Mike's Monkey Bread

The first time my friend John told me about his fabulous boyfriend Mike, it was in a picture text message.  The image: Monkey Bread.  The subject: Mike's badass cooking skills.

The text had me hooked--I knew, just KNEW that Mike had to be fabulous (who else makes Monkey Bread that delicious?), and I've been bugging him for this recipe ever since.  I bugged him so much that he was pretty much obligated to make it the first time we met.  There were no leftovers.

The thing I love best about Mike's monkey bread is the incredible presentation it makes versus the short amount of time required to make it.  Just take canned biscuits, chopped pecans, some cinnamon, melted butter, and brown sugar in a bundt pan, bake and VOILA: the most decadent dessert you've ever had.  This monkey bread is not for those on diets.  It's for those who just ran ten miles and deserve a clearly delicious treat.

Mike's Monkey Bread
Mike got this recipe from the Pillsbury website (the original can be found here), but really, he's been eating it since he was a little kid.  The recipe below has some variations from the original as Mike has doubled the cinnamon for an earthier, spicier kick, added pecans instead of walnuts, and called for raw instead of processed white sugar.  I highly suggest following these substitutions!


Ingredients:
* 1/2 cup raw sugar
* 2 teaspoons cinnamon
* 2 cans (16.3 oz each) Pillsbury Grands! Homestyle Biscuits
* 1 cup chopped pecans, or walnuts
* 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
* 3/4 cup butter, melted

1.) Preheat oven to 350F.  Lightly grease 12-cup fluted tube pan/bundt pan.

2.) Mix sugar and cinnamon.

3.) Open 2 cans of biscuits.

4.) Cut biscuits into 4 pieces each.

5.) Place cut up biscuits in sugar/cinnamon mixture and flip until fully coated.

6.) Toss coated biscuits into well-greased bundt pan making sure to add pecans among the biscuits.

7.) Pack 1 cup of brown sugar.

8.) Add brown sugar to 3/4 cup melted butter and stir to combine.

9.) Drizzle/pour melted butter/sugar mixture over bundt of biscuits.

10.) Bake for 30-35 minutes in 350F oven or until golden brown and no longer doughy in the center.  Allow to cool for 10 minutes in the pan.  Turn upside down onto a serving plate and enjoy! Makes...well...a lot: 8-10 servings.

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Vanilla Cupcakes

Tonight, I made the annual end-of-semester cupcake treat that I bake for my students.  Many of my peers often look at my funny when they realize that I, yes, "bake" for my students.  My logic is this one: by the time Thanksgiving break, or Spring break rolls around, many students are exhausted and need a little sugary boost to make it through their exams.  The answer? CUPCAKES!

For this particular batch, I used a basic vanilla cupcake recipe courtesy of Paula Deen.  Many foodies know Paula as that sweet-as-pie Southern lady who uses tons of butter and sugar to make the yummiest of American comfort foods.  I love Paula as a TV personality, but have often butted heads with her recipes.  Something always goes wrong when I make a Paula recipe! Case in point: disaster key lime pie incident of 2009.  Enough said.

Thus, one might imagine my hesitation when I found this recipe, and subsequent delight when I finally tasted it.  THESE CUPCAKES ARE DELICIOUS! They're very simple, but exactly what one would want in a batch of universally pleasing vanilla cupcakes.  Add that to a simple buttercream frosting and sprinkles, and you have a real crowd pleaser!

Vanilla Cupcakes, or Paula's "Old-Fashioned Cupcakes" Recipe

Recipe courtesy of Food Network and can be found here.

Paula's original recipe calls for a mixture of cake flour with regular all-purpose flour.  For those of you who don't have cake flour on hand, I am happy to report that regular all-purpose flour works just as well.  Granted, the cupcakes don't have that cakey-density that cake flour offers, but are still light, fluffy, and vanilly-delicious!

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
• 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into cubes
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• Old Fashioned Frosting, recipe follows

1.) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and line cupcake pans with cupcake liners.  Set aside.

2.) Combine the following ingredients in a bowl: flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt.  Add 2 sticks of butter in one inch cubes and mix with hand mixer.

