Cocoa Cake

The other day my friend Iris came over & we decided to make a cake. My mom sent me a recipe for her delicious homemade cocoa cake & we thought we'd give it a go. It wasn't as great as when Mom makes it, but I'd say it was pretty good nonetheless.

Here's the recipe:

3 c flour

2 c sugar

6 T baking cocoa

1 t baking soda

1/3 c oil

2 T vinegar

1 T vanilla

2 c water

First mix all the dry ingredients. Then add oil, vinegar, vanilla & water; mix until moist.

Bake at 350 for 30 min. Be sure not to open the oven in the first 15 minutes or else the cake will fall.

The frosting was a bit of an estimate-but it turned out delicious!

1/3 c butter

1 t vanilla

A bunch of powdered sugar (we just kinda guessed)

optional: cocoa to taste

optional: small amount of coffee

Then just add milk and mix until its the correct consistency

Enjoy!

-Amanda

(mis)Adventures in Breakfast.

After waking up and being slightly annoyed when i realized it was Sunday, I decided the best way to continue to put off homework (since there is no longer Aziz and dinner to distract me) was to make breakfast. Now I know what you're thinking, I make pretty good looking pancakes, I probably made those. YOUR WRONG. Several weeks ago I attempted to make what I call a Farmers Skillet. In this skillet there are potatoes, eggs, cheese, ham and onions. These are all good things when combined in my favorite omelette, so logic stands that it should taste great all mashed together, right? The first try was a complete failure. Never one to give up on food that logically should be good I tried again.

This time I looked for some tips online and made sure to scramble the eggs over the potatoes (which still seems sketchy to me). Everything else was pretty much the same, I'm out of cheddar so I used American cheese, which I can only hope contains typos because the expiration date read July 2050, lunch meat ham because that's the only kind of ham i have and i didn't think before starting and the potatoes and onions i got from jewel a week or so ago.

Now I'm aware this doesn't look like the most appetizing thing in the world, and you're sort of right, but at least it tasted better than my first try several weeks ago. Next time I think I'll stick to pancakes.

Please note if I die from some weird cheese infection, please sue kraft. Thank you.

-Sarah

Soup & Salad

As that it is freezing cold outside, I decided I wanted to warm up after my night class with a bowl of soup. In the cupboard I had vegetable noodle and tomato. Since a salad also sounded good, I opted for tomato soup because I didn't want a veggie overload. I went online to see if I could find a recipe to add some pizazz to boring tomato soup (also because I'm out of saltine crackers). What I ended up making was Creamy Citrus Tomato Soup with Pesto Croutons and I must say it was pretty delicious. The lemon sauce gave it a bit of zest and it was indeed very creamy. However, if I were to make it again, I think I'd just add some pesto to the soup to give it the garlic flavor and use the toast to just dip in. It was kind of difficult to cut the toast in the bowl and then it got soggy which isn't my favorite texture. But the flavors went really well together so it tasted good.

And in the salad, I added a tomato slice, green pepper, shredded mozzarella, craisins and almond slices to spring mix greens with spinach leaves. Then I topped it off with Italian dressing. Possibly my favorite salad creation, I used to make it this way all the time at the salad bar in the DePaul cafeteria-but I bet the veggies are much more fresh this way.

-Amanda

Pancake day!

I made pancakes and hash browns for dinner. The pancakes are the same as from an earlier post. The hash browns were just grated potatoes with a little onion and pepper. They don't look fully cooked but they are, i just used a really bad pan.

Happy Pancake Day everyone!

-Sarah

Calzone & Ed Byrne, what a lovely way to spend the evening

I believe its been about two weeks since we last made a pizza (and began this blog) so Sarah & I decided it was due time to try our hand at pizza once again. This time we wanted to be more creative than last so we made a calzone! Since I have about 3 weeks experience working at a pizza joint (Cheezies, gotta love it) I mustered up my memory on how to make these bad boys.

We wanted something different than just regular pizza & were inspired by the chicken, bacon, ranch flavor combination. We substituted marinara sauce for good ole Kraft ranch salad dressing (on sale at Target even!) and also added tomato, onion & green pepper to the meats. I almost forgot to put in the cheese but luckily Sarah reminded me before we put it in the oven.

We were much better at multi-tasking this time around. Here's all the prep work we did while the dough finished rising. Go us, right?

Despite what you may think by looking at this photo, the calzone didn't fall off the counter.

And the finished product. We brushed the crust with melted butter & garlic salt to keep it soft.

And we finished off our lovely evening by watching Ed Byrne, one of our favorite Irish comedians. Admittedly, he's one of the few Irish comedians I know, but still. Watch this, you'll laugh.

-Amanda

A Red and White Affair

Amanda's mom sent each of us a great Valentines day bag with lots of candy and cute erasers. In the bag was a huge 12 oz bag of Valentines day M&M's. As I am not one to open a bag of M&M's on my own and just eat them straight, I decided to make cookies with them. Of course I was out of both eggs and butter when I made this decision (which was on Wednesday) and only got around to making them this afternoon.

Baking seems to be become a weekend ritual for me and a lovely distraction from homework.

This is the recipe for Red's Ultimate M&M'S Cookies. I am not a huge nut fan so I didn't use any. I also like that they put the nutrition information at the bottom so I at least know how bad they are for me.

As I am trying to become a more organized person, I gathered all the ingredients I needed before I started baking. I have a picture to prove it!
After mixing making about a dozen cookies I began to get concerned because they were much crispier than I like, and our oven is known to get hotter than it is supposed to, so after carefully watching the next batch they came out looking delirious and not at all crispy. The whole process took about 10 minutes of prep and then about an hour to cook all of the cookies, plus another 10 minutes of clean up and a incident with the hand mixer.

Here are (almost) all of the finished cookies. This recipe makes around 50 cookies, so don't say you haven't been warned!

-Sarah

Salsa Chicken

When I went grocery shopping at the beginning of the quarter I bought quite a few chicken breasts that have since been forgotten in the freezer. Well, yesterday I decided I should actually make something with one of them. I had some left over refried beans and rice from a couple of days ago, so I thought I'd cook the chicken in a way that would complement those flavors. What I ended up doing was putting cayenne pepper on the chicken as it was cooking. When it was nearly done, I added medium salsa and let the chicken absorb the flavors. The salsa somehow caramelized or something and it tasted kind of like a spicy barbecue sauce, but with onions and peppers on top. Then while I was reheating my leftovers, I topped the chicken with some cheese.

¡Lo era muy delicioso!

-Amanda