Uh...bananas?

I won a cookbook from the Chef Talk food forums. "Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook". As you can see, I was astonished.
Ok, I wasn't really. But a picture of me making a freaky face at a book is funner to see than a boring stock photo of the book, right?
Yesterday I went to wash dishes, and mindlessly pulled out a cookbook and picked out a bread recipe instead. So I baked it. Parmesan pepper bread. Basically, just a basic dough with lots of pepper baked into it, and then roll a ton of parmesan into it and bake it. It was delicious.
I also made an egg-parmesan fusilli dish. I don't like that picture. But oh well, now you can see it. That was delicious, too.


Oh and I made the bananananaas today. Well, I didn't make bananas, but I fried some. I spread chocolate on a pasta wrap, sealed the edges with butter, and rolled each banana half into it. Then I fried it in oil until golden bubbly brown delicious. I drained off the oil, stuck it in some chocolate and drizzled more over it and took pics. Which you are probably now drooling over. They were SO SO SO SO SO GOOD. Dang. Now I want more. I'll go make more.

I was going to show you guys the food pics that I entered in the fair and won awards for, but as stated above, I have to go make more fried bananas before I go insane. So goodnight dear readers, eat well.

~lacey
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
Groucho Marx

OOHH FUDGE

*giddy*

Guess what! Our local city's Christmas fair changed their rules, and now allow vendors to sell homemade candies at their booths. They didn't allow it before, because the people who put the event on have a food booth for the affair, and wanted all the food business for themselves. But they changed their minds for some reason or another, maybe darth vadar came into their houses at night and threatened to cut their pinkie toes off if they didn't change the rules. If so, I am inviting him to come to the event and receive free fudge from our booth.

Oh, yes. My sister Laurel and me are going to sell fudge. We've no idea what kinds, or what's going on at all, but we have a few months to figure it all out. Laurel's in the kitchen experimenting with a new fudge recipe right now, in fact. And I've got some ideas too for different kinds.

We've been working on mad baker women designs/logos. Well, I mostly do so in class...but hey, we gotta work on them sometime!

I'm also going to make fried bananas. I made them once some years ago and got a champion for them at Food's Day, but I want to make them again. I'll tell you all how it went when it happens.

Oh yeah, fair results.

• I got first place for the cake I decorated, but if you ask me the judging was off by far. There were other cakes in other divisions who recieved lesser awards than what they deserved. Anyways, I concluded again, as which happens every year, that the people judging the cakes have little knowledge on how much work fondant is to use on cakes vs. tip work. They are both a seperate art, but the fondant work tends to get outshined but loads of detailed tip work. oh well *shrugs*
• Also, I recieved Best of Show for my garlic bread, which I wrote myself *proud*
• First place for double chip meringue bars, which surprised me, because I used carob chips in place of the peanut butter chips, and carob is usually frowned on upon by people who don't eat carob. Because they look like chocolate chips, but the taste is entirely different, people usually get the wrong idea about carob. Anyways, I was happy.
• Oh what else. I entered flourless chocolate cake in the All Chocolate Confections contest, and I got 2nd for that. I wish I could have known the recipe that won 1st, but they didn't have it displayed.
• My brioche got 1st. The piece that was brought along with the loaf for display was almost entirely eaten, they liked it so much. haha
• All my food photography got 1st place, and I got two Best of Division awards on my brioche photo and a photo I have of carrots...I'll post them next time.

That's all for now. I know the quote below has absolutely nothing to do with food, but the famous quote from a childhood movie brings back lots of memories. At least it has the word fudge in it! goodbye.

~lacey
"Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word! "
Ralphie from A Christmas Story

thumbs and cake

I've been baking lots these past few days for teh fair time. I entered in the cake competition, a Christmas cake. These past few weeks I've been getting ideas together in my head, my weird, twisted head, on what I want for my cake. I finally got some ideas together so last weekend I got started on making fondant.
If you don't know what fondant is, it's the stuff they use on professional cakes that makes the cake look obnoxiously gorgeous. The flowers on this cake are made of fondant. You know, that stuff.
Well, turns out you can make your own. Something I discovered earlier this year. I hate the store bought crap because its really hard, extremely expensive for almost no fondant, and it tastes like a melted rubber tire that used to be on a dump truck drove by a fat man in long johns who spit on the tire every time he got in the truck. The stuff you make yourself is obviously cheaper, basically just a bag of marshmallows and a bag of powdered sugar, its really easy to work with, and it tastes scrum-diddly-umptious.
Basically, you melt miniature marshmallows with a SMALL amount of water (i made the mistake of adding too much at one point, but it turned out ok because i blamed Laurel for it :D)
and then stir in your color, and knead a bunch of powdered sugar into it until it looks like that, over there.

