Chicken Vesuvio

Chicken Vesuvio - made April 13, 2011 from Cover and Bake by the Editors of Cooks' Illustrated (book #85)

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you - this is a "real food" blog entry.  In case it isn't obvious, I've had so much sugar lately that if I cut myself, I wouldn't be surprised if C&H came pouring out of my veins instead of plasma.  Even limiting myself to taste test pieces from everything I make is still a lot of sugar.  So I'm mixing it up with an actual cooking recipe to prove I do eat something besides sugar.  Cover and Bake is yet another recipe book I've had for years and to my memory, have rarely used.  Yeah, I do that a lot.  Hence my baking/cooking challenge.  I probably bought it during one of my "I'm going to learn how to cook even if it kills me" spells.

Cooking is always a production for me.  Whereas I can whip up cupcakes, cakes, brownies, and cookie dough in a blink of an eye, when it comes to cooking, I have to plot and plan far, far ahead.  Chances are I never have the ingredients I need so that involves a trip (or two...or three) to the grocery store.  It involves thawing stuff because I'll be all fired up to cook something, buy the protein ingredient, then the urge to cook passes and I throw the stuff in the freezer until I feel like tackling the recipe.  Honestly, you wouldn't think it'd be so hard but I have a mental block when it comes to cooking.  If it can't be microwaved and eaten as is, chances are I don't really eat it.  I do make some attempts to cook every once in awhile though and this is another one of those sporadic efforts.

Before I saw this recipe, I'd never heard of Chicken Vesuvio.  According to the editors of Cooks' Illustrated, it's popular in Chicago's Italian restaurants and refers to chicken and potato wedges baked in a sauce of garlic, white wine and herbs.  Sounds easy enough to do and, more importantly, had ingredients I would actually eat and not take (too many) liberties in leaving out, thereby changing the recipe drastically from what the cookbook authors intended.  Okay, yeah, I do that too.  This time around though, the most drastic thing I did was use only half the chicken and potatoes called for in the recipe while making a full recipe of the sauce.  No particular reason why other than I'd rather err on the side of too much sauce instead of too little.

Turns out I'm glad I did make a full recipe of the sauce because between reducing it and baking the reduction in the oven, the sauce almost dried up.  If I had only made a half recipe, I think the dish would've been bone dry.  As it was, it was pretty tasty to my simple taste buds used to Lean Cuisine meals and pasta sauce from a jar.  I did reduce the oven temp to 400 degrees once I put the chicken in with the potatoes though as I didn't want the outside of the chicken to burn while the inside wasn't cooked yet.  It's not gourmet food by a long shot but it was a nice little chicken and potato dish that was just my cooking speed.

3 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and ground black pepper

2 pounds red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into ¾-inch wedges

4 split, bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts, (about 10-12 ounces each), trimmed

5 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed through a garlic press

2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme leaves

2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano

1 cup dry white wine

1 cup low-sodium chicken broth

1 lemon, cut into wedges

1.     Adjust an oven rack to the lowest position and heat the oven to 475⁰F.  Grease a 9 x 13” baking dish with 2 teaspoons of the oil then sprinkle the dish evenly with ½ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper.  Toss the potatoes with 1 tablespoon oil.  Arrange the potatoes in the baking dish in a single layer, with a cut side flush against the bottom of the pan.  Lean any extra potato wedges up against the sides of the pan.  Roast until the potatoes are just beginning to brown, about 30 minutes.  Do not stir the potatoes.

2.    Meanwhile, heat 1 teaspoon of oil in a 12” skillet over medium-high heat until smoking.  Dry the chicken thoroughly with paper towels, then season generously with salt and pepper.  Carefully lay the chicken breasts, skin-side down, in the skillet and cook to a deep golden color, about 5 minutes.  Transfer the chicken to a plate.

