My mom is kind of a rock star. This isn’t something I’ve ever really thought about, mostly because she and I are so completely different. And not different in the “opposites attract” way. It’s more like different in the she’s-a-member-of-the-Rosary-Society-and-I-am-the-Devil-Incarnate way. Still, given that I am in the middle of a quarter-life crisis (Look! It’s for reals!), I’ve been getting mad nostalgic and existential up in this crib.
Mom left her home in India in her teens to attend nursing school in Heidelberg, Germany. The woman did not speak a lick of German, or English, or anything but Malayalam, and she was all alone. Within six months, she was fluent in the Deutsch and at the top of her class. By the time she was my age, she was already married to my dad and was an established registered nurse. Pretty amazing, right?
As I said, I really don’t think about how difficult her teens and twenties must have been, mostly because I am probably very self-centered and am trying to figure my own $&#% out.
Grandma, Mama, Baby Sad Shibow
This is a photo taken at my baptism in Kerala, India. What a little chubster I was, right? Mom had to lug me around quite a bit. She says that I was the little cherub (she uses a different word, whatever) who caused her carpal-tunnel syndrome. Haters gonna hate. Anyway, both my mom and late grandma are/were beautiful ladies. Mama, you might be the saint to my sinner, but I love you and owe you more than muffins. But you really like muffins so I made you some.
I’d made a variation on these last year, and remembered that Mom really dug them. They’re honey and goat cheese-filled fig muffins. These have a pretty decent amount of fiber in them, and are lower in sugar than many other muffins, so they’d be perfect for a breakfast treat now and then. I switched everything up a bit this time around. Here’s what you’ll need for my version:
Whole Wheat Honey and Cheese-Filled Raisin Muffins
3/4 cup of Neufchatel cheese
2 tablespoons of honey
1 teaspoon of lemon zest
1 1/4 teaspoons of vanilla extract, divided
2 cups of whole wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
1/4 teaspoon of salt
2 large eggs
1 large egg white
3/4 cup of brown sugar
1 cup of low-fat or non-fat buttermilk (or one cup of skim milk with a tablespoon of vinegar added; let sit for 5 minutes)
1/3 cup of vegetable oil
1 1/4 cup of raisins
3 tablespoons of brown sugar (for sprinkling)
Preheat the oven to 425°F and grease a 12-cup muffin tin. In a small bowl, combine the cheese, honey, zest and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. In a third bowl, beat your eggs and egg white , then whisk in the sugar and remaining vanilla. Add in the buttermilk and oil, then add the entire mixture to the flour mix. Finally, fold in your raisins.
Spoon half of the mixture into each muffin cup. Drop about a teaspoon of your cheese mixture into the center of each cup, then cover each cup with your remaining batter. Sprinkle the tops with brown sugar if you so please.
Batter batter batter sa-wing batter batter... (I am five)
Pop these into the oven for 13 to 15 minutes, until the tops are slightly browned and spring back when touched. Want to know how I figured out mine were done? They sort of exploded. See?
Note the cream cheese volcanoes atop several of these
We all make mistakes. When those mistakes involve honeyed cheese oozing out of otherwise-perfect muffins, I will take them. Hopefully Mama will too. Actually, she doesn’t have a choice. Deal with it, lady.
Happy Babymomma Day, Momma. Thanks for carrying my fat behind around for all those years.
Two of my best friends are turning 25 this Sunday. Jeff and Jeremy (hi friends!) are twin brothers who have put up with me for over a decade. Not only have they put up with me, they still hang out with me! Remember when I told you that I stalked Glen Hansard? Well, these two were with me. Actually, they were half a block away and hiding from me, but both of them still wanted to be friends with me after I harassed the poor man. Also, for my birthday, they got me a New York Giants jersey (#10, Eli Manning, may the Heavens bless his adorable soul), which I have been wanting and creepily trying on at various sporting goods stores for years. They’re the best. Anyway, I love these guys, and I bake for those I love, so get ready for some cookies, homeboys!
I scammed both guys into giving me a “top 3” list of their all-time favorite cookies. I think I told them I was doing research for a future post, and since they both know me as a massive dork, they believed this lie. I am a good friend.
Jeff mentioned loving rainbow cookies, which are also, as I’ve mentioned, in my top two, so rainbow cookies I shall bake. Look for that post in the next couple of days. He also mentioned salted cookies and the classic chocolate chip variety. Jeremy picked chocolate chip as well and told me he loved Pepperidge Farm cookies. I remembered him specifically requesting that I try to make their Geneva cookies when I first started the blog.
