S'more cake

Here we go again, another idea taken too far in the name of food. What idea is this? Well, St. Alton did graham crackers, home made marshmallows, and pound cake within a three month span of my wonky memory. Put together with Ina Garden's chocolate buttercream icing and the goofy Wilton heart-shaped fill-in cake pans, and here's another experiment in the making.

In short, I took the pound cake recipe, then adjusted the flour and sugar to match what was in the graham cracker recipe. I maintained the ratio of the flour ingredients and the sugar ingredients, and ended with 13 oz. graham flour, 3 oz. AP flour, 9 1/8 oz. brown sugar, and 6 7/8 oz. molasses. The butter and eggs were the same.

Oh, just as a side note, when it calls for you to grease and flour a pan, use butter. Not nonstick spray. Take a guess why.


I was in for a rude surprise when I filled the first pan and one recipe filled... one pan. A quick whipping together of a second recipe filled the other pan plus 6 cupcakes. So keep in mind that this cake is upwards of 2 pounds of butter right now. Stick all of this in a 350 degree oven. Pull the cupcakes at 30 minutes in, or less. Start testing the actual cakes around 1:45.

Now for the chocolate buttercream. Accent on the butter.

Yeah, that's a few tablespoons into a pound and a half of butter. That's six @#$%ing sticks of butter. Mark this down, because this may be the only time you'll ever see these words in this blog: This may be too much butter.

The heart-shaped cavity is filled with marshmallow. I started with a full recipe, and there's plenty left over. But that's okay. I'll use it.

For example, as little garnishes on the cupcakes.

So... there's also this little issue of the crowns of the cake. You know, the part you have to cut off in order to level the cake. Well, we ate one because it wasn't that big. But the other one, well, it needs another application

On the left: half of the crown laid out as a cutting pattern on top of some of the leftover marshmallow. On the right: the other half frosted with chocolate buttercream. You know what's coming next.

It looks like a giant Oreo, but so, so much better.

Ah. The taste. I knew I was forgetting something.

Well, it does taste like a graham cracker, a little. I think I'll try honey next time because the molasses leads to a heavy texture. The marshmallow, well, if you have ever had home made marshmallows, you're going to have a hard time stomaching store-bought ever again. And the chocolate buttercream. Um. I have a quart of it left over. The recipe says "makes 4 cups," but that's a filthy, dirty, undercutting lie. It makes something more like 7. I'm going to have to figure out something to do with it....

Apple butter cookies

As you all know, there are three rules here about Caes brother cooking. Rule number one is that everything is better with butter. This entry is an exploration of possible corollary to this rule: things with "butter" in their names are good.

At our Mart of Wal, they keep apple butter right next to the peanut butter. And since I was running low on PB, I figured I'll take some AB along for the ride.

Also in this neighborhood is jelly and jam. I guess I should have realized that apple butter would be closer to those because it comes in a similar jar. But it'll be close enough for what I want to do with them. I think.

What I have in mind is apple butter cookies. In my childhood we had this cookbook we got from a local hospital. I don't know how, but there it was. And in it was a dirt-simple peanut butter cookie: 1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg. Bake. It's really that simple. So let's see what happens if we try to make apple butter cookies instead.

Hmmm.... That consistency of apple butter has bitten me in the butt. But I had a feeling this was going to happen, so I figured I'd just add flour, a little at a time, until it becomes a cohesive dough. Or least a thick batter. Well, there's a spare 1/4 cup measuring cup that lives in my flour jar. Perfect, right?

2 1/2 cups of flour later, this is what we have. It's close enough. So. Apparently it's traditional to ball up peanut butter cookies and mash them down with a fork. I decided to mash the apple butter cookies down with a spoon. You'll want to spray the back end of the spoon with some nonstick spray. Pour out a blob of batter then mush it around into a disk. Bake at 350 for about 10-12 minutes or when you figure they're done.

Looks pretty good, right? Well, there's a bit of a problem. Remember how I added 2 1/2 cups of flour 1/4 cup at a time? You can surmise I beat the batter after each addition. Now, if you follow the gospel according to St. Alton, you'll be familiar with the muffin method: Mix your dry ingredients together, your wet ingredients together, then pour the wet on the dry and mix as little as possible. Beat it senseless and you'll get a very glutenous creation that will end up chewier than you'd like. But it's still edible...

...it even looks like a cookie. And it tastes quite nice. Apple isn't one of those flavors you see in cookies very much. That's a shame, and you should join me and correct that.

But now that I mentioned "muffin"....