3.    Pour off any fat left in the skillet.  Add the remaining 1 tablespoon oil to the skillet and return to medium heat until shimmering.  Add the garlic, thyme, and oregano; cook, stirring often until golden and fragrant, about 2 minutes.  Add the wine and broth and bring to a simmer, scraping any browned bits off the bottom of the pan.  Simmer until reduced by half, about 10 minutes.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.

4.    Pour half of the sauce evenly over the potatoes.  Lay the chicken, skin-side up, on top of the potatoes.  Roast until the juices run clear when the chicken is cut with a paring knife, or the thickest part of the breast registers 160 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, about 30 minutes.  Transfer the chicken to a platter and allow to rest for 5 minutes.  Use a metal spatula to release and transfer the potatoes to the platter.  Serve immediately, passing the extra sauce and lemon wedges separately.

Red Velvet Cupcakes with a "well" of cream cheese filling

Debbie's Dazzling Red Velvet Cake - made April 13, 2011 from Chocolate from the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn (book #84)

I'm trying to beat the clock again on some buttermilk that's got an expiration date for this week so that's determining what I make right now.  Anything that uses up milk and/or buttermilk or both is a plus.  I haven't done a red velvet in awhile so I pounced on this easy recipe.  Cake mix was on sale for $1 at Target and after having seen a similar box on the shelves of a grocery store in Australia for 5 times that amount, I can't help but feel grateful that food is still comparatively cheap in the US.  Even if I'm not a believer in a box mix.  So don't ask me why I have several recipe books that base almost all of their recipes on box mixes.  What can I say, I went through an insane acquisitive period in my not-so-distant youth.

The pinnacle of red velvet cupcakes to me is the one from Sprinkles.  It was the first cupcake I'd ever tried from there and what they seemed to be most well-known for.  It's not to everyone's taste but I happen to like it, 550 calories and all.  I even like their frosting for it even though I'm not a frosting person and I don't happen to like the frosting on all of their cupcakes.  But I do on their red velvet cupcake.

The original recipe for this was supposed to be a red velvet cake frosted with cream cheese frosting but I decided to make it into cupcakes for easier distribution. I also wanted to see if I could make a "well" in the center of the cupcake that would house a dollop of cream cheese batter with mini chocolate chips instead of frosting it.  The risk was the batter wouldn't hold a dollop of anything and it'd be a cream cheese center instead of a well but I was in the mood to experiment so I went for it.  The only thing is I didn't think an actual cream cheese frosting would bake well in the cupcake so I made it more like the cream cheese batter that gets swirled through a brownie.  I used the cream cheese filling recipe from the Double Fudge Cream Cheese Brownies instead of the cream cheese frosting recipe below.

When using a box cake mix, always sift or strain the cake mix first to get rid of any lumps.  Anne Byrn's recipe directions call for combining all the ingredients at once and mixing.  I find if I do that mixing together all the dry ingredients and all the wet ingredients at once sometimes produces more lumps and I have to spend more time mixing to smooth out the batter.  So what I do is combine all the dry ingredients first then add the butter, mix a bit to form a paste then add the eggs, mix then slowly add the buttermilk.  I add the red food coloring right after the eggs and before the buttermilk to gauge the color before all of the wet ingredients are incorporated.  I don't like pink velvet cupcakes so I was prepared to add more red food coloring if the batter wasn't a sufficiently impressive red color at the end.  Fortunately, I didn't have to.

As you can see from the picture, the "well" concept didn't work out.  Ideally, the dollop of cream cheese filling would've remained intact in the middle of each cupcake top.  It didn't turn out  that way.  Instead, the cream cheese filling sank into the cupcake and the cupcake rose, baking up around it.  It's not quite a center filling but more like a swirl on top hinting at the filling in the middle.  When I tried a cupcake, I also saw that  the cream cheese had sunk to the bottom so it wasn't even a center filling.  That's likely because the weight of the cupcake batter wasn't dense enough to hold the cream cheese well.  Oh well....

