I made these and they are delicious.
Category Archives: Food
kitchen nightmares, or how to make a lemon-strawberry trifle with ginger and thyme
Alright, so today is Easter, which means church with the family and dinner to follow family dinner. And I am in charge of dessert, because dessert is what I do. And I tried to think of something to make that wouldn’t be too heavy, because it’s spring now, and spring doesn’t feel like heavy dessert time to me. So I thought about it for a few minutes and decided to make a trifle. My aunt Martha makes this one with strawberries and pound cake soaked in orange juice and IT IS SO GOOD but my cousin’s birthday is also just around the corner and I know that he’s a big fan of lemon so I thought I would come up with some variation on the theme. So I thought… strawberries? Yes, please. And strawberries go very well with lemon. My two favorite gelato flavors to get together? Fragola e limone. Ay ay ay.
Anyway, so I didn’t want to soak a pound cake in lemon juice, because, um no. And I know how to make this amazing lemon glaze, but it is so full of sugar that it would just be too much for this particular dessert, so I scrapped that. And then I decided — oh! Lemon pound cake! Of course! Now, I’ve never made a lemon pound cake before, but I know the principles of pound cake and I further know that in order to make something lemony, all it takes is adding lemon to it, so I was pretty much all set. Also, you know what I love with lemon? Ginger. The ginger tempers the zing of the lemon a bit and adds a lovely note to the flavor and I know this because I make these lemon ginger shortbread cookies that are, not to brag, AMAZING. So I checked a pound cake recipe for ratios (baking is a science, and ratios must be correct) and then I decided I didn’t need butter AND shortening and instead of milk wouldn’t sour cream be better and also, you know, it needed lemon and ginger. So is the recipe I ended up with:
Flour mixture:
3 c. flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
The rest:
3 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. unsalted butter
ground ginger to taste
5 eggs
1 c. sour cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
zest and juice of one lemon
Normally I’d just give you the basics — oven temperature, pan size, baking time, etc., but today I have to tell you the story about how this cake came into being because it’s such a good story, you guys. Why don’t I have my own cooking show? Call me, Food Network!
Okay, so I combined the flour mixture. (You can sift or whisk or stir with a fork. I don’t care.) And then I began the task of creaming together the butter and the sugar. I like to start with cold butter, though I’m honestly not sure if this makes a difference or not. But I pretend it does and is worth the extra trouble. (I know it makes a difference to start with cold cream cheese when making cream cheese icing, and maybe that’s where I got this notion from from whence that notion came. Prepositions.) So okay, creaming together butter and sugar. You want to do this for a long time because this is the base of your cake batter and you want to get air into it. (This is another reason to start with cold butter, because if you start with room-temperature butter it’ll be runny and gross before you’re done.) You don’t want to overwork batter once you’ve added flour because this makes batter tough instead of light and airy. Light and airy — that’s the goal. Some advice from me to you.
Once I got the butter and sugar combined, I added the ginger. Then I added some more ginger, just for the hell of it. Not a ton, but you know, yay, ginger. At this point, I added the eggs (one at a time — v. important!) and added the vanilla and zested a lemon and added that and then juiced the lemon right into the mixing bowl (squeezed over a strainer, because you gotta watch out for seeds). Everything was combined, everything was looking the way it was supposed to look, so hurrah.
Then I started the next step, which was to add the sour cream and the flour mixture, alternating each about a third at a time. So, sour cream, combined. Flour, combined. More sour cream, combined. Then I added some more flour, and this is when disaster struck. I don’t even know what happened, honestly. I was apparently momentarily distracted, because that happens on occasion: my thoughts will shoot off to some sideways direction without warning and I’ll lose myself in the middle of wherever I was, in favor of saying “Oh really, brain?” Sometimes I snap myself out of this quickly and sometimes I follow one rabbit trail and then another and then another and then three hours later, I’m all, “What was I doing earlier, anyway?” I prefer to believe this is part of my charm. Anyway, so I guess that’s what happened, that my thoughts wandered off and I wandered with them instead of paying attention to the matter at hand. I don’t know how long I might’ve stayed distracted, but I was snapped back to the cake goings-on because suddenly there was a loud crash. I looked up and the mixer had done some kind of kamikaze dive out of the mixing bowl, winding up on the floor — still on, mind you — beaters spraying cake batter all over the kitchen. I’m not sure what I said at this moment, but it’s likely that it was in the vein of “Oh, fucking hell!” That’s me. I always talk like such a lady.