Pluots

Welcome to the first installment of What The? Theater, where we investigate the rare, quirky, and sometimes downright weird food we find in the grocery store. At the one near my office building has in its opening a display for "Flavor Grenades", at $1.99 per pound. What the...?


The stickers say "Dinosaur Egg", and the receipt says "Pluots". Pluwhats? Turns out it's some kind of plum. So what the heck, let's buy some. It'll be interesting.


So... it peels kinda nicely, or delicately. The sticker ripped of a bit of skin when I tried to take it off. And that's a nifty color stryation (?) when you slice it across the meat. Biting into it? Well, you better have a plate handy. These things are juicier than the worst office gossip. This thing shot juice across my cheeks and created a big honkin' puddle on the plate.

So what's it taste like? Unsurprisingly, it's got the consistency of a really wet plum. It tastes kinda like a plum with tangy acidic, mildly citric tones, and then the sweetness is turned up a notch. The flesh does its best to disintegrate when you put your teeth through it. Surprisingly, it holds together okay when you take a serrated knife to it.

Speaking of which, that gave me an idea of what to do with them. St. Alton makes a neat individual peach upside down cake, so I thought I'd adapt the recipe to take pluots. The recipe calls for four individual 6 oz. ramekins. Seeing as how I was really broke at the time, I decided not to drop $8 on a new piece of kitchen equipment and made one big cake in a 6" cake pan.


That's some butter and brown sugar at the bottom of the pan. It's supposed to be followed up by some candied ginger, but I couldn't find any. The batter you mix up as normal, and you pour over the pluot slices artfully arranged in the bottom of the pan. (Image of batter accidentally not taken.)

Because you're going from little ramekins to a [comparatively large] pan, double the cooking time.


It's got a nice color, and a toothpick will come out clean when inserted. Well, the pluots are gooey, so it won't be completely clean. Run the knife around the edge, put a plate on top, and flip the whole thing over. Use a big plate because the pluot's juiciness will cause it to splut out as it's freed from its 6" prison and into a wide world of horizontal space.

Cut the cake in quarters (so it would be the same serving size as the ramekins) and serve. The buttermilk in the cake makes a nice tangy counterpoint to the pluot's now almost excessive sweetness. But overall, it's very nice. I strongly recommend it.

Remember folks, just because it's foreign to you, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve an audition in your kitchen.

Dark Chocolate Brownies

I like dark chocolate. Not the insane 60%+ stuff, the turn your face inside-out bitter kind. Sure, all you chocolate snobs, take your shots now, as I say, "I like Hershey's." I also like brownies, and math. Let's combine the three and do an experiment, shall we?



Okay, so here's what you're looking at: Alton Brown's cocoa brownie recipe from the Food Network, and a bunch of math. A little digging around shows that the average milk chocolate has 10% cocoa solids, and what gets marketed as the average dark chocolate has 35% cocoa solids. If you look at the total of sugar plus cocoa powder, there's 1 1/4 cups cocoa powder and a total of 2 cups of sugar (1 granulated, 1 brown.) This gives us a 5:8 ratio of cocoa:sugar, with a total volume of 3 1/4 cups (or 13/4 cups, for those of us who are weird and like bigger fractions so we don't have to convert them on the fly.) Given that dark chocolate has 35% cocoa to milk chocolate's 10%, the amount of cocoa needs to 3.5 times what it normally is, so the ratio gets upped to 17.5:8, a little more than 2:1. Given that the total number of units in the original recipe was 13, I figured that fudging the math (har har) to a 9:4 would give me the just-over-2:1 ratio that I need.

tl;dr: That means the recipe now calls for 2 1/4 cups of cocoa powder and 1 cup of sugar, divided as 1/2 cup granulated and 1/2 cup brown.

I cut the recipe in half all the way across the board. This was an experiment; if it failed spectacularly, I didn't want to get stuck with an 8x8 pan of something I couldn't eat. So we go with a 4x9 loaf pan:



First observation: the batter is thick. Thicker than your average brownie batter. It also looked like it was pulling en masse away from the sides of the buttered and floured pan, so at least I was pretty confident it wouldn't stick.



Second observation: It was heavy. Heavier than you'd expect something of that size to weigh. But it looked a little spongy, not unlike the underside of your normal brownie. Flip it over...



...you know, it looks... just like it did before it went in the oven. That's a total headscratcher.



Well, this explains why the thing was so heavy: it's dense. I see next to no air bubbles, next to no leavening. And while it tastes like dark chocolate, it's got this slightly dry, slightly grainy texture to it. Removing large hunks of sugar from the recipe probably hurt it, so it's back to the drawing board to figure out how to moisten this brick.