Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs

Slacker

sugarbombs — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:34:32 +0000

I have been a monumental slacker, blog-wise. It’s not like I haven’t been cooking or baking or taking pictures lately. I’ve been doing plenty of that, in fact. And now is kind of an odd time to start up again because I burned both my thumbs cooking earlier (because I’m an idiot) and playing on the computer is not exactly the best way to deal with the pair of developing blisters. Oh well.

Here’s some photos from the past couple days/weeks.

Taken on a recent bike ride around the neighborhood.

Arlington Courthouse Farmer’s Market

Cornmeal Pancakes. Delicious.

Not exactly Kaiser rolls.

Head on over to the Flickr page for more. I promise I’ll stop being such a loser and start updating everything properly again soon.

The Bastard Batard

sugarbombs — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:52:47 +0000

Ok. This bread wasn’t actually bad. It’s just that its not what I was really going for and it’s not nearly as versatile as I would’ve liked, so it’s still kind of a bastard batard. It’s an adaptation of Peter Reinhart’s Pain de Campange, or French country bread, but something got lost somewhere. It probably has something to do with me thinking I could get by baking something without following the recipe exactly. (Not that you must follow every baking recipe to a T, but I’d recommend being a little more thoughtful in your substitutions than I was in this go around.)

Anyways, the Reinhart recipe calls for

3 cups pâte fermentée

1 3/4 cups unbleached bread flour

1/3 cup whole wheat or rye flour

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon yeast

3/4 cup lukewarm water

Where the pâte fermentée consists of the following

1 1/8 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 1/8 cups unbleached bread flour

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 yeast

3/4 cup room temperature water

Now, I was being less than bright, and basically ignored the whole pâte fermentée and went 75%/25% all-purpose flour/rye flour. The pâte fermentée is meant to develop flavor and yeast activity and so with my impromptu substitutions, mine ended up with a pronounced rye flavor and some sluggish yeast. Then I didn’t have some of my other amounts correct, but even still, things looked kind of promising for a while. After rising, shaping and proofing the dough it was time to slash it and throw the loaf in the oven. Well, throw it gently. Actually throwing it wouldn’t have worked out to well. I should note that there were a number of other steps involved in the whole process, but if you’ll forgive me, I’m still working on this whole “take photos of every step” thing and as far as bread making goes other people describe what needs to be done much better than I can right now.

The end result? It was a good loaf. The crust was good, but it could have stood to have been a little thicker. The crumb was fairly dense, which is what you’d kind of expect from a loaf made with whole rye flour. But I also used caraway seeds, and the caraway seed – whole rye combo makes for a very old world flavor all its own, and it doesn’t play well with a lot of other things. That’s not to say it doesn’t work well with nothing, though. It has made some excellent rye ham and german mustard sandwiches this week. But when I tried to have a slice with some roasted squash and zucchini…not so good.

I guess the moral is that I need to stop trying to make food do things its not really supposed to be doing. But in the meantime, I’ll just enjoy the rest of this batard.

Dumplings.

sugarbombs — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:36:47 +0000

There’s this dumpling place in Charlottesville, Marco and Luca’s Noodle Shop, that has excellent excellent dumplings. I never make it there as much as I’d like to, especially now that I don’t live so close. As such, I decided a few weeks ago to take matters into my own hands and make some potstickers of my own. They’re real simple as most of my first attempts are, but they turned out pretty good. They’re basically just little dollops of pork sausage placed inside a flour-water dough wonton. But the results are satisfying and tonight I paired them with some basmati rice (my favorite rice short of sticky rice) and sauteéd carrots and green beans. After being hungry all day, these were a welcome treat.

Orange Cat and Grey Cat

sugarbombs — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:31:29 +0000

There’s two cats that are always hanging around outside my townhouse – Orange cat and Grey cat. I don’t entirely know what to make of them. I know I like Grey cat better, if only because I’ve witness Orange cat on my car and I still have no evidence that Grey cat’s done the same. They’re kind of fun to have around, although they do try to sneak into my house sometimes. They’ll just sit on the porch and if they’re real sharp on a particular day, they’ll hear footsteps as I’m about to walk out the house so they get close to the door and then occasionally make an attempt to come inside. To their dismay (and my chagrin), they’ve always been denied.

