The Good, The Good and The Ugly.

I made these muffins to use up some apples that were on the cusp of becoming inedible - I was very pleased with how they turned out, and as you'll see in a moment, they saved my bacon..... 

But first -

I've altered this a bit from a recipe saved from Taste of Home

Apple Pie Muffins

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/3 cup canola oil

1 large egg

1 cup buttermilk

2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp nutmeg

2 cups chopped and peeled apples

For the tops -

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350'. 

Beat together the brown sugar, oil and egg.  Mix in the buttermilk. Add in flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt.  Stir to combine, and then add the chopped apples.  

Spoon into muffin cups, about 2/3 full.

Mix brown sugar, cinnamon and butter. Spoon onto muffins.

Bake 18-22 minutes until done.

I also made these Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkle Cookies for a Sunday dinner.  I didn't have any chocolate to make chocolate chip cookies (always the favorite around here) so I hunted down something new, and it was a surprise hit with the fam.  Try them here.

Lastly, I made a batch of Dorie Greenspan's brownies for a bake sale.  The morning of the sale I went to remove them from the pan and they were stuck SOLID.  I frantically pried and chiseled at them for a while before having to accept defeat.  I think a bunch of stuff went wrong with this batch - I should have used parchment paper in the pan, our new(ish) oven is a bit finicky and I think I baked them too long, and I wonder if using up the bits and bobs I had of chocolate - milk, dark, and white - could have factored in?  No idea.  But there was no way I could take these to the bake sale and I didn't want to show up empty handed, so instead I packed up 6 of the apple muffins from the top of the post and took those instead. 

Thank goodness for extra baking the freezer!

Ugly dinner - bundt pan lasagna

So this isn't a happy memory for me, but frankly the photos are too hilarious not to post. 

Last Fall some time I saw  this Buzzfeed video for lasagna party ring.  I thought it looked like a fun twist on lasagna - something we like- and decided to make it for Christmas Eve dinner, and I could take some to my Mom and Dad in  the hospital for their dinner.  

Then life went rotten and by the time Christmas came, we were spending our last days with my Mom before she passed away.  But when you have small kids you have to try to keep some normalcy about their lives, so I continued with our plans as best I could.

So!  This lasagne is made in a bundt pan.  

I watched the video multiple times and thought - how hard could it be?

ahem.

You boil up your noodles, grease up you bundt, and start laying the noodles down in the pan with the edges hanging over the sides so you can cover the bottom layer with the edge noodles.  

This nearly did me in, seriously.  My noodles would NOT stay in place, they kept slithering down in the pan.  And it seemed so bulky, so much noodle - where would the sauce and cheese go?  I whispered-screamed while I fought with those effing noodles and tried not to cry.

Here's my end result. 

I know.  I KNOW.

Before I started battling with the noodles, I made the very delicious meat sauce, and then carefully layered cheese, noodles and sauce into the dish.

I felt a little better - it didn't look so bad now!

Yikes.  Well, at least that is the bottom.....

Heyyyyyy - looking good! 

It had some time to cool, and the I popped it out of the pan, and ....... ummmmmm.

Is that not hideous looking?  It looks like a raw sweaty chicken.

And when I cut a piece to take to my dad, it slowly started to collapse.

Not my best result in the kitchen, to be sure.  The Mister and the kids said it tasted fine, but it sure won't be making a repeat performance at our house.  

Filed under: kitchen disasters

Sunday Dinner - Chicken Mamou and excellent bread.

This was a super delicious Sunday Dinner - the sort where everything was perfect and went great. And then the next 3 weeks of Sunday Dinners were all disasters.

Let's talk about this one first - this amazing bread is from

The New Best Recipe and I was so proud of it.

 Look! Artisanal Bakery Perfection.

The pasta was from Guy Fieri's Family Food and was called Chicken Mamou.

It was delicious and made a ton - we ate it for days.

I don't recall dessert - might have just been ice cream?

It was all downhill from there though.

The next Sunday I made a turkey sandwich from the same Guy Fieri book and it wasn't very good.  It had an orange cranberry spread that was too sweet, too sour and too harsh all at the same time.  It overpowered everything else.  Disappointing.

The next Sunday I tried to bounce back with a chicken dish with a creamy sauce.  The sauce was amazing but the chicken was awful - so tough we couldn't chew it.  Everyone was discreetly spitting out wads of partially chewed chicken, as discreetly as one can do that.  I was MAD.  Next Sunday would be different! I vowed.

Well, it was and it wasn't.......

We tried the New York Times version of the Mississippi Roast, but with a sub for roasted peppers instead of pepperoncini, which is fine, but we had kid activities, and then needed to do some shopping, and by the time we got home we were running low on time for cooking.  The roast got the minimum cooking time, but it needed more.  The flavor was nice, but it wasn't very tender.

I don't think I'm a super amazing cook, or anything like that, but 3 less than stellar Sunday Dinners in a row was a kick to the pants, yanno?

Well, back to the grind......

Our first attempt at zoodles

I jumped on the veggie noodle train back in 2015 by buying a handheld spiralizer, then 

going home and shoving it in a drawer and forgetting about it. Go me. 

But I really want to try all these interesting ideas for spiralized foods, so I hauled mine out, 

found a recipe for zucchini noodles with chicken and tomatos and went to work. 

Luckily for me, I changed my mind and didn't make it for family Sunday dinner, 

because good wasn't a word I would use to describe the end result. 

Here's some of the ingredients for our tasty sauce.

Here is the spiralizer.

Zuke noodles!

The problem is - the spiralizer I bought only has one setting and it is very, very thin.  

