Finally!

Pumpkin-pecan cheesecake!!!

I'll be quick with my blurb today!

1. Paula Deen pumpkin cheesecake recipe.
2. Substituted Pecan Sandies for Graham Crackers.
3. Candied Pecans.

Ingredients


Crust:
1 dozen crumbled Pecan Sandies
3 tablespoons light brown sugar
1 stick melted salted butter

Filling:
3 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, at room (softened)
1 (15-ounce) can pumpkin puree
3 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
1/4 cup sour cream
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Candied Pecans:

1 cup sugar
1 cup pecans
2 tbsp water

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2) Crust: Pecan Sandies are brittle enough to crumble in your hands if you don't have a food processor (like me). Squish this together with the other crust ingredients and press down into a 9" springform pan.




3) Filling: Beat the cream cheese until it's nice and smooth. Beat in the rest of the wet ingredients. Make sure to save the eggs for last if you forgot to set out your cream cheese before you left for work and had to nuke it when you got home (not that you would do that). You don't want accidental scrambled eggs in your cake. Add the vanilla, spices, and flour.



4) Bake: Pour the filling into the crust. At this point you may want to watch out for lumps. I always seem to have a little bit of cream cheese plastered on the bottom of the mixing bowl at the end, and we don't want those making the cake look all blobby and gross. Bake for one hour, cool to room temperature, and chill covered in the fridge (ideally overnight).


IMPORTANT SUGGESTIONS: Put the springform pan on a cookie sheet in the oven. I found that a lot of water cooked out of the pumpkin and seeped out into my oven, making it a little stinky the next few times I used it. Blech. Because of this escaping moisture, your cheesecake may tend to crack. It doesn't matter, because we are going to cover the cake in nuts. However, if you are lucky enough to avoid cracking during baking, cook the cheesecake 5 to 10 minutes less, turn off the oven, crack it, and allow the oven and cheesecake to cool. This prevents cracking because it limits the differential thermal contraction of the cake, blah, blah, science, blah.

Above: Science

5) Candied Pecans: Grease or line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Cook the sugar and water to 310 degrees. If you don't have a candy thermometer, this is the hard crack stage and you can tell when it has been reached by dropping a little of the candy into a glass of very cold water. If it has reached the proper temperature, it will be brittle and crack if you pull it out and try to bend it. Stir in the nuts, pour onto the cookie sheet, and allow to cool.

That is, as you may suspect, a tangerine holding down my parchment

6) Finishing: Crumble the bejeezus out of the pecans, discarding any extra lumps of sugar. If you won't be serving the cake immediately after preparing the pecans, store the nuts in a container with a piece of toast so they don't get soggy, and garnish at the last second.

I have lied to you.

I've realized that I cannot post photos of the cheesecake I've made for tonight's post! I won't finish garnishing it until tomorrow just before we eat it, lest the candied pecans get soggy in the fridge! Back tomorrow!

Regular Monday Post...

Moved to Tuesday! Why? Because I am making a pumpkin cheesecake tomorrow night for our office Christmas luncheon on Wednesday! So tune back in tomorrow night, for either a glowing success or a terrible bawling failure! Wheeeee!

Home Made Cookies Are Always Better!

The holiday season is upon us and if your like me that means it is time to make cookies! Cookies may not be the healthiest food you could be eating but if you make them from scratch they are so much better for you then store bought cookies or pre-made batter.
For the first round of cookies this season I decided to make 'Chocolate Crunchy Tops with Peanut Butter Chips". I did not make these cookies organic (I had everything in my cupboard already) however everything you need to make them is easy to find in an organic brand.

