Melissa's Drunken and Smoked Up Fudge

Melissa's

Drunken & Smoked Up Fudge

Sounds like this fudge has a bit of a substance abuse problem! All I can say is after one taste of this decadent fudge, you may walk away with an addiction of your own...IF you can still walk!

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

3 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

1/2 teaspoon salt

16 ounces Ghiradelli Chocolate

1 cup chopped Smoked Almonds

1 1/2 tablespoons Chambord Liquor

1 1/2 teaspoons Creme Fraiche

1/2 teaspoon almond extract


Directions:

Butter an 8-inch square baking pan and line with plastic wrap. Combine 4 tablespoons butter, sugar, cream, and salt in a saucepan. Over medium heat, bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Continue boiling, stirring frequently, to a temperature of 230 degrees F. This will take about 6 to 8 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in chocolate with a whisk until the chocolate is melted and the mixture is smooth. Add 1 cup chopped almonds and the liqueur and flavorings; stir to blend. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and spread evenly. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 2 to 3 hours. Remove the top layer of plastic wrap and flip the pan upside down on a cutting board or platter. Let stand at room temperature for a few minutes then cut into small pieces.

Melissa's Mexican Chocolate Pound Cake

Melissa's
Mexican Chocolate Pound Cake

Who doesn't love a good pound.....cake? I do. Pound cakes are one of my specialties. But again, my role here is to evoke and encourage you to step outside your comfort zone...push yourself to new culinary heights...bake a pound cake like one has never been baked before! So, this will NOT be your grandmother's traditional, sissy pound cake nibbled with tea or coffee. Oh no, THIS will be a masterpiece of epic proportion....WE ARE USING MEXICAN CHOCOLATE WITH CAYENNE! Yes, we are. YES, you ARE. ....and you will like it!

***WARNING: If you are not familiar with baking pound cakes, I will advise you they are highly temperamental. Do not run, jump, shut a door, walk through your home, have any type of physical relations, turn on the water, multi task of any sort, yell, hell whisper for that matter, or breathe heavy. Your best best is to leave your home from the time you place the cake in the oven until it's time to come out. I am not kidding. I have lost many a pound cake to a good solid Carolina Gamecocks Touchdown. (Think I'm kidding...um, no.) If you do any of these things the cake WILL know. It will fall...Just to prove a point. Pound cakes will throw a two year old temper tantrum and you will be stuck with a pan of half baked, half fallen, half crusty....goo.

So with that said, let's get baking!

INGREDIENTS
1 cup butter
1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening
3 cups sugar
6 eggs
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup Mexican Cocoa with Chilis
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1/2 tsp. cayenne (YES that says Cayenne...TRUST ME!)

DIRECTIONS
In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and shortening with sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Combine flour, baking powder, cocoa and cayenne. Add flour mixture alternately with milk and vanilla to the butter mixture. Mix well. Pour into greased tube pan without removable bottom. Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour and 20 minutes or until cake tests done. Cool 15 minutes before removing cake from pan. Cool on wire rack.

Now comes the best part. You HAVE to taste test while it's warm. If baked correctly you'll have a nice crispy top crust with an amazing chocolate flavor heightened by the cayenne. This will not burn you a new asshole as one might think, as long as you only use the amounts given.

I will tell you this...I entered this cake in the state fair this year and boy THAT cake gave Judge grandma quite a surprise!!! Bon apetit'!

PS: Unlike my counterparts, this is a successful cake recipe you can absolutley try at home!

Lacey's FML Rainbowish Lemon Drop Cupcakes

So..Cake week was supposed to be fun. I mean, its cake! I even bought a box of organic cake mix thinking to myself "it's boxed, I cannot screw this up!" Unfortunately sweets+baking=a whole lot of cussing reared its ugly head again and guess what? We tasted the rainbow, but the cupcakes looked more like a crusty rain puddle. Now I cannot say I didn't have fun while making these as I had my 3 year old daughter Gracie help me and she loves to cook, (or mostly get in the way, but who's complaining? I definitely don't want to discourage the girl) but still. I want pretty cupcakes. Not blown out holes in the middle cupcakes!

If you look up rainbow cupcakes on the internet you find these gorgeously colored cupcakes with blues, reds, yellows, etc. and pretty piped frosting on top. They look like a dream and I couldn't wait to make them. So we get our ingredients layed out...boxed organic cake, three eggs, two tbsp melted butter, vanilla, food coloring, lemon drops crushed up in a baggie, cupcake liners, etc.

We mix the boxed cake, eggs, candy, butter...divide the batter up into four bowls, add food coloring to each and stir it up. Next, line the cupcake tin and start spooning in the colored batter in the liners color by color. Pop them in the oven for 12 minutes at 350. Dunzo.
At 12 minutes I look in the oven and see that the cupcakes have WAY overstepped their cupcake liner bounds and are jumping OUT all over the damn place. But they look wet still, shiny. So I let them cook for another two minutes. I mean at this point, what does it matter. They are gonna look like colorful chantrelle mushrooms rather than the perfectly formed visions I saw on the internet.