So, I decided to pare the list down to these three: rainbow cookies, chocolate chip cookies with sea salt and “Geneva” cookies. The quotation marks are there for two reasons: 1. These are obviously ripoff cookies and 2. Insurance, in case the cookies suck. I guess, though, that if they suck, the quotations should be around the word cookies. But I digress…
Let’s start with the Geneva cookies, since those will prove to be the more challenging of the two (oh, but wait until you hear my rainbow cookie story people). I wanted to get the cookie as close to the original recipe as possible without having to break laws or jaws. Judging by the ingredients, this looks like a shortbread cookie made with cornstarch. Since I don’t have thiamin or soy lecithin at my disposal (what the…), I decided to go with a simpler, more classic recipe. Allrecipes to the rescue!
I halved the recipe to make room for the other treats that hopefully all come out perfectly. Here’s what you’ll need for a dozen:
1/2 cup of butter, softened
1/4 cup of confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons of cornstarch
3/4 cup of all-purpose flour
Have your oven preheated to 375°F. Also, have your patience level preheated to like nine thousand. Yes, kids, it’s story time.
So I whipped the butter with an electric mixer until it was nice and fluffy, like you’re supposed to. This was easy, as I do it all the time. Adding in the sugar was also pretty simple. Next up was the cornstarch. Still fine. Then the flour. THEN THE ANNOYANCE. It takes forever to get this to look anything like a dough. At first it looks like cereal. Then it looks like cereal. Then, ten minutes later, it looks like cereal. This dough is very crumb-y and delicate, so if after decades of mixing, you find yourself with results similar to mine, I recommend getting into this with clean hands and working it into an actual dough. Also, as I said, this is pretty fragile, so I suggest wrapping it up in wax paper and throwing it in the refrigerator for an hour or two to firm it up a bit. Any longer and the dough will harden, and you will have to wait another three or four hours to get it just right.
Instead of rolling mine into balls, I decided to cut them into elephants. Why elephants? Elephants are my favorite animal. I do not know why, so do not ask me. They just rule, so send along anything that has elephants on it, so that I may add it to my quirky-and-not-at-all-sad collection. Most of my friends already have (including the twins, who gave me a bamboo plant in an elephant-shaped pot as a housewarming present).
Remember how I said this dough was delicate? Homegirl wasn’t messing. You need to be careful with this stuff. It’s not as tough as most cookie dough, most likely because they are egg-less and filled with cornstarch, which lightens these up like crazy. After several rolling pin vs. fragile dough matches, I cut out my shapes, sent these into the oven for ten minutes, and finally ended up with these:
Cute, right? I thought so. I even went to pet one, and the trunk broke off. So, um, refrigerate them for a really long time before you handle them. Even after they’ve cooled, you need to be very careful with them. A few of these soldiers lost legs. Poor suckers.
Now, Geneva cookies have a layer of dark chocolate and are topped with chopped pecans. I melted 1/4 cup of semisweet chocolate chips with 1 teaspoon of butter at 15-second increments, then slowwwwly spread the melted mixture over each cookie with a butter knife. Then I sprinkled nuts over the cookies like a brown, frustrated fairy godmother.
Thoughts?
These don’t really still look like elephants, do they? Man, I have some serious issues frosting my animals. (Is “frosting your animal” a euphemism? I should Urban Dictionary that one to make sure.). Anyway, they taste good, but I’m not sure they measure up to the real deal. I’ll let the boys decide.
On to the chocolate chip cookies with sea salt. I love messing around with classic chocolate chip cookie recipes. I actually have my own special secret recipe. It’s probably not too different from anything that’s out there in the big bad world, but I am still going to call it my secret recipe because it makes me sound cool. It does right? Anyway, I’d heard of a recipe that replaced butter with olive oil, which gave the cookies more depth of flavor. This intrigued me, so I decided to sub some of the butter in my recipe for the oil. Here’s what I came up with:
1 1/3 cup of all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of sea salt, plus more for sprinkling
1 cup of brown sugar
1/2 cup of butter
1/4 cup of olive oil
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
As many chocolate chips as your heart desires, because Sad Shibow does not believe in limits (I used a little over half a bag of Ghirardelli Semisweet Chips)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda and sea salt. In a larger bowl, cream together the butter, sugar and oil until fully combined. The mixture will be pretty soft and gooey. Add in the egg and vanilla. When all the wet ingredients are fully mixed, add in the flour mixture. After everything’s completely combined, fold in your chocolate chips.
Because I’ve been working on all these cookies over the course of a couple of days, I refrigerated this dough overnight. It’s a little easier to work with when the dough is colder, since it can be formed into balls that will stay firm and not spread or melt on you. This will lead to less frustration, and if you’ve just spent most of your night trying to keep elephant cookies intact, you will appreciate this.
