Sweet Potato Casserole

I know this is a bit late for the holidays, but we were busy on New Year's Day and didn't get to make it so we made it a few weeks later for our celebratory special New Year's dinner.  And hey Easter's almost here so you should make it then.  It's really good.  Well my family likes loves it.  If they had to choose their last meal I'm 83% positive that at least two of them would choose this dish and all four of them would have it in their top five.  I would choose a flaky pastry stuffed with cream.  But that's me.
But seriously this is a yummy recipe.  Last Thanksgiving (not the most recent Thanksgiving but Thanksgiving 2011) my cousin's high school band was playing in a Thanksgiving Day parade close to us so they came over for Thanksgiving.  Well my cousin could not stop raving about this dish.  He's the most rambunctious little kid and I swear he told us at least four times during dinner that the sweet potato casserole was so good were we sure it wasn't dessert?  And since it wasn't dessert could he have some more?  Lol at least something tasted like dessert because I forgot the sugar in the pumpkin pie . . . but ANYWAY, let's not dwell on my failures in entertaining and instead focus on this recipe so you can make it and your cousins can rave about it too :)

Ingredients needed:

Potato Mixture:

4 medium sweet potatoes (about 2.5lbs)
1/2 cup sugar
1.5tsp vanilla
1 egg white
5oz fat-free evaporated milk

Topping:

1 cup packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
1 cup chopped pecans
1/3 cup butter

Start with the potatoes, sugar, vanilla, evaporated milk, and the egg.

Cook the sweet potatoes.  You can do this in the oven or you can prick them with a fork and microwave them for seven minutes, then flip them over and microwave them for another seven minutes.

 Next peel the potatoes.  If I were you I'd wait until the potatoes were cool before you peeled them.  But if you were me you'd have to peel them immediately because you were behind so you can either stick them in the freezer for 15 minutes or you can put clean dishwashing gloves on and peel them with the gloves.

Peeled potatoes!

Now mash the potatoes up.  You can do this with a fork but I find it goes faster to mash them with a pastry cutter.

Did you know I also use a pastry cutter to mash bananas for pancakes and banana bread?  Works really well.

Now add half a cup of sugar.

Open the can of fat-free evaporated milk.

Realize after you poured a little bit in the bowl that you only need 5oz and you have a 12oz can.  Freak out because you almost ruined everyone's favorite dish, then measure out the correct amount.

Pouring, pouring, pouring.

Add the vanilla.  And if you're like me you'll add more vanilla than the recipe calls for . . .

Separate the egg yolk from the white.

Add the egg white.

 Mix it all together.

Drop it into a 9x13 pan sprayed with cooking spray.  Hey look those are my hands!  As in two of them!  That's because Sarah was home and she was taking pictures for me :)

Keep plopping.

Then spread the mixture out evenly.

Now for the topping.

Add the brown sugar.

Add the flour.

Now the chopped pecans.  You can chop them up more but we just dumped them in.  The bag said chopped pecans so we believed them.

Mix it all together.

All mixed.

Start dicing the butter.

Now Sarah's dicing the butter and I'm taking pictures.  She dices very slowly.

Or I should say precisely.  You should see how long she takes to chop vegetables!

Add the butter.

Start mixing.

You can use a pastry cutter but hands work well too.

Now sprinkle it on top of the sweet potato mixture.

Spread it out so that everything is covered.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes until the top is caramelized.
Now go make it!  And see if my cousin was correct and if your family will love it as much as mine does!

Best Gingerbread Cookies EVER

**Warning**
**This is a public service announcement**
**These cookies are ADDICTIVE!!!**

No seriously, they are.
They disappear immediately from our house.  I think the problem is that you know they are cookies, but they don't scream "cookies" at you.  There is no chocolate, there are no M&Ms, no nuts, no frosting, they're practically healthy for you!  Lol, well I wish they were.  But I'm just trying to warn you, you will eat these for breakfast, and lunch, and snack and dinner and midnight snack and and and just be careful!  Even if you're so stuffed from Christmas cookies that you can't think straight.

Ok.

