Ever get a craving?  Sure you do.  Ever get a craving for food that you just can’t eat?  ME TOO!  I craved s’mores!   Now techinically I can eat s’mores, the difficulty I was having this past sunday, was that in order to make them I would need to build a fire.  Don’t get me wrong here, I definitely know how to build a fire, however the landlord of the apartment building I live was somewhat less then excited to here my plans for an in door fire pit.  (Some people!)

I though maybe I could try building it without her knowledge, but then I remembered that Twin is the appartment complex snitch, and she’d have no qualms about ratting me out! !!   So with my apparent lack of sibbiling loyalty I decided to create my own inside version of a S’mores!   Well, maybe “create” is a little to free of a term , I kinda stole ideas from 2 such recipes, and combined them to make my version!!

Here’s how it all went down.

First thing your gonna do is crush up approx 20 graham crackers and add 1/8-1/4 cup melted butter to the crumbs.  Mix that up so the crumbs are nicely coated, but don’t add t omuch butter.  We want just enough to make the crumbs not dry, but not enough to make that stick together.  Got it?    Good.

Take and spoon the crumbs into baking cups, I’m not entirely sure what the exact measurment is here, but lets say 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup.

Next, whip up a batch of chocolate cake batter!  I used a boxed mixed ( no hate mail please), Betty Crookers Chocolate fudge cake mix to be exact.  I added about 1/2 cup of flour to the box, it makes the cake a little more dense and not so airy.  I like my cakes denser and very moist!  Adding the extra flour seems to produce the results I like.

Fill the cups to about 2/3 ish full with the batter.  The throw them into a 350 degree oven for 15-20 minutes.  Check at 15 minutes to make sure your not overcooking them.

Perfect!  Set them out to cool.  Now lets make the to-die-for marshmellow icing!  First take 2 sticks of butter (room temperature please), and beat them until creamy.  Then add 2 cups icing sugar and beat that until its nice and fluffy.  Finally add 1/2 tsp vanila and 1 16 oz jar of marshmellow fluff!!!  (drool )   Whip the icing till smooth! 

 

Place the icing into a parchement icing bag and cut a large tip into it.  Swirl a very unhealthy amount of the icing over the cupcakes.  Next artfully place a piece of graham cracker and a piece of a Jersey Milk chocolate bar on top of each cupcake!

VOLIA!! You have just made S’Mores cupcakes!  They’re perfect for every occasion, family picnics, meetings, kids lunches, mid-night snacks and even pre-workout munchies (although that might be a conflict of interest)!!  And the best part is you don’t have to break any saftey or fire codes!  That’s what I call the best of both worlds.

Enjoy! 

Fondant is a beautiful and fun icing to cover and decorate cakes with.  However most fondant icing is tasteless at best, sometimes it even leaves a gross after taste. You can add flavourings to your fondant if you want or. . . .  . . You can make MARSHMELLOW fondant!! 

If you like the taste of Marshmellows, you’ll like this fondant.  If you like extremely easy recipes, you’ll like this fondant.  If you prefer to not add ingredients like glucose or glycerin to your baking, then you’ll like this fondant!

The ingredients for MMF are very simple:  Marshmellows, water, icing sugar and Crisco shorting.   Thats it!!  Four simple fun ingredients! 

Step 1:

Place 2 tablespoons of water and 16oz (or 2 cups) mini marshmellows in a bowl, over a pot of simmering water.  You could also use the microwave (if you enjoy killing your self slowly with harmfull micro-waves!!). 

Step 2

Generously grease the countertop.  Really grease that baby up!  Seriuosly you’ll feel like you’ve gain ten lbs just watching your self throwing the grease down.

Step 3:

Place 1 1/2 cups of icing sugar into the melted marshmellow mix.

Step 4

Dump  the mix onto the greased counter.  Grab about 1/4 cup of the shorting and slather it on your hands.  YUMMY!  Then digging into the lovely sticky mass and begin to knead the mix, adding icing sugar as you go.  You’ll probably use up to 3 1/2 - 4 cups icing sugar in TOTAL! 

Step 5:

Keep kneading and adding sugar until you have a ball of fondant that will be a good rollable consistancy and is also stretchy!  It took me between 8-10 minutes of kneading to get the icing to where I wanted it.  Also note that throughtout the whole kneading and sugar adding process you should keep reapplying shorting to your hands and the counter. You may not use the whole 1/2 cup but I know I sure did!