Before I continue, may I just say that the addition of olive oil really elevates these cookies? Seriously, I felt so classy making these. Anyway, sprinkle a touch of sea salt over each cookie, then send these into your hot oven for 10-11 minutes, until the tops are slightly browned.
So, as you can see, there is an odd number of cookies on my cookie sheet. I can’t give one twin more cookies than the other. That would just be rude. To keep myself from having to choose, obviously I ate one. And I enjoyed it. Again, I am a good friend.
I swung by my local bakery and bought two cake boxes to place the cookies in (At 50 cents total!), to up the presentation factor a little. I hope it worked. Anyway, happy birthday friends! To another couple of awesome quarter-centuries.
I’m going to let you all in on a tiny secret: I care about the Royal Wedding about as much as I care whether or not it’s acceptable to have hazelnut gelato for lunch. This means I do not care at all.
I am a terrible person, and this is awesome.
Ok, Kate looked gorgeous, the dress was fabuloso, blahblahboringblah. I’m a hater, I know. Really, though, nothing about this wedding intrigued me until I heard their official wedding cake would be a fruit cake. A fruit cake! Did my parents choose this? Worst. Nightmare.
Just as I was about to doze off and hopefully not wake up until the Saturday after the nuptials, I heard that Prince William also requested a chocolate biscuit cake be served, probably because he would have gagged if all he had to eat was fruit cake. Did I mention their cake was a fruit cake? Anyway, my ears perked up when I heard the groom’s request. Oh Wills. I had a feeling we were homies.
I knew not what a chocolate biscuit cake was, but I [correctly] assumed there would be no candied cherries (gag!) at play in this one. I also [correctly] figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a recipe for this cake, since, you know, no one cares about anything but Will, Kate and zzzzz…. sorry. I’m sure this cake will pair perfectly with the haterade I’m drinking. Also, for all you hippies who don’t believe in modern-day appliances, like ovens, this is a no-bake recipe. Score! Oh, you will need a fridge, though. Sorry hippies.
I used Darren McGrady’s recipe, which is said to be the exact recipe used for the groom’s cake, and found it here (first recipe). You’ll need:
8 ounces of tea biscuits or cookies (I used Kedem tea biscuits, which can be found in the “specialty/international foods” aisle of your grocery store, and are usually less than $1 a pack. Holla!)
1/2 stick of butter
1/2 cup of granulated sugar
12 ounces of dark chocolate (I used a bag of Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate chips)
1 beaten egg
1 ounce of white chocolate, optional
Grease an 8-inch round pan or 9 x 5 inch jelly roll pan. In a small bowl, cream together butter and sugar until it is fluffy and yellow. In a separate, larger bowl, melt 4 ounces of your dark chocolate. If you’ve got a double-boiler, use it. If you do not, you are me. If you are me, add half a tablespoon of butter into your chocolate bowl, and melt at 15-second increments until relatively smooth. The chocolate will still be a bit tough to stir, but fear not. Once the butter/sugar mixture is added, your bowl will look much shinier and prettier. Go ahead and mix these together, then add in your beaten egg.
The recipe says to have your broken tea biscuits ready. I am a rebel, and I also do not like having to clean extra dishes, so I suggest breaking the biscuits over your chocolate mixture. I found that my mixture was a bit biscuit-heavy after one packet, but you can go crazy and add as many of these as you please. Stir it all together until all biscuits have been covered in gooey chocolate.
Pour into your greased pan, making sure to evenly spread it throughout, and chill in the refrigerator for 3 hours.
Once chilled, run a knife along the edges of the pan and invert the cake onto a serving dish. Oh, who am I to tell you where to put your cakes? Invert it onto the floor if you feel like it. Anyway, in the meantime, melt the remaining 8 ounces of chocolate and pour it over the cake, making sure to evenly spread it over the top and sides. Let the icing cool at room temperature. You can also melt a bit of white chocolate on top if you are feeling extra fancy. I am obviously not.
Messy finished product. The Prince would be proud. (No he wouldn't.)
So, the verdict? I mean, it’s cookies, butter, sugar and chocolate all mashed together into a pan. It’s going to be good. I would suggest doubling the recipe if you want something that resembles more of a cake and less of a pancake. This thing is crazy flat, but still pretty fab. Oh, also, it isn’t fruit cake.
So my cousin George (‘sup yo!) came up with THE. MOST. BRILLIANT. name for my next sweet treat. I know caps are obnoxious, but the Kanye just passed through me, so forgive.
