Culinary Adventures: Gooey Butter Cake

So this afternoon I decided to make my father a gooey butter cake, which is a recipe my grandmother gave me long ago. I have no idea where she got it, but it is an awesome cake that has its own icing baked on. It’s a bit of a pain for a couple of reasons, like mixing the cake part and knowing when it’s done. But overall, it’s a pretty cool recipe. I made it for my father because he spent a full day fixing the showers in the house last weekend, meaning I finally have my shower back, and it was very messy and frustrating job. I will not be posting the actual recipe, but I will show you the process. I even took pictures.

First of all it has some pretty basic ingredients: cake mix and the like.

Pretty Basic Stuff

The cake itself, when you are mixing it up, doesn’t look like much of a cake. In fact it looks almost impossible to mix up because its so dry.

Starting the cake mixing

Actually the mixing it up is almost impossible because the butter is only softened and the eggs are the only real liquid in the cake part of the cake. It gets all stuck to the beaters, and you have to pry it off. It’s a messy job with the stuff flying out of it.

The cake mixed up

When it’s done you have to press it into a cake pan; I cheat and get a disposable pan most of the time to ease the clean up after the cake is done. It’s difficult to do this part because you have to make sure that the cake is spread evenly, otherwise it bakes all funny and the icing will be all uneven.

The cake is in the pan

It’s icing time, and it looks pretty gross before mixing. With no milk, and just eggs as the liquid its a strange mix. Mixing it is also messy because the sugar is fine and powdery, and it tends to fly everywhere until it gets moist.

The beginning of the icing

Once it is all mixed up it looks smooth and nice. It’s a lot less nasty looking, and it’s really creamy. The problem is that its pretty thick; so when you try to make sure its all mixed up it tends to gum up a bit.

The finished icing

It gets poured on the cake and spread out. Like I said the icing is very thick and it’s also sort of sticky, which makes it hard to spread. That combined with the crumbly cake makes this step a real pain. Every time you try to make sure you have full coverage you wind up pulling up a bit of cake and have to mash it back down. You never achieve full coverage because of the crumbly cake and thickness, but it doesn’t need to be complete covered.

The icing on the cake

Then its into the oven where it bakes until it is done. I mean that literally; there is no set time for the baking. Knowing whether the cake is done is the hard part. Mostly I just bake it until the edges are dry and firm and the top is a pretty nice golden brown with cracks in it. I also test to see how much it jiggles. Today’s cake was just a little bit over done.

The cake out of the oven

I promised you a culinary adventure today, and here it is.

And the Beat Goes On

So, readers, it’s time for a little update on what’s been happening in my life. Lately  you’ve just been getting random updates without much substance, so I’ll give you a much meatier post. Beware, this thing could have some serious length to it.

Let’s start with some things that are ending. Thursday night is mock trial banquet, since much to Wash’s dismay mock prom was canceled; that means there will be no formal wear on the Zoe, which is why Wash is a bit disappointed. Instead we will do dinner at the Chinese restaurant like always with awards and laughter and story telling. It will be my last mock trial banquet, as this was my last season. Mock has caused me a lot of stress over the years; well that is an understatement. But it’s also been a lot of fun. I’ve met a lot of great people, and really it’s how I got to know Wash. It’s done me a lot of good as well.  I’ve grown stronger as a public speaker, and I’ve learned how to write and argue much better than I once could.  The other thing that’s ending is my college career; you see I am graduating in May, on the 9th, and I will become an MTSU Alumnus instead of a college student. It’s a scary thought, I’m not going to lie. I will, God willing, find myself in a more cutthroat and difficult environment next semester, law school. But I do have an amazing support system in my friends, my family, and Wash.