That’s Orange cat. He’s a little more elusive than Grey cat, but I’m okay with that. And this is Grey cat, looking a little like that cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Speaking of which (witch?), what’s Melissa Joan Hart up to these days? Does anyone know?

Mmm. Food.

sugarbombs — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:20:26 +0000

I have been exceedingly hungry these past couple days and I’m not quite sure why. If I hadn’t been eating the foods I’d been making I could understand, but I’ve been eating plenty. In fact, I’m hungry right now and I just had a big dinner two hours ago. I don’t really understand and I’m just hoping it’s not a tapeworm. Sorry, try to erase the tapeworm image from your head. Deep breaths, clear your mind.

Ok. I made… cinnamon rolls (miniature sized… cinni-minis, anyone?) and a somewhat convoluted multi-grain batard. And while those things were baking, I tided myself over with this deliciously simple bagel sandwich.

If you can’t make out the ingredients, it’s just a homemade poppy seed bagel from an earlier baking endeavor, a couple slices of a near-perfectly ripe tomato, a bit of garlic and some cheese, toasted until awesome, with a few tomato chunks on the side for snacking. So good I could eat one again right now.

Then came the cinnamon rolls. The recipe was from Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which I’ve slowly been working my way through since receiving it as a birthday gift last month. (Has it really been a month??) They were pretty simple to make, and pretty fun since I’ve never made cinnamon rolls before and I’ve been eating tons of other cinnamon-sugar food items lately.

Here they are baking in the oven, well on their way to making the whole house smell like a Mitch Hedberg joke.

And here they are, all done and golden and yummy. I hate having to let all these baked goods cool before I can eat them.

Parent’s Weekend

sugarbombs — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:04:53 +0000

My parents swung through on their way home from the Outer Banks. I went with them to the Outer Banks once in high school, and upon discovering that if you haven’t brought a friend along on this type of vacation, you better have a good book to read or a high tolerance for boredom. I do have a high tolerance for boredom, but the Outer Banks won out. Especially the night my dad and I decided we’d take the ferry to Ocracoke Island. We got to the dock and found out we’d just missed the ferry, so we waited around forever for it to return. Then we hopped on, endured the uneventful ferry ride itself and arrived on Ocracoke just in time to be told that 1) the last ferry back to the rest of the Outer Banks was leaving shortly and 2) that the few things that there were to do were about to close. We bought a pair of candy bars to justify the trip and hopped back on the ferry. Total time wasted? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 hours.

But I digress. It was good to see my parents. I saw them when I was home for a wedding in June, but things were so busy we didn’t have much of a chance to socialize. We went out for a pretty solid Italian dinner at a place called D’Ambola’s down in Afton. It was a small, cozy little place but the atmosphere was nice, the waitstaff was friendly and I liked the restaurant’s attitude towards things. There were several menu items with notes like, “We will not substitute any other pasta or change this recipe. It is what it is.” I suspect that given the lack of an abundance of true Italian food in this area that they probably just got fed up of people asking for stuff to be more like their favorite TV dinners, but whatever the reason, I like their spunk. If you like what you make, you might as well stay true to it. People can eat elsewhere if they have a problem with it.

Saturday we bombed around humble Crozet a bit, hitting the farmer’s market, Starr Hill’s brewery (complete with a midday buzz-inducing free tasting), and Uncle Charlie’s Smokehouse. Charlie’s is like Crozet’s dive bar, I suppose. They do bill themselves as a family place, although neither of the times I’ve been in there have I seen families. But the food is good and the prices are good, too. Especially with the $10 coupons I’ve been finding in the mail.

Mid-afternoon my parents left to go back home. After that, the weekend slowed. But I did some cooking and some baking and some photogging. A few photos here, but more in another post.