Ooohhh yes, and when you are starting to knead, you have to rub shortening into EVERYTHING that's going to touch it. Hands, surface, everything. It's kinda fun. As you can see, the green fondant I made looks ridiculously like nose slime of some sort before I got the sugar worked into it. I loved making the green stuff the most because my family got grossed out when they saw it. Especially when I got it on my hands! weee
After I made the fondant I made dinner that night too. Spaghetti, of course.
But in the process of slicing up onions for the sauce, I sliced up my thumb too. I'm still un-used to using a nicely sharpened knife, even though I've been sharpening regularly since January. When it happened, though, I realized it was the first time I'd cut myself with my new knives. Not that it was a goal, but I'm just saying. Anyways, I cut myself pretty deep, and it bled everywhere. (not on the onions, don't worry). So I made the rest of the meal without my left thumb. Which, I quickly discovered, is very difficult.
I missed my thumb. And all the next day, I baked for about 10 hours for the fair. Brioche, garlic bread, meringue bars, and finishing my cake. Which was alot of work. And it was all slowed down majorly by the loss of the use of my thumb. You know, you can never truly appreciate how much your thumb means to you until you can't use it and you have a million things to do in the kitchen in a certain time span. You know what's especially difficult? Cracking eggs. I had to crack a billion of them and it was so annoying when I couldn't stab my thumbs into it to pull it apart. I can't wait to have my thumb healed. I'll never take my thumb for granted again!
And so, I'd like to interrupt my cake rant to give you this, my appreciation for thumbs everywhere.

AN ODE TO THUMB
The sun was high
The day big in it's might
I looked at my hands
And saw such a sight

Not an index!
Not a pointer!
But a short, fat, opposoble mover!

My thumb
My thumb
How I love my dear sweet thumb

I curse the day
That terrible day
The knife, it slipped
It slipped in the way

My thumb!
My thumb!
Now I run and scream and yell!

My thumb!
My thumb!
Will I ever be able to chop that big green pepper bell?!

One day
One sweet, glorious day
My thumb will heal
It will heal all the way

I can strum!
I can run!
I can move my opposable thumb!

I tell you reader
Never forsake
Never forget
The importance of that finger
The importance of the thumb

So, what do you think?
I know, it was probably the most pathetic piece of poetry you've read in a long time. But I'm not emo, so I can't write this stuff. I just insist on doing so anyways for your pleasure.
Ok, back to the food.
I started assembling my cake on Monday, since it was due at the building on Tuesday. I made it with just a crappy box mix, since it isn't a taste competition, only the looks matter (funny, that sounds similar to the human race). Then I rolled out the fondant and started cutting the pieces and pasting them on the cake. It was a little awkward trying to position the strips on the cake, in order to have them align just right, but I got it sorted out eventually. (I've no idea why part of that sentence is underlined, but I don't care enough to fix it, so oh well.) Then I started the top layer, cutting the strips and applying them horizontally. Then I rolled out a red sheet for the top and fixed up all the seams and stuff. I had also rolled out
some white fondant and cut stars out with a cutter. Then I covered them with some fancy gold powder stuff I found at the store. I set them out to dry for a day or so. Then I put an extremely goofy movie on, (i like cartoons. shoosh.) got some school glue, and constructed a top piece for my cake out of the stars.
Eventually I put it all together and got this:



I rather like it.
This is one of my longest posts yet, so enjoy it. Also, I added a "Followers" gadget, so if you'd like to follow me, it's located at the bottom of my page. Sounds a little creepy. But do it!

More posts and pics later. I'm off to clean the dirt out my thumb wound.

~lacey
"A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece."
Ludwig Erhard

im tired of titles

yeP, I am tired of them.

Anyways, after hanging out with some friends this morning for a few hours, I came home and decided to bake.

SO! i made cupcakes. I didn't have a good yellow cake recipe yet, so i decided to try a recipe from the joy of cooking called "1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake". Now, I've made a cake recipe before called "1-2-3 White Cake" and basically it was called that because there was something like 1 egg, 2 cups of flour, and 3 cups of sugar (of course these weren't the actual ingredients, because then the cake would probably be pretty nasty, 2 cups of flour to THREE cups of sugar?! Anyways, you get the idea of how these kind of recipes work..) But as I was inspecting the yellow cake recipe, it became very apparent to me that the writers of this recipe had no idea what they were doing when they named it "1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake". I say this because there was no sort of numerical order to the ingredients, like you would suppose there to be by the title. Just a bunch of normal sounding measurements, 1 1/2 c. flour, 1 2/3 c. sugar, a tsp. vanilla, etc etc etc. Well I'll stop boring you with details only a fellow baker would enjoy reading :P

i made the recipe anyways, despite the obvious flaws in the title writing process...they turned out pretty good. Kinda weird as cupcakes, I think it would have made a better whole cake instead of cupcakes, but nevertheless they were good. I made some basic butter and sugar white frosting and colored them and fed them to my neices and nephews. They informed me that they were glad i made two boy colors and two girl colors, orange and blue, and pink and purple. I didn't do it on purpose, but hey it was a pretty smart subconscious thing, huh?...I guess.

I also made a real quick pasta salad to go with our Labor day BBQ. I cooked some elbow macaroni (naturally i made way too much) and tossed in some diced tomatoes, olive oil, dried oregano, garlic powder, a bit of salt, tons of black pepper and a mountain of fresh chopped basil. The basil gave it a huge kick, it was delicious.

Well I put both pics because I just wanted to show off... :)

That's it for now. Next week I'll be baking a bunch more for the food competitions in the fair...so I'll have lots of results from that for you guys to read eventually. Annnd if I make anything in the meantime, I'll tell you all about it eventually, because I know how much you rely on my posts to keep your taste buds working. Well that doesn't make sense really because you cant eat this stuff...oh well.

Goodnight!

~lacey
"Life is a combination of magic and pasta."
Fellini