Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Honey Cake

For the past couple of years I've been engaged in a serious internal debate: Who is more awesome- Ina Garten or Nigella Lawson? Both have fabulous life stories. Both make great food. Both make a fabulous living making great food. I just can't decide. I will tell you though, this cake gives Nigella a bit of an edge (well, the cake and the British accent). I've made it several times for special occasions. It is beyond rich and sweet and would go perfect with some vanilla ice cream in the summer. I like to decorate the cake with almond slivers shaped into flowers and blackberries (above). Blackberries are so underrated in baking. Why? WHY, I ASK YOU? I love them. Nigella's original recipe called for marzipan honeybees, which I made once, but was underwhelmed by.

The number of my pictures which have wine in them are astounding. At least in this one you see several glasses, so I wasn't drinking alone.

I will not write out the whole recipe, which you can find here: Deliciousness Ahoy!

Tip: the consistency of the icing is key. Make sure you do not pour it over the cake while it is still too hot, or everything will run off and form a giant puddle on the plate below (and possibly on the table below the plate below). Also, when in doubt make more icing than the recipe calls for- better have too much (which, oh i don't know, you could dip blackberries in) than to run out and make more, which inevitably will be a different color than your first batch.

Proof that I do in fact eat vegetables

See? I had these for dinner one night. Bell peppers. YUM.
Of course, I added chicken and cheese (and some fajita sauce) due to my love of protein.


And yes, this means I'm eating meat now! BIG life decision! Chicken, turkey and fish. Never red meat or pork or bacon or any of that. And not when served in a form that reminds me that I am in fact eating an animal (i.e. No bones please. And if I eat fish, I don't want it looking at me). Cognitive dissonance is key. But the siren song of lean protein was too tough to resist.

Oreo Truffles

As you may recall, a couple months ago I made some peanut butter pretzel truffles for my dear madre. And it was so easy it got me thinking- couldn't I basically make truffles out of anything? Like, I don't know... Oreos?

And so I did.

And they were delicious.

Why does it looks like this pic was taken with Hipstamatic?

So delicious, in fact, that I had to get them out of my house before I ate them all. So I brought them with me when I went for a nighttime stroll with my friends Paul & Pete. They each ate a few... and then I ate the rest.

Mission divest-self-of-calorie-bombs FAIL. But whatevs. Totally worth it. And we walked all the way down to 72nd street and back so I like, totally burned off all the calories... right?

Oreo Truffles

Why yes, in addition to the truffles I did in fact dip a few Oreos in the leftover chocolate.

Ingredients:

• Oreos
• Vanilla icing (premade is fine)
  
• 1/2 cup melted chocolate chips

Crumble oreos (as many as you want, depending on how many truffles you want). Mix in icing one tablespoon at a time until the mixture is the right consistency for molding. Form teaspooon-sized balls of mixture and place on wax paper. Place in refrigerator for 30 minutes. Melt chocolate chips, roll balls in chocolate, place back on wax paper and chill 30 minutes or until chocolate sets.


What else do you think would be good as a truffle? White oreos? Chocolate chip cookie dough? Peppermint patties? The possibilities are endless.

BAM DanceAfrica

For anyone who lives in the NYC area, you should try to check out the BAM DanceAfrica festival Memorial Day weekend:

http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=41

I've gone the past two years. There's a really fun street fair with crafts, food, clothes, etc. There's also movies and dance performances, and usually art and photography inside BAM itself. I went to a dance performance last year and it was AMAZING. I've been to a lot of dance shows in my life (normal New York families get season tickets to the Yankees, my family gets season tickets to the American Ballet Theatre), but that one was one of the best.

Plus, this year there is going to be a "Late-Night Dance Party" on Saturday night. Hey-ohh!

Awesomely Bad Analogies

So I stumbled across this today:

56 worst/best analogies of high school students

High school teachers submitted the worst analogies they had seen in their students' assignments. Some of them are obviously meant to be a joke. Others... it's not so clear. Some favorites:

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.

I laughed so hard I cried. Alone. In the law school clinic office. Freezing cold. Surrounded by evidence outlines. It was a real highlow.

I'll leave you with this awesome song courtesy of my friend Krishna. AK and I are hosting a fiesta on Thursday and this will def be on the playlist.
Drake vs. M.I.A. vs. AR Rahman

Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles

This recipe is super yummy and super easy. It has only three ingredients: peanut butter, pretzels, and chocolate.

Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup natural peanut butter
  
• 1/2 cup finely chopped salted pretzels
  
• 1/2 cup melted chocolate chips (semi-sweet, dark chocolate, white chocolate.. up to you)

Mix the peanut butter and pretzels in a small bowl. Stick in the freezer for 15 minutes to set. Remove mix from freezer, form teaspoon-sized balls of mix and drop onto wax paper (should make about 10- 15 balls). Place in freezer for at least one hour until firm.

Now if you're like me, you're thinking 'Gross. Natural PB has no flavor and a weird texture!' Believe me, this recipe is the only reason I will ever willingly bring natural PB into the house. Reduced Fat Creamy Jif is my 6th food group. Seriously. But natural works better here because of that weird aka "natural" flavor and texture. Plus let's face it, the reason processed peanut butter tastes so good is because of all the added sugar- enter melted chocolate, stage right:

Melt chocolate chips. Roll peanut butter-pretzel balls in the chocolate, place back on wax paper, place in the refrigerator at least 30 minutes or until chocolate sets.



I'm going to find a fun way of packaging these guys and give them to minha mãe for Mother's Day. I already got her a jar of Sarabeth's Plum Cherry jam (she's obsessed), but I think she deserves a little more than that!

Muito fácil e muito delicioso! nom nom.

*UPDATE*: I went to the local chocolate shop and got a tin and some papers to put the truffles in. Only 8 fit in the tin, so the rest will be traveling in the ever-classy tupperware:

Birthday Brownies: The Sequel

Ok two things first:
1) Evidently I lied in the last post about starting to do work, because I've done none since I wrote that and here I am again
2) I just enabled targeted advertising on this site and the first ad I saw was.. Magnum ice cream! One of my all time favorite things in the world. Man these google people are good.

Alright, now back to the brownies.

Well all, just as I share my culinary triumphs with you, I must also share my non-triumphs (let's not use the word failures). The brownies were sub-par. Why, you might ask? Well, I kind of didn't follow the recipe. As you may recall it asks for ChocoBake or, in a pinch, cocoa powder. Evidently I was in more than a pinch because I used solid baking chocolate. Perhaps not enough? Perhaps at the wrong temperature? All I know is something went awry. The brownies were not as moist or chocolaty as they should have been. They were more like cake. Pretty good cake, but not what expected. I also place some of the blame on the hardware (evidently living in a prewar building means getting stuck with a prewar oven). Whatever, I stand by the recipe, and I just ordered a ton of ChocoBake from Amazon.

On to the decorating. I wanted to draw something with candles (since it was Akshaya's Bday, after all) but figured drawing a cake on brownies would be kind of weird (like a dessert turducken). For reasons unbenownst to me, I decided that I should draw a chandelier. So here's what I did.


First, I let the brownies cool to room temperature, and then drew a chandelier on a piece of computer paper. Actually I drew half of a chandelier, folded the piece of paper in half, held it up to the window, and traced the other half to make sure it was symmetrical.

Here's my drawing.

I cut out a few pieces of the sketch so I could use it as a stencil and block out the design. In retrospect, I wish I had done more of this and/or marked more spots with toothpicks because it was hard to reconstruct the design.

I made a simple buttercream frosting, dyed some of it yellow and some blue, and used a size 4 pastry bag tip to draw on the chandelier. The beads are the same candy pearls I used on the buttercup bundt cakes from last week. For the writing and the border I used a size 16 pastry tip.

Voila! Not too bad. Next time I will do more tracing and less eyeballing to avoid some of the squiggliness. ( And maybe I'll spend more than 20 seconds on the text to avoid the kindergarten-macaroni-collage look.)

Happy Birthday AK! xox