The mother of invention

I lost count.  I was really excited last month when I realized that I had a blogging milestone coming up.  I knew it would be sometime in February.  But I apparently wasn't paying attention.  So instead of happily announcing that I am at post #400, I can now tell you that I'm at post #402.  Oh, well. =)

Even though I already posted some this month, I figured such a momentous event called for celebrating with brownies.  Who am I kidding?  I don't need an excuse to make brownies.  But it is a good opportunity to make some new brownies.  Ones that I won't have that much competition for, since I have a feeling my kids won't eat them.  The one category I had left for this month was magazine focus.    It's not usually the first place I look, but I thought I'd try Bon Appetit.  I like a lot of what I read in the magazine, but don't search their website all that often.  The recipe that quickly caught my eye was the Cocoa Brownies with Browned Butter and Walnuts.  It's from Alice Medrich, and I've made enough of her recipes to be pretty confident that I'd like the brownies.

I only made a couple of small changes to the recipe--I used pecans instead of walnuts, and I added salt--half a teaspoon.  I also took a shortcut and simply lined my pan with non-stick foil.  I may try another cocoa powder in the future, but for this round I went with plain old Hershey's.  The batter was easy to mix up, and I love the fact that you can make it in one pot.  The suggested baking time of 25 minutes worked great for me.

The only downside is that I was making the brownies last night after dinner.  So I knew it was going to be challenging to get decent pictures.  Sometimes I can manage to take pictures in the morning before work, but I had a very long day today.  I left the house before the sun was up, and knew that I wouldn't be home again until long after it set.  Then inspiration hit--I took a page from my friend Abby's book (she likes to take dough on field trips), and took the brownies to work with me.  Now you're probably thinking, she takes baked goods to work all the time.  That's true, but not with the intent of taking pictures of them in natural light.  Which meant, in my car:

The verdict?  The pictures turned out better than I expected. =)  I need to work on the setup if I do this again, but at least the color in the pictures is good.  The brownies were really good, too.  Jamie and I both like them a lot.  I'm not usually in a nuts-in-my-chocolate mood, but I love pecans, and they worked really well in these brownies.  I think the salt was a good addition, too.  I did share the brownies with one of my coworkers, who thought they were fantastic.

If you'd like to try the recipe for yourself, you can find it here at Bon Appetit!  So what's the most unusual thing you've done to get good blog pictures? =)

Wordless Wednesday - 41

Vanilla Cupcake with Chocolate Frosting (both from Bon Appetit Desserts)
that I made for my birthday yesterday;

frosted with a 2D tip as in this video (via Tracey)

Wordless Wednesday - Stone fruit lattice pie

(recipe here)

Words with kids

Several months ago, I treated myself to an early 40th birthday present and got an iPod touch.  I admit, that was partly because Jamie got one for Christmas and I saw how cool they are and wanted my own.  (And then I followed that up by treating myself to an iPad 2 once I got my annual bonus.)  I'm still on the hunt for good apps, both for cooking & baking and other stuff.  Several of my twitter friends introduced me to Words with Friends, which I really enjoy.  Brianna, of course, has been looking for any excuse to get her hands on my iPod, so she kept asking if she could help me with my games.  I finally gave in and let her play her own game against Jamie.  It's always interesting when she asks me about the meaning of some of the words that he plays.  Being of sound mind, I put a dictionary on my iPod, too, so now she can just look things up for herself.  She also likes to do the math to figure out how many points she'll get for a particular play.  For those who currently have games going with me, I have to admit that B has been playing some of my turns against you, too. =)

Gillian has her own word thing going on.  She's at that age where she hears things but doesn't always understand them.  It's often quite entertaining when she repeats what she thinks she's heard.  I'm sure many of you have heard young kids singing, for instance.  One of my all-time favorites was listening to G singing Bon Jovi--"You give love a bandaid, bandaid!"  Lately, though, she seems to be saying things to see what she can get away with.  I had to have a conversation with her the other night after she and B were in the bathroom, and I heard her tell B to "get off the freakin' step!" (We keep step stools in all the bathrooms.) And it was all I could do to keep a straight face one night when I heard her say something under her breath when she was mad about something I asked her to do.  I wasn't sure if I'd heard her right, so I asked her to repeat what she'd said.  She hesitated, and then told me "Bandit!" 

Sometimes there are interesting words in cooking and baking, too.  When I got my most recent issue of Bon Appetit, a couple things caught my eye.  One was the assortment of frozen desserts--I have my eye on the Peach-Vanilla Cream Pops, but that will be another post.  The other, which was the first thing I made from the issue, was the Strawberry Conserve.  Conserve--that's a term you don't hear all that often.  I looked up a definition for it, which was "a sweet food made by preserving fruit with sugar; jam."  The article says that since the recipe doesn't use commercial pectin, you end up with "a conserve of soft berries in a barely set syrup."  The conserve is pretty easy to make and gave me a great excuse to buy some pretty half-pint canning jars.  I doubled the recipe, which gave me 4 small jars of strawberry syrupy stuff.  Basically, you macerate strawberries with sugar and lemon zest.  Then you cook the strawberries briefly to soften them, and then remove the strawberries and simmer the liquid until it thickens into a syrup.  

The verdict?  Well, I've made two double batches so far, and if I can get my hands on some more good strawberries, I'll probably make some more.  It'll last for about a month in the fridge, so hopefully I can enjoy some strawberry goodness for a lot of the summer.  I was surprised by how wonderful the conserve was, especially since it had such a simple ingredient list.  We've had it over pound cake and on top of ice cream.  I even made my own fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt by topping it with some plain Brown Cow.  If you find yourself with a surplus of strawberries, I recommend giving this recipe a try.  You can find the recipe here at Bon Appetit.