Well now that I'm not the only one in the house, I do like to prepare a meal for my husband to come home to. Which means I'm doing a lot of cooking. Like everyday cooking. Seriously. Anyhoo, it's been fun pulling some recipes out of my arsenal of the years of watching my mom cook and learning bits and pieces about making biscuits or icebox coconut cake or whatever she was making that night.
With the inclusion of Pinterest in my life, new recipes are being tried quite often and most of them are quite successful. RC isn't picky, thank goodness. Just leave out celery, pickle relish, lima beans and some other oddities and he's good to go. He does love red velvet cake. And I had never made one before. Ever. 2 bottles of red food coloring? Are you serious? I worked my way into homemade by using a box mix to make red velvet whoopie pies for RC to take to work. The cream cheese frosting was really good...I didn't care for the cake part at all. I forgot to reduce the liquid to make a true whoopie pie, so I had to bake them in a jelly roll pan and cut them...can you say crumbs EVERYWHERE? I even had enough crumbs to make some cake balls...eh...whatever!
RC's birthday was a week later and I decided to give the homemade cake a try. I used Bakerella's Red Velvet Cake recipe as well as her icing recipe too. I don't know who bakerella is, but she's pretty popular on pinterest...so I decided to give it a go. Lemme just tell you. Red food coloring, two whole bottles of it, is something quite dangerous. Don't mistake the lock/unlock button for the speed button on the stand mixer. It won't be pretty. Here's the batter...
Easy enough, right? Pour into pans and bake until done...check and check
Remove from pans and cool on rack. Um yeah, not so much...Every single one stuck to the pan...like REALLY stuck. One would think that with a cup of oil and really well sprayed pans, the cake would just pop out. One would be wrong in this assumption!
The picture doesn't do the mess justice, but oh my...what a hot mess. I pieced together what I could, determined to salvage the cakes and proceeded to the icing. Butter, cream cheese, vanilla and confectioner's sugar. Not too intimidating and very good. One recipe should have been enough, but because I had to repair layers, and basically use the frosting as glue...here is what one recipe got me.
So, I went back to the mixing bowl and made another batch. That's 12 cups of sugar, 2 blocks of cream cheese and 4 sticks of butter in total....Yikes! But here is the finished product complete with candles for RC's 42 birthday...and I must say homemade red velvet is MUCH better.
Here's the guts...don't look too closely or you can see the obvious repair points.
I gave RC the choice of what he wanted to eat that night and he chose cubed steak, rice and gravy...so here's the plate of that...Paula Deen, before her realization that cooking and eating bad foods is actually bad for you, geez who would've thunk it, would've been proud...it was delicious! And I added a pic of the birthday boy blowing out his candles...Thank goodness the cake was good!
So in my search on Pinterest I came across some cute St Patrick's Day cupcakes, using none other that Bakerella's (told you she was popular) recipe and swapping out two bottles of red for one bottle of green. So I made some more treats to send with RC to work and a container of mini cupcakes for the kids for snack today. That's some seriously green batter, folks...whew!
I am enjoying my rekindled love of cooking, the scales however does not agree with me. So I'm now in the search for some more summer clothes wearing friendly recipe to incorporate into our routine. We'll see how that goes over. Have a great weekend everyone!
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