Have I ever mentioned that pie dough and I are not friends?  Because of this fact, I usually stick to pies that use graham cracker crust.  Yes, I know that I can buy a package of perfect pie crust.  Have you ever tasted one?  Blech.  I'd rather make one.

I found myself in a South Carolina kitchen on Thanksgiving, tasked with making a pumpkin pie.   I have made pumpkin pie with gingersnap cookie crust, and it’s tasty.  However, this was the perfect time to test the recipe for No Roll Pie Crust!   The hardest thing about the recipe was grating the frozen butter.   Things just got tossed in a bowl, then patted into a pie plate, and frozen until needed.  Granted, it’s not identical to regular pie crust, but it works, and quite nicely, but not for a top crust.

If you need a pie – give this a try!

I promised the boys a cake to celebrate the first day of school.  Not just any cake, a spectacular cake.  Chocolate Malt Cake seemed to fit the bill.  Maybe I mentioned before that I’m not a baker?  Here’s how (probably not) to do it.

Step 1:  Check to make sure that the malted milk balls purchased for garnish when they were on sale are still safe in their hiding place.  Hmmm, must remember that vegetables are a natural camouflage.

Step 2:  Need to buy eggs.  Check fridge and pantry.  Decide may as well print out weekly menu and get it all done.  Remember have not posted weekly menu.   The printer is out of blue ink, and thus will not print at all (whose brilliant idea was that?).  Handwrite list.

Step 3:  Wait for pouring rain to stop, and go to store, which is full of college students buying awful foodstuffs and clogging up the aisles.  Splurge on whole milk for the cake (will need it for the éclairs anyhow).

Step 4:  Realize that the children are in school and thus are not around to haul groceries.  Put away groceries.  Curse because bought 2 whole chickens and a ham which are not going to fit w/o some serious reconfiguration of the refrigerator.

Step 5:  Start making cake.  Figure out that this will make quite a mess.  Give stink eye to sugar and oil mixture that does not cream like sugar and butter.  Add eggs and keep going.   Now it calls for 1 tsp. of kosher salt.  Kosher salt?  I’m already not getting the warm and fuzzies about sugar and oil.  It gets regular salt – 1/2 tsp feels about right.   Get to the part where it says to sift.  I already sifted once this year – skip that.

Step 6:  Finally get the batter together and decide that it doesn’t look right.  Probably didn’t add enough flour as the recipe called for 1 2/3 cup, which is odd, and probably distracted me.  Add more flour.   Grease and flour the pans generously.  Extra tip:  don’t use Wondra for this.  Although the shaker top seems convenient, the flour is too grainy to do the job. 

Step 7:  Fill the pans.  That’s a lot of batter, more than half full.  The cake bakes for 40ish minutes at 325, - here’s hoping.  20 minutes in decide to do the right thing and turn the pans.  They look very nice – not flowing over lava-like as expected.  Smells good in here.

Step 8:  Cake is done, but has domed.  Hate that.  Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then remove and cut off domed part, which will speed up cooling process.  Eat domed part for quality control.

Step 9:  Frosting.  It looks good until the addition of milk and malt powder.  It’s wrong, I know it is, but, crumb coat the cake as directed.  And when I pick up the cake to refrigerate it for 15 minutes again?  It almost slid off the plate.  And of course have to reconfigure the ‘fridge yet again to make space for the cake and the rest of the frosting.  The whole mess will chill while I figure out how to fix this.  Could be the heat or the humidity, could be the recipe, or it could be that the cake gods find my baking practices heretical.  There is no way the crushed malted milk balls are going to stick to the side…

Step 10:  So done now.  It is an unmeasured quantity of powered sugar (in frosting, hair, and on floor) later.  Things are looking better, but that might just be my sugar buzz.  Oh Look!  At the end of the recipe it says this cake is stored in the refrigerator.  And why is that?  Is it because the frosting is such a pain???!!  AAAARGH!

Lucky it tastes good…

It is raining.  I have an incredible amount of work to do.  Most of it is mapped out, some still needs to get on the to-do list.  I am not up to the task.  When the going gets tough, the tough…make Vanilla Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing?  I’m not sure that’s how it goes, but, that’s what I did.

      People send me recipes.  I play with them.  Hard job, I know.  I’ve been looking at this particular recipe for a while.  The first strike against it was that it calls for cake flour, and who wants to buy a whole box of cake flour?  The second strike was that it called for 3/4 cup of whole milk.  Again, not something I keep around.  BUT, today I happen to have some half and half left over.  Obviously some divinity wants me to play and not work.

The first thing I must impart to you is that sifting dry ingredients onto a flexible cutting board and then dumping it in the mixer in parts is excellent in theory.  As I gently shuffled 1/3 of the mixture into the mixer, I was unable to gently shuffle the remainder back onto the center.  It ended up in a bowl.   My sifter lives in a plastic bag in a bin of rarely used but never to be parted with kitchen gadgets.  I could have used a sieve, but I need some justification for this bin.  Picture, if you will, a fine flour cloud in the kitchen…

Finally the batter was done, the muffin cups over-filled (this recipe probably makes 18 just to the top of the foil cupcakes), and the baking commenced.  Nothing interesting to report.  Of course, once they came out of the oven the vultures started circling.  I can yell my darn fool head off and the boys don’t hear me, but they sure come running at the merest whiff of baked goods.  Oh, there’s a product for the air freshener people! 

Time for the icing.  Frosting?  Whatever you like to call it.  I am not a big fan of mixing together butter and powdered sugar and tweaking it until it doesn’t taste raw.  I’m even less of a fan of the industrial tub-o-sludge that’s next to the boxed cakes.  This 3 ingredient icing is my new go-to favorite:  sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chips, and butter.  Zap it in the microwave, cool slightly, and go.  It’s inspired, truly.   Now, had I been paying attention to the measurements, this recipe would have made the perfect amount.  I got distracted and poured in the whole can of sweetened condensed milk, and thus had to use the whole bag of chocolate chips.  I’m sure the rest can be melted again for ice cream (being optimistic that the boys won’t just eat it!).   Had I used just 3/4 cup of the sweetened condensed milk, the rest would have lingered and been wasted.  Once the frosting was slightly cooled, it dolloped on nicely, and then set beautifully.  What more could you want?  Low fat and low calorie?  It’s not, so don’t look.

Now for quality control.  They were pronounced “really good” by the panel of 3.  No one stuck around for my evaluation.  I cut a cupcake in quarters.  The crumb is good, they are moist, and hold together well (meaning:  cake flour NOT required).  They taste like vanilla.  The frosting is set, chocolaty, and sweet.  Maybe next time I’ll throw in a bit of darker or unsweetened chocolate just for my personal preference, but it certainly isn’t necessary.

Definitely make these Vanilla Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing.