Creamy Peppermint Hot Chocolate (Minus the Cream)

I had to think of something last minute to post here. The reason being was I didn't get to say goodbye in my last post. So goodbye.

Okay, so you probably want a little more than that. Well, I'm going on an adventure and am going to be away from this blog for a bit. I'll be back though. I promise.

Anyway, this drink. It does have alcohol in it, and a type of alcohol I bought because I had to try it but was very sceptical about it. Turns out it really really works (for some things). I'm talking about whipped cream vodka (cake batter is the next one on the list to try). It took me a bit to find something I would want to drink with whipped cream flavouring in it but I can now say it is very good for two things: creamsicle screwdrivers (just your typical vodka and orange with an added creamyness to it) and hot chocolate.

With the hot chocolate I do find you have to balance the alcohols out. I love peppermint hot chocolates but the peppermint schnapps makes the drinks taste more bitter (and I like a sweeter, creamier, milk chocolate hot chocolate), and the whipped cream vodka on its own makes the hot chocolate excessively sweet. So do a 1:1 ratio of the two and it perfectly balances the drink out. The amount of each that I use doesn't make a strong drink, it just adds a hint of flavour. So if you want it stronger feel free to increase the quantities. What I really like about the vodka is that it makes my hot chocolates seem thicker and creamier (it's the word of the day) without having to make it with milk. This was a really good thing when I was limiting the amount of dairy I was consuming. Up until figuring this out I would rather have no hot chocolate than one made with water. But make it with water and add in this vodka and it's all good. Really.

So how do you make this wonderful thing I'm bragging about.

Ingredient

3/4 C. Boiling Water

1 Pkg. Hot Chocolate Mix

1/2 oz Whipped Cream Vodka

1/2 oz Peppermint Schnapps

*Optional* Whipped Cream

Directions

~Boil the water and pour into a mug.

~Stir in hot chocolate mix until dissolved.

~Mix in alcohols and stir.

~Top with whipped cream if desired.

Enjoy

Blueberry Lemon Curd Galette

Okay, I know this looks messy and like I ruined my cookie sheet but I can assure you it actually came off the sheet beautifully and once it was on a plate you would never know that all the innards leaked out of it.

The beautiful thing about this is that it looks about as far from perfect as could be, but the rustic look is in right? Right? So really, imperfect is perfect now or at least that's what I'm telling myself. The other great thing about this is that you can really make them as big or as small as you want. Because you aren't limited to the size of a pie pan. I ended up making 4 of these (we cut them into 3 or 4 pieces) and I used about 1/2 - 2/3 of this pastry recipe. It was a great recipe to use up the leftover pastry from the chicken pot pies because I was able to make as many of these as I wanted at the size that I had pastry available for. It wasn't like trying to stretch not enough dough into a pie pan. Plus with my little bit of scraps I was going to throw out at the end I decided to do something with them as well so scroll down to the bottom for that.

Recipe from For the Love of Cooking.

The pastry really didn't roll out that well.

But it all tastes the same in the end

Makes 2 Galettes

Ingredients

1/3 Batch of Pastry, divided in 2 

4 C. Blueberries (I used frozen, fresh would work too)
Lemon Curd

5 Tbsp. Sugar

2 Tbsp. Cornstarch

1 Egg

Sugar

Directions

~Preheat oven to 350 F
~Grease a cookie sheet or large baking dish.
~Place 2 rolled out pastry circles onto greased pan (I slid 3 or 4 knives under the edges of the pastry to make it easier to not over-fill it and it helped to just flip the pastry up over the edges when done - see picture above if confused with what I'm trying to say here.)
~Spread lemon curd over the pastry, leaving about an inch around the edge.
~In a bowl combine berries, sugar and cornstarch. Toss to coat evenly.
~Scoop berries on top of lemon curd.
~Flip up edges of pastry over the berries and with your hands press together to seal.
~Bake for 30-35 min. or until pastry is golden.

Enjoy

And this is what you can do with the scraps. Roll it out into a long rectangle, scoop a bit of curd in the centre and fold it up and press the edges together with your hands to seal. Bake with the galette at 350 F but for a little less time (say 25-30 min.), just watch them and when they are golden they are perfect.

Pastry

Bear with me while I post this recipe. Like my vanilla ice cream post I just want to have it up here by itself so I can find it easily without having to sift through multiple other steps of more complicated recipes (like the one I'm going to post next). So yes, this post is really just for my benefit (and yours too if you want. I guess I can share).

Recipe from the back of the Tenderflake box.

Makes shells for 3 complete pies with tops and bottoms

Ingredients

5 1/2 C. Flour

2 Tsp. Salt

1 lb Tenderflake Lard

1 Egg

1 Tbsp. Vinegar

Up to 1 C. Water

Directions

~Stir together flour and salt

~Cut in the lard until you get pea sized pieces

~In a measuring cup whisk the egg, add in the vinegar and top up with cold water to a total of 1 C.

~Stir the water mixture into flour mixture, adding a bit at a time and only add enough to make the dough cling together

~Gather dough into balls (6 balls - makes 3 top and bottom pies)
~Dough can be refrigerated if not ready to be used right away (just pull out at least 30 min. before rolling) - don't roll dough until you are ready for it at the end as it won't come off of the counter once it is left for awhile and warms up.
~Roll dough out on a well floured surface.
~Then do with it whatever pastry creation you have in mind.

Toll House Cookies

This was my go-to recipe for chocolate chip cookies from the very beginning. I guess you could say it was where my love of baking really began. I'd spent a lot of time leafing through our cookie cookbook searching for the next great thing to make (if only I had known about food blogs then), but I always seemed to find my way back to page 92, nine times out of ten. Even though I haven't made these in probably a year, I did not forget page 92 when I opened up the book this time. I made this recipe for years almost exclusively before I ever knew what a food blog was. Then I kinda got bored of it (too much of a good thing) and started to search elsewhere for a good recipe. Until discovering food blogs I never found one that I liked as much. Since beginning this blog (and getting my KA mixer) I haven't made these cookies. I made other ones and a few recipes I swore hands down were better. More flavour, more chewy, you get the picture. Well I take it all back. Ever since getting our new oven, the two recipes that as of late I would say were the best cookies really haven't been cooking up well. So I decided to go back to my good old faithful Toll House recipe, a recipe I have yet to make in my mixer. Actually I think I tried making this in my first mixer (the one that broke and was way, way, way too small for me), but I don't count that because the mixer didn't get to work it's magic on the ingredients. But my new mixer...I'll say it again, you never know what creaming butter and sugar truly means until you make cookies in a stand mixer. The hand held mixer just doesn't even come close.

So back to the results of the cookies. They were amazing. I ate some warm and they were the gooiest things I'd ever eaten, they fell apart in my hands. But the dough before baking was amazing. It was silky and light and fluffy (basically whipped is the word to describe it), instead of thick and chunky like my other recipes have been, probably due to their being quite a bit more butter and eggs in this recipe than others (and you bake at 375 vs. 350 so really it is a significant difference from other recipes). So the end result was that these cookies probably tasted close to the same as the recipe I remembered but the texture was so much better. I feel like I've found a whole new cookie recipe. The only think about these cookies was they went pretty flat and almost concave (something I've never really experience with this recipe or other cookie recipes seeing as I usually opt for a chewy and thick cookie recipe), and typically I associate flat cookies with crispy cookies. But as long as you watch your baking time (for my liking, 8 minutes and not a second more was perfect), these cookies are anything but crispy. When the family bit into the first cookie it was asked what recipe it was. When I responded they said they could tell. I guess there's nothing like the original chocolate chip cookie recipe.

One final interesting thing. I was just searching this recipe online (as I got my copy from one of the only recipe books I refer back to time and time again), and found that I really cut back on the chocolate. The recipe in my book is identical to the one on the Nestle website, except mine calls for 1 pkg of Nestle chips and the web version calls for 2 cups. I didn't really know how many cups was in a package so I started by the half cup full and counted up and it looked good at 1 1/2 cups. But I can see why they called for 2. Some of my cookies were amazingly chocolate-filled and others had very little (simply because I had made a double batch and my mixer was pretty close to capacity and wasn't distributing the chocolate quite as well as it should have), so take your pick on the amount of chocolate. 1 1/2 may be enough if you're just making a single batch and you can mix the chocolate in evenly.

Recipe is the Original Nestle Toll House Recipe, from Cookies! A Cookie Lover's Collection.

Makes 4 1/2 dozen medium-large cookies (it's a much larger recipe than other recipes out there).

Can you tell how light and fluffy it is?

