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!

Paella

This holiday season, Dad was able to get Mom to make his favoritest-ever dish: paella.  It's not a very traditional paella recipe, but it is incredibly tasty.  And also kind of expensive, so you might want to save this one for special occasions.
To make it, you'll need: 1 1/2 lbs boneless, skinless, chicken thighs; 1/4 C extra virgin olive oil; 2 14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes; 1 1/2 C Arborio rice; 3 C chicken broth; 2 Tbsp salt; 8 oz sea scallops; 1 lb fish cut up into chunks (Mom used grouper); 4 oz pimento; 1 15 oz can artichoke hearts; 14 oz raw shrimp; 9 tsp paprika; 1/2 tsp black pepper; 1/4 tsp red pepper; 1/8 tsp saffron; 4 oz sliced onions; 10 oz frozen peas; 6 rock lobster tails (if desired).

All this, minus the fruit, plus the peas and onion, which I forgot to get out.

In a heavy large pot or dutch oven, heat up the olive oil and brown the chicken.  Remove the chicken once it's browned and pour off any excess fat.
Add the onion and tomatoes to the pot and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes, or until the onion is tender.  Stir in the rice, chicken broth, salt, paprika, black and red pepper, and saffron and then add the chicken back into the pot.

Let this come to a boil, then cover tightly, lower the heat, and let it simmer for 20 minutes.
When that's done, gently stir in the shrimp, fish, scallops, and peas.

Cover it back up and let it simmer for another 15 minutes.
Now gently stir in the artichoke hearts and pimento, and continue to cook until it's all heated through.

If you're also having lobster tails, go ahead and throw them in a pot of boiling water while your artichoke and pimento is cooking, for about 5 minutes, or until the lobster meat is opaque.

And you're really done!  You can serve this right from the pot, or you can dish it up on a big paella dish and put your lobster tails on top, all fancy-like.

Brownies

I said last time that I was going to make brownies this week and I generally try not to be a big ol' liar, so here they are!  Plus I'd told my friend that I was going to bring them for his half-birthday party, so I really needed to make them anyway.  It's really a pretty simple recipe and I haven't made brownies from a box mix since I found it.  What you will need is: 1/2 C butter; 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped; 1 C granulated sugar; 1 tsp vanilla extract; 2 large eggs, lightly beaten; 2/3 C flour; 1/2 tsp baking powder; 1/4 tsp salt.  Plus, I threw in about a cup of peanut butter chips because they are delicious, though entirely optional.

And because a half-birthday doesn't come around every day, I got the good chocolate.

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.  Grease an 8" square pan and set it aside.  In a medium saucepan, melt your butter and chocolate over low heat, stirring constantly.  Once it's all melted, remove it from the heat and let it cool slightly.  Then whisk in the sugar and vanilla, then the eggs, and finally the flour, baking powder, and salt until it's all blended.

If you're going to add in peanut butter chips, or chocolate chips, or anything else that melts, let your batter cool a while longer before you stir them in.

Only a few melted peanut butter chips

Once you've done that, just spread the batter in the pan and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out with just a few moist crumbs attached.  And I seem to have forgotten to take a picture of the finished brownies, but I'm pretty sure you can guess what they look like.  Instead, here's a picture of my kitty investigating the package of mousies she got for Christmas last year.

Uh-oh, mousies, you better watch out! Hilda's gonna get you!

And that's it!  They may take a little longer to make than a box mix, but I think they're a lot tastier, so it's worth it.  Stay tuned for next time, when I try making something maybe a little healthier!

Chicken and Broccoli Alfredo (done the easy way)

I've been kind of remiss in posting things this summer, due to a killer combination of the awful southern summer heat and the fact that my apartment isn't climate controlled.  I've got a couple of window units, but the kitchen has been around 90 degrees for the last month or so, which makes it awfully difficult to motivate myself to cook anything.  This weekend was a little bit cooler (it was only 87 degrees in my kitchen!) so I decided I'd try something pretty easy: chicken and broccoli alfredo.  There's not much actual cooking involved and it makes enough leftovers to give me lunch for most of the rest of the week.  All you need for this is a rotisserie chicken, broccoli, a couple of jars of alfredo sauce, and a box of pasta.

Cut up your broccoli into bite-sized pieces and boil it for about 5 minutes.  Shred up your chicken and add that, the cooked broccoli, and the alfredo sauce to a large pan.

Warm all this up over low to medium heat until it all heated through.  While you're doing that, go ahead and cook the pasta as directed on the box.  Once the pasta is cooked, drain it and return it to the pot.  As soon as your sauce is hot, pour it over the pasta in the pot and stir it all up so it's nicely mixed.

And that's it!  The sauce might seem like you've got too much, but if you plan on having a lot of leftovers and you don't have the extra sauce, your pasta will be kind of dry when you reheat it.  And having made this many many times before, I can tell you it does make for good leftovers.

That's it for this quick recipe.  Stay tuned for next time when I make homemade brownies!

Irene Courtney

I didn't talk about this at all on here at the time, but last August 24th, my Grammie passed away.  Today would have been her 97th birthday, so I thought it might be nice to write a bit about her.

Grammie was born June 22, 1916 in Dickinson Center, New York to Edgar Newland Aiken and Agnes Effie Stacy Aiken.

Edgar and Effie and KITTIES!!!!

Edgar and Effie also later had a son, Newland. 

I think this picture's kind of adorable

At some point, she met my Grandpa, John Courtney, through a mutual friend while he was working as a mechanic at a garage in Malone, NY.  They got married on September 7, 1943.

What a nice looking couple!

The had three kids: my Uncle John and later my mom and Aunt Mindy.

D'awwwwww!

Sadly, Grandpa died on May 29, 1967.

Grammie had a few different secretarial jobs in her life.  During World War II, she worked for Alcoa.  Later, she worked for a place called Adirondack Commercial in Malone, and finally for St. Regis Falls Central School.  She retired from the school in 1977 for health reasons.  She had a tumor removed that ended up with her losing half of her stomach.  Grammie wasn't expected to live very long after that.  It wouldn't be the only time she defied such predictions; much later she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and, since she decided not to subject herself to going through the painful treatments she'd seen other go through, she was expected to live just a very short time.  It was more than a decade later that she passed away.

In 1990, she moved in with my family.  I, of course, thought this was absolutely great!  Now instead of having to go visit Grammie to get pies and cookies and things, she would be able to make them for me all the time (I was 9 at the time)!  And, for the most part, it was pretty great.  I got a great appreciation and some skill at baking tasty things.  She also helped me with learning how to drive, at least until she decided she was really too old to renew her license and let it lapse (seriously, as great as my parents are, they were NOT helpful at teaching me to drive.  Mom's method involved a great deal of screaming as if we were about to die and Dad is the most nit-picky passenger in the world.  To this day I am still very nervous when I have other people in the car when I'm driving).

Of course, Grammie didn't spend all of her time doing Grammie-type things.  She was a member of a couple of different clubs, such as the 4 River Valleys Historical Society, which she visited Italy with.  She also had a couple of close friends that she would go out and spend a lot of time with, especially Mrs. Anna Scott and Mrs. Dorothy Murphy.  She outlived both of them, and I think their deaths were a real blow to Grammie.

In order to alleviate that sad thought, here's Grammie with an umbrella hat

While I was in college, Grammie, Aunt Mindy and I all took a trip out to Arizona to visit Uncle John and his family.  It was a whole lot of fun and I'm mentioning it pretty much just so I have an excuse to add in this picture of Grammie and Aunt Mindy at the arboretum we went to.

Cacti!

The last few years of her life were pretty rough for Grammie, I think.  She could neither hear nor see very well.  She did become close with a couple more friends, though, and they would come and visit and the three of them would have cake or cookies and chat.  But her health did take a sharp decline.  Here's a picture from a few year ago with my sister's new puppy:

That dog has since gotten much bigger

And here's one some time later with her other new puppy:

That dog has not gotten any bigger

After several years of declining health, Grammie passed away in her sleep at home on August 24, 2012.  My parents were in Florida earlier that month and when my aunt called and told them to come home right away, the picked me up on the way north and we got there on the 23rd.  She never wanted to be put in a nursing home and I have so much respect for my parents and my aunt for being able to ensure that she never had to be.  I am also very grateful for Hospice of Jefferson County.  They helped take care of Grammie for quite a long time and when she died made things easier for the family. 

Grammie's funeral was quite nice.  We had the funeral mass at St. James Church in Carthage, and then loaded the old lady up in the hearse to bury her at St. Ann's cemetery in St. Regis Falls.  The funeral director followed my dad's car to the cemetery since he wasn't sure just where it was (Carthage and St. Regis Falls are about 100 miles apart).  He told dad that he could go as fast as he wanted, but I don't think he was expecting all the windy and bumpy roads that dad zoomed down going about 70 mph.  Grammie did not go bouncing out of the hearse, though, so it couldn't have been that bad.  I think the man was further scandalized by the priest who performed the burial service who came strolling through the cemetery wearing a cap and black jeans with a pouch of what looked like chewing tobacco in his back pocket (I think he might have ridden there on his motorcycle).  And you know what?  Grammie would have loved it.

My favorite thing about Grammie's funeral was something the priest said at the funeral mass.  "Irene was very sharp.  She managed to catch just about everything.  And whatever she didn't catch, she made up."  Yup.  I think that sums things up pretty well.

Christmas Day, 2003

Chicken Tetrazzini (and other stuff)

Wow, it's really been a while since I've posted.  It's not that I haven't wanted to write about anything, but since I went to Montreal I've gotten a new boss at work, and it's been, in a word, exhausting.  Don't get me wrong, the new boss is great, but he's also pretty much the exact opposite of my old boss and so it's taking a lot of getting used to.  My workload has also increased exponentially since we had a couple of higher-ups quit not too long before he started.  I did, however, get a temporary promotion to Interim Branch Manager (with a temporary pay raise!), which is great!  But there's no Interim-My-Old-Position, so I'm still doing all that work, too (or at least trying to).  Add to that the fact that it's the end of our fiscal year when things are extra crazy anyway, plus time for employee evaluations, which made me want to hide under my desk when I had to write up two of them (I now have to do eleven), and yeah, I'm stressed.  And stress makes me not eat and have trouble sleeping.  Which makes me depressed and adds to the stress.  Things will get straightened out eventually, though.  I just need to hang in there for a few more weeks until I get to go on vacation again (10 year college reunion!).  But you didn't come here to read about me being all "Waah waah, life is hard!", you came for a chicken recipe!  And here you go:

A while ago, I decided I really wanted chicken tetrazzini for dinner, but alas!  None of my cookbooks had a recipe!  After looking at a few recipes on the internet, I decided to try Martha Stewart's since I already had a lot of the ingredients.  I did change a couple things, though: 1. I still don't have any dry white wine, so I used extra chicken broth instead; and 2. My grocery store had lost power the morning I made this and I couldn't get any frozen peas, so they got left out, too.  Here are the ingredients for how I actually made this:

6 Tbsp butter; 1 lb. white mushrooms, sliced; 1/2 C flour; 3 C milk; 1 14.5 oz. can, plus 3/4 C chicken broth; 3 C grated Parmesan cheese; 1/2 tsp. thyme; 1 lb. angel hair pasta; 1 rotisserie chicken, skin removed and meat shredded; salt and pepper.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.  In a large pan, melt 2 Tbsp butter over high heat and add the mushrooms, seasoned with some salt and pepper.  This will look like an awful lot of mushrooms:

Before

But you will cook them for about 10 minutes, stirring them around frequently, until they get kind of browned, and they'll lose a lot of volume:

After

Transfer the mushrooms to a bowl and set aside.  In the same pan, this time over medium heat, melt the rest of the butter and whisk in the flour.  Stirring constantly, add in the milk and chicken broth.  Bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat so it's simmering and add in two cups of the Parmesan cheese and season with some salt and pepper, stirring until it's all melted.

So cheesy!

Cook the pasta in a big pot so it's al dente, drain, and put it back in the pot.  Stir in the mushroom, chicken, and sauce until it's all well mixed.  Divide it up between two 2-quart baking pans and put the remaining one cup of Parmesan cheese on top.

Now, you can cook both of these.  Or, if you don't think you could possible eat that much chicken tetrazzini before you either get sick of it or it goes bad, cover one of the dishes with foil and put it in the freezer for up to three months.  For the one you're going to eat right away, bake it at 400 degrees for about thirty minutes, or until it's nicely browned.  (And for the frozen one, if it's going straight from the freezer, bake it covered with foil at 400 degrees for about 2 hours, then uncover and bake another 20 minutes until browned or, if you've thawed it in the fridge first, bake covered with foil at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake another 20 minutes until browned.)

I thought this recipe turned out pretty well, if a little bland.  I think if I make it again, I'll definitely have to add some kind of vegetable.  Maybe not peas, maybe broccoli or something (I like broccoli much better than peas).  And maybe I'll substitute a more flavorful cheese for some of the Parmesan.  I don't know.  This warms up really well, though, so that helps my opinion of it quite a bit.