So I turned the mixer off and threw it into the sink. I think I said “I’ll deal with you later.” Because apparently small kitchen appliances need to be spoken to like they’re misbehaving children sometimes. And then I noticed that I had cake batter all over my arm and sprayed up my shin and thigh. Nice, right? I think so too. I figured that was as good a time as any to do a little taste test so I licked some of it off my hand. (What? My hands were clean. And also Classy is my middle name.) Not bad, I thought, all things considered. And then anyway, I had to wipe up the batter from the kitchen floor and cabinets, then I had to mop the floor, then I had to dump out the mop water, then I had to wipe down the countertop, then I had to deal with the mixer. And by the time I got all that done, I was fucking exhausted (it was also about 11 p.m. by that point) but I still had to finish combining the flour and sour cream. Which I finally got done and then I poured it into a sheet pan and baked it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately 25 minutes. (Why a sheet pan? Because I wanted it to be relatively flat so I could just cut it into small squares for my trifle. If I’d been making the cake to be a stand-alone cake, then it would’ve gone into a different pan. Mind you, this makes A GIANT AMOUNT OF CAKE.)
After the cake was out of the oven, I chopped some strawberries and threw them into a bowl with a spoonful of sugar and the leaves from a few sprigs of fresh thyme. Then I made some pudding. I put the bowl of pudding and the bowl of strawberries into the refrigerator. Then I did some other stuff for awhile and somewhere around midnight though I can’t remember if it was before or after, the cake was cool so I covered it and then I finally went to bed.
And now. The trifle part.
So. You start with a trifle bowl:
(Let’s pretend that’s not blurry.)
Trifle bowls are so pretty, though they seem so unnecessary because what are you going to use a trifle bowl for except for trifles? But still, I am happy to have a trifle bowl because it is so trifley.
And then there’s the lemon pound cake:
Of course, first I had to test it to make sure it was okay, considering what an adventure it was to get it made. So I sliced it up into small squares and took one. OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. It’s lemony. It’s gingery. It’s dense, but not heavy. It’s airy. It’s very moist (I can’t even tell you how much it pains me to use this word, because as you know, it is one of my least favorite words of all time. OF ALL TIME!) and has a fine crumb and is perfect in every way. Which is good, because oh mercy, I have so much of it.
So anyway, I cut the cake up into squares and tossed them into the trifle bowl to make the bottom layer. Like so:
And then this is how much cake I have left over:
Yeah. Um, who wants some leftover pound cake?
The next step is to layer pudding (you can also use some kind of custard or something):
And then the strawberries:
And then whipped cream, more lemon zest and some fresh thyme leaves:
So easy. Haven’t tried it yet, because it’s for dinner this afternoon, but how could it be bad?
Happy Easter, kids.
chocolate red-hot shortbread cookies
I don’t cook as much as I used to, because normally when I come home at night I’m so tired I’m ready to fall over dead, but every once in awhile, I’ll have an idea for something that I want to try. And so it was with these cookies, a pretty straightforward chocolate shortbread recipe I found while I was trying to find a use for a box of unsweetened baker’s chocolate. Well, I didn’t want to use the whole box at once (that would’ve been a lot of chocolate) but I figured if I had a recipe handy, I could whip up something chocolatey from time to time as needed. Because sometimes chocolate is a necessity of life. Anyone who doesn’t believe that has obviously never had to be nice to people while inflicted with PMS. I’m just saying.
Anyway, I was lying in bed a few mornings ago and I was thinking about cookies. It’s much more pleasant to think about cookies than to think about getting up and going to work, wouldn’t you say? And I thought something like this:
That chocolate shortbread cookie recipe… that was alright, but I think it needed something. You know what would be good? Cinnamon or something. Oh! Something spicy! That would be even better! Remember in the movie Chocolat when they put pepper in chocolate? That’s totally a good idea. Remember also in that movie when Johnny Depp said something like “I’ll come by and get that squeak out of your door” and it’s INSANELY SEXY even though the line itself is not sexy at all, it’s just that Johnny Depp — why am I thinking about this? Oh, right. I think perhaps if I put cinnamon and pepper in the cookie dough, that would be a good idea. I’ll try that.
