Cocoa Ripple Ring Revisited

1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup butter, softened (2 sticks)
4 eggs
3 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1 1/3 cups milk
1/3 cup cocoa, or more, (mixed with a tbl or so of sugar if you like)

Cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and beat well. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture and milk, alternately, mixing until smooth. Layer batter in thirds, alternating with cocoa mixture, into a well greased 12 cup bundt pan. Bake at 350 for 35-45 minutes, till toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes in pan then turn out onto a plate, top with powdered sugar and serve.

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I posted about this cake some months ago and it's been crying out to be updated. This was something my dad used to make on Saturday mornings for breakfast. It's kind of like a coffee cake, but without any topping. Instead it has veins of chocolate running through it. It's simple, not too sweet, rich and wicked good. The recipe came from Better Homes and Gardens originally and I just noticed that there isn't any vanilla in it. That seems odd, next time I make it I might try putting some in. But it doesn't need it, that's for sure. Here's what you do.

First, mix together the flour, salt and baking soda. Then cream the softened butter and sugar. I don't always soften my butter properly and whenever I do take the time to I wonder why I don't more often. It makes creaming so much easier. Which is what's next, creaming. Then eggs. This is a half recipe, since I have a six cup bundt pan that I was using. That's why there was only one stick of butter and two eggs. Anyway, you want to mix the eggs in. Then alternate the flour mix and milk till they're all gone and it's well combined. Now prep your bundt pan. I usually use the spray stuff, I've found it's easier what with all the fluting. Now spoon a third of the batter into the pan. Sprinkle a layer of cocoa (I always mix a little sugar into it) on it and repeat. Twice. Each. Until they are all gone. I wound up not using all the cocoa this time for some reason. I should have put it all in. Oh well. Then it's into the oven till brown and lovely. Once it's cooled for five minutes it's flip time. Oh yeah. It's best warm with some powdered sugar. It's some good stuff kids.

Apple Upside Down Cake Update

Typically when I've made a recipe and I decide it needs some kind of retooling I don't try it again for some time. Sometimes I need to do some research or I have a bunch of other stuff to make, sometimes I don't want to eat it again too soon or I just don't want to deal with whatever it needs. But I remade that apple upside down cake a bit more quickly than normal. And I learned a valuable lesson, too. Namely, bundt pans aren't very good for making upside down cake in. My dreams of fluted, caramel covered cake are simply not meant to be. Well, at least not in this format. Maybe some kind of sauce... Anyway, I made it again pretty quickly because it tasted wicked good. This time it was even better, thanks to a few changes. Namely not halving the cake part of the recipe and adding toasted pecans and raspberries. I'm not going to go over each step again, since it wasn't so long ago that I made the original. But I will show what I did differently.

First, like I said, I added toasted pecans. Right in the caramel. This added a great flavor/texture. They were salted, which worked out nicely. I did the apples the same, trusting the extra batter to cover/ hold them in place. But, after adding half the batter I added a layer of fresh raspberries. Not squished or anything, just whole. I still halved the caramel portion, figuring there would be plenty since there was so much less top to a bundt cake than a regular cake. And there was plenty of caramel... sort of. Using the whole recipe meant leaving the cake in the oven much longer which browned it up nicely. Added some flavor depth. It still didn't cover the apples quite all the way, but at least it didn't split into pieces when I got it out. Which was a hassle since this time the caramel stuck even more, making the cake, once again, ugly. I wound up peeling the caramel off the bottom of the pan and kind of patting it onto the cake. But it was worth it, for this. This was wicked good. I'm going to be working on this recipe, we'll see what happens. The pecans and berries were a great addition, but I might try it with mixed berries next time. I bet bananas and walnuts would be good. Or vanilla in the caramel and chocolate chips in the cake...

Spaghetti al Amatraciana

10-12 strips of bacon
1 med onion, diced
2 14.5 oz cans of diced tomatoes, pureed
3 1/2 tbls red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp fresh black bepper
1/2 cup fresh grated Romano cheese
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
1 lb spaghetti, cooked

Chop bacon into bite sized pieces and brown it in a pan. Remove it to a paper towel lined plate and pour out all but a tbl worth of fat. Brown the onion then deglaze the pan with the vinegar. Add the tomatoes, red pepper, black pepper, bacon and cheese. Reduce heat to low and let simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the basil and let simmer for another 5-10 minutes, still stirring frequently. Add the pasta and stir to coat. Let it sit on low heat, stirring occasionally for a couple minutes. Serve, garnish with more cheese.