Here's the recipe.

Don't say you weren't forewarned.

Here are the ingredients: Flour, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, ginger, allspice, cloves, pepper, vegetable shortening, butter, brown sugar, molasses, and an egg.

Start with the dry ingredients:
 

Put them all in a bowl, and mix with a whisk (this is so you don't have to sift them, because I think sifting is a waste of time, and I don't exactly own a sifter.  Honestly if anyone tells you that sifting makes your baked goods fluffier when you're just going to mix them in a mixer anyway, question their motives.  They're just trying to make you waste time!) 

 

Next, add the butter and the shortening to the mixer and beat them until they are fully mixed together and creamy.  Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Then measure out half a cup of brown sugar (be sure to measure it in a one cup measuring device because you are too lazy/your hands are messy and you don't want to walk across the kitchen and get the half cup measuring device.  Hey, you're saving dishes.  (You're welcome dad!).  Add the sugar to the creamed butter and shortening and mix it together.

Now add the egg and molasses to the sugar/butter/shortening mixture and mix together.  Now let's be clear, the recipe doesn't call for vanilla, but that doesn't mean you can't add it, right?!  I mean EVERY baked good that I make includes vanilla, since vanilla is the elixir of life.  But you don't have to add vanilla if you don't want to.  But if you were going to, now would be the time to add it.

Here's what it looks like when it's all mixed.

Now, by hand, mix in the flour.  Don't worry about getting it all incorporated with a spoon because that's hard.  It's just as easy to mix it mostly together, then dump it out onto the counter and knead it all together.

Then, divide the dough into two balls and put the balls into two bags.

Now here's my trick.  The dough needs to go into the fridge/freezer if you're impatient like me and chill.  Well it's hard to chill a ball all the way through since it's four inches thick.  If you instead flatten the dough in the bag it's going to be only half an inch thick and will chill faster.  Again I'm impatient and want to make the cookies pretty much as soon as I make the dough!

When the dough is done chilling (about an hour or so or up to a few days if you really plan ahead.  Which I do not) take it out of the freezer so you can roll it out.  Here is the other part of my trick.  Have you ever tried to roll out a chilled ball of dough?  Doesn't work too well does it.  It splits apart and you get these big cracks where you have to press the dough back together.  The beauty of flattening the dough when it was warm and then chilling it, is that the rolling out portion is almost done!  All you have to do is cut the bag off the dough.

Then roll it out flat, and then cut pretty shapes in it.  Notice I'm using flowers and bunnies and ducks because these gingerbread cookies are not just for Christmas time!

Then bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes.

They'll come out of the oven and smell heavenly.

Now you can leave them plain, but I like to mix some powdered sugar and water and make a frosting/glaze to put on top.  It keeps the cookies moist and not stale for a lot longer.  Not that they will last that long . . . but dang it people, everything tastes better with frosting!

Here are the ingredients (recipe courtesy of Food Network.com)

 3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper (trust me you can't even taste it)
8 tbs butter
1/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2/3 cup molasses
1 egg

Btw I like to make these before I go on trips or anyone I know goes on trips because they have ginger in them and ginger is supposed to calm your stomach right?  So you're in a new place and the car ride or the plane flight turbulence or ok you get the point.   But they're awesome please make them soon!

Christmas Parties

Wednesday last week was the culmination of days of baking and weeks of planning in a massive amount of Christmas parties!  I baked close to ten dozen cookies (and decorated them all) and missed Small Fry's Christmas concert (no worries I went last year and the parents went this year) so I could decorated a gingerbread house for my mom's office dessert competition!

Did I mention they were all on the same day?

Did I also mention that I'm a perfectionist and no one else can touch my cookies?!

Yes well.

Here are all the gingerbread men.  Dad needed six sets of six for his office cookie exchange and I needed some for my office Christmas party.