In taste, the cupcakes were pretty good, at least for something with a box mix base.  The texture was light and cakey like we traditionally like our cakes to be and they were moist.  Sprinkles has no competition to worry about here though.  Since the well experiment didn't work, I think they would've been better without  the cream cheese filling but that's me.  Next time, I'm better off trying to make more of a frosting-type center that's sweeter and lighter rather than a filling recipe and see if that does any better.

Cake

1 package (18.25 ounces) white cake mix with pudding

1 cup buttermilk

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, melted

2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

3 large eggs

2 bottles (1 ounce each) red food coloring

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cream Cheese Frosting

1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, at room temperature

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, at room temperature

3 ¾ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted, plus additional if needed

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1.    Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 350⁰F.  Generously grease two 9-inch round cake pans with nonstick cooking spray, then dust with flour.  Shake out the excess flour.  Set the pans aside.

2.    Place the cake mix, buttermilk, melted butter, cocoa powder, eggs, red food coloring and vanilla in a large mixing bowl.  Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 1 minute.  Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula.  Increase the mixer speed to medium and beat 2 minutes more, scraping down the sides again if needed.  The batter should look well combined.  Divide the batter evenly between the prepared pans, smoothing it out with the rubber spatula.  Place the pans in the oven side by side.

3.    Bake the cakes until they spring back when lightly pressed with your finger, 28 to 30 minutes.  Remove the pans from the oven and place them on wire racks to cool for 10 minutes.  Run a dinner knife around the edge of each layer and invert each onto a rack, then invert again onto another rack so that the cakes are right side up.  Allow to cool completely, 30 minutes more.

4.    Meanwhile, prepare the Cream Cheese Frosting.  Place the cream cheese and butter in a large mixing bowl.  Blend with an electric mixer on low speed until combined, 30 seconds.  Add the confectioners’ sugar, a little at a time, blending with the mixer on low speed, until the sugar is well incorporated, 1 minute.  Add more sugar as needed to make the frosting spreadable.  Add the vanilla, then increase the mixer speed to medium and blend until the frosting is fluffy, 1 minute more.

5.    Place one cake layer, right side up, on a serving platter.  Spread the top with frosting.  Place the second layer, right side up, on top of the first layer and frost the top and sides of the cake with clean, smooth strokes.

Store this cake, tightly wrapped or covered, at room temperature for up to 3 days.

Diane's Double Chocolate Sheet Cake

Diane's Double Chocolate Sheet Cake - made April 9, 2011 from the Doughmakers Cookbook by Bette LaPlante and Diane Cuvelier (book #83)

If you think I have a one-track mind when I'm baking for bake sales, you'd be right.  Brownies and sheet cakes are the easiest things to make when I don't have a lot of time or notice, they're easy to package up, they freeze well so they can be brought out to thaw right before sale time and they're generally crowd pleasers. I was out of town the 2 days before the bake sale so I had to come up with quick and easy recipes to bake that would keep when I dropped them off at Christine's before I left.   I've had this recipe in my "Still Need to Make" for the longest time now so I'm glad I finally got a chance to make it.

This called for baking in a big pan so I cut it to 2/3 of the recipe below and baked it in a 9 x 13 pan instead.  Fortunately, most of the proportions were easy to take 2/3 of, although I did have to eyeball the buttermilk.

Of the three things I made for this last bake sale, I have to say I liked this sheet cake the best.  It's cakey but also fudgy and moist and surprisingly, I liked the touch of cinnamon flavor against the chocolate.  Although this looks similar in appearance to Les Brownies, the texture and even the taste is different.  Still chocolate goodness but this is definitely a cake rather than a brownie.  I liked the cake itself as much as I liked the German Chocolate Cake I made last week.  It's not as fragile but definitely just as good.