So even though I’ve been sick with some general creeping malaise since Thursday, I decided today, now that I’m feeling reasonably better but still kind of tired, that I would make some cookies. I used half the recipe that I linked above. Like so:
1 stick unsalted butter (room temperature)
1/4 c. powdered sugar
1 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 oz. melted unsweetened chocolate
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
And then I added about a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a couple of dashes of cayenne pepper.
Knead dough to combine ingredients evenly, roll to 1/4 of an inch thick, cut into whatever shape your heart desires, I suppose, though I just used a small drinking glass instead of a cookie cutter (I know I used to have cookie cutters, but I’ll be damned if I can find them) that was about 2 inches in diameter, and I baked them at 325 degrees F for 10 minutes. I left them to cool on the pan for an additional 5-10 minutes, which firmed them up some, and then I moved them to a wire rack.
So, the verdict –
Buttery, chocolatey goodness. The cinnamon really comes through, and just adds another note to the flavor, and the cayenne pepper is barely detectable (if I make these again — and I will — I think I’ll actually measure the cayenne; I think a little extra dash wouldn’t hurt, though it’s a delicate balance because I want the cookies to be chocolate with a kick, and not the other way around), but there’s a slight bit of heat at first bite and again at the finish. Maybe they’re perfect as-is. Though I guess it wouldn’t kill me to measure.
There you go. They’re at least as delicious as an innuendo-spouting Johnny Depp.
day ten: preserves
From pj:
How long can you keep stuff in the freezer for before it goes bad? Do different things have different half lifes? I threw away some frozen chicken breasts and some hot dogs and some cured ham and some rolls and some white thing I couldn’t even begin to figure out what it was but in each instance I realized I have absolutely no idea what the deal is with the whole freezer/food combo and when things are bad even though they are solid blocks of ice.
Here’s a simple phrase (that also happens to rhyme) that I learned once in regards to food safety, and it has served me well: When in doubt, throw it out!
You can freeze things for a really long time, but make sure to seal them well. Air is the enemy when it comes to preserving food.
On the subject of food turning bad, what’s the deal with the canned stuff too?
I tend to avoid canned food because it often contains nearly lethal amounts of sodium and I am not down with salt. I mean, I like salt, but really sparingly. Canned goods are technically non-perishable, but if you ever see a can that is misshapen or lumpy-looking, then throw it away. Unless you think botulism might be a good time.
peach cobbler is delicious
Yesterday, I got some peaches, and I had to turn them into this bourbon peach cobbler. (Recipe by Tyler Florence, one of the few people on Food Network I don’t hate. I always play with recipes a little… I followed this pretty closely, because it’s rather perfect as-is, but I did add a little (a teaspoon, maybe) ground cardamom to the peach/bourbon/cinnamon/sugar mixture, because cinnamon and cardamom go together like Siegfried and Roy.) So as I made the cobbler, I took photos because, you know, why not? (Also because apparently I am mean to people who don’t have any bourbon peach cobbler. Muahahahahaha Sorry.)
I’m not going to admit whether or not I licked my plate. But you guys? This is so good. No foolin’.
let’s make fun of the slap chop
Here are my thoughts on this delightful commercial, provided here with notes on which moment in the commercial I thought them:
0:01 — Hi, Vince.
0:05 — I’m gonna be in a great mood all day because I’m gonna be slapping my troubles away. With the Slap Chop. Aside from the obvious inference that slapping things is a mood elevator (and I think we can go ahead and perceive that euphemistically if we’d like), I’m not sure I can say that I’ve ever thought of un-chopped vegetables as things that are ruining my life.
0:08 — If I slap a potato once, I’ll have big chunks for stew. But if I slap it twice, I can have home fries! You know, call me crazy, but this looks more inconvenient than just using a knife.
0:12 — I will never add a mushroom.
0:13 — The more you do it, the finer it gets. That’s really true about so many things, isn’t it?
0:17 — Granted, cutting up a lot of vegetables to make a salad can be time-consuming.
0:19 — Hello pizza? With a baby carrot, a chunk of celery and a radish? CARROTS DON’T GO ON PIZZA.
0:25 — Boring tuna = boring life. Got it.
0:26 — And now we’re delving into the exciting world of the split-screen. Fancy!
0:30 — For people who eat egg salad (I do not ever, because, um, no) I suppose slapping a mini gherkin would be much easier than using a spoonful of relish.
0:33 — I can add the ham.