Apparently the shiny was the three eggs the organic cake mix called for! After thinking about it, WTF is that all about? I've never seen a Betty fucking Crocker call for 3 eggs! Now my cupcakes are cookie on top, cupcake on the bottom. Okay.

I whip the whip cream with sugar and vanilla, add in a ton of the crushed lemon drops and whip some more, so its really stiff. I put all of that into a baggie, cut the tip off and squirt it out onto the cupcake. I was going for a dreamy creamy look, but honestly it looks like soft white dog poop on a colorful chantrelle mushroom on a plate. FML. Gracie wants sprinkles, so we dress the poopshroom up with some purple and pink sugar and eat up.
I gotta say, the cupcake tasted pretty damn good for what they looked like. I am going to buy this boxed cake again to make batter as listed on the box and then make cookies with it. I mean, surely I could do that right? It involves over baking and all...right?

Nikki's Fabulous Weight Loss Mini Carrot Cake Cupcakes!!!

"Gauranteed to make you lose weight"
*disclaimer, you will only lose weight if your only food option is Nikki's Fabulous Weight Loss Mini Carrot Cake Cupcakes*

I've made carrot cake layered in cream cheese icing several times and am quite convinced that while carrot cake is good, cream cheese frosting was invented by angels who, in their infinite generosity, deigned to share their gloriously luscious creation with us mere mortals who are entirely undeserving of its magnificence... in other words: cream cheese frosting is YUM! However I am attempting to be healthy and have been thinking about making a healthified version of carrot cake for awhile. Also I love anything in miniature, there's something about bite sized foods that make my heart go pitter pat... maybe its the fact that I can eat THREE bite sized brownies/cookies/cupcakes/perogis for every ONE normal size one... and three is way better than one... right? So, I geared up to create the most amazingly delicious desert that anyone had ever tasted. I had already invisioned myself handing out the beautiful little confections to my friends and coworkers, being ever so modest as they showered me with compliments, sharing in their astonoshment that these dainty morsels of ambrosial perfection were actually *gasp* HEALTHY!

yeah... it didnt quite go like that...

I started with my basic carrot cake recipe that has never failed me before, it calls for such fattening delights as buttermilk, oil, butter, cream cheese and above all SUGAR! I started editing from there and decided that I could sub out applesauce & mashed banana for the oil, and since those are so sweet on their own I surely wouldn't need sugar. I replaced the buttermilk with greek yogurt and replaced some of the white flour with a Bob's Red Mill high fiber cereal. I guess I should have sensed that this wasn't going to work out after my new gadget didnt work... I found this mandoline style slicer/grater thingy for only $3.99 at my local discount store... yes I do realize that if its $3.99 there's a reason... and its not that the benevolent manufacturers created such an amazing product that they just HAD to share it with the world with no concern about profit... anyway it was plastic and POSSIBLY would be good for grating something really soft... like velveta... although that might still be to hard... but never fear I have my black & decker handy chopper and although it took several batches to come up with 2 cups of carrots they were perfectly evenly pulverized... I added all my ingredients (seriously they tasted so bad I'm not going to bother giving you the breakdown... you don't want to know it!) and tasted the dough... it wasn't bad... it wasn't a dainty morsel of ambrosial perfection yet... but hey my regular carrot cake isn't really that amazing uncooked either.

So I lined my mini muffin pan with cheerful rainbow liners and filled them with the dough, popped them in my oven and sat back to wait for the magic to happen... They smelled amazing which I decided was a preliminary indicator of their impending magnificence. After checking them several times I decided they weren't going to fully set no matter how long they baked so I pulled them out, let them cool a few minutes and (slighlty giddily) took the first bite... and almost spit it out... This couldnt be! My perfect little treats were... BITTER?!?!?! I tasted another one (yeah yeah I know they all came from the same bowl of dough, if one is nasty they all are gonna be... but a girl can hope right?) that one was gross too so that batch went in the trash. After agonizing consideration I decided that I should add some sugar... not a lot, just 1/3 cup to balance the bitterness a bit... enough that I was already feeling the first twinges of failure though... these would not be the perfectly healthy delights I had envisioned... That didnt work either and I finally gave up for the night. I froze the remaining dough just in case I come up with a blast of inspiration on how to fix it (suggestions? anyone?) cleaned up the mess and got a glass of wine to console myself... I take culinary imperfection very personally...

I won't go into detail on how I managed to screw up the cream cheese icing... suffice it to say it wasn't much better than the cupcakes...

CAKE!

Cupcakes, birthday cakes, spiced cakes, fondant cakes, boxed cakes, scratch cakes, Cake the band. Millions of kinds of cakes. It’s sweet, it’s fluffy, it’s delicious. Sometimes it's even nutritious. Wedding cakes, anniversary cakes, better-than-sex-cakes and now divorce cakes. There are Beefcakes, piece of cakes, and loving you like fat kids love cakes. We heart cakewalks. And we let them eat cakes! Ode to CAKE!


Up next week: Alcohol! Yeay us!