugly head during church, funerals, weddings and work meetings. I can't help it. I love my inner 12 year-old. Having said that........

Last week I had a very unfortunate encounter with a post-Taco Bell crackhead whom I have affectionately named "Greasy Britches". Ol' Greasy Britches decided that 5 feet away from me was the place to relieve her bowels. Appreciate the CRAP out of that, Greasy Britches. Thanksomuch!!!

Yes, I took a picture. And yes, my inner 12 year-old thought it was a good idea. Keep in mind I was running away when I snapped that shot. This near death encounter yielded a result that looked remarkably similar to this:

Yep, that's my cookie. And that's why it has earned the title Chocolate "Somebody Has the Trots" Chunkers.

Now I will shut my inner 12 year-old up with a cookie.

Chunky Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Chocolate Chipsters

The name itself is as much a mouthful as the cookie itself. Oatmeal.....Peanut Butter.....Chocolate Chunks.....SHUT. YOUR. MOUTH. Dorie, Dorie, Dorie. You really outdid yourself on this one. I believe you may indeed be the devil. I'm not really sure how many cookies I ended up with other than "a lot", but I lost about 1/4 of the dough to my belly. I wonder why my thighs jiggle the way they do????? I only wish I had tried them with raisins too. I was too busy gorging myself to stop and think to add some. DE-LISH!!!

I'd like to share a picture, but again this week, my internet is a total hunk of junk.....at least my cookies weren't. I'll try to add a picture tomorrow.

Chocolate Banded Torte

I knew I owned a spring form pan. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I always just borrowed my Mom’s spring form pan. I realized this when it was time to put the first layer of chocolate in the pan. And my Mom was two and a half hours away. What to do.....what to do. I decided to use a pound cake pan that the bottom lifted out off of the sides. I had serious doubts. But it actually worked. AMAZING. And then I found the spring form pan that I knew I owned.

I further discovered that I do not own a whisk. Who doesn’t own a whisk??? I remember throwing it away because it had rust on it. I knew I did not own a whisk. So I used my wire beater from my Kitchen Aid mixer.

The torte was pretty and was very easy to make. I think I would prefer in the future to just use mint chocolate chip ice cream directly from the container rather than creating a flavored ice cream. That would be like crack in my house.

I'd like to show you pictures of everything, but my internet is being a total piece tonight and doesn't have the capacity to upload too many pictures......something about a former hurricane now a tropical depression has a way of doing that to a signal.

Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes......

This week's TWD challenge was the Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream chosen by Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity. I do not own an ice cream maker, so I had the option to prepare a previously completed recipe. I chose the Double Crusted Blueberry Pie. Actually, my sister Amy picked the Double Crusted Blueberry Pie. Up until this moment, my kitchen had been a autocracy, but I allowed it to be a democracy just this once. Good kitchen karma, ahhhhhh.........

Apprehension doesn't begin to describe my feelings toward pie dough. Please refer to my Summer Fruit Galette blog in the event you were not present for my very public Crown Royal breakdown. Images of warm blobs of super glue pie dough flashed through my head like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. This could be bad....berry berry bad. I was consumed with dread at the thought of doing this to myself again. I even toyed with the idea of using refrigerated pie dough. Of course, if we were to commit such a baking sin, we would have to make this purchase in our sunglasses so we could not be so easily identified if we were later picked up by the pastry police.

Tisk Tisk! We could never get away with it. And what if it just became a stepping stone? First, refrigerated pie dough. Then what? Cool Whip? Blueberry Pie Filling? I couldn't allow the devil in my kitchen. So, homemade pie dough it is. And breeeeeeeathe....in through the nose, out through the mouth......repeat. After that it was pretty uneventful.

This is how I roll.......

The filling was really easy to make. The only difficulties I experienced was working with....wait for it.....the pie dough. I don't know how one "gently transfers" the pie dough to the dish. My dough transfer was more of a quick prayer and a toss. Whatever works I suppose.

By far, this was the best creation I have made so far. If only there was a piece of it left.

This is how you feel when you eat Double Crusted Blueberry Pie:

Kitchen autocracy restored.

