Bailey’s Irish Cream Profiteroles

I love that word.  Profiteroles.  It sounds so fancy!  Much fancier than cream puffs, which is what they are.

A friend of mine, Ira, got me some Bailey’s Irish Cream Puffs along time ago and I was amazed by them.  They were soft but crunchy on the outside and filled with the delectable Bailey’s Cream on the inside.  Truly masterful I’d say and I couldn’t have imagined I’d one day be able to make them.

Some time later, during the FNCCC, Betsy got the wild hair to make profiteroles.  What flavor could she fill them with though instead of just some plain vanilla?

“BAILEY’S IRISH CREAM FILLING!”  I shouted at her.  I wanted to make sure she didn’t misunderstand.  She made them and they were good.

I’m not one to be outdone though so I decided I’d tackle this scary concoction.

The dough for this is super weird.  It has the consistency of flour mixed in Elmer’s Glue and sticks to your fingers and tools just as well.

I missed out on getting a pic of it on the stove because you have to stir constantly to prevent any burning but once it’s done you get this thing.  My eggs are already mixed in but it looks about the same.

The methods seem a bit weird but this is really the only difficult part of the process.  The recipe calls for you to heap it onto the cookie sheet with spoons but I can’t imagine doing that with this.  I put it in a ziploc bag and cut the corner off and squirted it out that way.  Made it super easy to get on the cookie sheet and they tended to be a bit more uniform.

You bake ‘em and out come these beautiful little cream puffs that are just as hollow as can be.  It’s a great feeling when you see them bake out like they are supposed to.

As a side note, ovens are hot (especially at 450F).  In fact, I suggest NOT touching the middle racks in your oven with the sides of your hand.  It hurts.

A lot.

From there you have another 2 options.  You can either cut off the bottoms with a bread knife or try using a pastry bag with a tip to fill them.

I made the Bailey’s Irish Cream Puffs awhile back and used the cutting off the bottom method.  They don’t get as full since you don’t have that pressure from the pastry bag but it was WAY easier… WAY easier.

The great thing about these is that they aren’t too sweet.  Well, it’s great at first but 10 cream puffs later you regret it.

Recipe courtesy of Cooks.com.

BAILEY PUFF PASTRY
- 1/2 c. butter
- 1 c. boiling water
- 1 c. sifted flour
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 4 eggs
Heat oven to 450 degrees.
Melt butter in water and add flour and salt at once, stir vigorously. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture form a ball that down not separate. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each, until dough is smooth.

Drop dough by heaping tablespoons on greased cookie sheet. Bake in 450 degree oven for 15 minutes. Lower oven to 325 degrees for 25 minutes. Remove cream puffs from oven and split. Turn oven off and put cream puffs back into oven for 20 minutes. Cool. Fill with cream filling before serving.

BAILEY’S PUFF FILLING
- 1 pkg. (3 5/8 oz.) instant vanilla pudding
- 1 env. whipped topping mix
- 1 c. milk
- 8 tbsp. Bailey’s Irish Cream
Empty contents of pudding and whipped topping mix into mixing bowl. Add milk and mix at high speed until thick. Add 8 tablespoons Bailey’s Irish Cream and mix until thoroughly blended. Chill and fill pastry puffs.

I don’t know the point of the whipped topping mix and it seems to come out just fine without it.

Goin’ round the bend

Been slow going around here recently.  Mainly I’ve just been posting about my weekly cooking because that’s really all I’m doing.  I’ve been putting a lot of effort into working out but not eating too healthy so the weight is dropping at a snails pace.  But dessert is soooooo goooood.

Betsy keeps mentioning to me about portion control and how low fat muffins aren’t low fat after the fifth one.  I can barely hear her over the pig sounds I make as the food is shoveled into my gob though!

I do love working out though, I’m really enjoying cardio and the endorphine release.  It’s even better when someone is with me so I can make it a competition (even if they don’t know they are competing).  Strength training I’m not really enjoying though.  I tried to do some curls on a machine last week and of course I pushed myself too far.

The next day I could barely bend my arms, my biceps and those muscles that get big in your forearm from masturbating too much REALLY hurt.  I took some aspirin and a hot shower so they were mostly okay that day. Then we jump to the day after that (2 days after the workout) and my arms cramped up over night.  My range of motion was non existent and I looked like a T-rex.  I even left work early because people looked at me funny when I would go to pick something up and groan like a dying cow.

It’s takin’ me a week to recover from it but I’m working on doing the machines again.  A friend of mine goes to the gym EARLY in the morning to do weight training (with free weights) with a friend of his.  I’m still working on getting up early enough to go.  My alarm goes off at 6am (about 4 or 5 hours after I’ve gone to bed) and I chunk it across the room.  Yea, I’ll have to fix that.

