Cooking in KC: May 2015

It’s the first blog post of the summer! If you don’t know me personally, I’m a teacher, so this is a momentous occasion.

I’ve been a little preoccupied for the past 2 months, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking up ideas for posts (ha, #sorrynotsorry about the pun). So rather than just abandon these half-baked posts (and again), I’m resurrecting them. These two treats come from the last days of school. It’s fairly entertaining to read back over my writing and see what I would say differently now. From here on out, my original bits are bolded and interspersed with present-day-me.

So during the absolute busiest part of my year, I find myself making cake pops—something totally new to me and in my mind, utterly complicated. But also exciting, because these aren’t just any cake pops—they are superhero themed. One of my students who is a budding chef has repeatedly challenged me to a cook-off, and I have repeatedly told her, “Maybe at the end of the semester.” Well. It’s here. The end of the semester. (Thank goodness). Being the competitive kid she is (we wouldn’t know anyone like that would we?) we decided to 1) make something totally new to the both of us and 2) make a themed food—Cupcake Wars style.

I give you: Marvel’s Black Widow Cake Pop. Of course thinking in my head “teachable moment!” (or soapbox moment?), I declared that I’d be choosing a female superhero, because duh, feminist.

Black Widow Cake Pops start with a red velvet cake with traditional red velvet icing (not the heavy cream cheese stuff—this is a bajillion times better, promise), then are dipped in dark chocolate, and finally are decorated with black sugar sprinkles and a red icing Black Widow mark.

Ha. What actually happened? Dipping cake pops in melted chocolate results in a gloppy cake pop, and it takes a ton of chocolate. I had to finesse the chocolate with a spoon to get a smooth, even coating. It's quite possible I needed to thin out the chocolate to get a coating that would smooth out and which I'd easily be able to tap off the excess chocolate. Also, my black sugar sprinkles turned everyone’s mouths black, and the red gel icing I bought didn’t even show up, so I ditched it. However, they were a hit.

Here is the recipe. Ree’s sheet cake (which I will definitely make on its own sometime—was very quick and easy) makes about 52 cake balls. You will only use about ½ of the icing (I suggest eating the other half with graham crackers).

Yep, I have already made the sheet cake again.

Here is my process, which I totally researched and borrowed thanks to this blog.

1. Crumble up the cooled sheet cake in a food processor. It will look like this.

Makes me want to snort this cake like crack.

2. Hand mix the icing in until you get this consistency. You don’t want it too wet.

This is what it should look like if you press your thumb into a ball of the dough.

3. Refrigerate the balls at least 3 hours. Store them on paper towels instead of wax paper so any oil is soaked up.

4. When I was ready to go, I took a few out of the fridge at a time. Dip your stick in chocolate before pushing it into a cake ball. After you dip your pop, stick it in a Styrofoam block to dry. Store in the fridge.

This is what my little stations looked like. Dip, sprinkle, stick.

I didn’t dip all of my cake balls, so I froze them. They held up well, except for some of the larger ones which were a little weird and oily. I thawed them overnight in the fridge, and this time, I used Wilton Candy Melts to dip them in (dipped a little better than the chocolate, but generally the same notes). Recreated, they look like this:

I got a little adventurous and tried to decorate them. . .

Some turned out better than others.

But wait, there’s more. I don’t want to let cake pops steal the show. As good as they were, what I typically make for my students at the end of the semester is cookie cake. Chocolate chip cookie recipes are not hard to come by, but you have not lived until you’ve had this precise cookie cake.

If I may say so, Mrs. E makes the bomb cookie cake, and the kids know it.

You guessed it, I forgot to take pictures, but I have pictures from last year, when the cookie cake made its debut at school for my grammar and composition class (which had a whopping 8 kids in it, including my TA).

Evolution of the colon.

Also I’m a nerd. (A proud nerd.)

I make this cookie cake in a round or square pan, either 8 or 9 inches. I usually end up needing to bake it about 5 minutes longer than the recipe suggests. In a square pan, you can get away with cutting it into 16 pieces. I usually don’t ice it, even though I did above.

Three things make this cookie cake ultimate. The cookies have a richer, more caramel-y sweetness thanks to the dark brown sugar, and the cornstarch and small pan mean a thicker and chewier cookie cake. Seriously you guys.

By request, the recipe for Mrs. E's cookie cake #lastpiece #nomnomnom http://t.co/lJBC74fYNQ pic.twitter.com/Ts302VrxFV
— Madison Engquist (@MrsEngquist) May 19, 2015