At this stage I had made the dough, cut out the cookies, made the frosting, and outlined the cookies.  I also added a cute little scarf.  Then I just had to fill in the cookies with their respective frostings.  Have I mentioned how much I appreciate having an outlined cookie to decorate?  It's a pain in the buttocks but I can fill that cookie full of tons of icing and it doesn't cascade off the cookie like a waterfall!  So not only do you get a thicker layer of frosting, you also get a pretty cookie ;)

Here's the beginning of the gingerbread house.  I've never made a gingerbread house before so let's just say I used A LOT of frosting to "decorate" (cover my mistakes).  Here I've cut out the walls and the steeple and the front is cooling and waiting to be cut out.  I cut the shapes after the cookie had baked because that meant straighter and flatter edges.

Here are the sugar cookies!  Not outlined our decorated.  I'm slacking I'll admit it.

Alright, here the sugar cookies, or should I say santa cookies, are halfway decorated.  Squeeze bottles are SOOOO much less messy than using a spoon for frosting btw.  And they're super cheap at craft stores.

Oh and don't you just love my nativity?!  It's my favorite because the emotion Mary is showing is so realistic to new moms :)  It makes me realize that even though the Holy Family was pretty much the holiest family ever they were still human and the love of a mother for her new baby and the love of a father for his wife and new baby is universal.

And now . . . THE BIG REVEAL!

Days upon DAYS of frosting coolies till my hands cramped have finally paid off!

Here are the finished products :)

The santa cookies!

Aren't they just adorable?!  Is santa supposed to be adorable?
(I used the same hard frosting I used to outline the cookie to make the texture in the hat.  Just start squeezing and plopping frosting all over to make it look 3-D).

Now the gingerbread men!

I used a powdered sugar and water icing for the brown body because that makes the cookie the softest and then used the harder meringue frosting for the red and green scarves.  They were delicious!


And the piece de resistance!
My gingerbread spanish church! (mom's office theme was a Southwestern Christmas)

I totally blew the competition away to win best themed cake! (there was cake inside holding up the walls . . . don't tell).

I also don't think many people entered/took it too seriously . . . but it was a competition and I had and idea and by golly I was gonna try and make the best possible entry!

The roof is my favorite part :)

So Merry Christmas Eve everyone!  I'm off to go to the gym so I can fit in my Christmas dress for mass tonight ;)

Condensed Thanksgiving

Now I know that it's Christmas in two days but I was looking through the photos on the camera and I saw these fun ones from Thanksgiving so I thought I'd post a random photo montage of that holiday real fast.

Although I guess it won't be a montage because I'll be talking through it.  So montages have voice overs?

Oh well, here goes!

Here's our turkey getting all ready to be roasted!

Dad  actually bought brussel sprouts from Trader Joe's on the stalk.  They were kinda cool.  Medium Well thought so too ;) 

The beginning of our cranberry sauce.  We baked it in the oven this year which was different but it tasted quite yummy!  I just think the colors of this picture are gorgeous!

Our gorgeous table-scape designed by yours truly ;)

I love my velvet pumpkins.  Like really, REALLY love them.  I don't know why, but they speak to me :)

Our plates.  Quite the colorful array.

And now to end things off with dessert and our cute platter turkey :)

And there, in two seconds was our Thanksgiving!  Happy almost Christmas!

Holiday Cooking Vent Session

So I know these aren't the traditional holiday cookies you're used to seeing this time of year.  You know, the pale yellow, icing topped confections?  Or the dark brown, spicy, iced wonders?  Or the colorful mouthfuls of butter?  Well I'm rebelling in this cookie post.  I'm not posting a SINGLE picture of those!  Because.  Just because . . . I felt like it . . .

Well also I have an insane weekend of cookie making ahead of me.  And when I say insane I mean insane.  Here's the email I sent to Medium Well yesterday venting about my cookie marathon:

Dad needs four dozen cookies for a cookie exchange (I'm making gingerbread men) and then he needs 2 dozen for the Christmas party (sugar cookie santas) both on Dec 19th (wednesday).  Then mom needs a cake for her office cake contest and I'm planning on making a gingerbread Spanish style church (bc their theme is a southwest Christmas) with cake in the middle (to hold it up) also on Wednesday the 19th.  I'm having a Christmas party at work and I've offered to make some dessert for that (I don't know what I'm making for it yet though, prob not cookies! lol) but that party is . . . you guessed it, Wednesday the 19th.  Oh and Dad is also going to go to his old office for their holiday party this Friday and wants to bring sugar cookies.
Sooooo.  I need to bake two batches of sugar cookies (that will make 48) and two batches of gingerbread cookies (that will make 60) so I can decorate them in stages and be finished by Monday night so they have time to dry and I can bag them up on Tuesday to send to work with dad on Wednesday.  I also need to bake a third batch of gingerbread in the shape of the church so I'll have time to decorate those walls, put the pieces together, and let it harden before mom has to take it to work on Wednesday. 
Plan:
1. make sugar cookie dough (twice)
1a. put dough in fridge
2. using same bowl, make gingerbread dough (three times)
2a. put dough in fridge
3.  take out sugar cookie dough and bake
4.  take out (2) gingerbread dough and bake cookies
5.  cut out walls and roofs and bake
6.  commandeer the basement ping pong table as a staging area for cookies.
7.  make three batches of stiff frosting and store in air tight containers until cookies are cool enough (and I have energy enough) to decorate.
8. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Did my sister who is taking a final this morning really need to worry about my cookie craziness?  Probably not, but I didn't make her read the email!  It was just there in case she wanted to peruse the interworkings of my weekend plans (in which she will probably feature).

So, because my mind is shutting down whenever I think of a Christmas cookie and all the work it will entail, I'm devoting this post to cookies I made a few weeks ago.  Macarons!  NOT Macaroons, MACARONS!

 Macaroons are crescent shaped cookies dusted in powdered sugar.  Macarons are light, airy almond cookie sandwiches.  I had a random craving for macarons one day and decided to make them. 
(whenever I have a random craving I normally move mountains to make sure I can make that recipe that night.  Let's not dwell on the fact that by the time I've finished making the recipe I'm too mentally exhausted to even enjoy the fruits of my labor . . . )

Thing is, I've never actually EATEN a macaron that I haven't made. 
Wow, that sentence didn't make much sense did it?
Let me re-phrase.  I've made macarons twice and I've eaten the macarons I've made but I've never eaten a macaron that someone else has made.  So I'm not giving a recipe since I'm not sure I even made these things correctly.  I don't want to say what I did and have someone make them the way I said and be like Blech!  What was she thinking?!?!  This is the worst French inspired cookie in the whole world!  All the Frenchmen/women of years past are rolling in their graves!  French pastry chefs everywhere are having a moment of silence to mourn the atrocity of my lack of pastry skills!

So if it's not perfect, you can't blame me! 

Lol I thought they tasted fine btw. 

So here's how I made them.  The recipe is pretty easy, it calls for sugar, almond meal (I tried to food-process my own almonds when I tried this recipe in college because I had them and didn't want to go to the store for almond meal.  It turned out ok but was a bit chunkier than was strictly acceptable . . . ), and egg whites.  Now the egg whites are tricky.  Every recipe I've seen calls for the egg whites to sit out on the counter for days.  As in up to a week.  These French people take their food a wee bit too seriously.  You know I bet that someone years ago just forgot to put their eggs back in the fridge and decided to make cookies with them anyway and got an ok result so, to save face, they told everyone they MEANT to do that and if you don't do that your cookies won't be as awesome. 
In other words, I didn't do that. 
Call me a germaphobe but the thought of leaving raw eggs on the counter for days makes me squeamish and I start having visions of my last bout with food poisoning (not pretty).  Maybe it's necessary?  Like I said I haven't tried a real macaron so I'm not an expert.  I did let my eggs sit out and get to room temperature.  That's gotta count for something.
Anyway, you then beat the eggs and fold in the almond meal and sugar and such and I added food coloring because that's the way I've always seen them made.  I put the mixture (it will be runny, not resembling a dough at all) into a pastry bag and plopped circles down on parchment paper lined baking sheets. 

And I let them sit for an hour.  This is a step I actually followed because it made sense that the tops have to harden so it can create a nice shell. 

Then I baked them and they pouffed up!  I was so proud of myself!

Now you have to let them cool COMPLETELY.  Like for an hour at least.  I get impatient and want to pop them off immediately but they will stick to the paper and it will not be pretty.  They are ready to come off when you can tap them with your finger and they move. 

Now to make the sandwich part of the cookie.

Normally you would make a chocolate ganache (I personally think that white chocolate ganache would taste delicious) but who has time for that!  So instead, I went with the closest thing to ready-made ganache that I wanted to eat . . . .Nutella!  Just stick a spoon in the nutella jar and instead of eating it straight off the spoon like you normally would, spread it on the flat side of one macaron and add another macaron to the other side to create a sandwich.

Tada!  Pretty as a picture!  Magazine worthy scrumtiousness! 

Btw, has anyone ever noticed that your food looks better the closer the camera is to the food?  A whole plate of cookies? not as cool as half a cookie at an angle (at least in my opinion).

Winter Memories

It's the end of the semester for those still in college and it's also December.  With all of the fb posts about graduating and going home for the holidays i was reminiscing about manhattan and thought I'd share one memory that happened more than I wish it had. (my mind wanders randomly at lunch time, can you tell?)
Let me set the scene.  It's December (or January or February).  It's recently snowed so the roads in my apartment complex have been plowed but the roads in the neighborhood between my apartment complex and campus have not been plowed.  Since the neighborhood is between a busy campus and a busy apartment complex, the unplowed snow is pretty packed.  It also hasn't melted because it's still below 30 degrees outside.  Or if it has melted, it has since refrozen and is now ice masquerading as snow.   Fun.
Back to setting the scene.
I've woken up and realized that I'm going to be a wee bit late for class if I don't kick it into high gear.  I've also realized that the class I'm going to be late for is the one taught by a crotchety old grandpa of a teacher who we all adore but who thinks the day starts at 5am and if we're late will ridicule us to no end.  Sooooo I've got to book it.
Getting ready goes something like this:  roll out of bed, throw on yoga pants and a shirt, fly down the stupid steep spiral staircase to the bathroom, brush teeth, brush hair, put hair in pony tail, swipe on foundation blush and mascara, run back up the spiral staircase of death to grab socks, boots and cell phone, run back down stairs, tuck yoga pants into boots, put on fleece jacket, put on winter jacket, put on scarf, put on gloves, try to put on hat but realize you have to take out your pony tail first or it will look weird, take off gloves, take out pony tail, put on hat, throw books into back pack while gloves are off, put gloves back on, grab keys and run out the door. 
And that's not even the fun part.
I never drive to school because it was faster to walk because parking was disgusting, especially in the winter time.  I'd have to park as far away as my apartment so I might as well just save time and walk.
Well on mornings like this I didn't have time to walk.  When I said run out the door I literally meant run.  Run out the door, down the road (less slippery than the sidewalk), cut across the complex by the tower, dodge the mail truck delivering stuff to the office, cross the street into the neighborhood and switch from running to a modified skating/shuffling motion on the ice packed snow that doesn't require picking your feet up.  By the end of the road I'm getting pretty toasty.  Not only do I have a bunch of layers of clothing on, but I'm also running, and carrying a bunch of books and binders.  So off come the hat and gloves.
Cross the street on to campus.  Cut through the tennis courts by my old dorm, cut through the parking lot of my old dorm.  By now I've lost the hat, gloves, scarf, and winter jacket (taking articles of clothes off while running and juggling a backpack on icy sidewalks should be an Olympic sport so I could win and go to Olympic village and make babies with my pick of the hot athletes!  Just kidding.  Kinda).  ANYWAY!  In my now semi-summery clothing choices, breathing hard, I decide not to risk sliding on the tile in the engineering complex and detour around it outside.  Then it's up the stairs, through the door, and into my seat right as the bell rings.  Where I unceremoniously drop all my outerwear on the floor, roll up my sleeves as far as they will go, and fan myself vigorously.  My classmates would give me weird looks because I was sweating and looked like a mess in the middle of the winter. 
Oooooh the memories. 
Happy almost Friday!

<3 B