I was looking for a Baked Pear recipe. This one from Disney Family was easy and hard to resist (see above). If you don't have a melon baller or a peeler (like me), slice the pear, cut off the skins and cut the slices into small chunks. 

Juicy pears are the star of this flavorful baked dessert.

Hands-On Time: 1 hour

Ready In: 2 hours

Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients

1 ripe pear (Bosc, Anjou, or Bartlett)

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided

Pinch of cinnamon

Pinch of nutmeg

1 teaspoon plus 1 tablespoon packed brown sugar

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

Pinch of salt

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Cut the pear in half lengthwise. Scoop out the seeded centers with a teaspoon or melon baller. Then spoon out most of the flesh onto a cutting board, leaving the pear shells intact. Put the shells in a baking dish. Chop the scooped pear into bite-sized pieces and transfer to a small bowl. Cut 1 tablespoon butter into small pieces and add to the bowl.

Your child can add the cinnamon, nutmeg, and 1 teaspoon brown sugar to the chopped pear mix and toss with a spoon. Then she can spoon the filling back into each pear half. Give her some aluminum foil and have her crumple it into balls, placing them around the pears to keep them from tipping.

Put the flour, 1 tablespoon brown sugar, 2 tablespoons butter, and the salt in a small bowl. Let your child use her fingers to smush the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, then sprinkle half the topping over each pear.

Bake pears, uncovered, until the topping is golden brown, about 35 minutes. Cool 15 minutes before serving.

Paula Deen's Sugar Cookies

There were no cookies in the apartment, so darn, I had to make some. I went back to Paula Deen to supply me with these sweet sugar cookies. The combination of Almond and Vanilla is DELICIOUS! Instead of making cut-outs I just rolled the dough into balls and flattened them with a fork, like you do with peanut butter cookies. Only you press it once instead of twice, or else they flatten too much and burn the edges. 10 minoutes in the oven makes perfectly soft cookies, 14 minutes makes crispier ones. 

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon pure almond extract
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
Granulated sugar
Royal Icing, recipe follows

Directions

In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter, then mix in the egg and vanilla and almond extracts. In another bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, and cream of tarter; mix the dry ingredients into the creamed mixture, then cover and refrigerate for 2 to 3 hours, or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Divide the chilled dough in half and roll it out on a lightly floured pastry cloth to a 1/4-inch thickness. Lightly grease some baking sheets. Cut the dough with a floured cookie cutter; sprinkle with sugar. Transfer the cookies to the prepared sheets and bake for 9 minutes.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/monogrammed-sugar-cookies-recipe/index.html

Got Bananas?

If given the choice to eat 4 overripe bananas or make them into a cake - I would make them into a cake every time. This recipe was so much fun to try with my boyfriend and I was happy to have the extra hands when we were preparing the caramel.

As a general rule, I like to cut the fat in half in my baking recipes - it almost never has an effect on the flavor. The butter may be needed for the caramel sauce, but the vegetable oil can definitely be cut in half from 1/2 cup to 1/4 cup.

Caramelized Banana Loaf Cake 

Rachel Ray Magazine, December 2009

Ingredients:

3 to 4 large bananas

3/4 cup sugar

2 Tbsp unsalted butter, in 1 piece

1 large egg plus 1 large egg white

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 325 degrees. Grease a 5-by-9 loaf pan. Trim both ends off each of 3 bananas to fit crosswise in the pan; reserve the ends. Halve the long banana pieces lengthwise; peel and transfer to a plate

2. In a large, heavy skillet, bring 1/4 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons water to a boil, without stirring. Cook until the water has evaporated and the mixture starts turning amber. Remove from the heat and swirl in the butter with a fork. Add the long banana pieces cut side down and cook over low heat for 1 minute; transfer to the prepared loaf pan, arranging them crosswise, cut side down. Drizzle the remaining caramel on top.

3. In a medium bowl, mash the banana end pieces to equal 1 cup (add more banana if necessary). Mash in the remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Beat in the whole egg, egg white and vanilla. 

4. In a large bowl, whisk the flour with the baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Add the banana mixture and oil; whisk until blended. Scrape the batter over the bananas in the pan and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out dry, 50 to 55 minutes. Let cool on rack for 10 minutes; invert the cake onto a platter and let cool completely.

When you have lemons, make Lemon Bars!

No meal is complete without a little dessert, and for my spaghetti and meatball dinner there was a whole lot of dessert! A 9" x 13" cake pan full of lemon bars was enough dessert for probably 10-15 people! Well, maybe 10-15 girls...3 grown men could wolf them down pretty easily! I don't own a food processor, so after beating the crust batter with an electric mixer, I just molded it together with my hands until it had the consistency almost of cookie dough. It was actually really easy for me, but I am starting to realize that maybe some of my projects are no longer what I would consider beginner baking... I guess I forget what it was like to never know what they want or what it was supposed to look like. It means I have improved, but that this blog may no longer be just a college-age girl struggling to figure out how to cook. It may actually be about sharing a passion for cooking that is increasing everyday with every new ingredient or recipe that comes my way. 

