Macaron Making

So I promised to serve you good food if you ever find yourself in my home, in my kitchen. And I stand by that. But I also need to mention the kind of obligation that comes with it. I need you to come over when I make gougères, or macarons, or the doughnuts I am currently dreaming about, to help me eat what I have made and keep me from eating half the batch of macarons in the course of one hour.

If you are a picky, only eating pasta with butter and a little cheese but not the lasagna I have made, or even worse, if you don't like to eat, I am not sure we could be friends.
Not that I could not like you, it is just that I dont understand. At all.
Which reminds me of the boyfriend I once had, who sometimes forgot to eat until dinner came around. (WHAT?) I should have known from the beginning on that this could not turn out well. (As my father likes to say: You cannot trust a person who does not eat breakfast).

I do not have a recipe to share today, I am not enough of an expert on macarons to give advice or modify a recipe. If you want to try making macarons yourself, I have found the collection of links David Lebovitz put together here quite helpful. But I am just happy that this batch of macarons did turn out quite lovely. I still had some crackling and only one half of the macarons did develop feet (the one I let sit on the counter for about an hour), but I can see an improvement from the first batch, which makes me so happy.

Mississippi Chocolate Cake

I have no idea why this cake was named Mississippi cake, but it is a cake I often come back to. Back in school I used to make it whenever we had a cake sale to raise money for something.
Now that I cook more I often like to try new recipes, make fancier cakes than this chocolate cake. But today I came back to the recipe from my childhood because I needed a simple quick but chocolaty and delicious cake for a friend's birthday. You see, this is the ideal procrastination cake.
I should be working on a seminar paper right now. And I am. But I also want to make a birthday cake for this friend, because everyone should have a birthday cake on their birthday. This is where this cake comes in. As you will see in the directions, it is a add-and-stir cake. One bowl, add, then stir. Repeat. Simple like that. And then you leave it in the oven for quite some time, and end up with a great, portable chocolaty cake. And while the cake bakes you have more than an hour to work on your seminar paper.

Red Wine and Brown Butter Chocolate Cake

This happens when you take a great recipe and make it even better:
Red wine in a cake already sounded fantastic. However, I made this cake for my flatmates birthday, and she really loves chocolatey chocolate cakes. And the red wine chocolate cake I found over at smittenkitchen struck my fancy, but really did not contain enough chocolate.

There are not many things I consider to be true without exception, but more chocolate is always better. So I added chocolate chips to the batter. Then I made a chocolate ganache to top the cake. More chocolate. After that, I really did not know how to add more chocolate.
I cant help but make easy recipe more complicated. Where the original recipe used regular butter, I decided to brown mine. I couldn't really taste the brown butter after the cake was baked, but I want to believe that it added another layer of flavour to the already amazing cake.

Well, the birthday cake was eaten way too quickly, and I was looking through my facebook friends to find someone who lives close I could bake this cake for. We're invited to a party tomorrow, and since I could not find someone to bake for, I decided to make the cake again to bring with me. Only this time I changed it up again and made cupcakes out of the cake. I also changed a few things up again, since the batter for the cake was rather liquid and I thought that this might make it difficult to fill the cupcake liners. I think this recipe should also work in cake form, since I did not change that much.