Thinking of law school, I’m at the moment praying that when I get my applications in near the middle of the week it will not be too late. I’m really hoping that I get accepted at UT Knox’s law school because I missed the deadline for my dream school. Fate handed me a raw deal, and I have been so swamped that filling out applications wasn’t low on the to do list because I have to graduate first. So I haven’t been able to get all my stuff taken care of. At the moment I am terrified that I am too late and that I will be out of luck until next year; I’m scared to death that I won’t get into law school and will have to wait a year, which means first of all I will be off my parents’ insurance due to my age and second of all I will have to find a full time job, that I will only work a year, in this lousy, job poor economy. I’m also afraid that some thing will happen that will prevent me from going all together. I know, weird right, Zoe is scared. But it happens.

I went to the doctor a few weeks ago and discovered that I am a great deal heavier than I thought, which means I am really cracking down on my habits. No more two or three cokes a day, even if its a diet coke, and no more eating bunches of junk. Starting tomorrow I will be keeping “health journal” where I will write down everything I eat and all the exercise I do. I’m hoping it will inspire me to get healthier and excercise more; I’m going to be watching to see how my eating habits and work out habits balance out and working for a better balance that will help me trim my waist line and tone up. No matter how many times Wash tells me I’m beautiful and not fat, the fact reman I’ve let myself get fat and I’ve got to stop it.

On Wash and Zoe front things are moving as they have been, toward a future that makes me smile. At the moment we are on the quest for the perfect song to be our song. After all if we ever do get married or anything someday, we’ll need a song to play, and besides its always nice to have a song that suits you. Wash insists that it be a duet, so that we can sing it together, but I don’t have the same confidence in my singing ability that he does. Wash has a great voice, and I love it when he sings to me. But I just don’t think I have that kind of ability, I know once upon a time had I worked with my voice I could’ve been good. Either way, I guess with practice I might be ok. He wrote a song for us, and it was really cute and sweet, but it shall not be our song. The search is on for a song that suits us, and it’s harder than I thought. He invited me to Panama City Beach this summer, but its a family vacation, and I just don’t think I’m ready for that, not yet anyway. Not to mention the fact that as much as I love the beach I’m not so into being fat in a swimsuit in front of him and his family, which is an argument Wash cannot understand. Next year though, next year I just might  because then we will have been together a little over a year and a half, and I will be more aquainted with his family and the like. And hopefull I will be less fat. This year we will make other plans to do things, and we will still have fun. I look forward this summer and having the time to spend with Wash.

Oh, and at some point tonight I will showcase my latest culinary adventure.

Quote of the Day: “Forget regret or life is yours to miss” – Rent

Be My Valentine? Wait I already have one…

So Saturday was Valentine’s Day, the first for Wash and I, and I honestly hope there will be more to come. I got all girlie, and we went out to dinner and a movie, which is like a normal date for us, but we exchanged gifts and all that jazz, which is not standard. So I suppose you are wondering what exactly happened on our big V-Day night outing. Pictures of my awesome cookies and the gifts we exchanged are on my Flikr page.

So I went shopping ahead of time, and I was seriously excited about the lip shaped cookie cutter I found at Walmart. I know, I know, I’m such a goofy woman; thrilled with my discovery I also bought cookie dough sheets and red sugar sprinkles, deciding that lip shaped cookies would be a cute gift for Wash this Valentine’s Day. They actually turned out great, and I was really proud of them. I’m such a goofball that I became excited enough to constantly update my facebook status as I made them. What I did was get wax paper and lay out the cookie dough sheets, then I sprinkled the red sugar over the dough and cut out the cookies. I got to much sugar on the first batch, and so they were a little hard to make sure they were done.  The next batch had less sugar and turned out much nicer. I put four into a little bag for Wash, one for each month we have been together and one for this month. I had so many that I wound up putting six into individual bags to give to my mock trial team at our meeting Saturday morning. Wash liked them, which made me very happy.