Not a Black and White Banana Loaf

This week's recipe was the Black and White Banana Loaf chosen by Ashlee of A Year in the Kitchen. Instead of a Black and White Banana Loaf, I got a wild hair and decided to run with it. That and I failed to buy bananas in advance to let them rot away on the kitchen counter prior to use. Gotta love a baking procrastinator! So, I made a Pink and White Raspberry Loaf!! It smells SOOOOO De-lish!!!!

I made the following substitutions:

Original Ingredient / Substitute

Bananas = Raspberries

Bittersweet Chocolate = White Chocolate

Nutmeg = Cinnamon

Vanilla Extract = Almond Extract

Rum = Franjelica

The final product didn't have the visual contrast of pink and white as I had hoped, but it is SO GOOD!!!! I did get my kicks by enjoying a bit of kitchen porn for this challenge:

Bring it on baby! The Kitchen Aid mixer and the Food Processor working side-by-side. I'm gonna need a private moment after that.

I think maybe the cooking time and temperature needed adjusting for my version. It didn't seem cooked thoroughly, even though I baked it for 1 hour and 40 minutes. I'll just lie through my teeth and say "It's so dense and moist". Fake it til' you make it, fellow banana loafers.

Now who's gonna clean up this mess?

Summer Fruit Galette

Hmmmmm......soooooooo.....apparently I'm not the greatest baker in the world. OK, I can accept that. Apparently there is indeed a village somewhere missing it's idiot. Ahem.....HERE I AM!!!! 5 hours later, I present to you, my very own proving ground, the Summer Fruit Galette. I would first like to welcome the new food processor to the family -- sorry you got the short end of the stick on that gig......as soon as I learn to use you properly, I promise we will communicate on a higher level. Say hello to my little friend.....

Until this challenge, I had never made pie dough. In fact, I am scared of pie dough. Turns out, it's with good reason. Since the pie dough needed to set up in the refrigerator for at least an hour, I made the pie dough the night before making the remainder of the galette. I apparently developed an inconvenient case of A.D.D. sometime between removing the pie dough from the refrigerator and rolling it out. I completely breezed over the section of the recipe that said to roll on a WELL-FLOURED surface. Oops. I also abandoned my dough for some time while I was in search of a measuring tape to ensure that I had rolled to the correct dimensions. Well, if you roll warm dough on an unfloured surface, it just turns into a big sticky mess. I finally was able to scrape the pie dough up and call a re-do.

I decided on my re-do round I would roll directly onto an overly well-floured baking stone. It was 13", as the recipe called for. I thought it would be easy to roll it out and then flip it to a larger baking stone. Yeah....guess how that went. I flipped the dough, and low and behold....there it remained on the smaller baking stone. It was like one of those bugs that hangs out on your ceiling for 12 straight days and you wonder if it's ever just going to fall off. It was almost like it was being held in place by some invisible force.....it was a battle between good and evil at that moment in my kitchen. Well, evil won that one. Well, here I am again, standing here with a warm lump of re-do dough. So, I decide to just roll it onto the bigger stone and not worry about it being perfect, and that way I wouldn't have to transfer it to anything. Finally, I had a roundish dough thingy on a surface I could bake it on. YAY. Now, on to the next task at hand.....

That's right - pie dough drove me to drink. It's all fun and games until Jules here has to roll out some pie dough. I'd like to thank my good friends at Crown Royal and also my buddies at PhillipMorris. Without them, something ugly may have just happened here. Don't worry, I'm under the skillful care of a certified professional.

Thoooo now I'm dwunk and I got a big knife and smashed apart some damn fwuit and put it in this thing and make my new best friend the pie dough reach up and hug it. I cook it and then custardededed it an cook it sum more. At thum point it ended up out of the stove and I ate it.

On a serious note, this is quite delicious and I will definitely make again. It's the kind of thing you hide in the laundry room because you know you're the only person that's actually going to go into the laundry room so the rest of the food thieves you live with will just have to starve. It's so good, in fact, that the dog is looking at me and licking his chops. Or, maybe he thinks I'm so drunk that I'm an easy target to take out.

My good friend Peggy of Pantry Revisited has now joined TWD thanks to my friend Amanda of Beckett Bakes It. Be sure to check them out. My thanks again to Amanda whose massive overpurchase of produce this week provided me with nectarines and plums.

Homework: Figure out my mental deficit when it comes to rolling out dough

Coming up next week: Black and White Banana Loaf....I think there's rum involved.