Millionaire Shortbread and Fireworks.

This week I wanted to do something simple but awesome, something from when I was a kid. I remember taking a bunch of trips to England when I was a little, and one of the things that sticks out in my mind is my Grandma showing me how to make this dessert bar. It's shortbread, rich caramel and chocolate. Ridiculously good.  I'll start with the three different groups of ingredients.
Shortbread Layer

2 sticks of butter, I froze these and then grated it with a cheese grater.
2 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt

Caramel Layer
2 cans condensed milk
2 tbsps butter

Chocolate Ganache
2 1/2 bars of decent chocolate ( I went to shoppers drugmart and found two bars of dark chocolate that was on sale for 1.99 each. I then threw in some semi-sweet baking chocolate I had lying around )
1/3 cup scalded cream (or a bit more, it's up to you. Less cream will give your chocolate a harder break, while more will add pliability to it)

To start, you'll need to preheat your oven to 350 ° and get your baking tins ready. This is a pretty big recipe so you'll need two 8 inch pans, or whatever you have lying around. You could do it in a larger casserole dish if you wanted to. Take the wrapper off of your butter and use it to grease up the inside of the dishes. Then you just sprinkle some flour into your dish, moving it around, trying to coat all the butter. Tapping the back of the pan helps aswell.

Mixing the shortbread is fairly easy. You can either cut up your butter into tiny chunks, mix all your dry ingredients, throw it all in a food processor and buzz till it looks like peas OR, if you're sorta poor like me and don't have a fancy food processor you can freeze and grate the butter into your dry ingedients and mix it like you would a pie crust ; rubbing it between your palms to flake it into the dough.

 I got mine to a bread crumb stage and then divided it between the two pans. Then, it's just a matter of smoothing it out and pressing it down. I used this giant spatula I have (coated in flour first) to make it all nice and smooth.


 These puppies need atleast 20-25 minutes in the oven before they're ready. You'll start to notice a golden brown edge and it'll smell delicious.


Set your cookies aside and get started on some tasty (faux) caramel. This stuff is rich, sorta chewy and very sweet. I put two cans of condensed milk and the butter into a thick bottomed pot and slowly brought it up to a light boil.  It looked like creamy lava.

The secret to this is to stir the everloving crap out of it. Don't let it burn, it'll suck to clean and you'll be sad. You're going to be doing this for awhile, so maybe throw on the television. I watched an episode of Community and it was hilarious. I've found that the best way to know when it's ready is to keep one of the lids from the condensed milk to make a colour comparison with. I kept on staring this bubbling mess I had on the stove, trying to figure out if it was done or not. If you keep the lid then you'll know when it's done. It'll be a few shades darker, like a light amber. The caramel will also pull away from the sides as an almost solid mass. Once you like the colour, go ahead and pour it over your two giant shortbread cookies, smoothing it out with a rubber spatula. Set these in the fridge to cool while you make ganache.

This part is criminally easy for how good it tastes. And you can use it for so many things. Chocolate covered strawberries, a cracked cheesecake topping, the possibilities are endless. Heat up your cream until just before boiling (scald) and break up your chocolate into a small bowl. Pour hot cream over chocolate, and let it sit for a little while. The cream melts the chocolate and it's just a matter of mixing it together to smooth it out. Work the cookies one at a time, using a small offset spatula to smooth out the chocolate. I did a little design in mine, but no one spends a long time looking at these, it you're smelling what I'm stepping it.

Afterwards you throw 'em in the fridge for another 20 minutes or so cut them into shapes and enjoy!

Ginger was upset that we didn't do anything dog-related this week so we took her to the local Bocci ball (i'unno) court so she could have a runaround in the tall grass.

She had a grand old time up until all the fireworks started going off and scraring the crap outta her, so we headed home to watch them from the balcony while she hid.

Happy (belated) Victoria's Day!

So I've been thinking about how to go about managing this blog.  I wanted to do mainly baking related posts, but that's really only going to be once a week, and that seems a little ghost towny. Ideally, posting all the time would be cool, but I end up working all the time. I guess maybe, I can fill the time in between by talking about myself a little bit more. I'm a little egotistical, but I try to pass it off as just strongly believing in myself. I feel like I'm sorta kick-ass, I'm pretty darn good at what I do. I've been cooking for a living for at least ten years at this point and have learned a whole bunch about technique from this. I can teach you how to use a knife, how to anchor your cutting board, tons of little things that make me a better cook that you are. But I want to help. I can be patient, show you again and again how that little flick of the wrist, that tiny flourish, will make your radish rose, (or whatever) look as awesome as mine. I think what I might do is just share some general cooking stuff, but try to focus on the baking. Speaking of, this week I'm going ot be making a tasty bar of some sort. I need to figure out what first.