Cake

3 cups flour

3 cups sugar

1 ½ teaspoons salt

¾ pound (3 sticks) butter

6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa

1 ½ cups water

1/3 cup buttermilk

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon

3 eggs, beaten

Icing

4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa

1/3 pound butter

9 tablespoons milk

5 cups confectioners’ sugar

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

1 ½ cups chopped pecans

1.     Preheat the oven to 350˚F.  Grease a 13 x 18-inch sheet cake pan with solid vegetable shortening and lightly flour.

2.    In a large mixing bowl, thoroughly whisk together the flour, sugar and salt.  In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, bring the butter, cocoa, and water to a boil, stirring frequently and pour this over the sugar-flour mixture.  Add the buttermilk, baking soda, vanilla, cinnamon and eggs.  Mix well and pour into the prepared pan.  Bake for 30 minutes.

3.    To make the icing: In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, bring the cocoa, butter and milk to a rapid boil.  Remove from the heat, add the confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, and pecans and beat until smooth.  Spread the icing over the hot cake.

4.    Allow the cake to cool slightly, then cut into 3-inch pieces.

Les Brownies

Les Brownies - made April 9, 2011 from A Passion for Chocolate by Maurice and Jean-Jacques Bernachon with the American translation by Rose Levy Berenbaum (book #82)

Maurice and Jean-Jacques Bernachon are father and son chocolatiers in Lyon, France.  According to their cookbook, they were instructed in the artesanal tradition of making chocolates by hand and published this cookbook to share their recipes.  Rose Levy Berenbaum, author of The Cake Bible and, in my mind, the undisputed goddess of cakes, translated and adapted their cookbook for the American kitchen.  There are much more complicated recipes in this book but I homed in on the brownie one, partly because I didn't have much time to bake stuff for the bake sale and partly because I just love trying out brownie recipes.

This is another one of those brownies where it's critical to use the best quality chocolate you can.  It's not a terribly dark chocolate brownie since it starts with bittersweet chocolate.  I used a 62% bittersweet chocolate but if you like your brownies to have more of a dark chocolate flavor, go up to the 90% that Valrhona or Lindt sell or something similar.   Again, I frosted it for the bake sale but this could stand on its own without frosting.

5 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

6 tablespoons butter

1 ¼ cups sifted all-purpose flour (or 5 ounces)

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

¾ cup + 2 tablespoons superfine sugar

2 extra-large eggs

1 scant cup walnuts (optional)

One 8 x 8” baking pan, lined with foil and lightly sprayed with nonstick cooking spray

1.    Preheat the oven to 350⁰F.

2.    Melt the butter and chocolate in the top of a double boiler set over hot water, stirring to keep the chocolate from burning.  Cool to lukewarm.

3.    In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

4.    Gradually add the sugar, eggs, and then the flour mixture to the chocolate.  Mix until well incorporated.  Stir in nuts if using.

5.    Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out almost clean.  The brownies should still be slightly moist in the center.

Linked to Sweet Tooth Friday

First and Foremost Brownies

First and Foremost Brownies - made April 9, 2011 from Brownie Points by Lisa Slater (book #81)

That's what these are officially called in the Brownie Points baking book so that's what I'm putting down.  Not that they're necessarily my first and foremost brownies but that's mostly because it's hard for me to play favorites.  People always ask me what my favorite brownie recipe is.  That's like asking me to look at my hair and pick a favorite strand. The main reason I don't have a favorite is I don't like to limit myself to just one.  There's a whole world of brownie recipes out there and I feel the need to try them all.  I won't necessarily love them all but I do love trying out new recipes for them.