On the other hand, making this big meal on Sunday was truly exhausting. Waiting for everything to cook so I could put the next thing in the oven, worrying about times and temperatures... it was a little stressful. I hope in the future I can plan my meals better so that both dinner and dessert do not require the use of the oven - even though it is by far my favorite kitchen appliance. That I even have a favorite kitchen appliance! It is such a change from a year ago when most of the meals I ate were at the Campus Dining Hall and I thought I was doing well when I cooked pasta in a hot pot and sauteed vegetables from the salad bar. In the past few weeks, I have been doing a lot of reflecting on my cooking and it really has become a major hobby of mine - I love experimenting with food in my free time, but also sharing food with others and learning how to accommodate everyone's dietary needs and desires. If I could find a meal that would satisfy vegetarians, avoid allergies, be kosher and most of all be healthy. It probably doesn't exist...

Wow I got way excited for a second there...I need to calm down about food...

"23° F Snow/Blowing Snow" and We Make Cake!

After my last post, I decided to be very selective in picking my next recipe - a yellow cake. Food Network had nothing resembling a basic yellow cake, while All Recipes had dozens of versions that were all just slightly different! After looking through reviews, I could not find a yellow cake recipe that did not have at least five reviews claiming it tasted like cornbread and five more who found it dry and tasteless. I ended up searching for Butter Cake instead, and chose a recipe that achieved a rating of 4.5 out of 5 with 100 reviews. Still on my guard for cornbread character and dry, tastelessness, I read through the reviews. Several people suggested adding an extra egg or egg yolk, so I added an egg yolk. At least one person suggested doubling the vanilla and I figured - why not? With the cupcakes ready to bake, my roommate and I had a last-minute urge to add food coloring and you can see the results....Personally, I think it looks like a griffin or a pegasus or something, but I may just have a creative imagination.

The cupcakes cooked up really fast actually - after about 20 minutes.  The loaf pan, meanwhile, is still in the oven. It is way past the 55 minutes that was prescribed, and the knife is not coming out clean. That said, I live in a college apartment with a poor quality stove, so it should not be surprising. 

No School - I'm making Cookies!

The urge to bake has not left and after dinner today I could not wait to make molasses cookies! When I look on my shelves at all the spices and sauces I have accumulated recently, I am quite impressed with how much I have really become a Cook. When one of my roommates is missing an ingredient to make dinner, it is not unlikely I will be able to find it in one of the five or six places that I hide away food. Even more exciting to me is when I try to make a recipe and have no way of getting the ingredients, I am able to throw something together anyways with the ingredients I have. I made crab cakes last week and we had neither old bay nor hot sauce nor dijon mustard. Instead, I used yellow mustard packets from the convenience store, I added lots of fresh black pepper and some Worchestershire sauce, and baked them up!

Today, I just got lucky because I had molasses and sugar and flour and spices. The recipe was your typical cookie recipe...beat wet ingredients, combine dry, mix together. But it does ask that you refrigerate the dough for an hour before you bake it. Well, being the impatient baker that I am, I ate the batter and I baked some of the dough right away. They were very doughy, but they were delicious. The later batches that had been refrigerated were more crispy, but still a little chewy inside. 

Snowed in and making Meringues

The University of Maryland probably got 3 feet of snow yesterday, and barely any stores are open. However, with my determination to bake, I found a recipe that only required a minimal number of ingredients. The recipe we used to make meringues is a very basic one - egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar, lemon zest and salt. But we added in cocoa powder and instant coffee to some of them to create a little more variety. They turned out amazing! We made the cookies really big, so we left them in for ten extra minutes, but other than that the recipe was really easy and accurate. I thought it would be funny to keep them in an old empty meringue container - but I am probably the only one who finds it immensely cool!

Red/ Pink Velvet Cake

I found this nifty muffin tin at the Thrift Store and I couldn't wait to use it - literally two days later I made these! With Valentine's Day coming up I thought it would be fun to decorate these heart-shaped cupcakes. I used a recipe from Emeril Lagasse because a dessert is not supposed to be healthy, it's supposed to taste good. It was pretty straight-forward as far as the recipe (combine dry ingredients, cream butter and sugar, add a little of this and that), but I underestimated how much food dye I needed. The recipe calls for 2 oz of red food coloring, and there is about .25 oz in the little bottles you get from the store. I would have needed eight of those little bottles to achieve the red color typical of this cake, but on the other hand, it is not the red dye that really matters. In fact, I know some people who refuse to eat red food coloring because it is made from ground up beetles. From the websites I read (below), it appears that FD&C Red #1-15 are all made from this beetle and according to the Spice Place:

Ingredients in McCormick Red Food Color: Water, Propylene Glycol, FD&C Reds 40 & 3 and Propylparaben (as a preservative).

Moral of the Story? If you are vegan, vegetarian, or allegy-prone, know what you are eating!

http://money.aol.com/bw/general/canvas3/_a/whats-in-my-food/20060808141909990001

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/bugjuice.asp