Feck

sugarbombs — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:12:10 +0000

This week is a strange combination of busy and lazy. We had the wedding Sunday, drove back Monday, went to work Tuesday (some of us anyways, Laura stayed on vacation), volleyball Tuesday and today and then again tomorrow… then my parents come to visit Friday. And yet amidst all this I still haven’t unpacked my duffel, my room is a mess and only gets messier and I haven’t updated this as much as I wanted to. So.. apologies. I’ll take some pictures this weekend, I swear. Until then, stay tuned.

Peggy’s Wedding

sugarbombs — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:52:58 +0000

Laura and I rode up to Syracuse this weekend for my friend Peggy’s wedding. I’ve known Peggy since high school and she’s one of the best friends I could ever ask for. I’m having trouble articulating my feelings on the whole matter, probably because I’m still exhausted from the drive back today (9 hours, ugh), so let’s just say it was very special. And maybe that doesn’t really come as a surprise seeing as it was a wedding and all, but it was.

Just look at ‘em. The ceremony was short, but very nice. And the reception was a lot of fun. We also felt very honored to have been invited and to be there. I didn’t realize until we arrived that it was a very small wedding. Mostly family and only a few of Peggy and Darian’s friends. It just meant a lot knowing that they wanted us to share their day and I’m so glad we made the trip. It’s always good to go home, but things like this make it even better. And my date didn’t look so bad either.

Heron vs. Geese

sugarbombs — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:18:11 +0000

The other day I was on the phone with my mom discussing the details of my then-upcoming trip home. I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember much of the conversation because I was massively distracted when I looked out my bedroom window and saw a blue heron in the pond behind my house. This makes heron #2 for the summer, although I spotted the other one when Laura and I were kayaking around Roosevelt Island. I’m not sure which location makes more sense for spotting herons (or if either does, for that matter), but I digress.

I hurried outside to try to snap a few photos of this big bird, but it wasn’t the easiest of tasks. Once I got a certain distance away, it seemed like every step I took closer, the heron took a step further away, until I finally got too close and it flew to the other side of the pond.

Of course, on the other side of the pond was a bunch of geese and they weren’t too thrilled with the heron encroaching on their side of the lake. They must’ve had a quick conference on the matter because one appointed goose got to head on over to the heron and talk things out. And by talk I mean squawk. They debated the matter for a while until they were so rudely interrupted by my once again getting too close. The heron got up and flew back to the other side of the pond and I followed him over. Well, third time wasn’t the charm and when I got too close this time, the heron decided it’d had enough and flew up and away.

And for your viewing pleasure, a photo of the not so little guy…

Morning Ride and Peaches

sugarbombs — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:42:56 +0000

Laura and I woke up Saturday and the great outdoors were already threatening to turn things into another scorcher. So despite our half-zombie states, we opted for a light breakfast before heading outside to get some exercise in. Laura’s a hella crazy runner. She ran a half marathon a while back and could pretty much kick my ass in any run lasting longer than 2 minutes. Since there’s no real way to run with her without just slowing her down, I grabbed the bike. Yes, it’s not exactly fair to ride a bike while someone’s running, but unless anyone wants to throw me a better suggestion, I’m sticking with this.

We stayed on the roads for a while but then I took us on some of the trail I’d ridden last weekend to mix things up a bit. When we got back to the roads I happened to notice the sky looked particularly sweet, much bluer than usual and with some scallop clouds to boot. Pretty sweet.

We’d been planning on going peach picking since there’s an orchard just down the road from my house (it still feels strange saying things like that). So rather than clean up from the run/ride before going, we just went as our sweaty selves.

On the way out the door, grey cat (one of two cats that hangs out by my house) was sitting by my car. He looked like the wanted this picture taken, so… I took it. When I showed her this shot, Laura announced, “Watch out popsicle! You’re gonna die!” Which, incidentally, was meant to be an impression of grey cat had there been a popsicle around for him to eat. There was no popsicle and her grey cat impression was, well.. she didn’t use a special voice for it, that’s for sure. So I didn’t really understand what was going on. But grey cat does look a little bad ass, right?

I was really kind of indifferent on peach picking. That might sound like I don’t care, but that’s not really the case. I just don’t like peaches, that’s all. But I brought my camera so I could play around and take some photos. See?