Eating + Desserts= :)

This week for my senior project I cooked two desserts.  I made oreo balls and this cream cheese spread type thing with sugar and cinnamon on top. They were delicious! They were a huge success; everybody seemed to really like them. Carrie has made oreo balls before so everyone was really happy to see them again. The other dessert was new but still popular. They were by no means healthy or good for you. The oreo balls were kind of a pain to make. Sometimes when I dipped the oreo ball part in the white chocolate it would fall apart. The recipe also called for only one box of white chocolate squares but I needed two (luckily I got an extra one). I mainly tried these recipes to test trial for an event next week. Mrs. Halla has her church dinner thing next Monday and needs me to fix the desserts for the dinner. It is about two hundred people. So I am thinking that I don’t want to make two hundred something oreo balls so I am going to try to do some other dessert with the cream cheese spread for her church. I will also probably just help her out with that whole night’s dinner at her church. I am also hoping to talk to my mom or Mrs. Halla to find a family or person I can cook for. 

Yummy in the Tummy

Hello there! I got to cook this week! I had more of a laid back week because of Martin Luther King day and I didn’t go to school on Tuesday because I was getting stitches on my face from an icy snowball thrown at me. So I cooked an Sour Cream Lemon Pound Cake for the senior class/lounge. I got all good reviews and compliments on it. What I keep forgetting to do is put out comment cards. The next time I cook I will need to make sure to do that. One thing I have discovered is that I am not a big fan of bunt cakes or tube cakes. I still like them but out of the different desserts one can make those are probably my least favorite. I don’t like the uncertainty of it top coming out whole or in pieces. The Sour Cream one only had a little bit on the top that didn’t come off but an earlier bunt cake I made was completely ruined and didn’t come out right and I had to put together a simple box cake really quickly. Also, I should have read the instructions all the way through before putting the ingredients on the grocery list because I didn’t read the part about needed one and a half tablespoons of lemon zest. Zesting lemons is a very time consuming task. It took two lemons to grade/zest to get enough. But the good part was that our kitchen smelled amazing! I also made toast with and goat cheese and a low fate Greek yogurt spread with raspberries and honey on top. I made that for myself because it is a healthy recipe from the Jillian’s Michaels book, Master Your Metabolism. I like fixing the healthy stuff for myself and the unhealthy desserts for the class. I also fixed a Mediterranean Pizza. A lot of the ingredients in the Jillian Michaels cook book are organic and all healthy so it is a lot harder to find in the grocery store. So my mom and I couldn’t find whole wheat dough so we had to buy white dough from a package and the directions for that dough and the directions for the recipe differed a good bit. So I decided to improvise and just decide and assume what to put on it and how long to cook it. It turned out good but I forgot to put it in the fridge over night so we had to throw it away unfortunately.  I am planning to cook some more next week

Ready, Set, Go!

This week during senior project I did my timeline. There was a lot of thinking ahead and planning this week to get back in the swing of things. Here is what I came up with:

Senior Project Outline for January –May

January:

-Bring in Results on New Recipes twice this month

-January 22, 2011: Bake Bread with Mrs. Halla and distribute to the Senior Class

-January 29, 2011: Bring a meal to a family in need

-January 17 2011: Help Mrs. Halla with Monday night dinner at her church

February:

-Cook Three New Recipes and Distribute to Senior Class

-February 14^: Bring Hospitality Group to Church Builders

-February 28, 2011: Help Mrs. Halla with dinner at Church

-February 18: Cook with Mrs. Holbein

March:

-Cook Three New Recipes and Distribute to Senior Class

-March 14: Bring Hospitality Group to the Soup Kitchen

-March 7: Help Mrs. Halla with dinner at Church

-March 11: Cook with Mrs. Godenick

April:

-April 12: Bring Hospitality Group to the Soup Kitchen

         -have to go to Mrs. Garrison and get her permission and her suggestions

         -produce a Facebook message and conduct a lunch planning meeting to see who            can come and who is willing to help

          -call parents and ask if they will come and help also

-April 4: Help Mrs. Halla with dinner at her Church

-April 7- Preparation Day

-Either April 14, 18, 20 - do Presentation

           -Help Mrs. Zion organize and orchestrate snacks for presentations

I know last semester I really over planned and underestimated how hard the year was going to turn out. I didn’t think about how grueling and how many hours were going to be spent on homework and school assignments.  So this time I tried to cut down and not be to overambitious and then be disappointed if I don’t complete all my goals. So hopefully this is a much more realistic plan.

Christmas Comfort Food :)

Hey there! I have had a great Christmas break and been cooking a lot! I missed a blog another week this month so I am doing that now to make up for it. Every year we have a Christmas Eve dinner with all the family at our house; and I always help my mom cook every year. This year I helped her a lot and found out some great new recipes. I made a green bean casserole, this slow cook chocolate thunder thing, red velvet brownies, an oatmeal spice cake, strawberry cake, blondies, salad dressing, corn pudding, and 14 berry trifles. It was quite an eventful break. Everything turned out great except for the oatmeal spice cake. I had to use a bunt pan and when I turned it over it didn’t come out as a whole and it was really tiny. The cake part was good but it didn’t quite make it all the way. I do not know exactly what went wrong. I was once again reminded of the intense amount of time it takes to cook. On Christmas Eve I was cooking all day just for a twenty minute meal. It was kind a of depressing but still well worth it because I enjoyed the process. I also was reminded of the need to read recipes very carefully. I often find myself in a jam because I just didn’t read it closely or I was distracted or wasn’t paying full attention, but that did get me in trouble a few times. Luckily all the mistakes were minor and did ruin the food. I also got to use a little bit of my creative artistic side with the berry trifles because of the layers and different ways to arrange the berries and cream part in the glasses. One of my favorite things I cooked was the chocolate thunder recipe and the red velvet brownies. The chocolate thunder took four hours to cook but it was so delicious. It was warm, moist, and so chocolaty. It was great. Now the red velvet brownies were a little bit more tricky. It was annoying because the middle wouldn’t cook but the edges would so the edges got burnt or a little crispy but the middle part was perfect. So I cut off all the too hard and burnt parts and found all the moist cake part. So they ended up being really amazing but took more time than I was expecting. The free time was great and I am so happy that I got a chance to cook again. It was a great break and I am hoping that I will be able to cook more next semester since my schedule has slowed down a lot. Bon Appetite!