If chocolate is your thing, then you MUST try this dark chocolate sorbet. I adapted Ina Garten’s recipe and tried a spicy version and a cinnamony version. I think I like it somewhere in between, but closer to the spicy version. It had a little too much kick for my husband, but I was a fan after the initial punch in the back of the throat. This recipe is so simple, easily adaptable, involves few ingredients and is insanely decadent. I highly recommend you give this one a shot! Enjoy!

Dark Chocolate Sorbet

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup very good cocoa powder (I used dutch process from King Arthur Flour)
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon (or more, to your liking)
1/8 teaspoon cayenne *optional* (and you do not need more than 1/8 tsp, even this will make it super hot!)
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups water
1/4 cup brewed espresso (I used 1/4 teaspoon espresso powder mixed with 1/4 cup water)

Directions:

One of my co-workers celebrated his birthday yesterday, so I decided that an adaptation of these Birthday Cake Truffles would be the ideal celebration treat. I bake something for each co-worker on my team every year for their birthday. My team is comprised of mostly men – men who don’t have people to bake them sweet treats very often – so it’s something I’m happy to do!

The best thing about these Birthday Cake Truffles is that they’re no-bake Could you get any easier? Not really. The second best thing is that you could play around with pretty much any combination of flavors. I opted for yellow cake with sprinkles, and covered some in white chocolate and some in semisweet chocolate. Both were great. I usually avoid white chocolate at all costs, but it really worked well with these. And it looked nice

Unfortunately I didn’t get a good photo of these because they disappeared so quickly! I get a new phone in three months, so I promise that when I don’t have time to snap a good pic, the quality should still be better than this!

In any case, please make these. They’re so addicting! Enjoy

Cake Batter Truffles
Yield: About 3 dozen

Directions:

1. Beat together butter and sugar using an electric mixer until combined.
2. Add cake mix, flour, salt, and vanilla and mix thoroughly. 
3. Add 3 Tablespoons of milk or more if needed to make a dough consistency (it took me 4-5 T).
4. Mix in sprinkles by hand.
5. Roll dough into one inch balls and place on a parchment or wax paper lined cookie sheet.
6. Chill balls in the refrigerator for 15 minutes to firm up.
7. While dough balls are chilling, melt chocolate in the microwave in 30 second intervals until melted. (Stir between intervals.)
8. Once melted, quickly stir in cake mix until incorporated completely.
9. Using a fork, dip truffles into chocolate and shake of excess bark by tapping the bottom of the fork on the side of your bowl.
10. Place truffle back on the cookie sheet and top with sprinkles.
11. Repeat with remaining balls until finished.

Man, I wanted Madonna to be awesome. I’ve loved for as long as I can remember. I’ve danced around my room to the Immaculate Collection more times than I can count. I laid on a beach during vacation listening to nothing besides Ray of Light. Madonna is iconic. She’s simply amazing. So, I figured her performance would either be incredible or horrible. It was by no means incredible, and I shudder to say it was horrible, but truth hurts sometimes.

Where to begin? How about with something positive? That’s nice. I liked the Vogue beginning. Love the song, loved  what they did visually. All around WIN! Oh, one more WIN = Madonna’s makeup.

OK, now to get into everything else. First up, her shoes. I didn’t mind them. I didn’t think they were too high, too provocative, or overtly anything. They went with her gothic get-ups and generally, I was a fan. What I was not a fan of was the fact that she couldn’t walk in them. Dear Madonna, this is why we have dress rehearsals – to practice such things and make adjustments if things aren’t working. Madonna stated that much attention to detail was taken when designing her wardrobe for the performance so as to avoid a wardrobe malfunction. Well, not being able to walk in your shoes is a malfunction in my book. FAIL.

At one point, there was a tightrope walker. Generally, the idea is kind of cool. Who doesn’t love Cirque du Soleil? Despite him doing some pretty cool tricks for about 15 seconds, this little bit just didn’t have enough for me to consider it a strength in her performance. For one thing, why was the guy wearing a dress? I could see a Greek robe type thing, but this costume was severely dress-like. And why did he have a curly ‘fro? I didn’t get it. Was he supposed to be androgynous? I just didn’t understand what the point of this part of her show was. FAIL.

