Apple Pie

I decided to make apple pie since I’d heard that it was easy to make, the recipe I used is here:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe-Tools/Print/Recipe.aspx?RecipeID=12682&servings=8

I found an article on making pie crusts and was going to use it to aprocimate amounts but ended up using a recipe my aunt gave me. The Pie crust article can be found here:

http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Perfect-Pie-Crusts/Detail.aspx

“Crust Recipe

2 1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup butter

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

4-6 tbsp cold water

Mix the sugar, salt and flour together then cut the butter into that mixture until the butter is crumbly and pea sized. Add cold water gradually until mixture is moistened.”

I’m not exactly sure how much butter we put in but I think we ended up putting in more than what the recipe called for. After mixing the ingredients together I kneaded the dough a little bit until the flour is all mixed together though my Aunt says that with pie crust you want to touch it as little as possible. Don’t forget to cut the dough in half since you need to have some dough for the lattice topping. Roll one of the dough balls out and place it in your pie pan.

Filling:

INGREDIENTS

1. 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
2. 1/2 cup unsalted butter
3. 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4. 1/4 cup water
5. 1/2 cup white sugar
6. 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
7. 8 Granny Smith apples - peeled, cored and sliced

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F

You start by melting the butter in a saucepan, although we melted it in the microwave and then put it in the saucepan. Add the flour gradually so as not to make a mess. Add the water, white sugar, and brown sugar, then bring to a boil then let it simmer while you cut and peel the apples. We used 8 apples like the recipe says but there would have been plenty of apples with only 6 or 7.

Put the apples into your pie crust in a small mound. The recipe says to put the lattice on before the sauce but we put the sauce on 1st and it worked fine, but I think it would have worked better with adding the sauce after.

Roll the other ball of dough out and cut it across, the dough strips should be about an inch wide. After you cut the dough then put the strips onto your pie one at a time, you can weave them if you want. Here’s a video to show how:

http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Making-a-Lattice-Top-Pie-Video/Detail.aspx

On my pie I made the mistake of not sealing the edges and so the filling leaked out and made a mess in the oven so be sure to seal the sides when adding the lattice topping.

Baking:

Bake for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, reduce heat to 350 degrees F and continue baking for 35-45 minutes or until apples are soft.

Serving:

You just cut the pie in whatever size pieces you want and enjoy! The pie tastes best hot it tastes great by itself but adding a little vanilla ice cream is also good. Here’s a picture of the finished pie:

Overall:

It was fairly easy to make and was really fun! Although I’d suggest investing in an apple peeler, we don’t have one here and my cousin and I spent a fair amount of time peeling the apples. When the pie was finished it tasted great, although because of the filling overfilling I had to take it out of the oven early so the apples were still a little hard.

Japanese Christmas Cake

I’d wanted to bake a Japanese desert but it needed to be something that didn’t use very many ingredients, what I ended up making was a Japanese Christmas Cake. Basically all it is is a sponge cake with whipped cream and fruit on top. The recipe I used is found here: http://japanesefood.about.com/od/japanesecake/r/christmascake.htm

Sponge Cake:

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 Tbsp milk
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 Tbsp butter

You start by whisking the eggs in a bowl, then put them into a double boiler and add the sugar a little at a time until fully mixed. Then add the flour a little at a time, because otherwise you’ll edd up with a huge floury mess. Mix the butter and milk in a separate bowl and then add this mixture to the batter and stir. Bake in the preheated oven (350 degrees Fahrenheit) for 25-35 minutes.

Topping (Whipped Cream):

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 4 Tbsps sugar
• Various fruits (strawberries, peaches, cherries, and so on)

Mix together the cream and sugar and whip until stiff peaks form.

To Serve:

Cut a piece of cake and put a dollop of the topping on top of it and then put some fruit on top of that, we only used peaches but you can add other fruits as well. We also put a little bit of chocolate sauce on top of t

he cake and that made it taste better.

Overall:

It was easy to make but definitely not the best recipe, it tastes a little dry so you have to have a lot of topping and fruit to make it taste good; if I make this again I probably would find a different recipe to go off of. So it was fun to make one time but I don’t think I’ll make it again.

