GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: dessert

What Happens When You Forget To Add Butter

What’s wrong here? Oh, I forgot to add the butter.

Are you sometimes on autopilot when baking. I must bake some sort of cobbler or crisp every week, and I do the recipe mostly by eye now. Not sure what was going on in my head here, but I made this whole cobbler, baked it in the oven, and then realized something was wrong. (Of course we have a cobbler recipe video here.)

The crust was just blah.

But it was time to go to dinner at the camp, and I was to bring dessert, and this was it. So I got out the propane torch and dropped some cubes of butter on top of what was supposed to be cobbler, melted the butter and toasted the topping.

It ended up being not bad, especially when ice cream was added. Just crunchy sweet stuff. Definitely a done is better than perfect moment. What have your forgotten ingredient incidents been?

August 6, 2015
Simple Chocolate Cake Recipe – GF Video

Fast and Simple Chocolate Cake Recipe, a perfect last minute dessert or for when you want chocolate cake and want it fast! Mix this cake in the pan, put it in the oven for 30 minutes, and you’re done. Nice.

This cake recipe is also called screwball cake, or crazy cake. Its a great cake recipe for kids, its not complicated, and its fun to make. You can’t really mess up this cake, except for I almost messed up this chocolate cake while making this video…

This was was the first cake I ever made, I remember a neighbor gave us this recipe, and I liked how you could make it all in the cake pan, no extra bowls, etc. The other neat thing is it uses vinegar and baking soda as a rising agent. Not something you see too often in chocolate cake recipes.

Things to keep in mind when making Chocolate Cake

Make sure your sugar doesn’t have lumps in it

Mix the dry ingredients together well. Use a whisk if you like, or a fork.

You don’t have to grease the pan. Not sure why, but it works.

Don’t overbake the cake, you want it moist.

This cake recipe is pretty flexible, I’ve made it a bunch of ways, and you can ramp up or down the amount of oil or sugar. Add more water if you take out some of the oil. My oven bakes this at 30 minutes, if you have a convection oven, or one that isn’t from a camper trailer, test the cake at 25 minutes, it might be done already.

You can frost this cake, but I’m not big on frosting, I find most frostings too sweet and gets kinda crunchy after a day. At 1 cup of sugar in the cake, that’s enough sweet for me.

Does your family have a Screwball Cake Recipe? let us know in the comments below:

Simple Chocolate Cake Recipe – GardenFork.TV
Ingredients
•   1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
•   1 cup sugar
•   1/2 teaspoon salt
•   3 tablespoons cocoa
•   1 teaspoon baking soda
•   3/4 cup veg oil
•   3/4 cup water
•   1 tablespoon vinegar
•   1 teaspoon vanilla
Cooking Directions
1. Heat Oven to 350F
2. Put all the dry ingredients in an 8 x 8 or 9 x 9 pan.
3. Mix together well, using a whisk or fork if you like
4. Make a well or hole in the middle of the dry ingredients
5. Add the wet ingredients in to the well.
6. Mix the wet into the dry until it looks like chocolate cake batter
7. Bake on the middle rack of the oven. Check at 25 minutes, you want it moist, not dry.
8. In our oven, this bakes in 30 minutes, a convection oven may be faster.

February 10, 2014
How to make easy pie & pastry crust by Chez Pim – a video how to

Trying to actually chart how I find cool people and neat stuff on the web can be interesting. I was showing my sister the Tartine Bread video made by 4SP films, and I saw that 4SP also had produced a video about Chez Pim making a pie – pastry crust. The recipe is super simple, what really interested me was the technique of making the dough by hand on a piece of marble. So many of us – me included – pull out the food processor to make pie crust. Next time I’m using Chez Pim’s method shown here in this well done video:

Pim has published a book, The Foodie Handbook, information is on her website here.

July 14, 2011