Friday was Stacy's birthday. I, of course, made dinner! Because that is what I do! After a long conversation with the birthday girl, I decided on fettuccine Alfredo, cheesy buttered Italian bread, and chocolate cake. Recipes below.
The cake I made the day before. It tastes okay, but is glued together with chocolate frosting 'cause I moved it too soon and it crumbled a bit in a nice, Pac-Man-mouth-shaped wedge. According to Aly, it tastes pretty damn similar to the cake I based it off of (Greg's in RI's Death By Chocolate cake. One piece is so big and so chocolatey and so filling that it takes a week to eat. I love it so much, and Stacy loves chocolate, so... good choice!).
The cakey part is nice and dense and filling, and filled with chocolate chunks. The frosting is frosting, but the chocolate chips added to it make it excellent. I wrote "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" across it in chocolate chips, but you couldn't really tell 'cause it was a bit too small and crunched together. And I used two 8" pans instead of 9", so it was a bit small.
Making the pasta and bread was obscenely hectic.
You see, I live in a dorm. Which means my pasta pots are tiny. I have two 2qt saucepans. One box of pasta is cooked in 4qts of water. And I was making two boxes.
So, this is me. I have three pans going on the stove: two boiling water, one melting butter in cream. I have a baguette on the table I'm trying to slice, butter, and cheese & spice. So I'm running back and forth. And this happened twice. Took about an hour to finish.
The bread? Was gone in a snap. I think Steve alone ate half a loaf. And apparently, I'm making more. On a regular basis. Because it is excellent.
That being said, it needed more cheese and the butter needed to be spread out better. There was too much garlic on the first one and not enough on the second. It would probably be better if I could somehow get the cheese and spices inside the slices, too, instead of on top.
The alfredo sauce was not the best I've made, either. It was far too watery and didn't taste quite right. My search for the perfect sauce continues. This was the third recipe I've tried. But I found another one that looks promising. But the recipe at the bottom is for the one I made last night.
Regardless, everyone liked it. I forgot how damned filling heavy cream is, and fewer people that I originally counted showed up, so I made twice as much pasta as I needed to. So we have a shitload sitting in a bowl in the fridge. Which means I can't make cookies until the end of the week when I throw it out, 'cause that's my mixing bowl.
But, yes. Recipes.
Death By Chocolate Cake
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup alkalized (Dutch process) cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 1/3 cups sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup sour cream
1 bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips, the size you use to make chocolate chip cookies
2 cartons of chocolate frosting
Tin foil
Directions
0. Set a rack at the middle level of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour 2 (9 by 1 1/2-inch) round cake pans.
1. Combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and baking soda in a mixing bowl and stir well to mix.
2. Sift the dry ingredients onto a piece of parchment or waxed paper and set aside. I just put it in a separate bowl.
3. Beat the butter and sugar together in an electric mixer set at medium speed.
4. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating smooth after each addition.
5. Lower mixer speed to low and beat in half the dry ingredients.
6. Scrape bowl and beaters well.
7. Add the sour cream and scrape again, then beat in the remainder of the dry ingredients.
8. Dump in half the bag of chocolate chips. That is, half of what you would put into a batch of chocolate chip cookies
9. Scrape batter into prepared pans and bake cake 30 to 35 minutes, or until well risen and a toothpick or knife inserted into the center of the cake emerges clean.
10. Cool in pans on a rack for 5 minutes, then turn out of pans. Turn cake over again so it stands right side up.
11. Cut off the top of ONE (1) (just one) of the cakes.
12. When finished cooling (takes maybe an hour to get cool enough), spread a crapload of frosting onto the top of the topless cake. Put the other one on-top.
13. Put on a plate and frost the rest of it.
14. Cover with a crapload of chocolate chips.
15. Wrap in tin foil and refrigerate. Best served cold and all that jazz.
Notes
I mixed everything with a wooden spoon and it came out fine. Cool in the pans for more than five minutes. The chocolate chips make it kind of unstable and sometimes it falls apart when you move it. And be careful that then raw batter that come out when you stick in a knife isn't actually just melted chocolate chip.
Cheesy Buttered Italian Bred
Ingredients
1 baguette
1 block of Parmesan cheese
1 block of Asiago cheese
Garlic powder
Chopped oregano
Chopped basil
Chopped parsley
Tin foil
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Cut the bread into slices the size you want, but don't go all the way through. Leave the bottom crust connected, so that you have, well, a load of almost-sliced bread
3. Put a pat of butter in each slit in the bread.
4. Put baguette on a sheet of tin foil (so that it's easier to wrap up when covered with stuff).
4. Sprinkle the top with a wee bit of garlic, oregano, basil, and parsley.
5. Shred the two cheese onto the top. Take whatever falls onto the foil and sprinkle that on top, too. To taste. And stuff.
6. Sprinkle the top of the cheese with more of the spices/herbs/whatever to taste.
7. Wrap up in the tin foil.
8. Bake in the oven for 10 minutes.
9. Unwrap, let cool a wee bit so you don't burn your fingers off, and enjoy!
Alfredo Sauce
Ingredients
1 pint heavy cream
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Freshly cracked black pepper
Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, for garnish
Directions
1. Heat heavy cream over low-medium heat in a deep saute pan.
2. Add butter and whisk gently to melt.
3. Sprinkle in cheese and stir to incorporate.
4. Season with freshly cracked black pepper.
5. Serve immediately.
Notes
This is enough for one pound of pasta. It's edible, and if you don't know the difference, it tastes fine. But still not the best alfredo sauce recipe I've ever used. The major problem was that it was too watery. I still haven't found the perfect mix of cream and cheese to make it neither watery nor gritty.
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the_wanlorn) wrote2006-02-11 05:45 pm
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Clearly addicting.
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Thanks for cooking and I can't wait til next year when I can have that all the time, well almost all the time...
:)
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(Anonymous) 2006-02-13 12:17 am (UTC)(link)