Fake Mac n Cheese

I had the night off from my other job yesterday and even though I was tired and wanted to take the evening to relax, I also wanted to cook something new. Cooking new things make me happy. I learn something new and there's always an excitement of sorts to see how the recipe will come out. I think that it's important to still push myself to do these kind of things despite my exhaustion because all work and no play makes me a dull girl - and a grumpy one.

When I polled Facebook for recipe suggestions, I got some great ideas. I wanted to make them all, but one in particular stood out for me, simply because it had only 4 ingredients. Easy! Not to mention less to pick up from the store.

The lucky winner came from Ms. Domezio and it was Baked Tortellini, which I am going to call Fake Mac n Cheese. There's nothing fake in it, but it was super easy and reminded me of homemade Mac n Cheese, so I am going with that. The directions from the link above is for some fancy TurboChef oven where it cooks stuff faster, so my cooking directions have been modified for a regular oven. 

Ingredients:

• 20 oz of Cheese Tortellini
• 15 oz Alfredo Sauce (My jar was like 16.8 oz - I used the whole jar.)
• 8 oz Mozzarella Cheese, shredded
• Prosciutto (I don't trust this kind of meat so I used about a cup of Rotisserie Chicken because I am lazy.)

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350.
• Prepare Tortellini according to the instructions on the package.
• Prep meat to put into dish.
• Pour 1/4 cup of Alfredo sauce in the bottom of your dish to coat the bottom. (I used an 8 x 8 Pyrex, the original recipe says to use a 1" deep ceramic or Pyrex dish.)
• Drain pasta and return to pot (removed from heat). 
• Pour remainder of Alfredo sauce over the pasta. 
• Add the meat of your choice. 
• Stir it all together. 
• Pour into baking dish.
• Top with 8oz of Mozzarella making sure Tortellini is fully covered with Cheese.
• Bake, uncovered, for 20 minutes; or until cheese is golden to your liking. 

Review:
This dish was AWESOME! Pair it with a green veggie of some sort, or a salad, and garlic bread and you have a gourmet meal that was fast, easy and fairly cheap! The only thing I will change next time is I might layer the cheese. I think the cheese is what made this dish so good and there were bites of pasta without the cheese so next time, I might layer the cheese, possibly even use more.

Adventures in Cake Decorating

I learned something valuable about myself this weekend. I am not destined to be a cake decorator - or even a baker. 

Don't get me wrong, I love to bake. However, I learned Friday night that I prefer to bake only for those I know and not on a grand scale. It's a lot of pressure to bake for multiple strangers!

A friend of ours celebrated a 20 year anniversary and I committed to making the cake for the celebration. Her favorite cake is a Pepperidge Farm White Coconut Cake - a cake I have never made before and didn't really understand. Is it coconut cake with white frosting? Is it white cake with coconut frosting? I was unsure and either way, I should have definitely done a trial run before making a cake for 100 people. 

K said it was white cake with coconut frosting so I went on a mission to find a recipe for coconut frosting. Most of them were really lame... using just coconut flavoring and they sounded boring. I finally found a cream cheese coconut frosting and - HELLOOOO... I LOVE cream cheese frosting so I was sold. I know, I know... It wasn't my cake so I should have kept searching for a regular coconut frosting, but I was running out of time so I just went with it. 

On my way home from work, I went to the store and bought four boxes of white cake, a ton of powdered sugar, a ton of cream cheese, a ton of butter and some coconut. (I should have realized right then and there that the ratio of coconut to everything else was off, but I didn't.)

Let the disasters begin.

I put the first two 9 x 13 cakes in and they came out looking great. I was off to a good start! I let those two cakes cool and threw in two round cakes. When I thought the first two cakes were cool enough, I attempted to get them out of their baking dish. Uh oh. They weren't coming out as easily as I had hoped. &%$#! What did I do wrong?!

K worked in a bakery for a while so I left them to her to figure out how to get them out without crumbling them to pieces. It was a hopeless cause!

This was at about 10:30 PM. We took a moment to figure out a game plan. I certainly didn't have the time or energy to bake four more cakes, let them cool, then decorate them. I decided we'd do some cupcakes since it's pretty hard to mess those up and bake another 9 x 13 cake (K was able to piece a 9 x 13 back together.) If the cake fails again, at least we will have the cupcakes for our friend, and everyone else can eat a store bought cake!

See? It's hard to screw up cupcakes. They looked so good someone stole one before I could even take the picture. I felt really bad though because after I got back from the store, I was super frustrated and realized that these cupcakes weren't being baked with love. :o( I told that story to someone at the party and they said, "I feel that same way sometimes too. It's OK, angry cake tastes good too." That made me feel a little better.

So the cakes weren't the only disaster. While the cupcakes were baking, I thought I better start making the frosting so K can start frosting the cake she saved. I mixed all the ingredients together, stirred in the coconut and... It barely freaking tasted like coconut!!! The coconut was the whole point! GRRRRR! Well, it was too late now to change the recipe, so I just had to go with it and hope it worked. 

K had the brilliant idea that she would make a sand dollar to put on the cake because our friend as a sentimental connection to them and recently got a tattoo. That was kind of a nightmare too. The sand dollar started out much larger than it ended up, but I think K did a nice job and recovered nicely. 

Not bad, right? I mean, it's no Ace of Cakes or Cake Boss, but it worked. 