I have a chance to donate to another bake sale where the proceeds are going for Japan earthquake relief.  My cousin Christine's son Jason is in kindergarten and his school is hosting the bake sale on Tuesday in Cupertino.  If there's one thing I love more than baking, it's baking for a purpose.  Most people assume that if I didn't have to work for a living, I'd open a bakery and bake all day.  Not so.  While I wouldn't mind baking all day, baking for my own business and/or a bakery feels like work.  My dream, "post-retirement" job would be to bake for charitable organizations and events: like providing baked goods as snacks after races to benefit the American Cancer Society or the Susan G. Komen Foundation or any other good cause. Baking for volunteers working on a Habitat for Humanity project or an environmental clean-up project.  Baking for after-school programs, soup kitchens, shelters for battered women and children, homeless shelters and the like.  I can't do it full-time as of yet since I still have a mortgage to pay and something has to pay for the baking ingredients but that would be my goal for down the road.  In the meantime, looks like I'm baking for bake sales for a good cause.

I changed the directions slightly for this recipe.  The original recipe called for browning the butter and letting it cool for 10 minutes before pouring it over the bittersweet chocolate, letting the chocolate melt and blending them together.  I tried that.  Didn't work.  The browned butter wasn't hot enough to melt all that chocolate, even though I had chopped it into small pieces for easier melting.  Instead, I would recommend that after browning the butter in a saucepan, transfer it and the bittersweet chocolate to the top half of a double boiler and stir until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is combined.

This is a nice fudgy brownie, like a moist slab of chocolate goodness.  Adding the salt at the end brings out the saltiness a bit more so if you're one of those people who like sweet and salty together, this is a good brownie to try.  I frosted it to make it a little more eye-catching for a bake sale but I think I would actually prefer these plain.

8 tablespoons butter

8 ounces bittersweet chocolate

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup granulated sugar

3 eggs at room temperature

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

½ cup all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

1.     Preheat oven to 300°F.  Line an 8 x 8-inch pan with foil and spray lightly with nonstick cooking spray.

2.     Melt the butter and cook until it becomes light brown and smells wonderful.  

3.     Pour over the chopped chocolate in the top half of a double boiler set over hot water and stir until chocolate has melted and mixture is smooth.

4.     Transfer to a mixing bowl.  Add the sugars and mix well.  The mixture will be grainy.

5.     Add the eggs one at a time, mixing until the batter is glossy and thick.

6.     Add the vanilla, then the flour, mixing only enough to incorporate the flour.

7.     Add the salt and mix briefly.

8.     Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes.  The edges will be firm but the center will be slightly soft, yet puffed.  Remove from the oven and chill completely.

9.     Slice into bars, wrap well and store in the fridge for up to a month or in the freezer for up to 6 months. (I recommend the freezer even for short periods as refrigerating tends to dry out most baked goods.)

Nutella Banana Bread

Nutella Banana Bread - made April 8, 2011 from Baking Junkie's blog

Yes, I'm still going through the Costco-size nutella 2-pack in my pantry.  I'm actually almost done with the second jar so my nutella experiments are drawing to an end.  Until I make the next Costco run anyway.

This is yet another recipe that I saw from Sweets for a Saturday #1 (hopefully you're seeing the pattern now when I come across recipes that intrigue me that aren't necessarily from one of my cookbooks).  I already have a great banana bread recipe that I like and that has stood the test of time for years.  Like Baking Junkie, at first I thought I might try just swirling nutella through my original banana bread recipe.  But I decided I might as well go all the way and try this Nutella Banana Bread recipe as is.


The batter was easy to put together and mixing a cup of the batter with the melted nutella smelled really good.  I baked this in 4 mini loaf pans rather than 1 big loaf pan, mostly so I could give the small loaves away.  I didn't try too hard to swirl the batters together since I like the distinctiveness between the two.

This was pretty good, especially if you like banana and chocolate flavors combined together.  I've discovered I'm a bit more of a purist so when I'm in the mood for banana bread, I think I just want banana bread as is.  However, I do think I want to try adding nutella to my banana bread recipe and see how I like it.  My recipe makes a slightly more cakey, rather than "quick bread-y" banana bread and is a little sweeter than this so I'd be curious to see how the nutella pairs with it.