The rest of my time is spent working, cooking, playing Dark Spore or theory crafting the WoW TCG.

I had an article posted on one of the main WoW TCG websites which I’m proud of.  I’d link it but they posted an early version of the article that was unrevised and not proofread which makes me very sad.  It was also formatted very poorly (ie. extra spaces where there shouldn’t be, spaces between paragraphs isn’t consistent, and it just looks like a tragedy).  Plus it would read like greek since you’d have no idea what I was talking about.

Cooking has been a lot more fun.  I don’t feel like I’ve got two left feet while I’m doing it and the fluster level has gone from JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! to OMG are you srs?!  Oddly it went down when I realized that my stove had more settings then off and burninator.

Tonight I’m going into baking mode making orange almond toffee sandies, those stupid white chocolate no bake cookies I’ve been putting off and I need to make my mom a cake for mother’s day.  I think I’m gonna make something similar to Betsy’s mini chocolate chunk orange cakes.  I want it as a two layer cake though and I want something pretty on top.  Not completely sure what I’m gonna do, we’ll see.

(random amount of elapsed time)

Betsy happened to be on MSN so I started MSGing her and the cake is now fleshed out.  Two layer strawberry cake with vanilla cream cheese frosting and one of those pretty strawberry flower things on top for the detail.

Anyone else being nice and cooking their mom something or copping out and buying her something?

Changing recipes all willy nilly

Daemia, Casual Collective, managed to find a recipe awhile back that used up a bunch of ingredients he had accumulated from the random dishes we make.  I’ve been having that same problem recently which is why I’ve been focusing on baking because they all use sugar and flour and eggs.  Problem is they have their little tidbits as well that linger around.

I’ve got several squares of white chocolate leftover from the tiramisu, quick rolled oats from the buffalo chips, arborio rice from a risotto I made (last year?).  Did you know uncooked rice keeps for like… ever?  Anyway, I’ve got all this stuff left and it’s nice when you can get rid of it.  The rice I’m using in my Anne Burrell recipe so that’s good.  The white chocolate will keep for awhile but the quick oats will go bad… quicker so that is the item I want to get rid of the quickest.

What can you make with relative ease using rolled quick oats?  Oatmeal of course but I like my oats steel cut so that won’t work.  They can be added to a lot of baked goods but I’m not making another 20 pounds of cookies so nix the recipe they were originally in.  That brings me to no bake cookies.

Betsy has made them before and they are amazing.

CHOCOLATE OATMEAL NO-BAKE COOKIES
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 stick butter
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
3 cups quick-cooking oatmeal
1/2 cup peanut butter
Combine sugar, cocoa, butter and milk in a saucepan. On medium heat, bring to a boil for one full minute.
Remove from heat. Stir in peanut butter (optional), vanilla and oatmeal.

Drop by spoonful onto wax paper. Let cool for at least 30 minutes.

That’s when it struck me… they are basically chocolate right?  I have chocolate… white chocolate.

I’m going to set out to modify a recipe so much that I’m going to consider it my own.  Great thing about baking is that it’s a lot of math and I’m good with the maths.  After discussing it with Betsy she pointed out that white chocolate bars already have fat and sugar in them which the cocoa powder won’t.

I’ll have to switch things up so that I’m using less sugar and butter (because too much fat in no-bake cookies makes them puddles).  Probably going to have to cut the vanilla as well.

I’ve always preached to Betsy that you can’t go changing a recipe all willy nilly when we make recipes for the FNCCC but in this instance… it’s the whole reason for doing it.  Maybe these changes are elementary for more seasoned cooks but so far I’ve been as close to the recipe as I can get.  Changing things only when I’ve absolutely had to (ie. chinese 5-spice extra spicy wings).

Wish me luck!  I’ll let ya know how they turn out (hopefully divine)!

New Toys!

I’m really loving my second job over at Ross.  Granted I work my ass off but I’m just a peasant with no responsibilities.  I get to gossip and fuck around and work hard at not working.  It’s like that job you got when you were in high school that you didn’t really give a fuck about.

You don’t need the job, you are just doing it for some spending cash and in my case… the discount.

Ross’ employees (the peasants anyway) get a 20% discount on most everything in the store.  This is bad mmmkay.  My wardrobe has been expanding exponentially.  I’m gonna have to have a garage sale to get rid of shit I haven’t worn in years and use that cash to buy even more clothes at Ross!