Pulled Pork and Dog Biscuits! not together of course.

Seeing as this is my first actual food related post I wanted to start things off with a bang! So I present to you, pulled pork my way.

2 pork tenderloins (I'd prefer shoulder but this is all I could find at the store) cleaned of excess fat and silverskin then cubed
2 shallots - sliced
1 onion - sliced
1 tbsp garlic - chopped
2 sm. hot peppers - chopped (the smaller the pepper the bigger the bite)
3 cups chicken stock
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp chili powder

a whole lotta time.

To start off I got all my veggies chopped up. Remember to wash your hands after cutting the hot pepper. Touching your eyes, lips, anything sensitive is a big no no if you forget. Trust me on this one, milk wont help you flush out your eyes.

I didn't show the peppers being cut, just make sure to remove the stem and pith (white stuff). Keep the seeds in if you need extra spice, I used two little ones and gave 'em a rough chop. Next, move on to the pork. If you look closely you'll see that there's a shiny thick looking layer over some of the meat. This is called silverskin.  You can't really digest it or chew through it so you might as well just cut it out. Using a long thin blade (a boning knife if you have it) slide the tip under a small section and pull the knife under it, with the blade slightly angled up. This will ensure that you lose as little meat as possible. Now you just go back and remove the other side. Keep this up until your pork is a uniform pink color. Then cube.

Once all your meat is cut, get your large sautee pan ready with some oil. You want to make sure your pan is hot to get a good sear on the meat. Another little tip to a good sear is make sure your meat is dry! Too much moisture causes steam, not browning. Steam has no taste while brown bits are delicious.

Once all your pork is seared off you can remove it and put it into whatever you're going to be braising in. I kept the sautee pan hot and just dumped all the veggies in there. I sweat them for a bit, added the garlic (never add your garlic too early, it might burn. Get other things cooked down a little more first, then bang it in.) After all of that cooked together for maybe..5 minutes I added in my chicken stock. While waiting for my braising liquid to come to a boil I threw a bunch of spice at my pork and let it sit around for a bit.

Next you put the two together and throw it in the oven in a tightly lidded casserole dish. I had this in for about three hours and 300. Once that happens you remove the pork from the braising liquid and shred it all. I put the braising liquid back on the stove, reduced it by half (maybe a bit more) and started adding ketchup (about 2 tbsp), honey (another 3tbsps) and a little dollop of store bought bbq sauce to round it out. Once my sauce thickened a little I put the pork back in an began to feast.

                       Next up... Dog Biscuits! Honey Dog cookies to be exact.

This ones real easy
1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups porridge oats
2 tsps baking powder
2 tbsp butter ( I used margarine (i know i know) instead. It worked just fine)
2 tbsps honey
2 eggs
2/5 cup (100 ml) milk
flour for dusting.

This was super super easy and ginger loved the hell outta them. She was watching me the entire time.

Mix all your dry ingredients together, then flake in the margarine. Have you ever made pie crust? It's the same thing as that. Use your palms to rub the butter/marg. into the flour and oats, try not to melt it all. Afterwards add all the wet ingredients in. Mix together loosely, it'll be super sticky. Dust your tray with a bit more flour and roll into little balls. This makes about..30 or so little cookies, and is great if your dog has friends (mine doesn't, she's a bit of an ass) Your oven needs to be on at 400 degreets and these babies are going in for 15-20 minutes. These need to sit in the oven for an extra two hours after it's been turned off so they can dry out. However, it's totally worth it.

Intro to the Baking Dog.

Hey. I'm Emily. I'm a 25 year old girl who loves baking and loves her dog. There's alot of other stuff to me aswell, but those two are bigguns. As any dog owner, I believe that my dog is the best dog. She can be a douche bag sometimes, but more often then not she's just awesome. And she loves to bake. Rather, she loves to get up in my business while I bake.  When she's not shadowing my every movement she loves mischief.

This is Ginger. I've got no clue as to what she is, other than awesome. She talks alot and enjoys serenading me as I cook.

This is her on a good day, actually letting me work and not eating cupcakes off the counter. Those however, are not my legs. That would be Mike, my boyfriend.

That's it for now. The next post is going to be all about..cookies! Not human ones tho, puppy cookies. Well..I guess you could eat them, but they're probably gonna be meat flavored.