Chicken Salad

Today was the kickoff at my library for our summer reading program and I decided that to celebrate that by throwing together a pot-luck at work.  One of my contributions was chicken salad.  It's a super short and easy recipe, but very tasty.  To make it, you'll need: ~3 C cooked chicken; 1/4 C dried cranberries; 1/2 C diced celery; 3 Tbsp diced red onion; 1 diced apple; 1/4 C chopped toasted pecans; 6 Tbsp (or so) mayonnaise; 2 tsp lemon juice; 1/4 tsp salt; 1/8 tsp black pepper.

Just get yourself a rotisserie chicken; it's so much simpler that way

Either chop up or shred your chicken into little bits and combine it with the cranberries, celery, red onion, apple, and toasted pecans.

Like so

In a little bowl, combine the mayonnaise, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.  Stir it into the chicken until it's all nicely mixed (add more mayo if you need it).  And you're done!

Ta-da!

The only "difficult" part is all the prep work, especially chopping up the onion.  That always makes my eyes water something fierce.  Anyway, you can serve this alone, on rolls or crackers, or, my favorite, on banana bread!

Heaven on a plate

I've got a pretty good recipe and Panera has a great recipe for peanut butter banana bread.  I know it might sound a little weird, but trust me: chicken salad and banana bread go great together.

Guinness Chocolate Cake

It's Saint Patrick's Day which, for a lot of folks who bake something for the occasion, means breaking out the green food coloring.  Not me, though!  My Saint Patrick's Day goodies usually involve Irish Cream and this year, Guinness.

To make your own Guinness chocolate cake (with Irish Cream frosting!) you'll need: 1 C butter; 1 C Guinness; 3/4 C cocoa powder; 2 C flour; 2 C sugar; 1 1/2 tsp baking soda; 3/4 tsp salt; 2 eggs; 2 /3 C sour cream; 1 C Irish Cream; 8 oz cream cheese, softened; 3 C confectioners' sugar; 6 Tbsp Irish Cream.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease a springform pan.  In a large bowl, melt the butter and mix in the Guinness and cocoa powder.  Set it aside to cool for a bit.

In another bowl, mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt.  And in another bowl, beat the eggs and sour cream together.

Mix the eggs and sour cream in with the Guinness mixture, then slowly stir in the dry ingredients and then pour it into your springform pan.

Bake for 45 minutes or so, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.  Also, you might want to check your springform pan beforehand for leaks.  Otherwise, you might get this fabulous burning smell from your oven about 5 minutes into baking and discover a small batter puddle getting charred into the bottom of your oven and you'll have to go around and open up all your windows and balcony door even though it's kind of cold out.

ANYWAY, after the cake has baked, let it sit for about 20 minutes or so to cool down, then remove it from the pan and put it on a cake plate or cardboard cake round.  Then look on in horror as you try to remove the bottom of the springform pan from the cake and find that, despite greasing the bejeebers out of it, a lot of the cake is still stuck to the pan.  Scrape these bits off of the pan and artfully arrange them on top of the cake.

Oh the humanity!

Realize that, while frosting can cover a multitude of sins, this is just a disaster.  Get out another cake round, put it on top, and flip the damn thing over.

MUCH better!

Poke a bunch of holes in the top of the cake with a fork, and slowly spoon 1 C of Irish Cream over the cake, letting it soak in.

Make the frosting by beating together the cream cheese and confectioners' sugar and add in the Irish Cream until you get both the desired consistency and flavor.  Frost the cake and stick it in the fridge until you're ready to take it to your coworkers!  Many of whom, it turns out, are teetotalers and won't eat it anyway.  Well, MORE FOR ME!

Cake Balls!

A while ago at work I was looking through a cart of books waiting to be reshelved and saw this little book all about making cake balls.  Looked simple enough, so I figured I'd give it a try!  And you know what, it was simple!  This recipe is for amaretto cake balls.  You will need: 1 box of yellow cake mix (and whatever ingredients are listed on the cake mix box); 3/4 C amaretto; 3.4-oz. pkg instant vanilla pudding; 1/2 tsp almond extract; 1/2 C chopped almonds; 2 C confectioners' sugar; 2 Tbsp softened butter; 2 Tbsp milk; 1/2 tsp vanilla; 24-oz bag of milk chocolate chips; 2 Tbsp shortening.

First up, we make the cake.  Follow the directions on the back of the box, except reduce the water by 1/2 C and add the amaretto.  Stir in the package of pudding mix and the almond extract and bake your cake by the instructions on the box.

What a pretty cake!

While the cake is cooling, make frosting by mixing together the confectioners' sugar, butter, milk, and vanilla.  When the cake is cooled down to room temperature, the fun part begins.  You need to crumble up your nice, pretty cake into a large bowl.  Try not to leave any big chunks.  I find that the corner pieces don't crumble very well, so you might just have to eat those parts.  Mix in your chopped almonds in with the cake crumbs.

Now, mix in the frosting until it's all nice and doughy and moist.

It's time to start rolling little cake balls!  Get out a large cookie sheet and cover it with waxed paper.  Pull off little bits of dough and roll them in your hands to get little balls about an 1"-1 1/2" in diameter.  You'll end up with a lot of them.

Put them in the freezer for about 2 hours or so.  When you're ready to dip them in chocolate, melt your bag of milk chocolate chips and 2 tablespoons of shortening together in a double boiler.  When the chocolate is melted, take the cake balls out of the freezer and dip them one at a time into the chocolate, using a fork or a toothpick (exact same way that the Oreo truffles and the buttercreams were done).  Put the dipped cake balls onto some more waxed paper and refrigerate until you're ready to eat them!  And of course I forgot to take a picture of them finished, but you can probably guess what little balls dipped in chocolate look like. 

This ended up being very easy to make, though rather time-consuming.  There are pretty much endless possibilities with these, using all kinds of varieties of cake and frosting flavors.  Just have fun and experiment!