0:34 — Actually I do have time to make breakfast, because I’ve never been particularly challenged by pouring cereal into a bowl or opening a container of yogurt. Be that as it may, explain to me how a chopped hard-boiled egg, pickle and green onion, combined with what appears to be less than a third of a piece of paper-thin-sliced ham constitutes breakfast. I understand that people eat all kinds of things for the most important meal of the day, but really? Do you then put that chopped up amalgamation of awfulness on a plate with some toast? Or do you also add the toast and slap that together with the egg/pickle/onion/ham combination to blend everything together into an unrecognizable pulp? And why do I have the song “Smack My Bitch Up” stuck in my head right now? Dammit.
0:36 — I can have an exciting life now.
0:38 –”You’re gonna love my nuts.” Whether that’s euphemistic or literal, he is so wrong.
0:41 — A one-finger application to the nuts, eh?
0:43 — They’re gonna charge a dollar for toppings at the ice cream stores, because ice cream stores are brazen that way. But with this amazing product, you can get your fingered nuts for free.
0:44 — What about fruit?
0:45 — “Put a mango.” That’s not even a complete sentence. And he’s blatantly disregarding the strawberry.
0:49 — “Isn’t that beautiful on your ice cream?” I don’t know but it’s absolutely breathtaking on the countertop there, Vince. I especially appreciate how the strawberry sparkles.
0:53 — It pops open in three easy steps. And then you can clean the hell out of it.
0:57 — You can’t pop open other choppers. He looks angry about this.
0:58 — Over the shoulder and into the sink. I’m impressed.
1:02 — He left the skin on that garlic? What a rebel.
1:06 — Okay. The onion with the skin. It’s already chopped in half, of course, because there’s no way anyone would ever fit a whole onion into that thing. This means two things: one, you already have to use a knife so why bother getting something else dirty, and two, if the onion is chopped in half you can just pull the skin right off of it.
1:10 — Wait, the Slap Chop can guarantee that I won’t cry anymore?
1:14 — Do people really use food processors just to chop onions? Honest question.
1:17 — We’re gonna make America skinny again. Right. Let’s review the food dear Vince has Slap Chopped so far: a potato to make home fries, a carrot and a piece of celery and a radish for salad or pizza (mmhmm), a chunk of tuna mixed with aforementioned carrot/celery/radish mixture to make tuna salad which is something people typically mix with mayonnaise, a hard-boiled egg and a pickle and a piece of green onion to make egg salad which is again something people typically mix with mayonnaise, all that egg salad stuff mixed with ham for the worst breakfast ever, nuts and fruit to go on ice cream, garlic and onions. While none of these things are inherently unhealthy, the suggestions for use aren’t exactly directed toward the wisest choices possible either.
1:21 — And then after that whole bit about making America skinny again, here comes the special offer for the cheese grater. It’s called the Graty.
1:25 — Watch this! It’s cheese! Grated cheese! It’s a miracle!
1:26-1:29 — “Tacos, fettuccine, linguine, martini, bikini.” Oh Vince, you poet. Grated cheese for tacos, sure. Fettuccine and linguine, okay. Martini? Dear lord no. And as for that bikini thing, no matter how I imagine it — a bikini made of cheese, or a bikini full of cheese — it’s just wrong.
1:40 — I feel a special offer coming on.
1:42 — Oh, we’re so close to the special offer! I can only get it within the next 20 minutes (I know, you can’t do this all day). I’m so excited!
1:44 — I CAN GET THE GRATY ABSOLUTELY FREE! Cheese bikinis, here I come! But wait, didn’t you just special offer me the Graty back at 1:21? Allow me to rewind and check. Yes, you said “If you buy the Slap Chop, we’re gonna give you the Graty for cheese.” If you say you’re gonna give it to me, that means it’s a gift. So we’re not really covering any new ground, are we? No.
1:45 — Just pay for processing! What kind of cheapskate are you? Giving me a present and then making me pay for processing. The nerve.
1:46 — Here’s how to order. Punk.
1:54 — A foldable cutting board? Do wonders never cease?
So I went to the Slap Chop website, and aside from the fact that it forced me to do this:
I noticed two things. First, I noticed that if I ordered through the website, I could get two Slap Chops and two Gratys for the price of one! You know, in case I want to do it two-handed. Second, shipping and handling is $7.95, which I’d have to pay twice, you know, because god forbid they put both Slap Chops in one box, so really, instead of paying $19.95, I actually would have to pay something like $35.85, probably plus tax.