Dulce de Leche Crunch Blondies

Blondie Squares - made April 8, 2011 from Chocolate by Nick Malgieri (book #80)

Nick Malgieri's Chocolate baking book is what it sounds like: recipes featured around chocolate.  So it's with a sense of irony that I not only chose a blondie recipe to try but I deliberately omitted the chocolate chips that were in the original recipe that had qualified this as something with chocolate for the baking book.  I didn't do it to be willful but I needed a blondie recipe to experiment with to make dulce de leche bars and this was in the "Still Need to Make" file ready to go.  So I went.

Ever since I did the Peanut Butter Crunch Brownies and the Nutella Crunch Brownies, I've been wanting to make a dulce de leche version of the same but sans chocolate.  Usually I'm sparing with dulce de leche because I normally buy it from Williams Sonoma and at $10 for a 16-ounce jar, I want it to last or at least be able to use it for more than 1 recipe.  But, in my typical addiction to shopping at amazon, I found a more reasonably-priced option for dulce de leche that lets me be a little more creative with it more often.  The quality of the Nestle version isn't quite as good as the Williams Sonoma jar but for the amount of baking I want to do with it, it's a reasonable alternative.

I left out the chocolate chips in this recipe only to stick to a pure blondie bar.  The original recipe is below in case you don't approve of my changes and want to make the blondies as Nick Malgieri intended.  If you want  to go on my caloric ride, here's what I did: Make a half recipe of the below and bake in an 8 x 8" square pan.  Omit the nuts and the chocolate chips.  Bake until the bars are golden brown.  In my oven, that took slightly under 30 minutes.

Warm up a 13.4 oz can of dulce de leche until it's liquid and spreadable (careful not to burn it; I microwaved mine for 30 seconds and that worked fine).  Add 1 to 1 1/2 cups rice krispie cereal and stir to blend.  How much rice krispie cereal you add is up to you.  If you prefer more crunch, add more crispy cereal.  If you prefer less crunch and more sweet, add less cereal.  Spread over the warm blondie shortly after it comes out of the oven and let set.  Eat.  Workout.  A lot.

Nah, in all seriousness, my little experiment didn't turn out.  The rice krispies softened in the dulce de leche so there wasn't the crunch I had hoped for like there was in the chocolate brownies. It was more chewy or soggy depending on your viewpoint.  Which is disappointing because I was going for crunchy.  And yes, my Rice Krispies were still fresh and crispy before I added them to the dulce de leche.  Bummer.  On the positive side, the blondies themselves were quite good, like dark brown sugar bars.  So they still made a good base for the blondie.  It's just the topping that didn't turn out, at least not with the cereal. I think the rice krispies absorbed the moisture of the dulce de leche so they lost their crisp.  FAIL.  Back to the drawing board.

ETA: it occurred to me that what would make these blondies a success instead of a failure is to substitute coconut for the rice krispies.  They would add flavor and chewiness to the dulce de leche blondie.  The blondies themselves taste great and using coconut instead of rice krispies wouldn't add crunch but they wouldn't get soggy either.

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

1 ¼ cups granulated sugar

¾ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans

2 cups (12 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

One 10 x 15 x 2-inch jelly roll pan, buttered and lined with buttered parchment or foil

1.     Set a rack in the middle level of the oven and preheat to 350˚F.

2.     In a mixing bowl stir together the flour, salt and baking soda to mix.

3.     Beat the butter with the sugars until combined.  Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and finally the vanilla extract.

4.     Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture, then the nuts and chips.

5.     Spread the batter in the prepared pan and bake for about 30 minutes, until well risen and firm to the touch.  Cool in the pan on a rack.

6.     After the cake is cool, invert onto a cutting board and peel away the paper.  Cut into 2-inch squares.

Storage: Keep the blondies in a tin or plastic container with a tight fitting lid.  Or wrap individually and freeze in a tightly closed plastic container.