The Contest is officially Over
Thank you so much to everyone who entered. I LOVED reading your cooking stories. They were just wonderful. Thank you for sharing those stories. I’m off to pick the winner.
Updated!!
I’ve made this post sticky for the duration of the contest. There’s a new recipe (this time, chocolate mousse) and a link to Chapter 3 of My Dangerous Pleasure. Also, since I was late getting out my newsletter, I’ve extended my contest deadline to Midnight Pacific June 4th in order to give them time to enter.
The Contest Info
As some of you may know, the heroine of My Dangerous Pleasure, Paisley Nichols, owns a bakery. In honor of that and in shameless promotion of the book (it’s out May 31, have you bought your copy yet?) I’m going to be giving away a slew of cooking supplies to one lucky winner. The supplies will include, among other things:
- Baker’s Sugar
- Cake Flour
- Chocolate (assortment)
- Dutch Process cocoa
- Vanilla
- Parchment paper
- Flour
- A cookbook or two
If the winner is in the US I will also arrange to ship some awesome butter to the winner. If I find out that butter can be shipped internationally, I will so do, but I cannot guarantee that will be possible. I will also include some other baking-related surprises.
But Wait! There’s More!
Over the next three weeks my publisher will be making chapters 1-3 of My Dangerous Pleasure available for you to read:
What Would I Do With All That Baking Stuff?
Well, you could make some awesome desserts . . .
The week before last, I posted a recipe for Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Cookies. download a pdf of the Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Recipe. Last week’s recipe was for download a pdf of the Butter Cookies recipe
This week? Chocolate Mousse. download a pdf of the Chocolate Mousse recipe
Notes on the Mousse
The higher quality the chocolate, the less tolerant this is to inattention, over-beating, cheating and timing. I recommend making this once with cheap chocolate, as it is less prone to seizing and will still taste really good. (but not to-die-for good) that way you’ll understand the steps involved and will not be as tense when you’re using the good chocolate.
Also, despite the cautions, this doesn’t take all that long to make. You can do it!
Notes on Ingredients
Heavy Whipping Cream: Get the highest fat content you can find. Not the cheapo grocery brand unless you happen to know it’s high quality.
The Chocolate
You have to look really, really hard to find chocolate without soy lethicin in it. Sadly several formerly high quality chocolates have started adding soy lethicin. If you find chocolate without it, almost by definition, you’ve found a high quality chocolate.
You should be able to pronounce all the ingredients in your chocolate: cocoa, cocoa butter and not much else. Look to the Belgian or Swiss chocolates.
A note on separating the eggs
There CANNOT be EVEN A DROP of egg yolk in the egg whites. This means you need three bowls. One for successful egg whites with no yolk, one for the egg yolks and one to use when you’re separating an egg. That way if the egg is old and the yolk is runny or what have you, you only need to discard one egg and won’t contaminate the successes.
Seized Chocolate
Seized chocolate gets instantly grainy and lumpish. You can try stirring your way out of it, but you’re likely to get mousse with an unappealing texture. This actually happened to a friend of mine. It was sad, and she cried.
Ingredients
16 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate, finely chopped or as chips.
2 cups cold heavy whipping cream
6 large eggs, separated
Directions
1. Whip the cream to soft peaks, put aside in a new bowl and refrigerate
2. Melt the chocolate.
You can do this in a double-boiler (over-but-not-in hot but not simmering water). Stirring often. With this method you will almost certainly end up having to wait for the chocolate to cool down to warm.
It’s far easier to do this in the microwave:
Put your chocolate in a bowl, and NEVER nuke for LONGER THAN 30 seconds.
Stir. Nuke again for 30 seconds.
Stir and nuke, stir and nuke etc until the chocolate still has a few lumps.
Now, you just stir continuously until the rest of the chocolate melts. It doesn’t take long and the chocolate will not be all that hot. Dab some chocolate on your lower lip. It should feel warm but not hot. If it’s too cool, the chocolate will seize. Same if it’s too hot.
3. Whip the egg whites in a very clean bowl until they are foamy and beginning to hold a shape. Beat until soft peaks form. Soft peaks should fold over and not be rigid.
4. When the chocolate is at the proper temperature, add about 1/4th or less of the whipped cream.
Add the egg yolks. If you don’t add the whipped cream first, the chocolate will seize when you add the yolks. (It will also seize if the chocolate is too hot.)
Fold by hand until mixed. Do this fairly quickly because you don’t want the chocolate to seize. (Fast, but not too fast!) Too slow and the chocolate will seize.
Gently fold in the rest of the whipped cream. You need the fluffiness, so be gentle.
5. Fold in half the egg whites until just incorporated using a whisk, then fold in the remaining whites, switching to a spatula. Be gentle. There should be no chunks or bits of white, but you need this fluffy so don’t over-work.