3.) Then, add the wet ingredients starting with the eggs.  Add eggs one at a time, then combine milk and vanilla extract with the batter.  Mix thoroughly.  My batch was particularly lumpy with butter, so if you have this same problem and just can't get the butter to even out, don't worry, the butter will melt and combine during the baking process!

4.) Scoop batter into cupcake liners until they are about 2/3 full.  Put in oven and cook for 17-20 minutes.  If you are using a gas stove, you'll want to watch the golden-color of the cupcakes.  If the tops of the cupcakes are just beginning to turn golden brown, pull them out, because they are done! However, if the tops are golden brown, there is a very good chance you have burned bottoms (this happened with my first batch, so I made sure to pull out the cupcakes when they were just beginning to finish baking/turn golden colored.  This change made for perfect gold brown bottoms, not burnt bottoms!). Ahh...that sounds funny!

5.) Finally, wait until the cupcakes are completely cooled to decorate.  I used a spray butter cream frosting from the store, but Paula suggests you use her "Old-Fashioned Frosting" which is essentially butter cream (milk, vanilla, butter, and confectioner's sugar).  You can find the Old-Fashioned frosting on the same website as the cupcake recipe listed above.  Add frosting and sprinkle with cupcakes.  Enjoy!

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Compost Cookies

Has anyone ever been to Momofuku Bakery in New York City? The bakery is located on 2nd Avenue on the corner or 13th St., and is one of those delicious wonders fusing old time New York with modern international cuisine.  Wait? What does that mean? Well, the great thing about Momofuku, is that much like old time New York, it has a cult following--crooners, locals, businessmen, and other New Yorkers know the bakery.  They eat its "crack pie," "compost cookies" and dine at its milk bar.  Yet, like much of international modern New York, Momofuku comes from an Asian inspired business model with its fantastic in-house hipster chefs who wear brightly colored headbands.  Momofuku is as if Hello Kitty moved to New York circa 1940 and decided to bake some zaney cookies.

What do I love about Momofuku? I love their crazy recipes.  Anyone can make chocolate chip cookies and apple pie, but can they make these traditional recipes from potato chips, pretzels, Fritos, and pounds of chocolate?! Probably not, and that's what I LOVE about Momofuku.  Finally, after much wait, I acquired the recipe for the bakery's most popular cookie, Compost Cookies.  These treats are similar to the "Dump Cookies" of an earlier post, only they demand the addition of salty ingredients like chips and pretzels  making this cookie your ultimate, clearly delicious, salty + sweet desert.

Compost Cookies
Christina Tosi, one of the Momofuku chefs, is credited with making this recipe and you can find her original here.  However, I've made numerous changes to the original (the omision of corn syrup, addition of whole wheat flour instead of all purpose, and an overall change to the heat and cook time).  Also, this recipe calls for 3 cups of filling ingredients--1.5 cups of salty stuff and 1.5 cups of sweet stuff.  You can literally put anything in here for these fillings, but if it's your first time making this recipe, I suggest you keep the salty ingredients in tact whilst playing with the sugary stuff.  Basically, make this for the first time using Fritos, potato chips, and pretzels, but feel free to play with your chocolate chip/sugar combination.

Ingredients:
* 1 cup butter
* 1 cup brown sugar
* 1 cup regular sugar
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 1 teaspoon almond extract
* 2 large eggs
* 1 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 2 teaspoons kosher salt
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 1/2 cups your favorite sweet/chocolatey treats: I used 1/2 cup dark chocolate morsels, 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips, and 1/2 cup cocoa crispies
* 1 1/2 cup salt ingredients: I used 1/2 cup honey mustard pretzels, 1/2 cup regular potato chips, and 1/2 cup Fritos (all of which are crumbled into miniature pieces)

1.)Preheat oven to 350F.  Cream butter and sugars in an electric stand mixer on low.  Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl after 2-3 minutes to incorporate all ingredients.
2.) Add and mix wet ingredients--eggs, vanilla, and almond extract. 
3.) Add and mix dry ingredients--baking soda, salt, baking powder, and flour.  Mix on medium-to-low speed and continue to scrape down the sides of your bowl to fully integrate the ingredients.

4.) NOW, the fun part: mix in your favorite fillings by starting with the sweet stuff.  I used chocolate chips, mini chocolate chips, and cocoa crisps.  Add the salty ingredients last (so they don't lose their structural integrity during the mixing process) and scrape down the bowl one last time.
5.) Scoop onto a greased cookie sheet using an ice cream scoop (the tool of any great cookie chef!).
6.) Bake in the oven for 6-8 minutes or until edges are a little more than slightly browned.  For some reason, it's REALLY easy to overcook this recipe in a conventional oven.  The first time I made these, I actually burned 90% of my cookies! It was a travesty--I hadn't burned cookies since I was about 10 years old, so I suggest a serious bit of caution during the cooking process.   I'm still uncertain as to why these cookies overcooked the way they did with my first batch.  Perhaps the original instructions of 400F for 9 minutes was the cause.  SO, bake these at 350F and check at 6 minutes.  You'll be glad you did.  The resulting cookie is soft in the middle with some elements of being crunchy.  YUM.
7.) Remove from oven and allow to sit on the cookie sheet for another minute.  Then, transfer to wax paper, or cooling rack.
8.) Feed to friends and cooking assistants.  Enjoy!

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Coconut Cake with Coconut Buttercream Icing & Fondant

This blog post may be the very end of me.  Why? Well, let's just say I accomplished one of those rare culinary tasks this past weekend that I, myself, cannot seem to believe I actually did.  What did I do? Well, I started by baking a double batch (4 layers) of a coconut cake that called for real coconut and coconut milk.  Then, I made a double batch of homemade coconut/cream cheese/buttercream icing.  Then, once the cake cooled, I carved it into the shape of...a unicorn.  Covered it in my homemade icing and then covered it in a layer of fondant (which I also made myself).  Then, decorated it with buttercream icing and voila--a mind blowing unicorn!

Now, the cake looked pretty amazing. I watched episodes of Ace of Cakes whilst performing this activity and telling myself I could do it.  I don't know if you've ever taken 4 circular discs of cake and attempted to create any kind of animal out of it, but let's just say it was beyond intimidating.  In fact, I didn't even take pictures of the pre-icing cake stage because I didn't want people to see any flaws I may have had in the first step of the process.

So why did I make a unicorn cake? It's not every day of the week you slave for 10 hours over a specialty item in the kitchen.  This weekend, I had the best reason to create one--the one and only Lydia Dorsey was celebrating her 21st birthday! So, unicorn cake in hand, I drove for three hours with my magical friend in the back carriage of my SUV.  It was quite a fantastic journey and worth every hour of effort to bring her this baked good! Lydia loved the cake (as you will hopefully see from below photos) and it tasted amazing.  Coconut cake is not a highly marketable baked good, but in this company, it was a clearly delicious treat.

Coconut Cake
This recipe comes from Elise Bauer over at Simply Recipes and can be found here.  One of Elise's co-contributers, Garret from Vanilla Garlic, posted this recipe as a cupcake recipe in the fall, but I think it makes a much more impressive cake.  I've made multiple changes here from the original--first, the frosting recipe, although initally Garrett's has been reworked into a hybrid coconut cream cheese and coconut butter cream icing, and second, the cake recipe is not only doubled, but also calls for a cakier creation (cake flour instead of all purpose).  The resulting product is a dense, wedding-cake-like creation, and the icing adds so many layers of flavor it practically melts in your mouth.  That's right, a cake that MELTS in your mouth.

Coconut Cake
Ingredients
* 1 1/2 cups unsalted/salted butter, room temp.
* 2 1/2 cups sugar
* 6 eggs, room temp.
* 2 cups coconut milk, or 1 regular size can of coconut milk
* 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 4 1/2 cups cake flour
* 2 teaspoons salt
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 cup sweetened desiccated coconut

Coconut Cream Cheese Butter Cream Icing
Ingredients
* 2 sticks of butter, room temp. (or1 cup butter, room temp.)
* 1 8 oz package of Philly Cream Cheese, room temp.
* 1/2 cup sweetened desiccated coconut
* 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 2-3 cups powdered sugar (probably more on the three side, but you'll have to taste as you add for personal preference and texture)

Cake Baking Instructions:
1.) Preheat oven to 350 F.  Cream butter until light and fluffy, then add sugars a little at a time, and cream until light and fluffy a second time.  Don't forget to scrape down your mixing bowl during this process!
2.) Add the eggs, one at a time.  Allow for 30 seconds between each addition so that the eggs are properly mixed in (this will take 3 minutes).  Again, make sure to scrape down the sides of your mixing bowl as you are doing this step.
3.) Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl: flour, salt, baking powder, and mix to integrate.  Set aside.
4.) In another separate bowl, mix 1 can coconut milk with 2 teaspoons vanilla.  Mix to integrate.
5.) Now, add both the dry and wet ingredient mixtures to the butter/sugar/egg mixture in your master kitchen bowl (i.e., if using a kitchenaid mixer, the one you're electronically mixing).  Garret from Vanilla Garlic suggests adding 1/3 dry ingredients first, then 1/2 wet ingredients; then, keep adding until all ingredients are fully in the bowl.  I think this method works well, but the idea is that you NEVER add all of one ingredient at once, but that you vary your dry and wet ingredients during this process.  Remember what the Mighty Alton Brown says, "Remember kids, speed kills."  This is very true when baking a cake!
6.) Once you have mixed all of the ingredients, scrape down the sides of your bowl and mix one or two more times on low to make sure all of your ingredients are integrated.
7.) Pour into 4 circular cake pans--I used 9 in. diameter pans, but as any cook knows, you can use whatever pans you have in your kitchen.  Cakes are amazingly flexible during the batter-to-cooked cake stage.  You can pour very thin layers of cake and bake until done, or very thick layers of cake and bake until done.  I did 4 regular sized cakes, but you certainly can divvy up the batter according to preference.
8.) Bake for about 25 mins., but make sure to check at 15 minutes and 20 minutes (to prevent over cooking and burning).
9.) Allow to cool on a cooling rack and then proceed to the carving/icing instructions.

Carving Instructions
1.) Are the cakes cooled? Are you sure? Okay, move onto step two.

2.) Set up two cakes next to each other and map out how big you want your unicorn to be.  You'll use the other two cakes to carve out details--a horn, a snout, an ear, etc.  You get the picture.
3.) Since I can't really articulate how one carves a unicorn...really, I don't think I can do it without weird made up words and confusing anecdotes, take a look at another food blogger's attempt to create what she called The Unicorn of Trial.  I followed her basic idea in cake carving and even used her fondant recipe.  This blogger at Cardamon and Lavender basically calls the carving process her "winging it skills."  I believe, yes, "winging it" is the terminology that you should use here.
4.) Somehow...create a unicorn, then, proceed to the next step to ice your cake.

Icing Instructions

1.) First, prepare the icing in your kitchenaid mixer: cream the butter and cream cheese together (about 3-5 minutes).
2.) Scrape down the sides, mix in two teaspoons of vanilla extract, and slowly add powdered sugar while mixing on low-to-medium speed.
3.) Fold in the coconut and spread frosting over cooled cakes (you should know by now that you can't ice a cake without cooling it properly first!).
4.) Voila! Once you've iced the cake, you suddenly see a real unicorn take shape. It's absolutely amazing.  Now, you can choose to roll out and add the fondant, or wait until the following day to do so (at this point, you will have been baking, carving, icing for 3-4 hours, so you'll probably need a break. Given how important the fondant detailing is, I'd suggest taking that break now!).
5.) However, if you've given your cake a 24 hour resting period, roll out and place fondant over cake.  It's best if you can do this in one layer, but given the size of the cake, there will probably be a seam where you've attached two very large fondant layers.  Carve off the excess fondant using a knife (I prefer a pizza cutter) and press into cake gently.  The coconut icing will adhere the fondant to the cake like delicious, sugary glue.
6.) Decorate with colored icings, sprinkles, and cut out fondant.  I'll post and detail the fondant recipe in tomorrow's entry.  It's shockingly simple and pretty easy to do!


And now, a photo montage of Lydia, her unicorn, and such: 

 

Lydia eating the horn.

 Lydia's Self-Portrait (the Unicorn that started this all!) FYI: Lydia's quite the talented painter/artist.

The magical unicorn on fire.

More fiery footage.

 The ravished unicorn, yum.

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