Leprechauns in January

I'm horrible, I know.  I have not posted in seemingly forever.  Mostly because baking can be expensive.  Also it is not good to have sweets lying around the house.  Also, sometimes I bake and I'm too intent on getting the food into the oven to stop for 30 seconds to take a picture.  And posts just aren't worth it without a picture.  But this cake, I promise, has a wonderful picture.  Several actually.

Now I can't take credit for the idea.  I stole it directly from notmartha.org and made only several slight modifications but I can promise you it is FAR easier than it looks.  Too easy in fact to the point where I tried to make it harder on myself.


The ingredients are as follows:
1. Cake mix (white or yellow)
2. Food coloring
3. Cocoa powder
4. Eggs
5. Butter
6. Vanilla extract

Frosting:
1. 1 cup butter
2. Powdered sugar
3. 1/2 cup milk

Directions:

1. Note that the ingredients mostly don't have amounts.  You really don't need measuring cups for this recipe.  You do need a lot of bowls though.  A LOT.  So start by making the cake following the directions on the box, except use melted butter instead of oil.  It gives a better taste.  Add in vanilla if you like that kind of thing.

2. Now split the batter into four more bowls with each bowl containing slightly less batter.  The biggest bowl is done.  The next bowl I made green by adding lots of food coloring.  Add food coloring to each of the other bowls making sure to wash the spoon between mixing otherwise it will bleed colors.

3. I added a few tablespoons of cocoa powder to the two darker shaded batches of batter.  To the lightest bowl I added a bit of cocoa powder and a bit of cayenne pepper and cinnamon to give it a kick.  The smallest bowl only had about 2/3 cup of batter so it's not going to make the cake spicy, but it will add a little extra flavoring.

4. Now this is where I had to make major adjustments.  The point of this cake is to lure a leprechaun to your cake so that when he goes for the gold in the center he falls into the hole at the center of the bundt pan.  Sadly, I don't have a bundt pan so I had to make one out of a circle pan.  I folded aluminum foil into a circular shape at the center of the pan and poured around it.  But this worked out quite nicely so I recommend it for anyone else who doesn't have a bundt pan.

5. Pour the white/yellow batter that you have the most of into the pan on the bottom.  Then pour each layer of color on top of it in concentric circles getting thinner and thinner with each layer.  It should look like this:

6. Now when mine came out it didn't look like it had kept the colors properly but when I cut inside it worked just fine. 

So don't panic.  Bake it at 325 or 350 F (really either one is fine) for about 45 minutes or whatever it says on the box.  When it looks done, take it out and let it cool.

7. In the meantime, beat the softened butter in a bowl with mixers and add in 2 cups of powdered sugar.  Slowly add in the milk and lots of green food dye, and then continue to add powdered sugar until you get the right consistency for your frosting.  This can be anywhere from 3-5 cups of sugar.  I swear powdered sugar disappears when it gets wet.  It's weird like that. 

8. Once the cake has cooled, I did a crumb layer of frosting.  Basically that means you frost it a little and then freeze the cake for about 10 or 15 minutes.  Then when you go back to finish frosting it, the crumbs don't get flaked into the frosting to ruin the look.  Very fancy.  I'm cool like that.  Once you've finished frosting the cake, you can take a fork and give the frosting a 'grassy' look.  Keeping in line with the impressive fancy methods and all.

9.  Now if you have leftover gelt from Hannukah, place that in the center and you're golden.  If not, I used Reese's candy and it looked just as good.  Then I made a ladder out of cut-up Kit-Kat bars.  They stick to the frosting so it works out well.

10. The Final touch is adding your sign to let the leprechauns know where the gold is.  My leprechaun looked oddly Amish, but I'm not the best of drawers.  Next time I'll get a redhead.

11. Serve and enjoy!  And remember, you're eating a lot of food coloring, so you may start to sneeze in bright colors.  Only one of the many wonderful side effects of this sugary concoction.

The Peanut Butter Experiment

Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies

I follow recipes.  I do not make things up when I am baking because so much depends on ratios and if you mess it up a little you might end up with a bad batch of brownies.  And that just seems like a waste of perfectly good ingredients.  So what happened tonight was out of necessity. Kind of.

I got home around 10 and started thinking about the dessert I have to make for a meat meal this Friday night at a friend's place.  She doesn't like for anyone to use margarine (actually, I don't really like using it all that much either) so I wanted a chocolate recipe for brownies that didn't call for butter or margarine.  I couldn't find one I liked online so I modified a cake recipe I've been making for years.  It uses oil instead of margarine or butter, which may not be much better than margarine, but for the moment I'll pretend.

Anyway, I wanted something with peanut butter, so I found some recipes online, mixed them in with the one I already had, and came out with a batch of brownies that (though I have yet to taste them) look pretty killer.

The ingredients are basic enough:
2 1/4 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup cold water
1/2 cup vegetable oil (or you can do 1/4 cup applesauce and 1/4 cup oil if you want to be healthier about it)
1/2 tbsp vanilla
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 cup chocolate chips

First turn the oven up to 350 degrees.  Then get out your handy dandy mixing bowl.  Technically you're supposed to mix the dry ingredients together and get out all the lumps, then separately mix the wet ingredients, and then pour the dry into the wet.  I know this will make a better, smoother cake but I hate having to wash the extra bowl so I just mix the wet ingredients:

and then add in all the dry ingredients at once.  As you're mixing the flour into the batter, put the peanut butter in the microwave for about 40 seconds until it's kind of soft and gooey.  I just microwave it in the glass measuring cup to save myself more dishes, but you can try microwaving it in the plastic container.  This might give you some disease down the road or just melt the plastic, but it might not.  Wow, this is like choose your own adventure baking!  Anyway, now you can pour half of the melted peanut butter in with the batter and mix it all up.  I guess this isn't necessary, but I figured the more peanut butter in the batter the better.

Now you can get out a round baking dish (or a square one, I won't be shape-ist) and oil/spray/butter it up.  Pour 3/4 of the chocolate batter into the dish, sprinkle the chocolate chips on top, and then dot the top of the batter with the melted peanut butter.  By which I mean take dollops (I really enjoy saying that word) of peanut butter and drop them across the top of the batter.  I got too excited about this to stop and take pictures, which would probably have been helpful for you.  Sucks to be you!  Haha, just kidding.  But back to the recipe...drop dollops (extra points for two usages in one post!) of the chocolate batter on top of the peanut butter and swirl it all around with a kitchen utensil.  I used a spoon.  I'm sure a steak knife or the tip of a ladle would work just as well. 

So anyway, now you put it in the oven and let it bake for 30 minutes.  If you're like me and enjoy the salmonellic thrill of undercooked brownies, take it out when it's still a little gooey in the center and (once it has cooled a bit) place it in the freezer.  It will now be delicious perfection.  Frozen brownie batter is what made Ben and Jerry famous after all.  Well, one of the reasons.

And now you have a great, dairy-free, margarine-free, peanut butter and chocolate dessert that everyone will love.  If they don't love it, they're probably crazy and aren't worthy of conversation anyway.  Not to be judgmental or anything, but I do have standards.

I'll re-post a warning if I bite into this and discover it's all bark and no bite.  I'm not really worried though.