Allow me to explain the awesomeness of this name. My dad, Sebastian, is known for a few things, including: 1. The mustache he’s had probably since birth that he refuses to shave “until one of you girls gets married” (so yeah, he’ll be mustachioed for while) 2. The catch phrase “Ok, time to go!” 3. His sweet dance moves (No joke. He wins the dance-off. Every time.) and 4. His pet name, Joy.
Many of the men, and some of the women, in my Indian-Catholic family have “good names” and “pet names.” My mom affectionately (I guess?) refers to Dad as Joycha. And so, George challenged me to come up with a dessert known as the Almond Joycha by Easter Sunday. As he stated, “it could be a play on the classic Almond Joy with coconut, almonds, and chocolate or something entirely different. As long as it fits the name.” Now, in my mind, “fits the name” means the treat has to include two things: almonds and Joycha. What better way to honor the dance machine who made me than with a sugar and almond-filled concoction?
I decided to veer away from actual Almond Joys in order to fancy up the dessert a bit. Actually, let’s be honest: I’ve been craving rainbow cookies for, like, years and am too lazy to roll into my local bakery to buy a pound (also, they’re kind of expensive). Rainbow cookies–which I will be baking in a couple of weeks, so keep an eye out– are typically made with either almond paste or almond filling, and have a cake-like texture with a sweet, subtly nutty taste. I tweaked the recipe to my liking.
Here’s the recipe, adapted from this recipe for rainbow cookies:
8 oz of almond filling*
1 cup of softened butter
1 cup of granulated white sugar
4 eggs, separated
2 cups of all-purpose flour
1/4 cup of raspberry jam
1/2 cup of sweetened coconut flakes
1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips
1 tablespoon of butter
*Now, you could use almond paste for this recipe but a. it’s significantly more expensive and b. the texture makes it more difficult to work with and blend into your other ingredients.
Preheat your oven to 350°F, and line a 9 x 13 inch baking pan with enough parchment paper that the ends hang off two sides of the pan. In a large bowl, cream together the almond filling, butter, sugar and egg yolks. Have another bowl ready for your egg whites. Having some trouble separating your eggs? The easiest thing to do is to tap your egg lightly with a fork, then use your fingers to break the egg into 2 halves. Holding the halves over your egg whites bowl, toss the yolk between the two shells, letting the whites drip out, like so (yes, it will be gooey):
You gotta keep 'em separated.
When your egg yolk/almond mixture is fluffy, stir in your flour to form a dough. Now, move on to the egg whites. Using a hand mixer or stand mixer at medium speed, beat the egg whites until soft peaks begin to form. This should take about five minutes. It took me ten, but only because I don’t know how to properly attach the beaters and they flew off mid-mix. I spent two minutes saying words not meant to be uttered on Easter Sunday, and spent another three scrubbing those suckers clean. When puffy and peak-filled, fold the egg white mixture into your dough, and spread the mixture into your pan. Bake for about 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Taste-tested pre-frosting several times by my lovely sister Sylvia
While that’s baking, combine your chocolate chips with a tablespoon of butter in a microwave-safe bowl. Heat the chips in 15-second intervals, stirring after each nuke, until the mixture is melted and smooth.
As soon as my cakey cookie was done, I stuck the pan directly into the freezer for about 15 minutes. If you’re more patient– like, eons more patient– you can let it cool on a wire rack. Either way, when it’s cool to the touch, pick up the cake by the parchment paper flaps (See how handy those are?) and place it onto a cookie sheet or smooth surface. Cut out squares or rectangles (or both if you’re creative/geometrically challenged like I am).
Here’s where things get…complicated. I am positive that there is a neater way to accomplish this, but, well, I yam who I yam. I dunked one side of each cookie into my melted chocolate and placed it on a cookie sheet to cool. Then, I spread jam on the tops and sprinkled coconut over the sheet until each cookie was covered. Lastly, using a butter knife, I spread the rest of the melted chocolate over the top of each cookie, then placed them in the refrigerator to allow the chocolate to harden. Mess? Yes. Mess. Also, delicious.
I would recommend NOT doing what I did here. Use a knife to spread the chocolate on.Half-finished product, before they were re-cut to near-perfection. Those are mustaches. So you know.
Now, I am sure you are all wondering: what did Joycha think? And why isn’t his proud mug to be found anywhere in this post? Well, sadly, Joycha is perhaps the only member of the family who is not a fan of my venture into blogging. I can’t say I am not disappointed, but I can say that he is OLD. My guess is that he knows not what a “blog” is. Someone hand the man a dictionary and a cupcake, because he is a grouch. Fortunately, the rest of the clan–including George– seemed to love them. Ok, time to go!