As for the actual gifts I got him, I spent several hours trying to decide what to get in the first place and after settling on the idea of a CD I had to figure out which CD to get. Easy gift idea? Not so much actually. You see the man has a massive CD collection, and I was terrified that I would get him a CD he already had. I couldn’t ask his cousin, who I have class with, because I didn’t want Wash to know I was getting him a CD. I finally settled on George Strait’s It Just Comes Natural, and I hoped beyond all that he didn’t have it already. I also got him a little plush heart that said “One Kiss” on it, which I then proceeded to make smell like my sweet pea lotion because Wash happens to like it .  Yeah, I know, it’s a little silly. The “One Kiss” thing I thought would be a cute gift because there is a little joke between us, one that I will not reveal. The card also took forever to pick out because I wanted to get something that fit our stage in the relationship. Of course I had to write in it, something I’ve always done, so that was extra time because I wasn’t sure what to say.

When he picked me, having been excited all day, he gave me chocolates, always a win, and a little stuffed frog, which must have a name eventually, that came with some candy and stuff. It was a really cute frog, and maybe frogs will become our thing, I don’t know. We thought about going to the movie first, but when we arrived at the theater there was no way we could get tickets or even parking. So we went to Longhorn Steakhouse for dinner before the movie instead, and we had to wait almost an hour to be seated. In the mean time, Wash hasn’t written in my card yet so I stand with my back to him, skimming the menu, while he writes, and then finally we are seated. We had dinner and exchanged gifts, cards first, and I read what was wrote. The man can seriously write, and what he wrote, which I will not repeat, was incredible. I was pretty speechless honestly, since no one has every written something like that before. I’m telling you readers, it was wonderful. He got me Firefly, a series you should all look up and watch, on DVD, and that won him additional points. That of course is the show where the nicknames Zoe and Wash come from, and so it’s an excellent gift. I was also glad to discover that he didn’t have the CD.

We wound up seeing Pink Panther 2, which was an ok movie, and the theater was emptier at 10 pm than I expected. I spent the entire movie snuggled up next to Wash, who was using my position and the fact that my sweater was off the shoulder to cheat, which is a term we use for little distracting kisses and touches that tend to be on sensitive areas. Not that I mind when Wash cheats because I tend to cheat too, only my best moves are a bit too obvious for public areas. It was fun, even if the movie wound up longer than we expected so that we missed out on some fun afterward.

Our first V-Day was over all lots of fun, and I’m looking forward to next year. If I don’t wind up in a dorm as a 1L I may cook dinner at my apartment and then we can spend the evening curled up on the couch watching movies instead of complicated plan and long waits for a table in a restaraunt. And now I’ve got to run off, literally, and get my ass on the treadmill so that I can hopefully fit into the dress I wore to my senior prom four years ago. Mock prom just might be fun, but that’s an entry possibly for tomorrow.

Quote of the Day: “Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.”  ~Author Unknown

Frankenbird’s Final Flight I

Ladies and Gentleman of the audience, today is the day of Frankbird’s Last Flight, or at least at the moment there has been a decision that we will not be making another such monster. But like The Eagles said, “you can have as many farewell tours as you want as long as you number them.” So this is Frankenbird’s Last Flight I because you just never know, perhaps this will be something that we will probably do again sometime. Ever since my father discovered the recipe online two years ago we have made Frankenbird at least once a year for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. This year we are making it a little late because we had a lack of ingredients. I suppose that you are wondering what exactly is Frankenbird, especially since it is a strange name to give something edible. Well Frankenbird is the affectionate name we gave the Turducken, a fabulously complex and intriguing dish that we discovered online one day and, while it is a mess, we are very fond of showing off the household’s cooking capabilities by bringing it to family feasts. Now we don’t follow the recipe exactly, and we don’t do any sort of funky gravy. But this is an adventure and a half with all the family participating in the affair. It begins as always with a massive amount of shopping.