6. Spoon the mousse into a serving bowl or individual dishes and refrigerate for at least 8 hours.
How to Enter the Contest
Leave a comment on this post in which you mention your fondest, funniest, saddest or most embarrassing cooking memory. Feel free to make one up. If you have one involving Elves, demons, fiends or other supernatural creatures, that would be pretty darn funny.
Leave a comment by midnight Pacific June 4, 2011.
Contest void where prohibited. No purchase necessary. People related to me can’t win. Sorry.
Winner will be chosen at random on or shortly after June 5.
Go!
Tags: cookies, My Dangerous Pleasure
my favorite memories are of the time I was making a Cake and pull it out of the oven and it flipped over and fell out of the oven on to the oven door and i was up set and my brother that was over says it’s still good and takes some and eats it right off of the oven door.it made me smile when I was so up set about it.and it seem so unlike him because he is afraid of germs to pick up the cake like that and eat a bit of it.that was about 20 years ago but will alway renember it.
My worst cooking disaster concerns a missed meal. I came across a really delicious-sounding recipe for duck breast with plum sauce in a cookbook, bought the book and made the meal according to the recipe. A taste test confirmed that the sauce was indeed delicious. I plated the duck breast and spooned the sauce over it and put it on the counter and opened a cupboard to get a wine glass. Out popped a glass jar and tumbled down and hit the Pyrex bowl I had poured the remaining sauce into. The bowl exploded and plum sauce and glass splinters went flying everywhere.
The duck breast had glass splinters embedded in it and there was sauce everywhere. I didn’t dare eat anything and the duck breast went untasted in the trash. It took ages to get the plum stains out of the linoleum, the t-shirt I was wearing looked like the result of a tie-dye experiment gone wrong and a couple of weeks later when I chanced to look at the ceiling I discovered some plum stains up there.
When I was in 8th grade Home Economics class at Junior High school, my teacher was whipping egg whites and she said “they should be so stiff that when you turn the bowl upside down, they would not fall out.” Well, they slid out all over her apron. The entire class got to do extra homework because we could not stop laughing. It was so funny because she couldn’t believe it had happened.
My baking memory is once I had invited a guy that I liked tremendously over for dinner. I was of course trying to impress him but this was the first actual dinner I had ever made for another person. With much confidence I made quite a nice meal however when it came to the dessert it was a disaster. I had planned after dinner Irish coffees and for some reason the coffee maker went crazy. There was coffee pouring all over from within the machine. (I don’t think it’s supposed to do that!) I regained my composure after cleaning the mess and thought Ok well perhaps no coffee and just dessert. Well on retrieving the dish from the fridge I discovered that my roommates had gotten into it.
Needless to say I didn’t have any dinner dates for a while.
Thanks! Great giveaway!
Margaret
My favorite funny cooking story actually happened before I was born. Shortly after they were married, my dad and his friends had gone out gigging frogs, and he brought them home for my mom to cook. Never having cooked frog legs before, my dad told her to just treat them like chicken and flour and fry them. He neglected to tell her there was a little tendon in the legs that needed to be cut before cooking. The next thing he knew, my mother was screaming like a banshee because the frog legs were hopping out of the pan and jumping all over the kitchen floor. My mom nearly fainted and my dad was laughing so hard he was of no help whatsoever. That story has kept our family laughing for more than 40 years!
An embarrassing moment-hour actually- was when I was demonstrating meringues to one of my cooking classes and for the life of me they would not beat into a frothy mixture…I’d not used the correct bowl and mixing tool and it was a diasterous demo…my following class went much better after I’d realized what I was doing wrong.
My preteen daughter kept asking me to make brownies & I replied that she should make them herself. So she headed straight to the kitchen. Time passes and she is back. “Mom (whine & drag this word out) they aren’t right.” I go look & they are very pale…she left the cocoa out. She still gets teased by her younger brother & sister about the “white” brownies. She always counters with “yeah, and you ate them didn’t you?” The youngest is now 22 so this was a while ago.
The very first time I made bacon I added lard to the pan so the bacon wouldn’t stick. In no time at all, I had a bacon-grease sprinkler going atop the stove. My mom said, “Gee, Kelly, where do you think lard comes from?”
Thanks for the giveaway!
When I was in high school, I decided to bake a chocolate pie to impress a boy. I even made the dough from scratch. It did not turn out well. He still ate it, but I think the boy was gay. I can’t find him now that we’re adults. I still miss his friendship though. Hope that chocolate pie didn’t drive him away.
I had decided to make a flourless chocolate torte for my dad’s birthday, and was using a recipe from one of my mum’s Dutch cookbooks. The batter seemed awfully thin, even with the egg whites whipped and folded in, but I stuck it in the oven anyway. To my chagrin, it came out the same sludgy mess it had gone in, even after baking it much longer than called for. My mum had to explain that in metric measures “1 dl” of water was not a demi litre (half a litre), but actually a desi litre (1/10th of a litre). My dad told me he loved me anyway!