Before I introduce my next creation, I feel I must clear up an issue that’s been causing quite a bit of confusion. Because I’ve lived with the name Shibow for so long, I’ve come to assume that pretty much everyone knows how to pronounce it. Wrongsauce. Here’s how it goes: “Shib” rhymes with “rib.” “Ow” rhymes with “cow.” Ribcow. Shibow. All set? Schweet!
So, the storm’s passed. Literally, it looks like the rain’s decided to calm its behind down and bounce for a bit. Also, things have been looking up for Sad Shibow. Friday, I stalked, met and photographed Academy Award-winner and lead singer of The Swell Season and my hero and lead actor in Once, my favorite movie and lead singer of my favorite band Glen Hansard. If you can’t tell, I sort of adore him. You can’t see the picture I took because I am in it and I have a case of the crazy eyes. I’m sorry Glen. Really I am. I’m not going to explain that apology in this post, but just know that it is necessary.
Glen Hansard. Swoon.
Anyway, that experience gave me the serious boost I needed in order to get baking for Easter Sunday. I’d been looking for a fun, kid-friendly dessert that wouldn’t be terribly difficult to pull off. I failed and decided on this cake instead. Yes, it was a PAIN to bake and construct. No, I am not an artist. These two facts together basically equaled, in my case, the fattest bunny ever. Seriously, I am pretty sure this thing was knocked up with cupcakes. That’s cool to say, right?
So, here’s the recipe, from Delish.com. If I were you, I’d pay little mind to the reviews. Hey, Internet Mom, mayyyyybe it’s not the cake’s fault that your son didn’t want to eat a bunny. And maaayyyybe it’s not the cake’s fault that your son’s allergic to coconut. I mean, that sucks, but really, you’re going to blame Good Housekeeping, lady?
As usual, I am stubborn and tweaked the recipe to my liking. Here’s my version (really only the frosting is different):
Cake
2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
1/4 cup of cream of coconut
8 oz of crushed pineapple, in juice
1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup of white sugar
1/2 cup of butter
3 large eggs
(Coconut)-Cream Cheese Frosting
8 oz of cream cheese or neufchatel cheese
1/4 cup of butter
1 cup of confectioners’ sugar
touch of lemon juice, optional
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla or coconut extract (depending on how overt you want the flavor to be)
1/2 cup of sweetened coconut flakes
jelly beans for decorating
Preheat your oven to 350°F, and line a 9×13 inch pan with enough parchment paper to be able to lift the cake out of the pan once baked. In a medium-sized bowl, combine flour, salt and baking powder. In a separate bowl, mix together cream of coconut, pineapple chunks and vanilla. In a third large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until fully blended and fluffy. Incorporate eggs into the butter mixture, one at a time, and beat until completely mixed.
Alternate between beating the flour mixture into the butter/sugar/eggs and beating the pineapple/coconut mixture in, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. By the way, this is when I knocked over my just-purchased bottle of vanilla extract and wept silently into the mixture. Just kidding. I cried in the sink.
Pour the batter into your pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. I’m kind of getting tired of using that phrase over and over again. It’s a necessary step, but it needs more pizazz, no? Anyway, once it’s baked, let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes before moving it onto a wire rack to cool completely.
While that’s happening, get started on the frosting. Cream together the cheese and butter until fluffy. Add in the vanilla, then the sugar a bit at a time until fully blended. Squeeze in a bit of lemon juice if you prefer a tangier frosting. Now, this isn’t technically a coconutty frosting, hence the parentheses above. After the bunny is cut and frosting, coconut is pressed into the frosting to create “fur.” As you will see, my overweight bunny needed a lot of coconut to cover him.
So here’s where I got “creative.” Good Housekeeping kindly offered this diagram as a guide for bunny cutting. There is definitely a better way to phrase that. Anyway, I printed out the diagram, cut out the bunny outline (body and ears separately), covered the cake in foil, and carefully cut around the outline to create what I prayed would be an acceptable-looking animal. I came away with this, which really isn’t terrible:
Naked bunny!
For some reason, once I frosted it, the bunny gained a ton or so. To frost, use a flat, rubber spatula or wooden spoon to spread evenly. Press coconut flakes into the frosting to create a furry little monster. Use jelly beans to make eyes and a button nose, and use anything but licorice to make whiskers. Licorice is gross.
Fat bunny!
So, would I make it again? Probably. This cake was delicious, especially with the cream cheese frosting. Still, I don’t think I’d try to get crazy with the animal shapes, if only because, um, see above.
Sad Shibow 
