My Devious Plan to get a New Oven

Well. It's been a while, I see. Whoops. So. How to sum up the past few months before we move onto the important thing, namely cake and new ovens? The best way to describe my summer is that involved a lot of pizza and a lot of roller derby, as I worked in two different pizza joints and worked hard on my skating. Big Easy Rollergirls taught me everything I know about skating and made my last year in New Orleans amazing! I spent a lot time with my friends, especially my wolf pack, and became a regular at Twelve Mile Limit, the best snobby cocktail bar I've come across. But, come August, it was time to move again.

I moved to Boston to start my non-profit management MBA at the Heller School. It's a huge change in identity, and so far it's great! My roommate also lived in New Orleans, and her sister is a friend of mine (before we settled on that, I interviewed some truly weird potential roommates. Maybe I'll tell you about it someday). Going back to school does leave less room for creative pursuits, but I've managed somehow. Soon I'll tell you about the beer brewing in recon room of my apartment, but for now, I'll restrict my comments to the oven situation.

The apartment is lovely, but the kitchen is best described as...dated. The oven and fridge are avocado green, the floor and backsplash tiles are brown. It's 70s-tastic. The oven never worked very well, as the door would only open with a fight, and fell off every so often. The fridge is the antithesis of energy efficient. So really, using the kitchen could be an exercise in slapstick comedy. It all came to a head Thursday night. The Gentleman in Question has a nice round birthday in a few days, and I had promised him cake. After some effort, I had the batter in the pans ready to go, so I opened the oven door. Big mistake. The door came flying off, crazy hot, and crashed to the floor. I couldn't get it back on. The landlord came over, and we discovered the hinges were warped. His wife kindly baked the cake for me, and our oven door is leaning against the door to the porch. As of Thursday night, there was talk of getting a new oven. My roommate is quite pleased with that turn of events, and the Gentleman is scheming a way to get me a new refrigerator.

The cake was totally worth it. The Gentleman requested some combination of chocolate and raspberry, and being an overachiever, I decided to do a checkerboard with those flavors. To get the checkerboard effect, you need a plastic insert. It comes in a kit. There are many options, so investigate. The pans in the kit I linked to are pretty nice. Once you have that essential piece of equipment, the rest is fairly simple. Finding recipes can be tricky, because the two cake flavors need to have similar textures, and bake at the same temperature for the same amount of time. Raspberry cake was an additional challenge. Every recipe involved jello. Which is creepy. Until Smitten Kitchen saved the day, with her adapted Pink Lady Cake recipe. I changed it further, cutting it in half and subbing in raspberries. For the chocolate, I went with this recipe from Joy of Baking, also cut in half. The raspberry flavor shines through, and the chocolate is rich without being too sweet. My cake came out extra dense and not as checkerboardy because of the baking drama, but yours will turn out light and delightful. You'll get three bowls dirty making these cakes, so the mess isn't too bad.

Mardi Gras

It ate my life. It does that. So one of the great things about Mardi Gras is that in celebrating it, you make new friends and cement old friendships. There is a camaraderie on the parade route. With cheap beer as a social lubricant, and a friendly smile, you can accomplish most things during Carnival. Except driving and parking downtown. As I relearned, that is a fool's errand.

But you develop your own personal krewe during the two week slog of day drinking. These are the people that you call and text every morning to decide on what you're going to do that day. Plans vaguely alluded to the night before come together. Mardi Gras mostly happens on the weekends, but, the Thursday before, it becomes an every day, all day adventure.

Some parade goers get really angry and shouty. Thus, for Endymion, my krewe had to search pretty hard for a spot to stand. By contrast, for Proteus and Orpheus, our neighbors were friendly. And that's generally the theme during Mardi Gras. I always meet new people, usually out of town friends visiting my people, or the kindly souls who live near the parade route and open their houses (and their bathrooms) to me, as a friend of a friend.

I'm a Mardi Gras veteran. Some years I'm more into it than others. Last year was particularly intense, seeing as it was Lombardi Gras. This year was a middle of the road year for me. But the new aspect was that for the first time, I was in a parade! Two in fact. As a rollergirl, I had the opportunity to skate in Pontchartrain and walk in Muses. Being in the parade is a completely different experience. Instead of trying to catch cheap beads, I was throwing them. But I decided to mix it up. I threw skate wheels! I painted them black and gold.

Unfortunately, I almost broke my friend's nose and busted all the liquor in the process. I was aiming a wheel at my roommate, and flung it pretty hard at his face, because I wanted to and I knew he'd catch it in time. But I failed to factor in my forward momentum as I skated along. So I missed and it went straight at my other friend's nose. He was holding the cooler of cheap beer and cheaper liquor, and was completely helpless. I saw the look of terror pass over his face as my roommate reached out and ninja grabbed the wheel, saving the booze.

Just one of my many adventures of the past two weeks.

Windowpane Cookies

Again, with the apologies. I'm sorry! I've been traveling and applying to graduate school, and thus not blogging. I also didn't have my camera on my travels, so the crafty things I did went unrecorded. Today, I offer up the last of my December cookie project. In coming days, I'll show you a bit of New Orleans, since the Henz will be in town.

But on to the cookies. These are a combination of recipes and concepts. I started with this recipe, but found that I was defeated by the sticky impossible dough. So I tried this one, but kept the candy concept. The dough itself is a dream. Not too sticky, and it results in a nice tender cookie.


Ingredients:

1 cup unsalted butter, softened at room temperature for an hour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
2 ounces cream cheese (1/4 of a standard cream cheese package)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Jolly Ranchers, unwrapped and crushed

Directions:

Cream together the butter and sugar, then add in the egg and mix until everything is pretty smooth. Add in the cream cheese and vanilla, mixing thoroughly. Then mix in the next three ingredients. Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour, until ready to use.

Preheat the oven to 350, and roll out the dough to 1/8" to 1/4" thickness and cut out cookies. To make the windowpane cookies, use two cutters of the same shape but different sizes. Cut out with the larger one first, then cut out the center of the resulting cookie with the smaller one. Place resulting cookie on lined cookie sheet, then carefully fill the center with the crushed jolly rancher. You don't want the rancher dust to get on the cookie, since it will stain.

Bake cookies for 8 to 12 minutes, depending on thickness, and let cool completely on the cookie sheet. The jolly rancher may look bubbly and weird out of the oven, but don't worry, as it cools it will solidify and smooth out.