Chocolate Mint Squares

We needed something that we could make for desert for guests and my sister found this recipe and decided to make it, and I helped her make it. The recipe is for chocolate mint squares and the original recipe can be found here:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/ChocolateMintSquares.html

The recipe is basically just a mint Nanaimo Bar, it’s made up of three layers:

The bottom layer is a cookie with coconut in it, the middle layer a creamy filling and the top layer is chocolate.

Bottom Layer:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (1 stick) (113 grams) butter

1/4 cup (50 grams) granulated white sugar

1/3 cup (30 grams) unsweetened cocoa

1 large egg, beaten

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 cups (200 grams) graham cracker crumbs

1 cup (65 grams) Coconut

1/2 cup (50 grams) walnuts or pecans, chopped

Before you start you need to crush the graham crackers so that you don’t have to deal with it later, make sure you make it into crumbs and not just small chunks. Also at this time chop the nuts.

You start by melting the butter in a pan then stir in the sugar and cocoa powder. Then add the egg gradually so that the egg is mixed fully into the mixture. You then allow it to cook for about 2 minutes. When it’s done add the vanilla, crumbs, coconut, and chopped nuts. Put this mixture into a pan and the cover and put it into the refrigerator for about an hour, although we only had it in the fridge for 30 minutes so that amount is probably long enough.

Filling (Middle Layer):

Ingredients

1/4 cup (56 grams) unsalted butter

2 - 3 tablespoon milk

2 tablespoons vanilla custard powder (Bird's) or vanilla pudding powder

1/2 teaspoon pure peppermint extract

2 cups (230 grams) powdered sugar (confectioners or icing) sugar

Green Food Coloring (optional)

First melt the butter and soften the cream cheese in the microwave so that it’s easier to mix together, instead of using the microwave you could just leave them out on the counter for a while so that they can soften.

To start you put the cream cheese and the butter into a mixer and blend them together. Then beat in the milk, vanilla pudding powder, peppermint extract and powdered sugar. Lastly you add a few drops of green food coloring and mix until it’s fully mixed in. Spread the filling onto the bottom layer and put in the fridge until firm (about 30 minutes, although I think we only had it in there for about 10 minutes)

Top Layer:

Ingredients

4 ounces (115 grams) semisweet chocolate, chopped

1 tablespoon (14 grams) unsalted butter

In a double boiler melt the chocolate and butter, spread this mixture over the filling and refrigerate. It only really needs to be in the fridge long enough for the chocolate to harden but it can stay in longer.

To Serve:

For serving it my sister cut three squares and put it so that the tips of the squares were together and the other side of the squares were spread out, she then put some whipped cream in the center of the squares and drizzled chocolate sauce on top, it was really yummy. A picture on the finished product:

Overall experience:

This recipe was really easy and fun to make and the result was yummy, I’d definitely try making this again. This recipe would also be fun to experiment with, like maybe use a different pudding powder and see how that’d taste or put some other flavoring besides the peppermint; if anyone tries experimenting with this recipe please let me know the results.

Cinnamon Muffins for Fathers Day

I didn't have a present for my Dad for fathers day so I decided to make him something the recipe I decided on was cinnamon muffins, the recipe I used can be found at http://www.muffinrecipes.net/cinnamon-muffins.html

The muffins:

It was fairly easy to make, the only problem I encountered was that I didn't have any shortening. After browsing the net for a while I found out that you can substitute butter for shortening at a rate of 1 cup shortening = 1 cup + 2 tbs butter. Though since this recipe only calls for 5 tbs of shortening I had trouble converting that to butter, in the end I put in a total of 1/2 cup and 15 tbs (which is one tablespoon short of 1 cup), that total does include the 5 tbs of butter that it calls for.

The first step is to mix all the muffin ingredients together in a bowl, I find it easiest to mix the ingredients if the butter has been melted (or softened) beforehand. When mixing in the flour and the milk it is very important to alternate the two by putting in a bit of flour stir then a bit of milt and stir and repeat this order until all the flour and milk have been put in. If you don't put a little in at a time and just pour all the flour & milk in at the same time then you'll have a big mixing mess to deal with (it's a pain, I know from experience). The next step is to put the batter into the pan (spray the pan beforehand with p

am, oil, or butter) and put it into the oven that's preheated to 350F for 20 minutes. When it's done let it cool before taking the muffins out of the pan. To get the muffins out of the pan it's easiest to pinch the muffin top on either side and wiggle it a little until it's loose, you could use a knife to loosen it but when I tired that the muffin ended up loosing it's hat so unless you want your muffin it pieces... ya. Another option would be to use two pans and fill the cups only halfway, that way the muffin would overflow so much (I haven't tried this so I don't know how it'd turn out).

