Tag: Better Homes & Gardens

The Cooking Chronicles: Vanilla-Fudge Marble Cake

I had been craving cake for a while, and remembering a quote from Ricardo Larrivée that I read somewhere about how people should only eat the sweets they make themselves, decided to buck just heading to the store and bake myself a Vanilla-Fudge Marble Cake.

I really liked the use of chocolate syrup in the recipe – simplifying the chocolate additive by at least a step or two (instead of say, having to melt baking squares). The batter came out thicker than I expected, but it didn’t seem to affect the final product. As I couldn’t locate our fluted pan, I had to use a spring foam pan in its place. It wasn’t a bad choice for ease of removing it from the pan, but I would have preferred a decorative and not plain circular shape. In the end, it didn’t really matter – the cake was moist, sweet, and contained just the right amount of chocolate flavor. I can see it working quite well as a birthday cake.
I will be bookmarking the recipe for future reference.
Slice of Vanilla-Fudge Marble Cake

The Cooking Chronicles: Best-Ever Carrot Cake

Using a recipe from my trusted Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, I baked a carrot cake for Mack in celebration of his birthday. I haven’t attempted to make a cake from scratch in some time, as I’m typically a Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker mix kind of girl. But as the recipe seemed straightforward, this was a reasonable challenge to overcome.

First of all, I never knew finely shredding carrots would be such a task. I ended up with orange everywhere (my nails still haven’t returned to their original color). Also, the icing took longer than expected as well, as I had to gradually beat in about 5 cups of confectioner’s sugar (that’s where the stand-alone KitchenAid mixer would have come in handy).

Overall, it was fun to make. And might I say, much like the other dishes I’ve been experimenting with, creating something from raw ingredients really instills a sense of pride and ownership. Often it seems that the act of cooking itself, even without the promise of an edible product at the end, is reward enough. The food, as they say, is the icing on the cake.

*I will also take this opportunity to wish Mack a happy birthday, and to let him know that for one day only, I will relent in my dominance in the NHL2K7 shootout and air hockey challenges.

Best-Ever Carrot Cake, about three-quarters frosted

The Cooking Chronicles: Farmer’s Casserole

Continuing with the season of potlucks, Mack and I decided to jointly contribute a homemade farmer’s casserole for a friend’s party. Though the thought of a casserole made me feel like I should don an apron a la Donna Reed or June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver, the recipe was very simple – essentially an assemble-and-bake dish, slightly easier and requiring less clean up than a quiche.

We layered hash brown potatoes, diced cooked ham, grated cheddar cheese and chopped green onions in a rectangular dish, poured the egg and milk mixture over top, then put it in the oven. Comparable to the quiche, the most difficult thing we found was to wait for it to bake, and to decide via the “knife through the centre” test whether the egg had cooked enough. Though I think sixty minutes would have done the trick, the knife still came out slightly moist at that point, though when we finally decided to take it out the egg thankfully continued to set out of the oven.
The finished product was quite good, and I can see why the description for the dish lists it as a “hearty” selection – two servings and I was comfortably full for the rest of the evening. Next time, we thought mixing the filling ingredients (ham, potatoes and some of the cheese) before spreading it out in the pan would give the casserole a more coherent flavor, otherwise the cheese especially acts just as a topping and not as much of a “glue” as it could have. Also, one could potentially cut down the fat by using diced boiled potatoes instead of the hash browns.
Anyway, it was another enjoyable cooking experience!
Farmer’s Casserole