To make these little bits of yum you will need:
7oz bittersweet chocolate (chop into small pieces)
7tbls unsalted butter
1/2c sugar
3 eggs
1teaspoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup coco powder
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt

1/2 cups confectioners sugar
Take a heavy bottomed sauce pan and add in the butter and the chocolate. Melt these together on low until nice and smooth. Make sure to stir them frequently so you don't burn the bottom. Once melted remove from the heat and stir in the sugar until its dissolved. Then add your eggs one at a time stirring well after each one. Add in the vanilla and set aside.
Sift together your flour, coco, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. If you don't have a sifter mix the blend together well with a fork to make sure everything is evenly distributed. Add in the chocolate mixture a little at a time. You will have a soft dough when you are done. Then add in your peanut butter chips and cover with plastic wrap. Place in the fridge until the dough is firm.

Preheat your oven to 325. Take the confectioners sugar and place in a small bowl. Scoop dough into small balls and roll around in your hands to make a good shape. Drop into the sugar to coat the dough then knock off any extra sugar. Then place on your baking sheet!

Bake your cookies for 10-15 minutes. You know the cookies are done when they feel slightly firm on top. Let sit for a few minutes on the cookie sheet then place on a cooling rack.

My dough was a little dry so they didn't quite have the look I wanted but they still tasted pretty yummy! You will want something to drink when eating these I can assure you!
One tip, if you are using a regular cookie sheet be sure to grease it just a bit. I prefer an air bake sheet which keeps the cookies from sticking and also keeps them from burning!

Enjoy!

Good Noms bakes

I've been craving chocolatey minty cookies ever since Tu and I finished our Thin Mints. My search for recipes proved difficult, as there are practically zero recipes not involving Andes mints or not being a regular cookie with mint chips.
So I present to you - Chocolate Mint Snow-top cookies.
I found this recipe online and thought I'd give it a try
it calls for:

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 package (10 oz) mint flavored chocolate morsels. They didn't have these at any of the stores I normally shop, so I used Nestle dark chocolate and mint morsels. Set 1 cup of these aside from the rest.
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 stick butter, softened
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• I also added 1/2 tsp peppermint extract (not pictured). The chips didn't smell/taste that minty, and I wanted to feel the coolness. Keep in mind though that the extract is pretty strong, so don't overdo it.
• Confectioner's sugar (optional)

Combine the dry ingredients. Cream butter and sugar. Melt 1 cup of chocolate pieces. The best way to do this is over a double boiler, or whatever it's called when you put a smaller pot into a pot of boiling water. This minimizes your chances of burning. If you are feeling ballsy (or are thinking to yourself that you'll just take your chances since these are going to be baked into a cookie anyway), pile them into a microwave safe container and after the initial 30 seconds, microwave at 10-15 second intervals, testing after each one. Once I made the mistake of thinking that since the pieces were still keeping shape they weren't melted enough. I want you to know that through the pure magical power of deliciousness chocolate and candy will keep shape even if it's all liquid inside. So poke it before to make sure, or else you'll burn it.
Now you'll want to break out your Kitchenaid (remember me singing its praise a few posts ago?) Beat in melted chocolate, vanilla, peppermint, eggs, flour mixture (in increments). Or you can do it by hand. I did this time (my mixer is indisposed). Stir in the remaining chocolate chips.
Cover and pop in the freezer for the duration of time it takes to watch an episode of cheesy anime on Hulu. Preheat the oven to 350. Then roll your dough into 1 inch balls. The recipe says to then roll them in powdered sugar. I did this for the first batch (I only own one cookie sheet, shameful, I know). I found that it did absolutely nothing, because by the time the cookies are done baking, the sugar (assuming you got a nice, even coat) will completely dissolve and become invisible.I got sort of a clumpy coat' so you can see some sugar on them, but I skipped the sugar bath for the two subsequent batches. The cookies bake for about 12 minutes, or until cracks appear in the top. I undercooked the second batch a little, they are flatter and darker than the first batch.Yes, I have eaten nothing but cookies today, and yes I did get sugar on my lens taking this last photo. I like these cookies a lot, they have an excellent minty flavor, nice round shape (if you bake them long enough) and a delicious crispy yet soft on the inside texture.

