Life in the Cheese Drawer

 
sushi night! nom nom nom.

so i thought i was going to be home by midnight to blog before my technical day was up, but i missed it by about 15 minutes, so i’m backdating and i ain’t even sorry, bros.
went to a superbowl party at liz’s and i ate sooooo muuuuuccchhhh bllllaaaaaaarrrrrggghhhhh. we also made b-kuchen and added a quarter cup of butter, which we think helps keep it a little moister. also we cooked them until they wer *just* done, which our mother rarely does, and that always helps with the moist factor.
so maybe this easter when do kuchen fer realzors, maybe i can convince mom of the extra butter at least. well see how receptive she is to change. :/

i’ve been meaning to make cakepops for a long, long time. i bought pop sticks probably two years ago, if that’s any indication. in addition to that, i have a coworker who liked february to be the month of love, so i decided to bring some treats in once a week through the month. time to finally make cake pops!
step one: bake a cake. i just used a box cake since i didn’t feel like it would make much difference after they were pop-ified.
step two: make homemade cream cheese frosting because they don’t sell frosting in the store without devil’s syrup. thanks, corn industry.

what else do you need? good chocolate (i chose cadbury) for dipping your balls.
step three: put cut up cake in your mixer and beat it to make it crumbly. SO EASY.

step four: add some frosting into your crumbled cake and beat it til it becomes the consistency of what looks like chunky brownie batter.


step five: roll the cake into balls and stick the sticks in them. set them somewhere to freeze up (this is easy this time of year).

step six: melt your chocolate, then dip the frozen cake balls into them. i used a cat scratcher to hold them upright until they cooled down. (it had plastic wrap over it!! calm down!!)
step seven: i melted some almond bark to dip the tops into and then sprinkled some red and white sprinkles on it for valentine’s month. tada!

i tried my hand at making cream of mushroom soup last weekend. i have a fantastic potato soup recipe, and so i decided to see what i could find for mushroom soup. i followed this recipe fairly closely.

1/4 cup butter
1 cup chopped shiitake mushrooms
1 cup chopped portobello mushrooms
2 shallots, chopped
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 (14.5 ounce) can chicken broth
1 cup half-and-half
salt and pepper to taste

i used some white mushrooms, baby bellas, and a package of dried wild mushrooms i had leftover from thanksgiving. i also added some parsley.


whilit was yummy, it’s not quite to the caliber that my awesome potato soup recipe is at. i might have to do some more digging and see if i can find any other recipes that are awesome.

cherry pie!
whenever someone at work has a birthday, i get to bake the dessert of choice. we have a workstudy whose bday was on the 5th, so tonight i made a cherry pie for her. except the recipe i found didn’t use enough cherries, so it’s sort of a cranstrawcherry pie. thank goodness i had some fruit in my freezer.
at the same time, since i was making crust from scratch, i decided to try my hand at a lattice crust. i’d never done one before, so it was an ideal time. my strips of dough were pretty wide and i only got three on each way, but it was easier than i thought it would be. i know the crust will be awesome – i’m just hoping the filling is sweet enough, or not overly sweet. we’ll see how it turns out tastewise.