Step 6

Next double wrap the fondant in plastic wrap.  The adove work is a total of 3 double batchs of fondant.

Step 7

You can use the fondant right away, or you can store it in a Ziploc bag in the fridge for a good week or so.

There you have it!  A simple and satisfying fondant recipe.  I have yet to cover a cake with this perticular recipe (I have with the Wilton fondant recipe), but once I so I’ll let you know how it holds up!

Enjoy!

Next up on this fabulous cooking adventure we have Buffalo Chicken wings with a Blue Cheese dip, which from here on in will be referred to as the Stinky Smelly Schmeese dip (3S-d for short).    Are you ready to cook???  

No. 

Fine I’ll wait.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   Ready now??? 

Ya!!!   AWESOME!  Lets begin.

 

Here’s what you’ll need:  16 chicken wings, 1 stick butter, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, Franks Hot Sauce or Tabasco Sauce, salt, 1.5 cups blue cheese (any kind), mayonnaise, sour cream, milk, Worcestershire sauce and celery for garnish.

First things first, take the chicken wings and cut it into 3 peices.   Here we have cut #1

And here we see cut # 2

Each wing should produce 3 pieces.  Piece #1 and 2 are what we’ll use for this reciepe.  The small, nerdy looking piece of raw chicken appendage can be thrown away. Unless of course you have a weird sense of culinary justice, then you can freeze all those useless pieces for some later use, whatever that use may be. 

Take your large pile of usefull chicken pieces and give them a nice thorough rinse.

Place all the washed chicken on a baking sheet and place it off to the side.

While the chicken is sitting around gossiping we’re going to make the hotish sauce to cook them with.   First place 1 stick of butter in a sauce pan and turn up the heat.

When the butter is melted, add 1 teaspoon (or more if you like your food hot) of cayenne pepper.  

Next add 4 tsp of Frank’s Hot Sauce or Tabasco.  Again if you prefer things more on the burning hot side then add more hot sauce.    Also add 1 tsp of salt - - because no receipe is complete without salt.

Side note:  Notice how my butter mixed is boiling?  Well that’s BAD.  Try not to get your butter mixture to hot, just melting and liquidy.  I had trouble with the consitancy of the sauce and I think it effected the finished product in a very negative way.

Brush 1/2 of the butter mixture over the chicken pieces. 

Um yummy - - salmonilla

I find this picture absolutely revolting.  Everytime I see it my stomach starts to get queasy.   So I thought, heck  I might as well share the queasyness!!   Don’t ya just love it!!

 *cough cough*  Okay, back to cooking.  Place these lovely little salmonilla carriers into your oven (or broiler if you have such things), and broil them 3-inchs below the heat for 8 minutes.   Then take them out, flip them over, brush the rest of the butter mixture over them and place back in the oven for 4 minute or untill done !!

Meanwhile, take your disgusting smelling cheese and crumble it up in a bowl.  Add your mayonnaise and sour cream and milk.

Next toss in some Worcestershire sauce.

Sprinkle in your salt and pepper.   Here is when I took a step back and wondered how in the world this tosseled pile of gross looking/smelling ingredients was possibly going to make an even remotely good tasting dip.   Then I shook my head, grabbed my blender and continued on . . . after all I have a goal in sight, to bake/cook every recipe in this lovely cookbook. (Even the ones that don’t smell so good)

At first I thought I could simply use my trusty hand-held mixer, but as you can see the results as well as the process were less then satisfying.

So I threw it all in this great little blender and mutilated it  untill it conformed to the texture I wanted.    Don’t mess with me you blob of stinky smelly schmeese!!!

Ahh, perfect.

When the chicken is good and cooked, take them out of the oven and transfer to a rack.  See all that yummy fatty, butter drippings at the bottom of pan??  That’s the reason we place these bad boys on a rack, to let as much of that potential heart attack drip off the chicken before we consume them.

 

Once most of the oil has driped off and the chicken has cooled, place them on a serving plater.  Then take the wings, dip and celery over to your parents house, or a friends, or co-workers, or a complete strangers.  Or you can eat them all by your self, but hey where’s the fun in that?

I choose my parents place.  When I arrived I found my neice was there for the day, and she insisted that we use the chicken plates because we were eating chicken.  Her theory sounded a little errie to me but who am I to argue with a 7 year old.

On whatever plate you decide to use, place some chicken wings, a blob of 3s-d, and some celery.  

Here goes nothing!   **Bite. . chew. . swallow. . **

I liked the chicken wings, although as I mentioned earlier, the taste would definitley have been better if I had gotten the sauce consistancy correct. 