Oh. One more thing. The fine print:
The Slap Chop is a manual chopper machine that works when you slap the plunger part. Every slap triggers the 3 blades below to chop and cut the food. [Chop AND cut. Not just chopping, not just cutting.] The more you slap the Slap Chop, the finer the food gets. Today you can get the Slap Chop and Graty for just $19.95 plus $7.95 shipping and handling. [Hallelujah!] But that’s not all! You’ll also get a 2nd Slap Chop and Graty set for FREE, just pay $7.95 to cover the shipping and handling fee! [You're so generous!] The Graty for cheese comes with 2 blades, fine and coarse. Place any kind of cheese in the container, turn and press the black top twister and the cheese comes right out for omelets, salads and pasta. [Don't forget the martinis and the bikinis.] The Slap Chop and the Graty for cheese both come with a 3 year warranty and are both dish washer safe. [That's a relief.]
So, yeah. I’m so glad we did this.
why roasted tomatoes are a good idea
I have hated tomatoes all my life, so it’s probably weird for me to extol the virtues of roasted tomatoes, but in the words of Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” I hate raw tomatoes. There is something about the way they smell that never fails to make me gag, and that oozing gelatinous goo in their centers tends to make me want to die, but I can handle them okay in other forms (except stewed tomatoes, which may possibly be more vile than their raw counterparts). I like salsa. It’s cool. Whatever.
Over this past year, I’ve been cooking a lot more, because it’s not like I don’t have time, and I’ve tried roasting a lot of things. I’ve roasted garlic and peppers and even the occasional onion, and once I decided to give roasted tomatoes a try, and you know what? I love roasted tomatoes. Somehow everything that I find gross about a raw tomato doesn’t bother me when a tomato is roasted. I don’t notice that tomato smell, and the gelatinous goo is no more. Also, roasting heightens the flavor, so they end up tasting like bursts of awesome. I’m all in favor of roasted tomatoes.
If you’ve never roasted tomatoes before, you should give it a try. Even if you discover that you don’t want to just stand in your kitchen eating them straight off the pan like I do, there are several uses for them. They make colorful, tasty pizza toppings. They’re good in salads, and I bet they’d be great tossed in some pasta, but since my diet is largely gluten-free these days (though kind of just incidentally and not militantly, as it’s not a health-related issue for me, so I guess I could say that it’s really more just low-gluten), I haven’t eaten pasta in ages. But I made dinner earlier this week with ribbons of zucchini and yellow squash and tossed it with roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic, a little butter and some fresh basil and IT WAS SO GOOD. So there’s that. Today I’m making pesto out of them. (Or the ones I don’t eat right off the pan when they come out of the oven, that is.)
How do you roast a tomato? It’s so easy. I like to use grape tomatoes because they’re small and they don’t take very long, but other varieties are okay too, though I’d probably never try it with those big beefsteak tomatoes. The first thing to do is to heat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Then cut the tomatoes in half (if you’re using bigger ones, I guess you should quarter them, though if you use roma tomatoes you could probably just halve those) and place them face-up on a foil-lined baking sheet. About one package of grape tomatoes will fill a sheet pan. Once you’ve gotten them all lined up, drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. I like to use sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, but use whatever’s handy. Once you’ve done that, it’ll look like this:
At this point, if you wanted to be fancy, you could also add some garlic cloves (leave their papers on them) or tear up some fresh basil leaves and sprinkle those things around, or you could go ahead and not do that. I think some people insist on the garlic, but honestly, the garlic usually can’t stand up to being roasted in individual cloves and without the protection of being wrapped in foil, so even though you might be able to eke some roasted garlic out of larger cloves, what you typically end up with is a bunch of charred black garlic rocks on the pan, which kind of irritates me (perhaps irrationally), because it seems like a waste of perfectly good garlic and I don’t notice that it imparts that much flavor. Your mileage, of course, may vary. I have no argument against using fresh herbs, however.
Once you have your prep work done, place the tomatoes in the oven and let them do their thing. With grape tomatoes, this whole process takes about an hour or so. I usually check after an hour and if they’re not done, I let them go a little longer. Brilliant.
When they are done, they’ll look shriveled and slightly charred. Like this:
All that sci-fi goo will caramelize and they’ll be sweet and the pepper will give them a little kick (depending on how much you use and how you define “kick”). You could let them cool or you could dive right in. I won’t judge you.
