Pumpkin Pie Cake

Chapter 1: The Reaction
To: Madoline
From: Coworker
Subject: Yum!!!
Message: That's the best pumpkin cake I've ever had.
(This was copied and pasted from an actual email, for full disclosure.)

Chapter 2: The End Product
Dense, buttery cake.
      Then, pumpkin pie.
            Finally, buttery cinnamon streusal sprinkled on top.
                  All melded together in the oven.

Chapter 3: From Whence It Came
My friend Brianne's aunt's pumpkin cake recipe.
The one she brought to Southern Progress fellow potlucks.
The one made with cake mix.
Tweaked to be from scratch by subbing in parts of some random "homemade cake mix" recipe Google found me.

 

Chapter 4: The Critique

I took this baking project on too late on a school (err, work) night (over-ambition in the kitchen=my downfall in life). And then I had to do math to combine recipes because I wanted to be original (originality for the sake of originality=not always the best idea). And then it was 11:30 p.m. and the top of the cake was STILL not set. And I just wanted to go to bed. So, yeah, I had bias against this cake before the innocent thing made it out of the oven. It ended up tasting sweet and richly dense, yes, but also too much like pumpkin pie for this Thanksgiving-pie hater. I ate a bit, gave away most of it, and then moved on to... chocolate, my one true love. But now I baked something seasonal and something original, so I can check that off my list and move back to the 17,987th variation on chocolate cookies and cakes I can develop.

Also, it was really ugly to photograph. That's why you basically see pictures of plant green and tree/house bright yellow with only a splash of all shades of distasteful browns and oranges, brightened in Photoshop.

 

Minestrone: Hello, soup season.

It was in a teeny, tiny old kitchen in Missouri that I first discovered how vegetables, water and spices can cook down into something comforting, and even satisfying.

It was my first month on my own post-college, in a new town where I knew precisely one person. I didn't think much of it that day, but the New York Times recipe for Summer Minestrone I found would set the tone for this season I was entering.

I would feed myself without a meal plan, without my mother, without good friends to eat with. Trying a new recipe to eat off all week would become my go-to weekend escape. In a creaky, sometimes creepy, small space all of my own, I learned what I liked to eat and how I liked to cook, not just what  I grew up with but still building on that foundation.

Five years later, my life looks different, though not drastically.  I am closer to home and have new companions in my day-to-day comings and goings. I share the fruits of my kitchen in different ways than I did then.

But as I  sauté onions and carrots, add tomatoes to simmer, and fill my kitchen with the aroma of Italian spices, once again all by myself, I return to fellowship with a simmering pot, with thoughts left to wander, with solitude.

For a good part of the evening, I don't look at my phone or consider the rest of the world's social plans on this Saturday night. I rest in the moment, in my happy place, and travel back to a mid-day lunch of Summer Minestrone and Parmesan toast in my lil' old grad school apartment. This is me embracing who I was created to be, and no one else.

Chocolate-Buttercream Cupcakes

Why even bake other kinds of cupcakes?

This is what I ask myself after tasting this Best Cupcake Combo Ever this go-round.

And self, I really have no good response.

 Let me explain:

1. The Cake. Cake more moist and pure chocolatey than what comes from a box, 100x more moist than my other attempts to bake cake from scratch and 100 percent without the fakey-chemically taste that comes courtesy of a box.

2. The Icing. It's butter and cream (milk actually). And sugar and vanilla. The best thing that will ever go in your mouth, and the perfect butter-vanilla complement to chocolate cake.

3. The Garnish. Shaving chocolate is easy, looks fancy, and, of course, is chocolate.

So if someone has a birthday coming up or an unbirthday, wow them with these... unless of course they don't like chocolate. Then they don't deserve birthday sweets.

But beware, if you blink, they will disappear. All 33 of them.

Summer Gratitude

This season I have been thankful...

For meals with 20 people who share my last name, and fruit of my dad's new massive "Bubba Grill" smoker.

Grilled Cilantro-Lime Shrimp Kebabs

For the grill on my back patio, the lovely woman with which it came, and all the meals and fellowship it has brought to our table.

For far-from-weak mint juleps in frosted glasses, chopsticks with which to stir them, and thoughtful persons who make them possible.

Grilled Chicken, Grilled Zucchini, Caprese Salad, Strawberry Scones

For self-taught grilling lessons and friends who affirm my gifts for culinary creations.

Tomato Watermelon Salad Stacks

I think I am eating out too much. Because I  plated my salad to look pretty yet have few degrees of functionality. To eat this masterpiece, you must in fact slash it up into pieces that end up looking like a normal tossed salad.

Blame my leaning tower of tomato and watermelon on Chis Hastings' tomato salad stacking at Hot and Hot. Or blame Slice's tomato-watermelon fancification. That's where the idea come from.

Still, I did dumb down chefly salad over-orchestration to six simple ingredients. And  mint+tomato+watermelon+feta tastes like an explosion of the fresh sweetness of summer in your mouth.

So try it in towers that can topple, or just cut it all up and toss it together like a normal person. Your call.

Mocha-Chocolate Chip Cookie Icebox Cake

Ina Garten is a brilliant woman. She dreamed up layering chocolate chip cookies with a tiramisu-like mocha cream in a spring form pan.

But in the name of "Barefoot Conetessa How Easy Is That?", her recipe calls for packaged cookies. Dessert blasphemy! I baked Tollhouse ones from scratch.

Actually I baked cookie bars in a jellyroll pan because it was like 9:30 p.m., and I did not want to be scooping dough and cooling cookies for forever. So I ended up with three thick layers of cookie and Kahlua/marscapone wonder instead of the five the recipe calls for. If I did if over again, I'd make thinner cookies so that cookie+cream melds together more seamlessly.

 Icebox desserts: Madoline's solution to serving seasonally appropriate chocolate desserts in the summer since the Strawberry Icebox Dessert wonder of 2010, or actually since Cooking Light's Chocolate- Eclair Icebox Dessert of my teenage years.

Chocolate Cream Pie Squares with Oreo Crust

Let me tell you about the day my life forever changed.

It started with a seething cauldron of sin. Chocolate and cream and such churned into the most decadent creamy cocoa-y yum that has ever gone between Oreos and real whipped whipping cream.

And there was enough of it to feed all the dudes who ate bread and fish that day in that Bible story. Almost. 

But for real, 20 people ate it at the lake on a Saturday, I shipped off slices to my parents' house and my brother's house, and then I divvied up like eight servings when there ended up being a viewing of super-interesting documentary Searching for Sugarman (check it out, fellow documentary-nerdy friends/anyone who likes music) at my house the next night. 

And then I ate a final solitary piece all by my lonesome one night.

My not-so-pretty photos just don't do it justice.

And now dessert-obsessed me is struggling to brainstorm any other confection to make for people because all I can think of is this, the most perfect way to eat chocolate in summertime. Ever.

Every time I try to think of something new, all that comes to mind is the way the rich fudgy chocolate cream is cut by creamy whipped cream and held together by a buttery-chocolate crisp crust. Ohmygoodness.