Buy a Doughnut [/Donut] Today... or Make One Yourself!

Today we celebrate "Buy a Doughnut Day," but as the folks at CDKitchen suggest, why not modify this day to be "Make a Doughnut [/Donut] Day"? In honour of the donut, I finally got around to making Chinese-style donuts which fed perfectly as a dessert to a dinner I had last night with four Denison students who live in my residence hall. Just as these recipes suggest (links 1, 2, and 3), the easiest way to make homemade donuts is to shape them out of the pre-made buttermilk biscuit canisters you can find in the grocery store. But with successive failed attempts at working with yeast, I was determined to finally master its use in creating homemade, from-scratch, donuts fit for celebrating. By combining these recipes (here and here) along with the brilliant recipe found at the Pioneer Woman's blogsite, I got around to making light donuts that were warm with doughy goodness. I have made donuts before using the pre-made stuff, but with a little patience, the from-scratch variety is much more meaningful. Along with my Chinese-style donuts with spiced chocolate sauce and whipped cream, the rest of the dinner menu included a Vienna pizza bread on my part, and by Joy (one of the students), soy sauce chicken and mushrooms, spicy sliced pork and cabbage, and "real" rice(!).

Celebrating National Chocolate Cupcake Day 2011 with Dark Chocolate

If you didn't know, today is National Chocolate Cupcake Day and quite naturally I had to celebrate this unofficial food holiday that's nevertheless recognised this time of you. Combining my adapted dark chocolate cake recipe (based off of the recipe found on the back of Hershey's dark cocoa powder containers) and this one offered by online specialty foods magazine The Nibble, I woke up this morning prepared to bake some cupcakes in acknowledgment of this 19th century treat. The one issue I faced was the fact that I don't have any cupcake pans in my apartment and so I baked two cupcakes in ramekins and poured the rest of the batter into a baking dish; by definition, a cupcake is typically a cake made as a single serving and so at least the ramekin versions fit the celebration. On the menu: Dark Chocolate Chunk Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Orange and Almond Cream Filling and Dark Chocolate Buttercream Frosting.

Textural Tastes in Bacon, Apple, and Brie

For the past week or two, I have been especially craving bacon (in actuality, when is this never the case?). And with an apple I still had sitting around from Bloomington, and leftover brie and puff pastry from last week's Paving the Way dinner, I finally got around to mixing all the textural tastes of bacon, apple, and brie in a tartlet form on two days ago.

Don't Scramble the Eggs! ...That's Easier Said than Done (Pairs of Pictures)

As you may or may not have noticed by now, I typically select a single photo to kick-start each blog posts. However, with the way the rest of this post is set up, I have done away with this short tradition. Covered here is a post which describes a night which began at 9pm and somehow ended about 4.5 hours later. Time certainly flies when you are having fun!

Couldn't Go to Sleep... So I Made an Orange Dark Chocolate Soufflé with Orange Dark Chocolate Custard

The introduction of the soufflé is a bit hazy for me, but I've narrowed it down to two possibilities: a soufflé made by a PBS cooking personality back in the '90s (most likely Julia Child) or the soufflé made by Vince on the show "Recess." There must have been something about the possibility of youth just getting up and leaving school to train in culinary arts in Paris that resonated with me. Whichever of the initial influences,, one fact remained: I had perceived soufflés as too delicate, necessitating absolute silence, and extremely difficult and pointless to try and bake, because it would all collapse in the end. Well, let me say that whatever brought me to baking a soufflé of all things has shown me how not so difficult the process really is.