Nicki Minaj, MIA, and Madonna. Interesting, but OK. Pom-pons? Really? Why? How does that make sense? I kept asking myself why on earth Madonna was dancing around with pom-pons, looking as juvenile as she was acting. The least you could do is straighten your arms! As an ex-dance coach, this repulsed me. The entire bit wasn’t all horrible, though, since Nicki’s rap was good, and MIA managed to flip off the camera. Overall, though….FAIL.

LMFAO. I love LMFAO! How cool for them to collaborate with Madonna. The biggest oddity I found was Madonna bouncing up and down on their shoulders. Really? Madonna used to be able to dance. Like for real dance. Now she’s bouncing around like a kid looking like an idiot? Cool for LMFAO, pitiful for Madonna. Sorry. FAIL.

I heard a rumor that Cee-Lo Green was supposed to help revive Madonna’s career – make her more relevant. If this was supposed to be relevant…then….
…anyway, I think Cee-Lo is generally great. I can get past the fact that he looks like a T-Rex and has super short arms and just an oddly shaped body. Really, I can. I have even grown to expect sparkly robes such as the one he wore during the halftime show. My confusion (although I guess I shouldn’t really be confused) lies in Madonna’s wardrobe choice. What was with the long gothic robe? I swore she was going to rip it off at some point, and actually found myself disappointed when she didn’t. Meh. FAIL.

Finally, the ending. Did anybody else feel like Madonna slipped into the underworld at the end? She’s singing Like a Prayer (awesome jam), which is all religious and godly, yadda yadda yadda….and then she disappears by falling beneath the stage in the a puff of smoke….while wearing a strange dark cape. One can really assume that the devil rescued her from this epic failure of a show. Wait. It did end with “World Peace” lit up. Meh. Underwhelming. I still vote FAIL.

I’m not even going to get into the fact that Madonna was clearly lip-synching the entire. I’ve grown to expect that sort of thing from live television. I can’t really fault them for this so it was a non-issue for me. And because I still respect Madonna as the Material Girl, I’m going to refrain from posting more pictures of her embarrassing herself by “dancing” or “walking.” But if you ever read this, Madonna, please go back to your roots. That’s when you rocked it.

Everyone else, what did you think of the show?

Anyway, most of these are under $1K, but still. For now I must window shop only and enjoy the eye candy…

1. A giant two-pound loaf of white bread is too tall to fit into a sandwich bag!
2. A giant two-pound loaf is also far too much for two people to finish before it goes bad.

So, that said, I wanted to try to make a different kind of bread, and this time I’d cut the recipe in half so as to have a more “normal” sized loaf of bread. After scouring the interwebs and food blogs for a suitable recipe (of which I actually had the ingredients on hand), I decided to creat my own recipe, inspired by this Vanilla Spice Bread recipe I found from the oh-so-trusty allrecipes.com site.

The original recipe looked great, but it wanted me to just mix the dough in the bread maker, and then transfer it to a loaf pan for the proofing and baking. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to throw my ingredients in the bread maker, walk away for a few hours, and come back to delicious bread. So, I adapted it a bit and played around with different ingredients.

The result was better than I expected (only because when I get  creative and stop measuring, the result isn’t always top notch). I ended up with a “normal” sized loaf of bread that smelled like vanilla and cinnamon. I was afraid it would be too sweet, but the taste was actually pretty subtle. My husband and I plowed through half the loaf (perhaps more…) in just a few minutes. I haven’t tried it any way but plain yet, but I think it would lend itself to a pretty spectacular PB&J. I think my favorite part of this bread is the fact that it’s nice and chewy and the crust has enough crunch to offer a good contrast, but not so much that it’s a pain to eat. Yum!

Ingredients:

3/4 cup water
1 tablespoon dry milk powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon white sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons apple sauce
1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 cups bread flour
1  teaspoon instant yeast

Directions

1. Place water, milk, vanilla extract, brown sugar, white sugar, spices, apple sauce, and salt into the pan of a bread machine in that order.
2. Pour the flour onto the other ingredients, and sprinkle the flour with yeast.
3. Set the bread machine to your desired cycle; turn on the machine.

