kitchenmage

Bûche de Noël: Chocolate Apricot Frosting Recipe

The crazy continues

I'd love to sit and chat but I have a cake to frost. With this.

Chocolate Apricot Frosting Recipe

Cream 3/4 cup each butter with 3/4 cup powdered sugar + 1/3 cup cocoa

Status
Cake is on the counter, rolled in a towel, the photos are in the camera and I still have to start the mushroom meringue. I also decided that candied rosemary sprigs would look very pretty. Because. I. Am. Crazy.

Beat 3 egg whites until foamy and slowly sprinkle in 3/4 cup powdered sugar. Beat to billowy, stiff  peaks.

Dice a handful of dried apricots, splash with amaretto and set aside for 30 min.

Gently fold 1/3 of meringue into the sweet chocolatey butter. Repeat with other 2 thirds. Add apricots and mix in gently. refrigerate until cake goes into oven, then set on counter to soften.

flickr set of this craziness:  Bûche de Noël

pizza face!

Quick report from the first day of Thump Thump Giggle Giggle 06. Make your own pizza night was a hit, with a well organized assembly line (if I do say so myself) with each pizza crust on its own sheet of parchment and all the toppings lined up behind them.  Except for the rum. I have no clue where that came from...well, I know where it came from, just not why it was out with the pizza makings, nor why I didn't get a drink!

This is a great way to make individual pizzas for parties, especially for kids. The parchment gives you something by which to manipulate the floppy while raw, and then extremely hot when cooked, pizza; plus you can write the name of the person who made the pizza on the paper. These were labeled with the names that everyone is using on the network: Kat, Monstrrr, Dracomiss, BabyDuck, and Dead, I mean Dad.

The pizza making rapidly moved into an art exhibition, with most people making faces of one sort or another. Dracomiss swears hers is a pig. Dead, I mean Dad made an abstract piece and mine was a self-referential wedges of wedges sort of thing. (I made mine last and when I picked up the scissors to cut the pepperoni, there was an audible gasp from everyone else; as if there had been rules or something!)

We've been munching our way through a plate of densely chocolate brownies studded with craisins and drizzled with a lattice of very dark and white chocolates while screams of dismay and four letter words drift in from the next room, where the carnage continues apace. I hear Dead, I mean Dad asking for directions back to the fray from some back part of a dungeon in which he's lost...as if they'll help. Do you suppose that he'd listen if I told him I can tell it's a trap from here? grin

Tomorrow is a big breakfast of some sort, which I just may sleep through, since it's the meal someoneElse is responsible for. Lunch is light: prawns and roasted red pepper sauce, baguettes, olives, marinated artichoke hearts, maybe some chunks of cheese and some fruit. Dinner is chicken that's marinating in this lemon, rosemary, dijon concoction; pasta with citrus ginger cream sauce that I had the other night and want to try to recreate (wish me luck); salad with warm goat cheese, pear slices, and spiced pecans; and a variation on Bananas Foster for dessert.

Last I checked, the kitchen was only mildly thrashed and the cookies a bit more; we were probably down by a couple of dozen cookies, maybe more since Dracomiss brought a few dozen which are also disappearing.

And now I must go pour myself a glass of amaretto. I think I've earned it.

getting ready for my favorite december ritual

We are lucky enough to be the host for the great annual "Thump, thump, giggle, giggle" reunion, when a handful of young women gather to kill each other on our network. And Eat. Over and over and over. For days on end. Seriously. (both the killing and the eating)

This year's bash is six people for four days, which adds up to lots of virtual death and lots of food. Coming on the heels of the book, my schedule was tight...and then the storm of madness hit and the power went out and...well, so much for schedules.

Since we got power back two days ago, I have made:

• 2 dozen Bagels
• 4 Baguettes
• 18 Rosemary olive oil pull-apart rolls
• 2 dozen pita
• 3 loaves oatmeal cinnamon twist bread
• 2 dozen cinnamon rolls
• double batch of brownies
• double batch of cookies

I'm guessing that I'm going to be too busy to post much in the way here as it's happening, but I put up a flickr set just for this, in case anyone is crazy enough to want to follow along.  It does at least give you a little hint of the mess that is my kitchen.

Menu for the bash after the jump.

Summerset: the evidence

I totally forgot the obligatory lateInTheParty photo of people with their "Buy me or the puppy gets it" prints, so here's the very last shot of the revelers.

I also forgot to mention that, in the spirit of "geekiness" (they were Geek Dinners, after all) we came up with an additional use of technology for Stormhoek. See, they use screwtops (!) and, while I'll skip the technical arguments (how anti-geeky) we did find one aspect of the experience lacking. No satisfying pop of the cork coming out of the bottle. While we could (and did) argue for the use of corks, we did come up with an alternative: chip the screwtop.

It seems like those little chips they use to make music in greeting cards could be repurposed into a higher use. Create a realistic cork popping sound and design a means of triggering the sound when the screwtop "breaks" apart. Small touch, big effect.

Not wanting to offload the work for our idea onto Stormhoek, and in the spirit of international cooperation, we also offer to test the technology. Repeatedly. Through many beta cycles. Just as often as Stormhoek wants us to.

I leave you with a final thought, tossed out somewhere in the Pinotage (the last of the wines) by a wise person and agreed upon by all:

This would have been a lot less fun if the wine wasn't so good!

Thanks again Sam, Jason, Hugh, and everyone else at Stormhoek who helped make Summerset so much fun.

Summerset: wine, food, friends...does it get any better?

As part of their "100 Geek Dinners" promotion, Stormhoek Winery was kind enough to send a case of their wine out here to evenTinierTown and we put it to good use last weekend by holding a potluck wine tasting. Our good friends, Sunrise and Jessica Fletcher, loaned us the lawn by the pond at the Inn at Lucky Mud and we gathered a dozen and a half friends on Sunday afternoon to sip wine, nibble delicious food, and listen to a little guitar music (contributed by Sunrise and someoneElse, both charter members of WAGS). Sunrise even came up with a song pairing for each of the wines, which was a real hoot, especially as we got further into the evening.

I decided that we were going to make our wine tasting a potluck so that we could let everyone's efforts shine in the appropriate setting, with the right wine, and it turned out to be a wonderful idea. Invitations included an "assignment" of a wine to cook for, some tasting notes that Sam from Stormhoek provided, and what I could glean from the blogosphere on food pairings from earlier Geek Dinners. This turned out to be a great idea, everyone brought food that was very tasty and went well with their wine. It may have helped that the people who replied sayng they'd been drinking Shiraz a lot lately were given Shiraz and the farmers got a white to go with their abundance of fresh vegetables, but I'm happy with the results.

My job was bread, desserts and coordination...and onon tarts...and I think I pulled it off; the tarts didn't hurt. I decided to make an assortment of bitesized sweets for dessert, which was almost as good of an idea as having other people bring the rest of the food (did I mention it was all excellent? plus made with mostly locally produced ingredients...I wouldn't be surprised if we were darned close to meeting the locavores goal of a 100 mile radius for our foodshed...well, except for the wine from halfway around the globe...)

Details on the food and wine after the jump.