We managed to cook them to just tender-crisp, but adding the sauce weighed it down and 

turned the noodles to mush.  It tasted ok and was edible, but it didn't look good and

 wasn't what I wanted.

So my veggie noodle dream is on hold right now until I can find a reasonable replacement to buy and justify spending the bucks on it.

If you have a recommendation for me, drop me a line!

Fail, fail, fail

It wasn't the best week in my kitchen. 2 recipes that I had such confidence in both completely tanked.

 I've had icebox cakes on my mind for a while.

 I made a basic one years and years ago - chocolate wafers layered with whipped cream, and oh, how delicious. 

While doing a purge of the remaining recipes from my cooking notebooks, I found an article from and old Food Network magazine on fancier ice box cakes. Most of them didn't interest me or used cookies or biscuits that I couldn't find here but one sounded super easy and good - ritz crackers with a grape jelly cream. Mmmmm!

 I made it for my Mom's birthday and it was a total embarrassment. 

First - and I do blame the recipe a smidgen for the directions on plating - it looked hideous.  Like a blindfolded kid made it.  But worst was second and third - the cream was gritty, not soft and pillowy like the magazine photos, and third - it just didn't taste good.  I was very embarrassed about serving it to my family, especially for a birthday dessert.  Everyone said it was ok, but not much got eaten.  

 

Then I decided to make some flourless peanut butter cookies from a well known food blog. 

I read through some of the comments, which were people saying how good they looked or asking for substitution information, but no one who had made them.  But whatevs, well known food blog.  I'm sure it will be fine.  

Nope.  I wasted the last of the peanut butter on this mess.  

Flat, greasy, oily, YUCK.  At least no one but myself was witness to this disaster.  

Ugh.

Weekend Cookbook Challenge 28 - TV COOKS

I think there's a wee jinx on my kitchen lately; I've produced a higher number of failures than usual. It's a good thing we bought that box of Annie's Mac n Cheese and the big bag of frozen burritos from Costco. One of those failures was supposed to be my dish for this months Weekend Cookbook Challenge. It's the 28th month, and the theme I chose for this month is TV Cooks.

I picked a somewhat new face(s) to Food TV - the Podleski sisters from Ontario, authors of 3 cookbooks, and hosts of Eat Shrink and Be Merry on Food Network Canada.

I've got all 3 of their books and have had success with the recipes I've tried. But my luck ran out with a recipe that I've wanted to try literally for years. I chose to cook A Curried Affair from their first book Looneyspoons.
This is a chicken casserole - curry, chicken, pineapple and mushroom soup, basically. I've wanted to try this for ages, but now I'm sorry I did. Who knew that chicken, curry, pineapple and mushroom soup when combined taste like nothing? It looked awful and tasted like mush.

Disappointed, I hit the bottle. Just kidding, I looked for a new recipe to try for WCC. And I found one by everyone's favorite TV hostess:
I know! But really, this recipe is a keeper. It's for a drink and the reason I picked it is because one of the ingredients is cassis. And I've had a bottle of cassis in the cupboard for years.
Cassis from Elephant Island, a beautiful and my favorite winery.

This was a pretty great drink and would be perfect to sip on the porch on a hot summer day. I hope we'll get some days like this year.

The deadline for entries for Weekend Cookbook Challenge 28 is May 25! Email me your posts at iliketocook AT shaw DOT ca.

Berry Smooth
Sandra Lee

serves 4

2 cups lemonade
1/2 cup cassis
1/2 cup vodka
2 tb lime juice
ice cubes

In a pitcher, stir together all ingredients except ice. Fill glasses with ice, then with equal portions lemonade mixture. Serve immediately.

The agony of defeat: Cinnamon Buns

OK, let's have a fast recap of my time as a Daring Baker, shall we?

My first challenge with the DB's was the Darkest Chocolate Crepe Cake. Scared the pants off of me, but tasted lovely.

Second was Gateau St Honore. Burned myself, the pastry didn't rise too high, but looked pretty and tasted great.

My third challenge was by far my favorite - bagels. So delicious. I was pretty nervous about the recipe, but they were easier than easy and I can't wait to make them again.

July brought the Strawberry Mirror Cake. Mine was blueberry, but still yummy.

And last month was the completely frustrating but good Milk Chocolate and Caramel Tart.

The above recipes all have two things in common. One - I was terrified of all of the recipes before I made them. Two - they all turned out just fine, increasing my confidence in the kitchen every month.

So when Cinnamon Buns were announced as the challenge for this month, not only was I not nervous, I couldn't wait to give them a try.

The recipe is very simple - sugar, salt, butter, an egg and lemon zest are creamed together, then flour, yeast and milk are added to finish the dough. After the rising, the dough is shaped into a rectangle, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and rolled up, cut into buns, have some more rising time, baked, then finally smothered in icing.

Sounds pretty simple. It was. Sounds pretty tasty. Sadly, they weren't.

buns having their second rising.

I don't know what happened. The dough came together fine. It didn't rise a ton, but was easy to work with. And how can you go wrong with sugar and cinnamon (or in our case allspice - still haven't bought any cinnamon) for the filling?

The buns were just strange. Texture-wise they were very stiff, and the buns had a strange "raw dough" smell, even though they were fully cooked. They just weren't good. I decided I wouldn't take them to work for one last "treat day". I didn't care for them, and neither did Scott. In fact, we only ate one apiece. The rest sat on the counter for 4 days until I finally threw them out.

glazed buns.

You can see the recipe right here. Wanna see how the other Daring Bakers fared with their buns? Then go here for the Daring Bakers Blogroll.

Well, the moving van is loaded and on the road, and we will be too shortly! B.C., here we come! Thanks for stopping by, see you in a few days.