You sure do blog about food a lot.
My most embarrassing cooking mistake was when I was in high school. My best friend at the time was spending the night at my house. A few weeks earlier she had introduced me to Rotel cheese dip. I was going to make her some cheese dip that was made with real cheddar cheese and not Velveeta. I was adding everything into the double boiler when I grabbed salt instead of garlic. Let me tell you there is no way to get 3 tablespoons of salt out of melting cheddar. That was the nastiest thing I had ever cooked. Needless to say we didn’t eat what was in that pan. Now, a decade plus later, my spices come out of the cabinet 1 at a time instead of having everything at my finger tips like I was taught.
There were children and chocolate-filled water guns involved. ‘Nuff said.
When I was 5, a “crick demon”* convinced me to put a jar of peanut butter in the microwave in order to soften up the peanut butter and enable spreading without bread-tearing. Six minutes later, an explosion rocked our trailer. When my father ran to the kitchen to investigate the problem, he discovered the ceiling blown out of the microwave.
Lessons learned:
-don’t leave the lid on the jar when you microwave it
-don’t listen to crick demons
-don’t put peanut butter in the refrigerator!
*crick demons, for those of you not born in West Virginia and raised near a “crick,” are slimy, spotted water sprites who rise from country creeks to cajole young children into disaster. Ask me sometime about the toaster shooting three-foot flames up the kitchen wall…
My most embarassing cooking disaster (and there has been many) was when I was in high school and I was trying to be a fancy mancy cook. I picked up a cookbook and just kind of flipped through it and where ever my finger landed I was going to fix that recipe. I made out an awful shopping list for my mother. She was game even though one of the ingredients was fresh trout. I made the dish, which turned out to be some kind of fish soup. To me it looked like pieces of raw fish swimming in milk. I couldn’t eat it but my mother did, and, she said it was good. I think I did see some elves floating in there but they probably went in the trash with the rest of the dish.
There was a time when my laziness has gotten the best of me. After successfully conning my mom to let me skip school, I proceeded the second after she left to cook some bacon and fried eggs. You know, to make the day really special. My parents had just recently put in new cabinets so I made sure to put the mesh grease catcher over the pan to protect the furniture. But I forgot to take it off.
After the mini fire which blackened the new white cabinets, burned the mesh cover, made my glasses black with soot, and took away my eyebrows, my day was shot. I have never had eggs and bacon at home again. I leave that for Denny’s.
My most embarrassing cooking disaster happened when I was young and living at home with my mom. I screwed up hard boiled eggs. I had started hard boiled eggs and a friend stopped by. I completely forgot about the hard boiled eggs and left the house. All the water boiled out of the pan and the eggs were burnt. If memory serves one of the eggs actually exploded. Burnt eggs is not a pleasant smell.
Thanks for the contest, Carolyn. At first I thought I really didn’t have anything I could share, nothing I remembered that was embarrassing (I’ve been lucky in that respect) or sad, but then the more I thought, I realized my fondest cooking memories come from my grandmother and my dad, who are both gone now.
My mom was a single mother in the early ’60s, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, the typical homemaker of her time, in her kitchen. Homemade chicken soup, fried okra, and chicken and dumplings are a few of my faves I still make now and again. I remember her homemade french fries after school back then.
When I would visit my dad over the years, I was always in the kitchen with him too, and I still prepare a lot of his recipes to this day – his famous and delicious spaghetti, his wonderful ceviche, and crazy-sounding but out-of-this-world egg gravy, just to name a few.
Sadly, I don’t think of those times that often anymore, so thanks for bringing them to the forefront today.
My most embarrassing meal fiasco was just after I was married. I was making our first meal in our first home. I wanted to impress my husband because my mother was such aa good cook and made everything look so easy. I used a cookbook we received as a gift and I made fried chicken. The chicken looked picture perfect and we sat down to eat. My husband was so proud and took a huge bite. Unfortunately while the chicken looked beautiful, it was still raw in the inside. We ended up laughing all night and for the last twenty two years
How wonderful! My fondest memory of cooking was when I was 17. Our Home Economics teacher wanted us to enter the local Farm Bureau Dairy cooking contest. I chose to try and come up with a dessert. My mother’s green tomato mincemeat is awesome and so I cooked my way through several ‘trials’ until I came up with a Mincemeat Cheesecake. We did local cooking competitions and I won!
That sent me to the Arkansas State Dairy Cook-off and I was really nervous. Going to the state capitol, cooking in front of all those people and cameras…but I came in First Place and won money for college and a nice plaque. I love my recipe and my Mom and grandparents were so proud! I look back now at the pictures and tv show we did afterwards and I still can’t believe it. It was an awesome experience for a little country 17-year old. I will always remember that and I still make the recipe for holidays, it’s become a tradition…along with making my own green tomato mincemeat now. Thanks Mom! 