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Ok kids, we all know this song. What makes everything better? Bacon! That's right. And bacon and tomato sauce is like some kind of wonderful drug. I posted this recipe before, but it was a long time ago and it wanted an update. I've changed the original a little, but not really that much and I bet Gina would approve of what I've done. Instead of using cans of tomato puree I've started pureeing diced tomatoes myself. This gives me a bit more sauce, which I like, and gives it a fresher tomato taste. Plus I added more bacon. Because bacon rules. I've also taken to not adding the red pepper flakes to the sauce, but sprinkling them over individual portions since my girlfriend doesn't feel it for spicy. This is a great, fast meal. I've even figured out the proportions for doing a single portion with an eight ounce can of tomato sauce. Well, I eyeball it, so it would be hard to share the measurements, but it's great for when I come home late from work. So, let's do this thing, shall we?

First, cook the bacon. Mmmmm, bacon. Now you have a pan full of bacon fond and grease. Mmmmm, bacon fond and grease. Now pour out most of the grease then plop the onion in there. Brown it up well, then deglaze with the vinegar. You could use wine in this, but I like the pop that the vinegar gives it. If you use wine you might want to bump it up to a half cup. Oh, and when you pour the vinegar in there, step back. The fumes that come off will knock you down at first. Trust me. Once you've scraped up all that gorgeous bacon fond pour in the tomatoes. You could use a big can of crushed tomatoes instead, but I've found that the flavor of pureed diced tomatoes is better. For me. You can do whatever you like. Now add the cheese. Lots of cheese. I got this stuff from the little Italian deli down the street from me, it is wicked good. I let it simmer for a few minutes to melt the cheese, stirring frequently. The only thing worse than burned tomato sauce is burned eggs. Ugh, nasty. Next, the basil. I've used dried basil in this recipe and it is... adequate. If you don't have anything else. Fresh is clearly the best. This time I'm actually using this stuff. It's frozen fresh basil. These folks were nice enough to contact me and send me some free samples in exchange for a review. I'm going to write a whole post about it once I've used them in more stuff, but so far so good. It's not quite as good as fresh fresh, but the difference is really pretty small. And this stuff keeps for a lot longer than fresh fresh. Well, I'll go more into it when I write the review, but the verdict at this point is a resounding thumbs up. I added three tablespoons (and took some wicked crappy pictures. Sadly, this was the best one I got. Grumble.) at this point, let it simmer for about ten minutes, then added another tablespoon. You could add even more if you wanted, it's hard to have too much fresh basil flavor in this sauce. But I was hungry and wanted to have at it, so I tossed in my pasta. Hmm. We're gonna need a bigger boat. And you can ignore the sauce splashies all over my stove. It was clean when I started cooking, I swear. Anyway, I moved it all from the frying pan I was working with to the pasta pot, stirred it around and let it all come together. In retrospect, it would have been easier to pour the sauce onto the pasta while it was in the pot, but what are you gonna do. I like to toss my pasta in the sauce to finish cooking, I think the flavor is best when the pasta absorbs some of the sauce. But you could also just spoon the sauce over it when you serve, if you are into that. And there it is, spaghetti al amatraciana. And thanks to Dajana taking the time to give me a little Italian lesson over at Bakespace I can even pronounce it now. Heh.

Flank Steak Lo Mein, Revisited

1 lb flank steak
1 small head of broccoli
1/2 a bunch of asparagus
1/2 a medium onion
1 red pepper
1/4 cup soy sauce
3-4 tbls hoisin sauce
1 tsp sugar
2 large cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 tbl minced ginger
1 tsp rice wine vinegar
couple turns of pepper
1/2 lb noodles, cooked al dente

Combine the soy sauce, hoisin, sugar, ginger, garlic, vinegar and pepper in a zipper plastic bag. Add the flank steak, squeeze out as much air as possible and let marinate for at least an hour or as many as 4-5. Chop the onion into whatever size pieces you like. Cut the asparagus, broccoli and pepper into bite sized pieces. When the steak is done marinating, take it out of the bag, scrape off as much of the marinade and chunks of ginger and garlic as you can. Reserve the liquid. Pat the steak dry and cut it once along the grain, then into thin slices against the grain. Stir fry the vegetables, in several shifts if needed, till almost done and put them aside. Stir fry the steak in several shifts, then set it aside. Add the reserved marinade to the pan and bring to a boil. Add the cooked noodles and stir to coat. Add the vegetables and meat, stir to combine. Keep stirring for a minute to finish cooking everything. Then serve.