Ingredients

1 C. Butter, softened

3/4 C. White Sugar

3/4 C. Brown Sugar

1 Tsp. Vanilla

2 Eggs

2 1/4 C. Flour

1 Tsp. Baking Soda

1 Tsp. Salt

1 1/2 - 2 C. Chocolate Chips

1 C. Chopped Nuts (optional - I've never put these in)

Directions

~Preheat oven to 375

~In a large mixing bowl cream butter, sugars and vanilla. Add in the egg and mix.
~Mix in flour, soda and salt until light and fluffy.
~Stir in chips and nuts if desired.
~Using two spoons, scoop onto cookie sheets (handle as little as possible with your hands, it doesn't matter what the dough looks like on the pan - it doesn't have to be a perfectly shaped ball)
~Bake for 8-9 minutes or until edges are golden and centre still is white and soft.

Enjoy (warm)!

The Non-Balled, Cheese Ball

AKA The Best Tasting, & Easiest Cheeseball Out There!

This thing is amazing. Once you start eating it you just can't stop. Seriously, what's better than garlic and cheese together? Umm, nothing. So, you could theoretically roll this mixture once made into a ball like you would for any normal cheese ball, but we get lazy and just throw it into a bowl and scoop it out with a knife (or by the spoonful if we're too lazy to search for a non-stale box of crackers). I've been thinking lately though that this may be pretty darned good spread on a toasted bagel. After all you put cream cheese on a bagel, and this recipe is just a souped up cream cheese. I was also one night wanting something to put on my baked potato but I didn't feel like making garlic butter or grating some cheese so I just put a scoop of this stuff inside the potato and let it melt and it was again amazing. Garlic and cheese, need I say more? I'm also just being reminded that this was also scooped onto steamed veggies and allowed to melt and was a simple cheese sauce.

There is a lot of fancy cheese ball recipes out there that call for expensive and fancy ingredients. This one calls for some pretty basic ingredients and very little work, and it tastes a million times better than any cheese ball I've ever tasted, and as you can see it's pretty versatile. We typically only make it at Christmas, but this year we bought a two pack of the Imperial Cheese so we had one spare for later.

Recipe (or ingredients list with no directions or quantities) comes from one of the ladies my mom worked with.

Ingredients

1 Pkg. Imperial Cheddar Cheese
Equal Part Soft Cream Cheese
4 Cloves Garlic, minced
1/2 Tbsp. Worcestershire Sauce

Directions

~Combine all ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer and mix until all ingredients are combined and mixture is fluffy.

~Allow to rest in fridge for at least half an hour (if you can)!

Enjoy

Chicken Pot Pies (Dairy Free)

These were quite a bit of work because we had nothing prepared ahead of time and we made the pastry from scratch. You could buy some pre made pastry sheets or use some leftover chicken and veggies from the previous nights dinner to take out a few of these steps. But, the homemade pastry was so worth it. It may not have been pretty (I've only ever made pastry one other time and that was years ago) but it was so incredibly flakey and delicious. I've not ever been a pie lover, it's something I'll eat but it's typically not the first (or second) thing I'd pick for dessert, but I now know why. When the pastry tastes like this, pie is so worth eating.

Pastry recipe is the one off the Tenderflake box.

Makes 5 individual ramekins and 1 regular sized pie

Ingredients

1/2 Recipe of Pastry
             5 1/2 C. Flour
             2 Tsp. Salt
             1 lb Tenderflake Lard
             1 Egg
             1 Tbsp. Vinegar
             Up to 1 C. Water

6 Chicken Breasts
Salt
Pepper
1/2 Tsp Poultry Seasoning

3 Carrots, peeled and diced
4 Medium Potatoes, peeled and diced
1 1/2 C. Frozen Peas

1 Tbsp. Butter

1 Large Onion, diced

4 Cloves Garlic, minced

5 C. Chicken Broth
5 Tbsp. Flour
1 Tsp. Salt
Pepper
1 Tsp. Poultry Seasoning

1 Egg

Directions

~Make pastry

        ~Stir together flour and salt

        ~Cut in the lard until you get pea sized pieces

        ~In a measuring cup whisk the egg, add in the vinegar and top up with cold water to a total of 1 C.

        ~Stir the water mixture into flour mixture, adding a bit at a time and only add enough to make the dough cling together

        ~Gather dough into balls.

        ~Dough can be refrigerated if not ready to be used right away (just pull out at least 30 min. before rolling) - don't roll dough until you are ready for it at the end as it won't come off of the counter once it is left for awhile and warms up

        ~You'll only need about half of this recipe, so reserve the rest in the fridge or freezer for later projects.

~Season chicken breasts with salt, pepper and seasoning and bake in oven until almost cooked entirely. 

