S'mores Cake

I am not an ambitious baker. When I need a recipe for something to take to a party, I tend to google  phrases like "easy chocolate dessert" or "easy dessert bars." One of my favorite go-to recipes is the ol' pie filling cobbler: apple pie filling topped with yellow cake mix and a few tablespoons of butter. Stick it in the oven for twenty minutes, and boom. Done.

That's what makes my even attempting this dessert so bizarre. I... separated eggs? I used the MIXER?? I basically use the mixer NEVER. But it was the birthday of two dear friends, one of them being my roommate, and they are both major dessert lovers.

Go big or go home, right?

I started by paging through Emily's Pinterest recipe board to see if anything caught my eye. What I noticed was a LOT of s'mores-themed recipes. Bars, cupcakes, and everything in between. Okay! S'mores it is!

After looking at a few different pins, I decided that a cake might be the way to go. But despite looking at MANY different recipes for s'mores cakes, I never found the perfect one. So what follows is an amalgamation of several different cake recipes. For ultimate deliciousness.

But nothing too ridiculous. FAR too many recipes called for me to make my own ganache, or other such nonsense. And I love my friends, but HECK no.

This recipe gave me a lot of inspiration, but on the whole it was just too complicated and time-consuming for me to attempt. So the main recipe I pulled from was this one, because it involved a graham cracker cake.

A graham cracker cake??? Who knew such a thing existed? Not this kid.

Now we just needed a little more chocolate. For my birthday this year, my sister made me an AMAZING cake (from this recipe) that was two layers of chocolate cake surrounding a layer of brownie.

That sounds good. A brownie layer it is!

Sunday morning before church I got up and whipped up a box of dark chocolate brownies in a round pan that I prepared with wax paper and a LOT of non-stick spray. It popped right out and I left it to cool while I went up to work in the church nursery.

When I got home, it was cake time! I got out the mixer, separated those eggs like a boss, and got to work on the graham cracker cake. This is, without a doubt, the most high-maintenance cake I've ever made. Mixing the egg whites, adding in the butter and sugar, alternating the addition of the milk with the graham cracker crumbs... it was crazy. But I did it! With only slightly messy results.



When the (super weird-looking) batter was done, I poured it into two round pans, that I had again prepared with wax paper and a TON of non-stick spray. Like, really. A lot a lot. I did not come this far to have my cakes stuck to the bottom of their pans. Heck. No.



So this is where being a SUPER FUN AND BUSY SINGLE GIRL ON THE GO YOU'RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALLLLLLL gets a little in the way. Because from here I had to leave to go to a concert downtown. (And by concert I mean like a symphony, not like One Direction or something.) And my roommate, one of the birthday girls, was due to come home at any minute!

If this were a TV show, this is where there would be a jump cut to these two little graham cracker cakes resting on wire cooling racks on a pink Rubbermaid container underneath my vanity in my room.

Sometimes a girl has to improvise.

I wanted to wait as long as I could to ice the cakes, so when I got home from the concert, I put them each in a big ziplock bag. Then when I got home from work the next day, I was on a TIGHT schedule. I had less than thirty minutes to change for the birthday dinner and build/ice the cakes.

I put the first graham cracker cake on the cake stand and covered it with a layer of chocolate icing. From a can. Not homemade, but it tasted fine to me! Then I added a few dollops of marshmallow cream (again from a jar--what WHAT!).



The marshmallow cream was much stickier than I'd counted on, which led to this lovely look.




Awesome. Well, who cares, because next came the brownie layer, more icing and marshmallow cream, and finally the last layer of graham cracker cake. By this time my hands were shaking because I was seriously running out of time, and I kept running to the sink to wash marshmallow off my hands, chocolate was everywhere... it was crazy. But I got the top layer frosted and promptly covered the whole thing with... a big pot lid. Because I have no cake cover. Hey, I told you I wasn't a baker!

After dinner, we came back home and I immediately set about finishing up the cake. I put a few more spoonfuls of marshmallow cream on top, but didn't really mess with them much so as not to disturb the icing. That turned out to work out GREAT, because in the next few minutes, it got nice and oozy and spread out just enough to look pretty dang awesome.

I arranged a handful of big marshmallows and rectangles of Hershey'son top, and dusted a small handful of leftover graham cracker crumbs on top. Oh, and I almost forgot, I used a lighter to toast some of the edges of the marshmallows just a little bit. I'm sure if you had an actual kitchen torch it would work a lot better/faster, but I worked with what I had!

The final result:
 










Boom Shaka Laka.

