Ookings of d00m

This is a family tradition. It's too sweet for pretty much anyone except me and my dead grandmother, so I'm the one who makes it now.

Bottom crust:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar

cream sugar and butter together, fold in flour.

grease pan
pat down mixture in the bottom of the pan
bake at 350 F for 12 minutes, watching it until it is golden brown.
Take out and let cool to room temp

Top layer:

Beat 2 eggs (the recipe says by hand, but it works just fine in my stand mixer.) until fluffy
Slowly add in 1 cup of brown sugar
Add a pinch of salt
Stir in 2 level tablespoons of flour and 1/2 tsp of baking powder

Add 3/4 cup of walnuts or pecans
Add in 1/2 to 3/4 cup of shredded coconut (unsweetened)

Make sure it's all stirred up.
Pour over the cooled bottom layer
Put back in 350 F oven, bake for 20 min or so, until it passes the toothpick test.

Let it cool again.
Make frosting out of 4 tbsp butter, icing sugar and condensed milk. Dye it the brightest pink you can. Because family tradition says you have "red" frosted dreamcake and green frosted brownies, because Xmas. No, I don't know why you would frost your brownies. I sure don't.
Anyway, frost your dreamcake with your pink icing, then put some red crystal sprinkles on top. Eat in small pieces to avoid insulin shock.

A week or so ago, I had a sudden taste pop into my head. A gooey, sticky cake full of whiskey and honey, with pecans and notes of vanilla.

Tonight, I finally attempted to create it.

I used this as a base.

What I ended up with was:

1 cup PC gluten free all-purpose flour
1 1⁄2 tsp baking powder
1⁄4 tsp salt
1⁄2 tsp ground cinnamon
1⁄4 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon zest
3⁄4 cup butter
3⁄4 cup white sugar
3 egg
1⁄4 cup milk
1 cup chopped pecans

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9 inch square pan. Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and lemon zest. Set aside.


2. In a large bowl (I used the stand mixer), cream together the butter and 3/4 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the milk, mixing just until incorporated. Add the vanilla. Stir in the pecans.


3. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Allow to cool for 15 minutes, then poke with toothpick all over. Pour honey syrup over the cake.

The cake took way less than 40 minutes. More like 25-25?

For the sauce:

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup honey
1 cup Bowmore single malt scotch whisky
1 tsp lemon juice

Put ingredients in a pot, heat to boil, simmer for 2 minutes.

I'm letting the cake and sauce get to know each other for a while before tasting.

Peanut Sauce:

• 2 tbsp tamarind paste


• 2 tbsp chopped garlic


• 8 tbsp fish sauce


• 2-3 tbsp brown sugar


• 2 fresh thai chillies (this ended up being pretty mild - next time, I'll probably do 4)


• about twice as much soya sauce as fish sauce


• 45 mL Lime juice (added because the sauce was too salty)


• 500g smooth organic nothing but peanuts peanut butter


• 3 tbsp chopped fresh ginger


• 1 tbsp sesame oil

Put this all into a pot and cook until you have a thick, emulsified paste. You may need to run it through with a hand blender to get the tamarind paste entirely broken down, or just do what I didn't and mix it with a little water and strain it out first.

The rest of the stuff:

• Chicken


• Red pepper


• Bean sprouts


• Shredded Carrots


• Green onions


• Fresh basil


• Sesame Seeds


• Crushed peanuts


• Snow peas


• Rice noodles (I used the wide flat kind)

Chop up your chicken, and put it in a dish with some of the sauce on it.

Put the rice noodles in a big bowl. Boil some water in your kettle and pour it over the noodles.

While that soaks in, chop up everything else.

In hot oil, fry up the chicken, and all the veg except the basil and bean sprouts. Then toss in the rice noodles (which should be nice and softened by now, just a shade tougher than al dente) and your peanut sauce, cook until it looks awesome. Toss in the bean sprouts and basil, cook just a little longer, then you're ready to go.

This is a relatively simple if time consuming recipe for Dal Puri (aka Dal Poori).

Stage one: the lentils! (because there has to be lentils).

Take some split moong dal and soak 'em for two hours. I was running low on moong dal so supplemented with some red lentils. The important thing is to use small lentils.