A Tale of Two Pies, Part 2

We shall now continue our study of pies from last week. You may ask yourself "dangersecond, aren't you supposed to post on Wednesdays? Why do you always post early on Thursday morning?" There are two reasons for this, my friends. First of all, most of my friends live in the EST. I live in the PST. Also, I get off work at 8:00 PM and have a lot of things to do before I get to use the computer, such as nomming. So it ends up being late at night my time when I post. This is my explanation. Now here is an explanation of french apple pie.

If you recall, I left you last week with one completed pie and an extra pie crust. For this second pie, you will need the following ingredients:

• Five to seven apples (depending on their size)
  
• 1/4 Cup white sugar
• 1/4 Cup brown sugar
• 3/4 Cup flour
• 3/4 Teaspoon Cinnamon
• A dash of nutmeg
• 6 Tablespoons of butter

Preheat your oven to 400F.

Slice up the apples to be nice and small. I like to make them about the size of a thimble, like this:

Cut the butter into slices that are a couple of millimeters thick.

Put the apples in the pie crust in a nice, big mound (sorry, that's the only word I could think of). Then sprinkle them with the white sugar.

Mix all of the remaining ingredients together in a mixing bowl and stir them until the butter is all crumbled up.

Pour this on top of the apples.

Put your pie in the oven and bake it for 35 minutes.

The pie that will result will not have a standard "dough top", but instead a delicious crumb top similar to coffee cake. The only problem I ever have with this pie is that sometimes it becomes too juicy and I have burned myself with delicious, hot apple pie juices (man, this post is inadvertently sexual). So indulge with care.

Sesame Noodz

Today...sesame noodles! Super quick, super easy, super tasty!
Sesame seeds are one of my favorite things in the whole wide world of cooking. The seeds themselves, sesame oil, sesame paste. They are all delicious and work well in sweet or savory applications.

THAT BEING SAID, I must warn you, sesame oil should not be used as cooking oil. This is not because it will catch fire or release poison gas or anything. It just loses its flavor, and you end up using too much to get a good sesame flavor and your food goes to the table way too greasy.

My sesame noodles have mainly Japanese flavors, which means the sauce contains sweetener. I use honey because it really imparts a nice flavor and yields a thicker sauce. You can easily use sugar or splenda or stevia or whatever other junk you have lying around the house, though. And my cooking pretty much revolves around using what I have. This sauce is rather sweet, so if you think you may want to cut back, add half the honey and taste.

A few other things you may notice are the following:

• I've used dry sherry in this recipe. You can use mirin (rice wine) if you want, but it is just too hard to find mirin that doesn't have a gazillion additives. You can also use any other dry wine, or nothing, but sherry is my favorite.

• I've used basil in place of going out looking for shiso and ground ginger instead of fresh (it was snowing in VA this weekend, and we are straight up plowless in our town).

Step 1: Ingredients

2 tbsp honey or other sweetener
1/4 tsp ground ginger or 1 tsp fresh ginger
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp dried basil
1 tsp sesame paste
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp roasted sesame oil
3 scallions
1/2 small head of cabbage or bok choy
1/3 to 1/2 cup of onion
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 lb pasta

Step 2: Sauce

Whisk together honey, sesame paste, sesame oil, tamari, 1 tsp of the sherry, and the spices. Chop the scallions and add to the sauce. Set aside to marry.

Step 3: Cabbage

Roughly chop the onion and saute over medium heat in the butter. Chop the cabbage while the onion sautes.

After it cooks down, add the remaining sherry. Because you love sherry. Turn this to low and let it hang out and soften some more. Typically I cook everything al dente, but undercooked cabbage is just a bellyache waiting to happen.

Step 4: Pasta

Cook the pasta al dente in well salted water, according to the package's instructions. You can use any noodle, udon, bean threads, soba, yam noodles...but again, it was snowing, and I didn't feel like heading down to the specialty store for the good noodles.

Step 5: Finish up

Add the sauce to the noodles and stir well. The add the cabbage and serve!