It ended up tasting WONDERFUL. Incredibly rich, which after sushi was maybe NOT the best choice? But still. Amazing.

Highly recommend.

Living

Having a four day "staycation" was a fabulous way to break up the past months of travel and work. Between the two of us, it's rare to find a day when at least one of us isn't working. We watched movies (I FINALLY saw "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"), pretended to be chefs, played racquetball and finished up some projects that had been on our list for months. Below is a random sampling of said "staycation."

So three cheers for COLOR in our room. It's just a start, but it's one of the first pieces of printed fabrics that we have BOTH agreed on. He always wants stripes. I always want something less masculine. He asked for no flowers, so I simply pressed for plant life. This is our mighty compromise. :)

The ancestor photos are slowly being printed and framed. We are so blessed to have so many amazing examples of faithfulness and love in marriage.

A Ciminello weekend wouldn't have been complete without lots of eating and lots of cooking. We even went so far as to go to a sausage factory to pick out and purchase some meats for the weekend. Seriously. On the menu for the weekend: brisket, pizza, short ribs, spaghetti sauce, colossal breakfast creations... you get the idea.

What's that on the plate? I'm so glad you asked. Braised short ribs, cheese grits, and a cherry glaze. I don't know if these pictures will do this meal justice. I want to eat it every day. I want to go to there.

More than anything, I think I'm just enjoying living in the now. I'm not worried about next year. I'm not even making plans for November yet- a rarity for me! I'm learning about living and loving right here... right now. I hope you are too. :)

p.s. Making plans with the neighbors again. Praying they accept our invitation and that we continue building relationships right here... right now.

The Longest Story About Cereal You Will Read Today, Guaranteed

When I was in England for a semester during my sophomore year in college, I was not the most adventurous grocery shopper. My roommates bought flavored yogurts and mysterious-looking pasties without trepidation, but I was not nearly as trusting of what I was confronted with at the grocery store. I found myself unable to see past the unappetizing appearance of watery cheeses or the bizarrely-named "cloudy lemonade."

Such is how I ended up living almost entirely on the BEST cereal ever, Kellogg's Crunchy Nut. I ate that cereal morning, noon, and night without abandon. I loved it, and was perfectly happy to sustain myself on honey-flavored flakes of cereal for the duration.

So you can imagine how distraught I was upon my return to the states to discover that my beloved Crunchy Nut was unheard of in my home country. I tried everything that even closely resembled that cereal, including Honey Bunches of Oats, which absolutely does NOT hold up, and is not even REMOTELY the same thing.

"Surely you can find something similar," fellow traveler and roommate Julie would say. "I wouldn't think it'd be THAT hard. It's just honey-flavored Corn Flakes!"

"False," I petulantly replied, then added wistfully, "A Crunchy Nut substitute does not exist for me in this land."

This is the part of the movie where the screen would darken, and then a line of white writing would appear, reading "7 Years Later."

From Wikipedia: "Crunchy Nut (previously known as Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes) is a breakfast cereal made by Kellogg's. They were first introduced to the UK and Ireland around 1980. The cereal is Kellogg's second most popular cereal in the UK after Special K. In 2011, Crunchy Nut was introduced to the US Market."

Oh yes, my friends. You read that right. CRUNCHY NUT CEREAL IS NOW AVAILABLE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE AND NOW ALSO DELICIOUS.

Upon hearing that my favorite cereal could now supposedly be found at my local grocery store, I indeed stormed the aisles of my local food provider in search of the perfect breakfast food. And there, among the Fruity Pebbles and the Kashi Granola... it wasn't. No bright yellow box! No Kellogg's-labelled package proclaiming "NEW!"

Despair.

But then. (You didn't think I'd leave you without a happy ending, did you??) My not-so-local grocery store to the rescue! It's true: up the road a piece, in a grocery store I do not often frequent, sat boxes of exactly what I was looking for. I picked up a box of Crunchy Nut amidst memories of my Oxfordian semester and headed to the checkout counter.

Of course, the biggest question one would have at this point: Would it taste the same? Had I built it up in my memory to be better than it is in reality? Would the American import be less tasty than its British counterpoint?

Scene: A bowl, a spoon, skim milk, and my honey-covered friends. (The cereal, I mean. Not actual friends covered in honey, as hilarious as that would be.) The verdict? Even BETTER than I had remembered! I went through that box of cereal in less than a week, even taking the last bit of it to work to eat for lunch on Friday.

The lesson here is, obviously, that DREAMS REALLY CAN COME TRUE. No matter how big it is, even if your dream involves breakfast cereal, it can happen.

Dream big, kids. Dream big.