I’m still VERY undecided on the 3s-d.  I have never like blue cheese dressings, or blue cheese anything, the flavor is a little too moldy for my taste.  However my Dad really like it, so much so that he kept the leftovers to use as chip dip.    

Why don’t you all go out and whip up a batch of these wings and dip and let me know what you think.

 

  It’s cold out side and snowy. . brrrrr.  Looks like the perfect time for some SOUP!!  

You remeber those roasted vegatables we made last month??  Delicous, steamy, spicey vegtables.  ..  . ..   yummmm!     Uh, ya,, Well I hope you made a double batch.  If not then quickly whip up a batch or two (or three depending on how strong your will power is) and lets get souping. 

For this recipe you’ll need 1 recipe of Roast Winter Vegatbles, salt. pepper. olive oil, a loaf of crusty french bread, and soup stock.

This recipe calls for 6-8 cups chicken stock, which you can either buy, or if like me you happen to have 200 bags of frozen stock in the freezer you can use those.     To speed up the whole thawing process I threw the frozen stock into a pot and placed it on the stove.

Now, this recipe is crazy simple, but it does require a blender of some sort. It doesn’t need to be a blender per say, food processors work fine, or those fun hand held masher thingys.  Anything that has blades

Ohhh shiny sharp blades!!

Begin by scooping up the roasted vegtables and placing 1/4 of them in the blender.  If your blender is bigger and more powerfull then mine (which wouldn’t be very hard) then you ahead and fill that puppy up!

 

This is pretty much all mine can take, :(  sad little blender.

Add 1/2 cup- 3/4 cup of chicken stock to the vegtables, this will ensure that there is enough water content in the blender for it to properly puree.  I’m not sure if you would need to add the stock if you were using a food processor.  Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t.  I’ve never used a processor so I just don’t know.  Sorry.

Turn the blender on, and watch the magic unfold.

Here’s a lovely photo of the vegtables pureeing taken from the top of the blender.  As I gaze at this picture part of me is thinking “um yummmyyy” while another part begins to see simalarities between the color’s and , , other less wholesome and non-food related things. . . cringe!   But since I’ve actually tasted this soup I’m gonna stick with my postive self . … . . yummy !!    

Moving on.

Place the puree in a bowl.

Remeber that soup stock we were thawing??  Well go grab it from off the stove, its time of usefullness has arrived.

Place all the puree in a large pot, put it in the stove and turn the heat up.  Now slowly begin adding the broth.   There’s alot of wiggle room here, if you like your soups very runny add LOTS of broth.  However, if you prefer a more thick soup simply add less!  

I choose less!!  Because I like soup you have to eat with a knife and fork.  Okay, well not really,  but I do prefer it on the thicker side.

Once you’ve reached the appropriate consistancy, grab your spices and start seasoning.  Throw in some pepper.

A dash or two of salt!

Stir all up and bring the soup to a slow boil, just to heat it up.

While the soups heating, take your loaf of bread and begin cutting it into 1inch cubes.  On a side note: this was a whole loaf of bread just this morning.  However, my lovely and ever so thoughtfull twin decided she’d like some toast for breakfast.  Slice Slice!   Then I stumbled into the kitchen, still half asleep and in a state of semi-conciousness, and decide I to wanted toast for breakfast.  Slice Slice.   Well before I knew it my lovely loaf of cruton making bread was now a stub.  Which is fine, I respect all shapes and sizes of bread here! 

Place the bread cubes on a baking sheet.    (How pathetic does this picture look! Poor stubby bread cudes

Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the pan.  Unless of course you have a rather sad amount of cubes then use less. . . . . . . way less.

Sprinkle on some salt.   I love sprinkling salt!!   Sprinkled salt completes me!!  (Kinda)

Shake on some pepper.

Toss the bread cubes around, until nicely coated.  Then pop them into a 350 degree oven for 5 minutes, then toss them around again and throw them back in the oven for another 5-10 minutes.

They should be nice and golden brown when done. 

Now, place some soup in a colorful and fun bowl!!  

Then change youR mind and use the boring white dishes.  (They matched my table decor better.).    Place some delicous crutons on top (use more then three, unless you used stubby bread, then three is all you really can do).   Drizzle a small amount of olive oil over the crutons.  Serve, eat, smile !!  

Ummmmmmmm!!!!!!!!!!!!!   This is gggood soup.  Try it!   That’s an order!