Then toss the lentils in a pot with some water, a whole clove of garlic and some spices (I used a Jamaican curry powder of cumin, coriander and turmeric, along with salt and chilli flakes).
Then, you cook the hell out of it. You want it to be a thick paste when you're done. Near the end, you'll have to stir almost constantly to keep it from burning.
The end goal is to have a paste thick enough that you can roll it into a ball.
This is why it's best to do this stage well beforehand, so it has time to cool enough to be handled. I did mine the night before.
Some of the online recipes suggested putting the lentils through a food processor, but I suspect that's more useful if you're in a hurry.

Stage two: the bread.

3 cups of flour
3/4 tsp of baking powder
a pinch of salt
a pinch of sugar
probably about a tsp of oil
"some" water.

Sift the flour, salt, sugar and baking powder together.
Add the oil.
Add a bit of water at a time and knead until you have dough.
The dough should be dry, and not sticky. If it is still sticky, go back and knead it until it is.
Make a lump of dough and drizzle with some more oil.
Cover and let sit for 30 minutes.

Knead the dough some more.
Roll the dough out into a big flat thing (shape doesn't matter yet)
Cut the dough up into equal parts. I made four.
Now take each lump of dough, and make it flat and round.
Shape it into a cup.
Make a ball of lentil paste, and drop it in the cup.
Pull the edges of the cup over so that you have a round ball of dough completely encasing the lentils.

Let sit for another 30 minutes.

Roll each ball out into a flat circle. If you do it perfectly, no lentil paste will escape. In practice, just shove it back into the dough and no one will notice.
Fry the suckers in melted butter or earth balance in a big flat pan with a thick bottom. I brushed melted earth balance on mine.
Cook 'em until they brown on the bottom, then do the other side. In theory, there is some visible bubbling, but in practice I just used a flipper to check how the bottom was doing.

i justify this as simple because there are no complex chemical or biological processes going on - I didn't have to bloom yeast, just sift in baking powder.
It's even healthy until you fry it in butter! You could probably dry cook it on a nice griddle or something, but it wouldn't be quite so tasty.

The latest Lentil Experiment: "Moroccan" Lentil Soup/Stew

a little over a cup of dried red lentils
about half a cup of dried chickpeas
about half a cup of dried mung beans
2 medium onions
5 cloves of garlic
4 diced fresh tomatoes
about a cup of diced carrot
about half a cup of diced celery

salt
pepper
probably almost a quarter cup of ground ginger (the dry stuff, not fresh - it is different)
about 2 tbsp of ground cinnamon
maybe 1 tbsp of cayenne
2-3 tbsp of whole cumin seeds (I was out of the ground stuff)
a pinch of dried chili flakes
a pinch of paprika
1.5 tbsp of honey

Enough water to fill the crockpot on top of all that stuff

Let simmer in crockpot overnight.

It was yummy when I woke up this morning, but I didn't have time to deal with the fridge and lack of space, so I put more water in and left it going.

When I get home I plan to add a little bit of couscous (maybe half a cup) so there's a little startch and texture there, but I don't want to simmer the couscous - it'd melt into the lentil goo if I did. I might also toss in a pinch of clove to make the flavour a little bit richer.

More blood. Today it didn't even wait for me to go to bed.

The computer I have had for less than a week, even after it's first re-install of windows, still seems to be losing time. A lot of time. Enough that it makes the computer close to sueless, once it gets going - dropping 3-4 hours overnight because it keeps hiccoughing is not useful. I predict arguments with support and having to ship it back some time soon. Pity.

I have been craving curry pasta with tomatoes and chickpeas, but I haven't been able to face a trip to the store on top of everything else. So tonight I made do with what I had (though starting to make dinner at 9:30 may not have been the best choice)

I ended up with a sauce made of onion, garlic, ginger, spices, frozen peppers, frozen peas, frozen spinach, and a mixture of pure soy protein powder and chickpea flour. the result was... weighty. I had no tomatoes and no chickpeas - I will have to add those to the list of things to always have on hand.

On the Good list;

* Got a couple guilt gorillas off my back on work stuff (by staying at work past 7pm)
* Lizard snuck in home before me and left me timbits
* My last ebay purchase arrived - I has tie pins
* I managed to do a fair bit of dish washing
* I've had enough water and alcohol that I might actally sleep once my nose stops bleeding (even if I am on to the Old Krupnik because I'm out of sippable rum)

More food links; a vegan fish sauce substitute. This one has been vetted by someone who's opinion I trust on such matters.

How to make your own vegan feta. This comes with recommendations from people who have tried it. I intend to give it a shot myself eventually.