Icing:

It seems I was supposed to put the butter and sugar blend on separately but I didn't, I mixed them together. For fathers day my sister and I were going to put some icing on the muffins and then dye the rest (with food coloring) and with the dyed icing spell out "Happy Fathers Day!" on the muffins but the icing ended up being too runny to be able to do this. What we ended up doing was putting just a little bit of icing on top of the muffin and then using a previously un-used paint brush to paint the food coloring onto the muffins. The extra icing was just left in the bowl so that when we ate the muffins we could add the icing as needed to our muffin.

Results:

In the end the muffins were quite yummy, and my Dad loved how we'd written happy fathers day on top, all in all a very successful fathers day gift and as a bonus it was a yummy breakfast.

Here's a picture of the finished muffins:

Pork Hot and Sour Soup

Today for dinner I made pork hot and sour soup. I got the recipe from the Shoujo Beat magazine in the section called "Easy Does it bye Jennifer Olvera". I tried uploading a picture of the recipe but the text was too small, so I'll just type it out:

Ingredients:

1/2 lb pork tenderloin

1 pkg char sui (Chinese bbq) seasoning

1/2 cup water

1 tsp vegetable oil

1/2 a while onion finely diced

3/4 cup or thinly sliced button mushrooms (About 6 mushrooms)

2 cloves minced garlic

7 cup low-sodium chicken broth

1 Tbsp soy sauce

2 Tbsp red whine vinegar or wine garlic vinegar (I used red cooking wine)

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

2 large eggs beaten

2 green onions, trimmed and sliced

1 tbsp cilantro, chopped

I wasn't able to find any char sui at the store so I found a recipe online to substitute (found at

http://bbq.about.com/od/barbecuesaucerecipes/r/ble10312.htm)

"

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 10 minutes

• Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup sherry
  • 2/3 cup hoisin sauce
  • 2/3 cup soy sauce
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 teaspoons black bean paste
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon Chinese 5-spice powder
  • 1 teaspoon salt

  Preparation:

  Combine all ingredients in a double boiler and simmer for 10 minutes or until it begins to thicken. Allow to cool and store in the refrigerator."
  
  

The only real problems I had with the recipes was the issue of missing ingredients, we didn't have any hoisin sauce or black bean paste so I had to go to the store to try and find it, fortunetally the store I went to had an Asian food section that I did find the hoison sauce in, although I had to substitute a different sauce for the black bean paste since they didn't have that. At the start of the recipe it tells you to mix the pork, char sui, and water in a zip lock baggie to marinate, we were out of the large zip locks so I just used a bowl. The mixture is supposed to marinate for 2-4 hours but I didn't have that long so I only marinated it for 1 hour, which ended up being fine.

While it was marinating I got out the rest of the ingredients and I cut up the onion, this would also be when I would cut up the mushrooms but I didn't put mushrooms in. After the pork was done marinating I put it in a pot to pan on medium heat, it takes about 20 minutes to cook. Leaving the meat to cook I put the onions in a soup pan to cook you let it cook for about five minutes and then added the garlic and let it cook for about three more minutes. After that I added most of the remaining ingredients to the pot (Didn't add: the eggs, cilantro, or green onions). I then brought it to a boil and then turned it down to low to simmer for about 20 minutes, then I turned it up to medium heat and added the now fully cooked, and cut up, meat and the egg, the instructions then say it's done but I let it simmer on low for about 10 minutes I then served it, I put the green onions and cilantro on the table so that people would have the option of whether or not they would put some in their soup.

Overall I found this recipe very easy to make and it was very delicious to eat afterwards. Everyone enjoyed it ^_^ Although it didn't taste like any hot and sour soup I'd ever eaten, it was still delicious to eat! I served it with hot Jasmine Green tea which made it taste all the better. I was going to post a picture of the finished product but I forgot to take one...