~Allow chicken to cool slightly and cut into cubes.

~Cut carrots & potatoes. Place carrots and peas in one pot and potatoes in another and cook until tender. Drain.

~In a large saucepan melt the butter and saute the onions until golden on medium-high. Near the end, add in the garlic and cook.

~Add in 4 cups of the chicken broth, reserving the remaining 1 cup, stir and lower temperature to medium.

~Pour the 1 cup of broth into a mug and whisk in the flour 1 tbsp at a time until all lumps are gone. Add into the saucepan, whisking constantly.

~Season with poultry seasoning and continue to whisk until mixture thickens. Remove from heat.

~Preheat oven to 425 F

~Grease the dishes.

~In a large bowl combine chicken cubes, carrots, peas & potatoes. Pour in the sauce and mix to distribute.

~Scoop mixture into dishes.

~Coat top lip of dish with a bit of egg wash.

~Roll out pastry on a floured surface and lay over top of each mixture filled dish. Trim edges and press to seal around edges.

~Brush top of pasty with egg.

~Bake for 40-45 minutes or until pastry is golden.

Enjoy

Fudge Brownie Ripple Ice Cream - 100th Post!!

My 100th Post!!

I remember when I couldn't believe I had two pages of posts. With seven entries displaying per page, it was a big deal for me to have to click to see older posts. I didn't know how I was going to do it then, and I still really don't know how I'm doing it now. All I know is that my motives haven't really changed. 100 posts in and I'm not trying to get everyone and their dog reading my blog. A few people are great, but I really don't want to dedicate the time to having thousands of hits a week. I'm happy with the pictures I have, they show what the dish is. Sure they aren't the prettiest or have the best lighting or whatever but they do the job. At the end of the day I enjoy it. I have fun making new things and searching for new recipes, and I realize I have a lot to say about the adventures that go into making each dish. This blog has done it's job though as it is a place to store things I have made and my notes on what worked and what didn't and I can honestly say that I enjoy referencing back to a recipe that is written up by me. It follows a procedure for how my brain works and my kitchen and equipment operate. And really, that's enough for me.

Now I know it's kinda cold out for ice cream (but we are going through a pretty mild spell here), but one of the ladies I work with just got back from Hawaii and she kept raving about these milkshakes she had that she was sure were made with homemade ice cream, etc. So I left work and headed to the store to buy cream. I was making ice cream in February, even if I had to eat it wrapped in a blanket. The plan started out with making brownie batter ice cream, but as I was sitting in the grocery store parking lot on my phone trying to find a recipe I knew I had seen before, I decided to go in a different direction because I have to be honest, I'm not much of a chocolate ice cream fan. It's kinda like blueberries and strawberries. I love the real thing, but don't you dare put them as an ice cream base.

Ice cream is a fair bit of work and it takes a bit of time but it's fun to make. The only problem is that there is two smells guaranteed to turn my stomach and that is warm milk and eggs cooking. Unfortunately, those two smells combined don't make it smell any better and it took a long time for the custard to cook so I was all too familiar with the smells. It amazes me though that something that smells so bad (in my opinion) while it's cooking can taste so amazing after it cools. It's magic.

The fudge sauce is not as bitter as the chocolate sauce I made recently which is a good thing in my eyes.

Fudge Ripple recipe is displayed on epicurous.com, but is actually from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. 

Ingredients

Fudge Ripple
1/2 C. Sugar
6 Tbsp. Cocoa
1/3 C. Light Corn Syrup
1/2 C. Water
1/2 Tsp. Vanilla

1 Batch Vanilla Ice Cream
2 1/2 C. Brownies, cubed & frozen

Directions

Fudge Ripple

~In a small saucepan mix sugar and cocoa. Add in corn syrup and water and heat until it reaches a boil, stirring constantly.

~Allow it to bubble and thicken for about a minute then remove from heat and add vanilla. Stir.

~Place in fridge to cool completely before adding to ice cream.

Ice Cream
~Make ice cream custard, when cool freeze in ice cream maker

Ice Cream Assembly

~In container place a layer of vanilla ice cream. Top with a generous drizzle of fudge (don't mix it in).

~Place layer of ice cream on top. Topped with brownie cubes.

~Repeat layers until you run out of ingredients.

~Finish the top with a drizzle of fudge and gently swirl it in to the top layer of ice cream.

~Sprinkle the edges with some crumbled bits of brownie.

~Place ice cream in freezer to set.

Enjoy