So if all you want are roasted tomatoes, then you’re all done. If you want to make pesto out of them, carry on like so:
To a food processor (or I think a blender would work), add the tomatoes and the following:
3 large garlic cloves or about 6 small ones
between 5-10 fresh basil leaves
fresh Italian parsley (not a lot, about 8-10 leaves)
a handful of pine nuts, or I used whole natural almonds, toasted
extra virgin olive oil (about 1/2 cup)
(You can add other things, like some onion, or some red pepper flakes or Parmesan cheese or more salt & pepper, but I didn’t add any of these. I did throw in about 1/4 of a sweet yellow pepper, though. Also, sorry I’m terrible at measuring. I like to throw stuff together until it works. This means I usually don’t know exactly how much I use of anything, because I just put stuff together until it looks right and tastes good, unless I’m baking and then I measure. So you might want to go lighter on the oil and then add more as necessary.)
Pulse together until it’s the right consistency, meaning there are no big chunks of anything and it’s a kind of paste. It’ll look like this:
And then I put it into a jar because I like to reuse jars. Like so:
The end.
let’s talk about cake
So, I do a lot of cooking in my every day life, though this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Oh sure, I always knew how, and I could cook well if I needed to, usually with some sort of accompanying adventure/disaster (though I always found that in cooking, like in life, things always turn out okay if you just roll with the disaster instead of letting disaster stop you), but over the past few months, I’ve embraced the fact that I’m home a lot, and I might as well use at least some of that free time in a productive way. So, you know, why not cook things?
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I had a dream. I was planning to make a lemon cake for my cousin’s birthday, because I had been nominated to make one and I was thinking about the glaze, and then I thought about chocolate, because I think about chocolate sometimes, and I must have fallen asleep in the middle of all this dessert-thinking, because in my dream, I was making a cake. It was the same cake as the lemon cake, except instead of putting lemon zest into the batter, I put in some tangerine zest. And then I poured this orange-bourbon-chocolate concoction over the top and it was INCREDAMAZING. And I thought, “You should make that!” But my cousin wanted a lemon cake for his birthday so I made the damn lemon cake. It was very tasty, but I kept thinking about my dream of orange-bourbon-chocolate goodness, and so yesterday, I decided to go for it. (I’m like Michael Ian Black that way.)
First, I needed something on which to pour this glaze, though I suppose I could’ve just eaten it right out of the pan. I have this cake recipe that I found online somewhere (can’t remember where) and it’s pretty decent but I’ve modified it a little bit, because that’s what I do with recipes: change them. I figure the written recipe is really just a starting point, and as long as you don’t substitute one thing for something wildly different then you can have a bit of leeway with ingredients. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this is how personal recipes happen. (I think I may tinker with this one a little bit more.) Anyway, here’s the cake recipe:
2 c. all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 c. butter (room temperature)
2 c. granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 c. sour cream
You can zest a lemon or an orange into this too for some citrusy zing.
Heat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease & flour 9″ springform pan.
Sift together flour, baking powder, salt.
With mixer, cream together butter & sugar on high for 5 minutes. Beat in eggs 1 at a time. (If you are adding citrus zest, add it at this point.)
Add 1/3 of the flour mixture, then 1/3 c. sour cream. Alternate these until you run out of them.
Bake 55 minutes, or until tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool in pan for at least 10 minutes before removing the springform. Glaze that bitch.
Heartbreaker Glaze:
This part is tricky because I didn’t actually measure stuff; I just threw it into the pan, as is my wont. If I were to estimate, I would guess the following measurements –
1 c. orange juice (pulp-free — I typically like to chew my orange juice because I’m a weirdo, but pulp is bad news for this recipe, I reckon)
a double shot of bourbon
1 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate (I know this one is accurate)
In a small saucepan (or pot, if you prefer), bring the orange juice and bourbon to a boil. Add the chocolate. Don’t boil it over, but if you do, nobody will cry. Reduce heat and simmer until the mixture is reduced by (roughly) half to two-thirds. Pour the hot glaze onto the cake. It will harden as it cools.
So how does it taste? Well, it has the sweet orange top note, followed by the dark sweetness of the bourbon, with a slightly bitter finish from the unsweetened chocolate. It’s this bittersweetness that makes it the food equivalent of remembering a lost love. Eat and enjoy. Listening to Elliott Smith CDs and silently crying optional.