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Here is another updated recipe. Well, sort of updated. Lo mein is never the same way twice when I make it. One odd thing happened this time around, there wasn't as much sauce as there usually is. I think it's because I added the hoisin to the marinade instead of doing it the way I usually do, adding it at the end when I'm cooking the sauce. Or maybe I accidentally used more noodles than normal. I don't know exactly what happened. But it was still wicked good. Anyway, the original post for this was also my very first post. It was more than a little rough around the edges, but that particular version of this dish is by far my favorite. This one is really just an example of how you can make it with whatever you happen to have. I had asparagus. So that's went in there. I guess that makes it kind of a east/west fusion kind of thing. Some of the pictures didn't come out so hot but fortunately I'm not vain, I just use what I have. Why don't we just dive right in here.

First things first, I made the marinade. A quarter cup of soy sauce in a zipper freezer bag thingie, a couple cloves of minced garlic, a big chunk of ginger. This is the ginger that I've been keeping in vodka, it still has lots of flavor even after twenty days. I minced it and tossed it in there. Then I put in the hoisin. This I think was a mistake. If anyone decides to make this, add the hoisin after you bring the marinade to a boil at the end of the recipe. I'll point out when. But this is the way I did it and pretending I did it another way would be like lying. And I couldn't do that to you guys. Heh. Now toss in a little sugar and the vinegar, mix it up and slap the beef in there. Get out as much air as you can and stick it in the fridge for a couple hours. When that's about done, prep your veggies. This time around I'm using asparagus, a red pepper, half an onion and some broccoli. Why? They're what I had on hand. Lo mein is kind of like a casserole that way. Anyway, I diced the onion, cut the asparagus into thirds,chopped the pepper into bite sized chunks and floretted the broccoli. Is that even a word? Well, if not it is now. Next, the steak. Mmmmm, flank steak. Man, I love flank steak. I have no idea what it is about it, but I just can't get enough. You want to take it out of the marinade and scrape off most of the garlic and ginger stuck to it, put the chunks back in the liquid and set that aside. That's the sauce. Pat it dry and cut it in half along the grain. That's the way the strips of muscle go. You want a short grain in the end product, makes it more tender. Then cut each half into thin strips against the grain. Now you're ready to stir fry. First you want to do the veggies. I usually do them one at a time, just to make sure they are all done just how I like them. But if you aren't as fussy as me then you can do them all at once. Well, if you have a big enough pan that is. You would probably wind up doing them in batches anyway. But here's how I did it. First the onion. I heated up my stir fry pan wicked hot, with a little canola oil in the bottom. I browned up the onion pretty well. I much prefer it that way, especially with yellow onion. Then I tossed the asparagus in with it and cooked it for a minute or so. You don't want it cooked all the way since it will finish cooking at the end. Then I pulled that out, added a little more oil and tossed in the broccoli. Once the broccoli was almost done I put in the peppers and just tossed them around little bit to sweat. No squishy peppers. Pulled those out and put them aside and put in about a third of the meat. You want to cook the meat in shifts, otherwise it winds up braising in it's own juices. Once the meat was done I pulled it out too, poured in the leftover marinade and brought it to a boil. Here is where I normally would have added the hoisin sauce. I don't know what I was thinking adding it to the marinade. Heh, I never said I wasn't a flake. Once the sauce has boiled enough to kill any critters that might be in the raw beefyness reduce the heat to a simmer and toss in the noodles. I just use spaghetti. I know, I'm a savage. You want the pasta not quite done when you put it in, that way it will absorb the sauce and be extra good. Toss it around to coat it then dump everything back in. Now mix it all up and let it all finish cooking, stirring it every once in a while. This also lets the flavors mingle a bit. And there you have it, flank steak lo mein with the veggies I had in the fridge.