Chocoholic Anonymous

Firstly, thank you to Laurie for relaxing the rules this week; allowing us to post Vibi’s (La casserole carrée) apropos selection after our Thanksgiving feasting.  How much more perfect could the recipe assignment for the week of Thanksgiving be than a pie that has Thanksgiving in its very name?

This week we are making Thanksgiving Twofer Pie.  If you are not familiar with it, this pie essentially takes two Thanksgiving classics and smashes them together in a single pie plate.  Now personally I absolutely love pecan pie (the only thing better is chocolate pecan pie) but pumpkin pie has always been missing something for me.  Don’t get me wrong, I like pumpkin pie and I make at least one every year but given a spread of desserts that often averages one to two full desserts per person at the table there is always something that I will choose before pumpkin pie.  After reading this recipe I had very high hopes – perhaps pecan pie is what had been missing from pumpkin pie…

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Every year around this time I find myself going through the exact same thing.  I go to store after store looking for the Heath toffee baking pieces (the ones without the chocolate), only to be disappointed at every stop.  I used to be able to get them easily; they were in the baking aisle of every grocery store, right there with the rest of the assorted baking pieces almost always next to the selection of nuts.  Then, about 3 or 4 years ago they quietly disappeared.

How could this be?  I asked at several grocery stores and I was informed that the Heath baking pieces were just not popular enough to keep them in stock and I should try a specialty store.  Well, I tried several to no avail.  Last year I actually bought full size Heath bars, melted the chocolate off them and crushed them myself.  I’ve looked online, and sure, I can find those wonderfully convenient baking pieces but the shipping costs are staggering.

This year I decided to finally give up on the idea of convenience (really, is it still convenient if you have to go to a dozen stores to not find what you’re looking for?), I decided I would try my hand at making my own toffee baking pieces.  It turns out that it is quick, easy, and well worth the (minimal) effort.

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Welcome to the latest installment of Tuesday’s with Dorie.  This week’s recipe is Arborio Rice Pudding selected by Isabelle of Les gourmandises d’Isa. After my difficulty with last week’s recipe I was pretty excited about Isabelle’s choice – I’ve made pudding before, I can do this! I was also very interested in the “black” rice pudding (big surprise, right?), especially since I missed our most recent chocolate recipe.

After reading over the recipe I have to admit that 1/4 cup rice seemed insufficient in proportion to the 3 1/4 cups of milk.  However, because my pudding making experience prior to last night did not include rice pudding I dismissed any doubts and made out my shopping list.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I wasn’t able to play with this recipe over the weekend as I intended.  So, instead of happily experimenting in my kitchen I sat down rather late on Sunday evening to read the P&Q – and I am so glad I did!  A big thanks to Dorie for her correction and all my fellow TWD-ers for sharing their experiences, it really made a big difference in this recipe.

One thing that was never in doubt was that I was going to make the “black” version of this recipe but I was in the mood to experiment a little so I had to do things just a little different…

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Two things have recently come to my attention:

1) I haven’t actually shared a recipe with you in about a month

2) My last few posts haven’t had very much (if anything) chocolate in them

I simply cannot permit this situation to continue.  This recipe not only rectifies both issues but it satisfies every craving for sweet, gooey, chocolaty goodness that I’ve had lately.  Not to be completely immodest, but these little bars are positively to die for.  And I’m not the only one to hold this belief – they vanished in under a day at the office and every single person gave them a rave review.

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer, grab the recipe here and let’s get baking…

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Here we are on another Tuesday, I’m not sure where the last week went.  I was really looking forward to having the day off of work today and being able to bake the TWD assignment actually on Tuesday.  It turns out that I haven’t truly had the day off (the ability to work from home is really only a benefit when it doesn’t interfer with time off!) and because of the long wait times involved in this week’s assignment I actually started working on it last night.  Oh well, can’t have everything I suppose.  Without further ado, this week’s TWD assignment is Kugelhopf (please don’t ask me to pronounce that!) selected by Yolanda of The All-Purpose Girl.

One thing I did like about waiting a couple more days to begin working on this recipe was the opportunity to learn from my fellow TWD-ers’ experiences.  The idiom goes “forewarned is forearmed” and I wish it were true in this case, but sadly it just isn’t.  The many reports of runny dough and dough that just never rose properly did not in any way save me from experiencing the exact same thing.  I did have high hopes of avoiding the “bland” flavor reported by several TWD-ers, but alas, that was not to be either…

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Having just returned from my honeymoon late Sunday night, I wasn’t sure if I was going to return to TWD this week or not.  Then I saw that the recipe selected by Piggy of Piggy’s Cooking Journal was one that I had never tried before – rugelach.  I decided I was up for the challenge after all, so here I am!

Rugelach is not only something I have never made before, but it is something that I have not even eaten before.  One of the things I’m enjoying so much about TWD is that it is broadening my culinary horizons.  Thankfully, since I was somewhat short on time and rather tired, this recipe came together pretty easily, although I did manage to forget a step…

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The honeymoon is over and it is time to get back to life as usual, which means it is time to resume posting here (one of the good things about coming back!).

This wedding cake turned out to be quite the saga of triumphs and tregedies.  I wish I had been able to chronicle it better for you, but I really did not have the time in the midst of all the final wedding preparations.  Before mom and I got started I just did not fully grasp the scope of the project.  I had selected all of the cake sizes and I had even seen the pans arranged to look like the finished cake, but it wasn’t until we started baking the various tiers and putting them together that I realized how large the cake truly was.

Mom had a schedule for us to follow that should have resulted in a relatively smooth path to completion, however, the cake just did not want to cooperate…

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