And for the final product we had a beach scene with a sand dollar:

 

I think it turned out pretty cute considering we were up until 3:30 am baking and getting the initial frosting done. We did the finishing touches the next morning before the party... We wont mention how we were almost an hour and a half late, but I guess better late than never. The guests seemed to really like the cake... Either that, or they were being nice. LOL 

When all else fails, cover the scraps left over in chocolate frosting and devour. At least that's what we did. :o)

Sketti Saturday

So what that I made this recipe Wednesday night, ate it Thursday night for dinner, and am calling it Sketti Saturday. I'm scheduling this blog to post on Saturday, so it works.

So what that I am writing this blog when I only had one bite to taste test so that I could write the blog.

So what that maybe I should have called the blog "So What" instead of Sketti Saturday.

So what.

Moving on...

I posted earlier about how I am making lots of casseroles and one of my loyal readers, aka good friend LisaBella, gave me lots of links to recipes. One of them being Baked Cream Cheese Spaghetti Casserole from the blog "Plain Chicken". Then my friend Ms. Rink from Bows and Leopard pinned it. I felt like the food gods were giving me a sign that it should be my next cheffing adventure. And so it was.

Ingredients:

•  12 oz spaghetti - I used linguini because it's what we had... which is odd because I have never even cooked linguini in my life!
• 1 (28 ounce) jar prepared spaghetti sauce - Seriously? This annoyed me to no end. Pasta comes in 16 oz packages, recipes always call for 12 oz. Pasta sauce? The most I found in a jar was 24 oz. It's a conspiracy, I tell you. I ended up buying the mondo jar of Ragu and literally measured 28 oz.
• 1 lb lean ground beef
• 1 tsp Italian seasoning
• 1 clove garlic, minced - I use frozen garlic cubes (see photo on right) and I used 3 of them. I like garlic. A lot.
• 8 ounces cream cheese
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated - I eyeballed. Is 1/2 a cup really enough cheese to cover a 9x13 dish? I think not. 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F degrees.

In a skillet, brown the ground beef until cooked through; drain fat and stir in spaghetti sauce.  Set aside.

Cook spaghetti according to directions on packet.  Drain and place cooked spaghetti in bowl.  Add cream cheese, Italian Seasoning and minced garlic.  Stir until cream cheese is melted and the spaghetti is thoroughly coated.

Lightly grease a 9x13" pan.  Spread a small amount of meat sauce in the bottom of the dish.  Put spaghetti on top of sauce and top with remaining meat sauce.  Sprinkle parmesan cheese on top.

Bake for 30 minutes, until bubbly.

Review:  From the one bite I had, this bad boy is delicious! I will definitely have this be a regular in our recipe rotation!

 

Baseball Game Goody Bag

So my recent posts about my love for the SF Giants was mainly because I made this really cute goody (or is it goodie) bag that I had seen on Pinterest and I totally forgot to share it in my other blog.

I just wanted to give K-Squared a little token of our appreciation for taking us to the game so I made them a baseball game goody bag:

Simple, fun, inexpensive, and took no time at all to throw together! (I could have spent a little more time on the tags, but that's what I get for being the Queen of Procrastination.)

Contents:

• Sunflower seeds
• Cracker Jacks
• Big League Chew
• Peanuts
• Werther's Originals Candy
• Squishy Baseball

They seem to have enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed making them and giving them!

Carmelita Melt Down

A couple of weekends ago, the SIL and I got into a serious baking kick. I think we baked four different sweet recipes. Ridiculous.

She made these things called Carmelitas. They are delicious, but a little on the rich side. Of course, K loved them. At first I was just like, "of course she does". It wasn't until the SIL said that the Carmelitas reminded them of something their grandma made that I decided I would make them for K sometime in the future.

The SIL got the recipe from Lulu the Baker. She doubled her recipe and I was debating doubling mine. K loves a sweet after dinner and the SIL said it freezes well so I figured, what the heck... I would go ahead and double the recipe.

The Recipe
32 caramel squares, unwrapped
1/2 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup butter, melted
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 cup flour
1 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips

Combine caramels and cream in a small saucepan over low heat. Stir until completely smooth; set aside.
In a separate bowl, combine melted butter, brown sugar, flour, oats, and baking soda.
Pat half of the oatmeal mixture into the bottom of an 8x8" pan.
Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.
Remove pan from oven and sprinkle chocolate chips over crust.
Pour caramel mixture over chocolate chips. Crumble remaining oatmeal mixture over caramel.
Return to oven and bake an additional 15-20 minutes, until the edges are lightly browned.
Remove from oven and cool completely before cutting.

*A stint in the fridge will help them cool off if you're pinched for time. They shouldn't be served cold, but all of that molten caramel takes a long time to cool down. They should be stored and served at room temperature.

**To make a 9x13" version, simply double the amounts. 

The key word there? "Simply". Apparently in the world of me, doubling a recipe isn't so simple.

I didn't double the flour. I thought I doubled the butter but in hind sight, my math brain was taking the day off and what I thought was a cup and a half of butter was really just the 3/4 cup it called for. And in reviewing this recipe for the blog, I am pretty sure I didn't put the full amount of brown sugar in.

Hence, the "Carmelita Melt Down".

The SIL "Melt Down"

Despite the melt down, and it being more caramel than anything else, they were still a hit. K devoured them, the SIL had an even bigger meltdown when she attempted to warm it to put over ice cream (above), and my boss nearly put himself into a sugar induced coma because he ate so many of them.

So, I guess even with major mistakes, it was still a hit and comes highly recommended. I think from now on I will stick with the recipe and stay away from doubling.