Posts Tagged ‘indulge’

Happy Birthday, jonesing for… !

One year ago today I started my blog and it’s been nothing but fun since.  This whole thing began after encouragement from friends since I enjoyed taking pictures of whatever I was cooking, and liked typing up a few words about it as well. I’ve had so much fun sharing my love of cooking and recipes, and nothing makes me happier than hearing my friends and total strangers have been inspired to cook from recipes I post.

And I have something even bigger to celebrate than my blog’s anniversary. I’m so excited to announce I’ve just accepted a position as the new Test Kitchen Assistant for a national food magazine! I’ll be testing recipes, assisting food styling, grocery shopping, and working in the test kitchen for a living – a.k.a. my dream job! Words cannot express how excited and blessed I feel to be able to do what I love for a living as young as I am. Getting out from behind a desk and back into the kitchen means the world to me, so now it’s really time to celebrate!

So to celebrate, I wanted to bake a cake – a very special cake. In a way, this entire post, blog, and really my career, is dedicated to my oldest sister, DeAnna. She honestly is the biggest reason I pursued cooking – admiring her life as a pastry chef when she was younger and always being enchanted with whatever she was baking or making. This bundt cake is one of the earliest food memories I have of being impressed with food, thinking the black and white drizzle was so fancy, the cake shape so odd, the entire thing just being special. So I wanted to go back to my roots with this one.

Unfortunately neither D nor my mom could find the recipe. They both tore their kitchens apart looking for it to no avail, which seemed almost poetic in a way. I got to just create my own version, which is exactly what I like to do here. So I took a simple chocolate bundt cake recipe and oomphed it up, adding coffee and buttermilk, using a chocolate ganache drizzle instead of melted semi-sweet chips, and I had to stay true to the white chocolate drizzle – even though I’m not a huge fan, you can’t get that stunning white color with anything else, and since the cake isn’t overly sweet, it balances out.

So thank you to my readers, family, and friends for a wonderful year! I can’t wait to see what this next year has in store!

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Oh, Easter. In a way you’re my favorite holiday in the culinary world more than any other because your day is devoted to breakfast and brunch, in which all my favorite foods reside. I was going nuts trying to choose what exactly to make for my Easter entry since there is no breakfast/brunch food I don’t love (no – really), and in the end, I had to go with one sweet and one savory dish (to be posted later).

Although we did a lot of the traditional Polish/Catholic customs for Easter growing up (dyeing eggs, strict lent, attending all Easter masses), our usual Easter fare wasn’t Polish at all. We’d have a big breakfast of sweet and savory things like scrambled eggs, potatoes o’brian, and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls before heading to church where I would secretly eat the Eggums I had snuck in my pockets and get disapproving looks from my mother. Then for dinner it would be bone-in ham, au gratin potatoes, and cornbread. There just wasn’t much Polish influence in our meals, so as much as I love my heritage and the food it offers, I decided to go with something we always enjoyed at our modern American Easter brunches.

The Doughboy certainly produces a delicious and fast cinnamon roll, but these just put him to shame. Although mine don’t make that glorious thoomp! sound when you make them, they are still ooey-gooey and rich cinnamon rolls with that cream cheese icing I could just eat by the bowlful. They require very little work (just time to rise) and once you’ve tried a homemade cinnamon roll, you’ll never touched the canned ones again.

Eggs, butter, buttermilk.

Dough + melted butter.

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“If you’re lucky enough to be Irish, you’re lucky enough.”

With St. Patrick’s Day here, I knew I wanted to bake something to celebrate one of my favorite cultures. I was kicking myself a bit since I previously made cupcakes which are, well, practically the most perfect Irish stereotypical culture themed dessert, but thankfully, this fit the bill quite well.

Drinking whiskey straight isn’t something I do often, but cooking with it is phenomenal. It makes everything aromatic, malty, and just richer. Combined with coffee and chocolate, this cake is out-of-this-world in the flavor levels. Topped with more coffee-whiskey glaze, these are borderline Paula Deen level indulgent, but hey, it’s a holiday which automatically means indulging. Which makes it okay…. right?

A holy triumvirate.

MY WALNUTS!

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I love Valentine’s Day. As my friend Beth put it the other day, “I don’t care what my romantic situation ever looks like, I will forever get 4th-grade decorate-a-shoebox-for-your-valentines excited for Valentines Day,” and I have to agree. Cards and flowers and chocolate and everything in special boxes and packaging… to me, Valentine’s Day is about love – not romance. It’s a day set aside to appreciate those you love most, regardless if they’re your best friend, spouse, significant other, relative, etc. It’s just an opportunity to show you care, if you want to.

I send cards to those closest to me, give out flowers, and of course, make special treats. Originally I wanted to attempt strawberry macarons for this holiday, but since I’m moving at the end of the month (full oven! fridge! dishwasher in my new place! – HOORAY!) with a better oven in the future, I decided to postpone. These popped up in my daily cookie newsletter from Martha Stewart and sounded delish. Plus I had an entire container of malt powder sans one tablespoon begging to be used.

I had fun renaming these with a little  dry humor knowing a lot of my friends and peers roll their eyes at Valentine’s Day and the entire stigma of it, but it really does fit. The cookies are rich and dark, with such a great added pungent flavor from the malt, and the filling is just so divine. Like drinking a chocolate malt, only in frosting form. How can you eat that and not feel the love?

<3

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I’ve lost 2 of my favorite Gingers in the past week. First Conan’s tear-jerking last hurrah on NBC, and then I found out one of my favorite people at work, Chris the resident snarky redhead, was leaving. So of course, I put pastries on the pain. And since Chris probably has the biggest sweet tooth in the building (next to mine), I knew I wanted to bake something pretty over-the-top while hopefully continuing my pie crusade for his goodbye dessert.

And wow, does this cover over-the-top. It’s basically cookie dough pie. With walnuts. And Irish whiskey.

Are you still with me? Good.

This pie is one of those great things you could most likely throw together since the ingredients are all pretty standard baking (and drinking) fare. I keep everything except the walnuts in my baking pantry, and the whiskey I used was actually from a teeny bottle of 12-year-old Jameson my friend Robbie got me while she was interning for Irish parliament (thanks, Robbie!). It comes together incredibly fast which is good because once you taste the filling it will take the hand of God to stop you from eating the rest of it.

So rich and chocolatey and indulgent… it’s got one of those pecan pie-esque ooey gooey sticky fillings, except it’s chocolate and walnuts and…  you really, really need to serve this with milk. Or ice cream. Or both. And maybe a gym pass.

Check that pie crust out!

Need I say more?

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