SuperEggplant

Okay, so maybe you read about the jar cake obsession over at Amy’s. It’s like a whole new world of endless possibilities just opened up in front of us, and both of us kind of lost our minds over it. Amy went so far as to deny her husband a jar cake because he committed the sin of not being excited enough about them, and I, well, I drove way out, in the dark, to some guy’s garage to buy a box of jars (hey, he was on Craig’s List, so it seemed legitimate).
So, today I made my second batch of jar cakes. The first time I doctored up a chocolate cake mix and used a chocolate mocha frosting. Not bad. The box cake ensures moistness, which is good. Now, the dilemma is between the cute little 1/2-pint wide mouth jars and the 1-pint jars. The 1/2 pints are cute, but they are small. You can really only fill them about a third full with batter if you still want room for frosting. Amy decided to skip frosting and stick with denser cakes. I, on the other hand, don’t really think cake is worth eating if there ain’t no frosting, so I chose to experiment with frosting and larger jars.
This time I went for red velvet cake. Mmmmm, red velvet cake. I filled the pint-sized jars about a third full of batter. I baked them at 325 F because I read somewhere that the jars might explode if you bake them at higher temps. They took about 35-40 minutes.
Now here’s the fun part.
Let me reiterate: I AM ALL ABOUT THE FROSTING. This got me thinking. With a pint-sized jar cake, you would be cheated out of frosting for more than half the cake, since the frosting would just be sitting on top, right? So, I had what I consider to be a genius idea. I will CORE the cake and FILL the core with FROSTING, lovely FROSTING! So that’s what I did, and these puppies are just oozing with cream cheese frosting.
I would like to report that these are delicious, but I can’t, since I haven’t sampled one yet. I do, however, highly encourage all of you to give these jar cakes a try. They are fun, novel, and make nice gifts. I plan to wrap mine in cute dish towels.
Read on for the recipe …

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Some baking plans were foiled because of a busy weekend, but I did get to attend the pretty-much-annual gingerbread house-making party hosted by Mrs. H. Us “kids” used to make the houses, but we have been replaced by ACTUAL kids, so now us big kids just stand around and eat as many scraps as humanly possible.

Mrs. H bakes like a madwoman so that each person can have his or her own complete house.
Check out these cool pieces:

Here’s Sara putting together a house. I think the burnt sugar has gone to her head:

Lillie was the oldest kid making a house. Apparently all the sugar has gone to her head, too. Her house was all pink:

Here’s an assembled house:

One of the 3-year-old girls had on the coolest shoes ever. Too bad they weren’t my size:

Yup, more baking. I apologize for the following unappetizing photo:

It may not look so hot, but it is dee-licious. It’s Gingerbread Pudding Cake, and it’s of the molten category. It is perfect scooped atop some vanilla ice cream. That way, the molten goodness oozes down into the ice cream while the chewy yet slightly crunchy cake sits on top. A friend who doesn’t even really like gingerbread heartily recommended this recipe, so you know it has to be a keeper.
The recipe is here. It’s very easy to make, and I had all the ingredients on hand, so no extra trip to the store was necessary. One tip: it calls for an 8×8 glass baking dish, but I would recommend a 9×13 pan if you like your cake topping a bit more on the chewy crunchy side. I baked mine in a dish even smaller than 8×8, and my cake was more, well, cakey.

I told you it was going to be all about baking this week! We had a little cookie-eating party here, and dang but if we didn’t have a bunch of delicious morsels!

And this isn’t even all of them!
We didn’t really have any rules, just bake a batch and bring them to eat! I made these:
Soft & Chewy Sugar Cookies from Cook’s Illustrated (I am too lazy to type out the recipe. If you want it, let me know, and I will post it) and Pistachio and Dried Cranberry Mexican Wedding Cakes (recipe here). I had never made Mexican Wedding Cakes before, but these were pretty tasty, I suppose. One trick I discovered–when forming the cookies, wear surgical gloves. Bare-handed the dough stuck to my fingers and wouldn’t clump together into a cohesive cookie mass.
Other cookies we had: Action Hero Melissa brought chocolate sandwich cookies (super yum) and palmiers. Read about them here.
All Buttoned Up Melissa brought some sort of minty Mennonite cookie that was soft and delicious and gorgeous (lovely chocolate drizzle on top). She blogged about them here. She also brought some little ginger spice cookies.
Amy brought the super yummy apricot bars from last year’s Real Simple magazine.
Susan brought peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and almond butter chocolate chip cookies. She blogged about them here.
And Sally braved nasty rush-hour traffic to bring crisp and light pizzelles and two giant containers of ice cream! Apparently there were cupcakes, too, but they met an untimely end (really, Sally, did you think we wouldn’t eat upside-down, smushed cupcakes?)
I am already looking forward to Holiday Cooky Gorge Fest ver2 for 2008! If I get my act together I’ll try to announce it early so we can have more attendees (don’t want anyone to feel left out–I was one of those who was always the last person picked in PE class, so I am sensitive to such matters. Also, we need help eating the cookies. I have seriously eaten about a dozen cookies today and will no doubt eat another dozen before bedtime).

I think this is going to be a week of baking, and really, is there anything wrong with that? A while back I read about baking bread in a rice cooker. It sounded so weird that it intrigued me, and today I finally tried it out.

See? Pretty weird. It is more labor intensive than the no-knead bread, but it’s hard to compare the two, since they produce vastly different breads. The rice cooker bread is more spongy (but not spongy like injera, so Melissa, you don’t have to freak out) and chewy. It’s not like a rustic artisan loaf at all. I found it kind of a hassle to knead the dough in the rice cooker pot, so I did a half-hearted job, but the thing still rose. I also had to cook it a bunch of times, since my rice cooker, which uses fuzzy logic, thought it was a really small batch every time and thus timed it accordingly. In the end, though, it produced a pretty tasty, edible little puck. Kind of a fun experiment. You can find recipes and instructions here and here.

Every time I decide to shoot for more consistency in blogging, something comes up, and I fail. Of course, it’d probably help if I were actually making something these days. Anyway, I have managed to do a bit of baking.

There are so many good cookies in the world, and I have SO many cookie recipes, but you know, you just really can’t beat a good chocolate chip cookie. I have quite a few chocolate chip cookie recipes, and lately my standard has been the one from Cook’s Illustrated. Last week, though, a friend made some chocolate chip cookies that were perfect–they were chewy yet soft and moist, and they were large (yes, that is an important factor). I had to bake them myself to see if I could duplicate them, and they came out pretty well, but I don’t think they held up as well (his were good for several days, but mine were only good for a couple). Anyway, the recipe is here. If you make them, please let me know if you agree about how great they are!

I have been busy obsessing over the calibration of the oven temperature. It was running a little on the low side, so I adjusted it, and now it’s running too hot, and now I am about to lose my mind. I have a turkey to roast, after all. But anyway, rather than just waste the energy when checking the oven temp, I decided to bake something.

I guess it’s kind of hard to tell from the photo what I am holding. It’s a Cranberry Streusel Bar! The recipe was in the local paper yesterday, and it is a keeper. These bars are very easy to make and have the perfect balance of tart and sweet. They are dangerously delicious, really. The recipe is here. I didn’t add the optional walnuts. I generally don’t like nuts messing with my baked goods (except peanuts and, on occasion, pistachios and almonds).