When we make Frankenbird we have to have three birds and a variety of ingredients to create several different stuffings. This often means that we do a sort of team shopping where we break the shopping into parts with each individual who has a car doing part of it. This year, however, my father and I did it a bit differently. We began shopping a bit later than normal, and a bit is an understatement. We decide too late that we were going to do this bird and so we made a bold attempt to do the Igor, pronounced eye-gore, portion of the work on Christmas Eve. That meant we were in various grocery stores praying that we could find a very large turkey and a reasonable sized duck and chicken for the thing. Not surprisingly we found the inner ingredients but failed to get the outer ones. The biggest turkey we could find was  sixteen pounds, which, just so you know, is not big enough to stuff three kinds of dressings and two birds into, regardless of a lack of bones. Ducks were also in short supply, if by short you mean non existent. So we were able to find only the makings of the various dressings. Celery, onions, chicken stock, shrimp, sausage, biscuits,  and the makings of cornbread were easily collected, but today when we began preparations we discovered that there were things missing, like enough breadcrumbs and ingredients for the shrimp dressing, minus of course the shrimp we’d already bought. So today we made our own bread crumbs using the left over biscuits from the ones we’d made for the cornbread dressing and then sent my mum out to get rice to make a shrimp and rice type deal because it was cheaper than getting all the stuff to use the recipe we already had. Eventually we managed to gather all the ingredients with the help of my Grandmother who provided the duck, and Publix finally had a twenty four pound store brand bird. That only let the cooking and building of Frankenbird.

So while my father began the process of deboning birds, which is not a pleasant or quick job regardless of the various times he made the carcasses dance and flap, I began the work on the dressings. First up was my Grandmother’s Cornbread Dressing, but luckily the biscuits and cornbread were already made, so all that had to be done for it before mixing was the cutting of the celery and onions. The problem with that dressing is that there is no real recipe; its a sort of just wing it with the following ingredients type deal, which by the way is harder than following a strict recipe just so you know. The process involves pouring chicken stock over crumbled cornnbread and biscuits with cut up celery and onions and then seasoning it with salt, pepper, thyme, poultry seasoning, and sage until my father says it smells right. And today it refused to smell right so I called my Grandmother and she was only able to tell me to keep seasoning until it smelled correct. Eventually it was done and I was relieved. Next up was the sausage dressing, which does follow a reasonable recipe with some additions we make to taste. My brother cut up the sausage while I was making dressing one so that was one step I didn’t have to deal with this time. It takes longer than I like to do that one because you have to cook the sausage then add the onions and wait for them to get translucent then add the celery and wait for the color fade before taking it off the heat and folding in the breadcrumbs. Of course instead of making sure that we had enough breadcrumbs my dumb ass assumed we did and we had to make extra breadcrumbs by putting biscuits in the food processor. Because of my panic over the lack of breadcrumbs I forgot to add the mushrooms to the pot before that, and so it was frustrating. Dressing two has to be spread on cookie sheets and chilled so it doesn’t try to cook the birds from the inside and so that it isn’t hot when you are packing it into the birds. Dressing three, also known as lets wing it with the shrimp dressing, is also a pain. Especially because there are no set ingredients, other than the shrimp and rice, and no set recipe at all. So I just sort of made rice with a cajun seasoning and then mixed shrimp and more seasonings into it. Of course it had to be cooled too because its so hot; that meant I had to scrape the sausage dressing off the pans and spread the shrimp dressing on them instead to chill them. So the fridgerator and freezer both smell like those dressings, which isn’t really pleasant. Now of course comes the real fun, stuffing three birds, which you’d think would be simple, and then keeping them together.

Boneless birds are by their very nature difficult to work with because they are unruly. So to get them to keep their shape with stuff them full of dressings that are fairly thick. We stuff each bird seperately and with a different dressing, then we put the chicken inside the duck and the chicken stuffed duck into the turkey. Now this is not the hard part; the hard part is holding them all together, especially since it is not going to be cooked today. By the time the birds were finished  it was too late to cook them, especially because a huge Frankenbird serves way too many people to be cooked for a family of four and takes several hours to cook. There’s also the fact that we don’t bake our bird, which would take eight hours; we smoke our Frankenbird on the grill, which takes much longer. So instead we are freezing Frankenbird and cooking him later, when we have more time. Otherwise we’d be trying to keep the grill hot at midnight or later in order to cook him. I apologize for the length of this entry folks; I guess I got carried away.

Quote of the Day: “I feel a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.”  –Madam Benoit