Posts Tagged ‘indulge’

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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It’s time for a little sentimentality via desserts, but not in the traditional sense.

Both my sister and a good friend of mine are heading to England in the next few weeks (on totally separate trips) so while I have been so excited for each respective person and sharing my favorite things from when I studied abroad there, it’s also made me incredibly jealous and heartsick for my own adventures across the pond. I’ve been musing about my favorite paintings, cathedrals, plays we saw, people we met, and of course, pubs we visited. I tried Guinness for the first time at a pub in Bath while I was there, and although I didn’t love it at the time (I had yet to grow my dark beer legs at age 20), it’s still one of the strongest sense memories from my gastronomic catalog of England.

The Eagle & Child: the pub that C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien frequented in Oxford.

So all week I’ve been craving stout, which I now adore. And after hearing my boss made chocolate stout and vanilla ice cream floats on New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.

After perusing some chocolate-beer cupcakes, I came up with these. Rich and dark chocolate stout cupcakes with sweet and tangy Bailey’s-spiked cream cheese icing. I mean, if you’re making boozy cake, you might as well make the frosting just as naughty, no? The beer adds the most delicious malty flavor to the cake, and the Bailey’s gives the cream cheese frosting that extra little zing to make it special. Since I’m in the microbrew capital of the universe, finding chocolate stout was easy as pie, but it may be a bit tricky for others. Feel free to use Guinness or any stout of your choice.

Of course you buy the bomber. That way the cook (you) gets to drink the rest!

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Let’s stay fat!

Haha, just kidding. But that’s what this entry feels like, in opposition to so many health-conscious and weight-loss centered food blog entries right now. Yes yes, so many people resolve to lose weight this week, which is fantastic. Yet I’ve been doing that since last New Year’s and I’m doing great. So I know I can derail, regardless of a diet frenzy right now, and do just fine.

And oh me oh my, what better way to derail than by skipping the tracks and soaring straight into one of the best chocolate cakes I have ever tasted. I finally bought the Baked cookbook for myself this holiday and couldn’t put it down the rest of my break. Every recipe sounded tantalizing and although often being lengthy, not intimidating.

This was the recipe that grabbed me the most (next to the s’mores nut bars, which no doubt will be next) and as a final farewell, my sister and I made this glorious confection the day before I left Kansas City. It came together rather quickly (especially the frosting, which was such a breeze) and filled the kitchen with the most delicious, malty chocolate smell.

We all devoured the cake after a dinner of indulgent pizza, and everyone agreed it was one of the best chocolate cakes ever, but only very light on the root beer flavor. Yet the cake is so moist and tender and the frosting is beyond to-die-for. So I still highly recommend this cake, but if you really want the root beer to sing, adding a teaspoon of root beer extract or even a splash of root beer schnapps definitely wouldn’t hurt. (And come on, when does adding schnapps to anything hurt?)

Sugar sugar sugar.

Do not measure the foam.

Mmmm, dark chocolate. There is no bad here.

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Here it is. The ultimate. The #1. The quintessential dish that is pure Christmas to me. Chruscikis.

Traditional Polish fried cookies which resemble either a bow-tie or angel’s wings (depending on your heritage/what your grandma says…) which seem simple on the surface, but in the end are some of the messiest, and somewhat labor intensive cookies ever.  Yet they’re worth every drop of splattered oil and puff of powdered sugar that ends up on the floor.

This is probably the oldest recipe we have in our family, which we know goes back to my great-grandma Jean who immigrated to the US when she was about 7 in the late 1800’s, and it probably goes back even farther than that. The ingredients are dead simple (eat your heart out, Martha) and the dough comes together very easily, it’s just all about rolling the dough incredibly thin and working very quickly once you get to the frying part. But they’re just so good warm, I cannot begin to describe it. I mean yes, they are basically fried dough, but come on – we all know how awesome that is.

So Wesolych Swiat! to my fellow Poles, and I hope you all enjoy the  most cherished part of my Polish culinary heritage!

Mommie Dearest on the hunt for the recipe…

Found!

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