I asked for a bread maker for Christmas and ended up getting this awesome supreme home bakery. This machine does far more than just make a loaf of bread! According to the box (I haven’t tried this yet), it makes pizza dough, meat loaf, jam, dinner rolls and more. There are 10 settings, you can choose your crust shade, and it has a fun little window you can look through to watch the different stages of the process.

I’ll be honest, I’ve only had time to make one loaf so far, but I plan on making it much more frequently. I made a loaf of white bread for sandwiches and it tasted way better than store bought. I also saw a bit on the news that looked into whether it was better (cheaper) to buy certain household staples or make them, and bread was one that was more economical to make. So, food for thought.

This particular machine will run you around $220 or so, but there are cheaper machines out there with fewer settings that can get the job done for you. If you’re a carb lover like me, this things pays for itself very quickly! From sandwich bread, to quick breads, dinner rolls, french loaves…and apparently meat loaf…how can you go wrong?!

Last year, I was signed up for a cupcakes and cake balls class at the Viking Cooking School and this year, I was signed up for an artisan bread making class at Sur La Table. Both were great, but for different reasons. I think a lot of it has to do with the teacher, and I got two very knowledgeable, professional teachers. The one at Sur La Table made the class more fun and explained things in a way that anybody could understand. The one at Viking was a little more “culinary school” when it came to her teaching – she undoubtedly knew her stuff but could have lightened up just a bit.

So what cooking or baking classes have you taken? Any advice or recommendations?

Viking Cooking School
Likes:

• Very hands on
• Knowledgeable teacher
• You’re given a snack during the class (which sounds kind of like kindergarten, but it’s nice to get a snack when you’re there for four hours, during lunchtime)
• You get to bring home a little bit of everything that was made throughout the class
• You get a coupon to purchase items from the store

Dislikes:

• Each team makes a different recipe
• Classes are a bit pricey
  

  Cupcakes from Viking Cooking School class

Cake balls from Viking Cooking School class

Sur La Table
Likes:

• Very hands on
• Energetic, personable, very knowledgeable teacher/staff
• Complementary espresso/cappuccino/water while you cook
• Each group makes all the recipes
• You get a coupon to purchase items from the store
• Classes are less expensive than comparable classes in the area

Dislikes:

• You aren’t allowed to bring food home, or out of the classroom for that matter
• You don’t get a snack or anything during the class (even if the class is for four hours, during lunchtime…boo hoo)

I bought my jars and vanilla beans from Amazon and tried a couple different kinds of vanilla beans: Bourbon, Mexican, and Madagascar. I think I prefer the Bourbon vanilla beans, but I’m not sure I’d be able to tell much of a difference. I experimented with vodka and rum since I’d heard you could use either. I haven’t compared them yet, so we’ll see what happens. Regardless, I think I’ll stick to this method rather than purchasing my vanilla extract from now on.

Have any of you tried this yet? What do you think?

DIY Vanilla Extract

Ingredients:
3 whole vanilla beans per 8 oz of vodka
clean glass bottle or jar
8 oz cheap vodka

Directions:
Split the vanilla beans lengthwise and place them in a clean glass bottle or jar. Fill the bottle with vodka. Seal the lid or top tightly and place in a dark and cool place for 2 months. Shake the bottle from time to time.

11. DIY: Vanilla Extract | Baking

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

10. The Hunger Games Trilogy | Reading

9. Feather Hair Extensions | Style

8. Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy | Reading

7. Faux Fur | Style

6. Baby Banz | Motherhood

5. Christina Perri | Music

4. Homemade Pasta | Baking

3. Teething Bling | Motherhood

2. Rent the Runway | Style

1. Pancake Cupcakes with Maple Bacon Frosting | Baking

Cheers to a great 2011, and here’s looking forward to an even better 2012. Wishing you all a happy, safe, and healthy new year!

XOXO,
Kimberly