Clothes isn’t the only thing they sell though.  You can get shoes (only one new pair so far).  You can get pillows.  You can get random accent furniture.

You can get kitchen utensils.

That’s right… I’ve been getting new kitchen things!

A: You might notice a nice cutting board that all the items are resting on.  I’ve got a plastic cutting board I use for EVERYTHING at the moment but I wanted something a little… fancier looking.  It’s a bamboo cutting board by Simply Bamboo and retails for about $30… I got it for like $10.  I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, I’ll be kind of sad once I do start using it since it won’t be as pretty anymore.  I like how it has the channels around the edge of it to catch liquids (read: salmonella) and other gross things.

B: When I got my first set of knives they came in a plastic clam-shell like package at Wally World.  They aren’t bad but they aren’t great either.  I hadn’t realized how flimsy my main cutting knife was until I got this new one from Calphalon.  It’s a Calphalon 7 inch Santuko knife.  It has the nice dips in the blade so food is less likely to stick to it when you cut it and it feels heavy duty.  The blade is sharper (tested via my bleeding finger) and the extension into the handle is more heavy duty.  The grip is really neat and it fits into my hand in a swell kind of way.

C: This was great for 2 reasons.  One my kitchen is black and metallic (if you ignore the bamboo cutting board).  This spatula sits in a metal container I’ve got all my other kitchen cooking thingies in so it adds a pop of color but has the metallic handle.  Reason two is because I managed to melt my other spatula in half by leaving it resting on the side of the pan.

D: I’m not completely sure what it is… but I know what I’m using it for.  If you’ve ever watched Rachel Ray cook then you’ve seen her use that pastry scrapper thingie to pickup shit off her cutting board (instead of using her knife… did I mention I wasn’t good at handling sharp objects?).  This one is roughly the same thing but has measurements on it to!  I won’t feel quite as lost now or end up trying to use my sticky / greasy / burnt / bleeding fingers on my iphone while I cook!

E: BAM!  I now have 4 small bowls, 1 medium bowl, and 1 large bowl.  Let the mixing squishing mashing commence!

Like I said… Ross has been good and bad.  I think they are just paying me in gift certificates at this point.  When I close at Ross I always volunteer to straighten the men’s department because I get to straighten AND SHOP at the same time.  It’s so great.

I also found a giant hollow glass fish that we use at work (job #1… the porn store) now.  I’ve tried to cut out all the offensive stuff from the pic… except what the fish is carrying in his belly!  This has been my greatest find at Ross so far.

Anyone else gotten anything new and shiny since you started cooking (or have been cooking more)?

(IRL) FNCCC

I posted on Saturday about those Pinwheels I made and I’m definitely enjoying cooking.  I’ve started reading the Misadventures of Mub and she does quite a bit of cooking and makes the most adorable sock monkeys.

I picked up a baking sheet this past Saturday at a garage sale for 50 cents so time to put it to work!  She posted a lil’ while back about some Baked Sweet Taters and Avocado Dip that she made as part of the FNCCC.  I’m going to attempt to make them tonight and I’m excited to try it.

I was wondering what this FNCCC (Food Network Chef’s Cooking Challenge) is and finally found a link to where it started at on the bottom of one of her posts.  The blog, I Thank My Mother seems to host it.  Each week she posts a Food Network Chef and a link to the chef’s blog or something like that and you pick a recipe and cook it and blog about it.  How simple is that?

Well, this week is Tyler “Hello” Florence and his recipes are scary!  For someone who is literally dabbling in cooking his recipes are like paint-by-number Mona Lisa’s.  I looked at the entree’s first and the ingredient lists are longer than the cooking instructions!  It’s okay though, I tried not to panic.  I started searching through them and found a few good ones so we’ll see how it goes.  I’ll probably try and do it Saturday night.

Last time I was in Wally World I was lookin’ for a lemon-pepper spice mix that Betsy sometimes uses.  They didn’t have any in so I picked up the closest thing a fiesta lime mix from Mrs. Dash.  It’s REALLY good.  I just coat the shit out of the chicken and plop it in the pan with just a bit of olive oil so it doesn’t stick.  I blacken each side and make sure the chicken is done and I’ve made it like 3 times, usually with asparagus (it’s in season ya know).

I know its simple and kind of cheating since its a premade spice mix but I don’t care because its srsly fucking good.  I never realized just how easy chicken is to cook.  I haven’t even given myself salmonella yet!  I’ve been using a lime (instead of lemon) to squirt on the asparagus after it cooks and I decided to squeeze a half onto the chicken itself and it really becomes a fiesta in your mouth.

I’ll let ya know how things go!