Keep Your Day Job

Ok...so as of last blog, I planned to start my new job at Baum's. We'll....Baum's bombed, in all negative aspects of the word. For reasons I will not elicit here, my first day at Baum's turned into my last day at Baum's. Retail baking, especially in my case, was not the smiles & rainbows that I'd imagined. Baking in one's own kitchen, taking pride in your work and watching people eat your masterpieces is nothing like working at a commercial bakery. So taking after Brett Farve, I went back to my Pennington job with more flexible/desirable hours and coworkers I can feed with my old-fashioned home baking.I am not naive; I realize the world outside of student work is not so forgiving. I'm just glad I learned the lesson of "keep your day job" earlier rather than later. As my Dad constantly reminds me "work is work, if you liked it then it wouldn't be called work."

On the up side, the rest of the week was work-free lending itself to more recreational cooking and baking!! A couple weekends ago my parent's took a road trip to Austin to visit my sister leaving their house vacant....you know what that means....AN EMPTY KITCHEN! As soon as I got out of class on Friday, I scooted over there, started cooking and invited my girl friends over for dinner and a House marathon! Using my Baker's Manual and a new addition to my baking collection, BakeWise, I planned out my menu of mozzarella sticks, homemade pizza and chocolate lava cake.


Marinara Sauce - Giada's recipe, for dipping cheese sticks and pizza sauce
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped - forgot to buy this at the grocery, used about 1/2 tbsp of celery seed instead
1 carrot, peeled and finely chopped
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
32-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 dried bay leaves
Over medium-high heat, I sauted the onion and garlic in the oil until translucent. Added the carrots, celery seed, salt and pepper and cooked until carrots were soft. Threw in the tomatos and bay leaf, turned down the heat to low and let it simmer for about an hour while moving onto my lava cakes!

Pizza Crust
255 g (1 1/3 cups) cool water
17 oz (~3 3/4 cups) all purpose flour
7 oz (~1 1/2 cups) bread flour
0.165 oz (1 1/2 tsp) rapid rise yeast - recipe calls for half but I accidently used double and it worked out well, rose very quickly
1 oz (1/8 cup) olive oil
1/2 tbsp honey
1/2 tbsp salt

Heat the water to ~105 degrees F. Mix (with hook) the flour and water in stand mixer, which I actually had thanks to Mom's kitchen.
Add the yeast, oil, honey. Knew with hook on low speed until combined then add salt. Increase the speed to medium for 8-10 min. The dough will be quite sticky, not to worry. Grease a bowl and plop your dough into it, grease your hands and form into a mound. Cover with plastic wrap and let it rise for about 1 hour.
When the dough has double in size, punch it down and roll it out into your pizza round. Perforate before adding your toppings to avoid air bubbles.
Bake the dough at 500F for 5 min. then add your toppings.
I like to add cheese between layers to keep everything glued together. First was the sauce with a layer of mozzarella cheese. Then tomatoes, and green peppers topped with cheese.
And finally pepperonis & mushrooms topped with a little grated parmesan.
Bake at 500 for 10 more min. until crust is browned and cheese melted!
Nom-noms.

Mozzarella Sticks - a truly original Katie recipe!
I've only concocted 2 truly original recipes at present and here is the second.
2 egg whites
2 tbsp milk
4 oz mozzarella (1/2 of a block)
1 cup Italian Bread Crumbs
1 cup grits
Salt & pepper

Whist the egg whites together with the milk for your egg wash. Cut the mozzarella into sticks with about 1-2cm width and 4 in. length. Dip the sticks in the egg wash then roll in the italian bread crumbs.
Once you've dipped all the stick in the bread crumbs, wash them in the eggs onces more and roll in ....hold your breath....GRITS! Sturdy enough to hold the cheese in and gives a crunchy coat.
Make sure you completely coat the sticks with the bread crumbs and grits or else the cheese will ooze out of any uncoated regions during baking/frying. Ideally you would fry the sticks but I baked them at 500 for about 5 min then finished them off by pan frying them in some oil.
Open up!!!
Bingham enjoyed some left overs a couple of days later...

Intense Chocolate Lava Cakes

Nonstick cooking spray
8 oz. semisweet baking chocolate
1 cup unsalted butter
3 large eggs
3 large egg yolks
6 tbsp sugar
5 tbsp all-purpose flour

Just looking at those ingredients might make your arteries wince. And let me tell you, this stuff is toxicly rich, make sure you have some tums for this bad boy.
I sprayed down the ramekins (or as you can see, whatever I could find) and lined them with parchment paper and sprayed on top of that also & set aside 6 tbsp of the chocolate.

In the mixer, I whisked the eggs, yolks, and sugar for 15 min. In a double boiler, I heated up the remaining chocolate with the butter until it was just melted then took it off the heat to cool. Turned the speed down on the mixer then added the flour.

I then whisked in the cooled chocolate/butter in until it was smooth.

After you parcel out the batter, put a tbsp of chocolate in the center. It's best if the piece of chocolate kinda floats in the batter, but if they are too big don't push the chuck to the bottom or else when you flip it over you'll have a little well of chocolate. It would be better just to leave some exposed to the top (which I learned the hard way).

Bake in the center of the oven at 325-350F for about 10 min until the outside is done but the center is jiggly. Run a knife around the edge, flip over, peel off the paper and definitely serve with ice cream! (or settle for frozen whipped cream).

Much more baking to come! I'm starting to get paid cake orders so keep up, this could get interesting!