Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Culinary Creations

I briefly mentioned before that I have had a plethora of jobs. Right now, I am an adjunct English teacher at a community college, and I love it. I get to teach and find new ways to make writing interesting and relevant. I also have an awesome schedule that allows me to indulge my passions: writing, reading, and BAKING!

I have a stack of recipes known as the "Will Make One Day" stack. Well, that will make day is now! With more time, I get to make more dirty dishes. I have conquered two recipes that I feared tremendously in my "one day" stack: homemade caramel sauce and homemade marshmallows.

 Caramel sauce is a fairly easy thing to make. I used this recipe from BakedBree.com (a great food website): http://bakedbree.com/caramel-sauce

I even propped the laptop on the bar so I could look at the pictures for reference. Doing that provided to be extremely helpful, because when the mixture of sugar and water started to turn into amber bubbles, I knew not to get nervous. Mine did, however, turn out a little darker than hers, but still delightful!

The sauce was the perfect topping for the leftover Bailey's Irish Cream cake, which I turned into bread pudding. (I guess it would be cake pudding in this case!)

Homemade marshmallows were not as easy as caramel sauce. The recipes I used were on the Food Network website, and they were on a mixture of an Alton Brown (Good Eats) recipe and an Ina Garten (Barefoot Contessa) recipe.

Somehow after finishing the marshmallows, the kitchen had an oil-coated sheen. My original pot was the right size to contain the expanding bubbles made during caramel sauce, but it almost over flowed during marshmallow making. During mid-boiling, I had to change pots, causing some sugar mixture to hit the stove eye and catch fire. Oops. Also, my old Sunbeam stand mixer did not like being left on high for so long. I had to say sweet and tender words to the old girl so she wouldn't riot on me and throw half thickened marshmallow goo all over the kitchen.

Anyways, the marshmallows after all the oil, pondering, fire, and fear, turned out great. I couldn't, however, successfully scrape the entire marshmallow mixture out of the bowl, and I turned my back on the left over goop.

By the time I had finished smoothing out the mixture on to a greased cookie sheet, husband had graham crackers crumbled in the bowl and was asking for melted chocolate. A quick whisk with the mixer and we had smores on a stick! Best thing EVER! Homemade marshmallows are great, but homemade smores on a stick are blissful.



Enjoying his creation!


1 comment:

Erin M. said...

NOM! That looked batter-lickin' good!