Vlog!

Wow I say "really" about 900 times but oh well. 

Jenna's Vlog! from jenna rollins on Vimeo.

Don't be a Fool, Eat my Blueberry Fool! (Title again provided by Brooke Rhea)

For St. Patrick's day, I made a traditional Irish dessert: Blueberry fool. Oh my god it was amazing. According to this source, which is also the recipe that I used, certain Irish locals know where to look when they are in need of blueberries. This recipe was created when those blueberries were mixed with Whipped cream, vanilla, and sugar!

Ingredients

1 pint fresh blueberries

2 cups whipping cream

¼ cup plus 2 Tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

Directions

1. Put the blueberries and 1/4 cup sugar in a saucepan over medium heat and cook just until the berries release their juice and some start to burst, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool completely.

2. Whip the cream with the 2 tablespoons sugar until soft peaks form. Stir in the vanilla.

3. Pour the cooled blueberries and their juice over the whipped cream and fold the fruit in lightly, allowing streaks to remain. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill for 2 hours.

4. Spoon into serving bowls or glasses.

I have never cooked blueberries before and was surprised when the directions called for me to wait for some of them to "start to burst." Although, when the blueberries and sugar were heating up, they were really pretty.

While those were cooking and eventually cooling, I started on the whipping cream. I have to say, after these past weeks, my electric mixer is my best friend. I have used it with every dessert, and will probably use it for the upcoming ones as well. So the whipping cream was to have "soft peaks form." I let it whip and it looked like it cloud.

At this point, all my ingredients were ready to be mixed, I had the soft peaks, and the juicy blueberries. But the blueberries were still pretty warm, and the whipped cream was starting to wilt a little bit. I put both of them into the refrigerator and took a dinner break. When i pulled them out again, they were ready to mixed. 

With the two of them finally together, it was pretty funny how my camera couldn't pick up the colors of the blueberries next to the bright white of the cream. Mixing them was difficult because I needed to mix them not too much where it would kill the whipped cream, and I also needed to keep it visually appealing of course. 

I wanted to eat it so bad at this point. It was like tie dye. Letting it cool was the worst part of this process. It looks so ready for me to eat! Fortunately I resisted, because after it cooled it tasted so much better than what I had tried off the spoon prior. So, since I made a pound cake last week and wasn't in the mood for that process again, I picked up an angel food cake block from giant, and six little sponge cake cups also from giant. I cut out the center of the block and plopped the mix into it.

Along with flopping some of it into the mini cups.

And here's my super artsy collage:

The blueberry fool was seriously so good I've been having it for dessert every day since I've made it, and i'm pretty sure my Grandma has been having it for breakfast! :)

Pounding that Pound Cake (Title provided by Brooke Rhea)

Pound Cake is extremely heavy and dense. When a recipe calls for five eggs, I guess that should be expected. I made a pound cake this week! So I kind of cheated with this week to be honest, I used a recipe titled "No Fail Pound Cake." It was one of those things where I had all the ingredients already in my kitchen, I hadn't started any other homework, and I was exhausted from the previous two weeks of musical madness. Although the cake really turned out delicious. 

I used a recipe from foodnetwork.com this week, which you can find here! 

Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
3 cups sugar
5 eggs
3 cups cake flour
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons lemon extract
Berries, for garnish
Special equipment: a 10-inch bundt pan, greased and floured

Directions
In a large bowl, using a mixer, combine the butter and sugar until creamy. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the flour and milk alternately, beginning and ending with the flour. Stir in the lemon extract. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.
Place the pan in a cold oven and set the oven temperature to 325 degrees F. Bake cake for 1 hour. Increase the temperature to 350 degrees F and bake for 30 minutes more.
*Cook's Note: Do not open the oven door while baking.
Cool the cake in the pan for 10 minutes, and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

The result was definitely a step up from last week. I was really surprised by the amount alone of each ingredient, seriously five eggs is a lot, plus three cups of sugar and flour all in one bowl, I was having trouble with the amount of splatter form the electric mixer. 

There isn't much to say really about the process of mixing the ingredients and such, because all I did was pour everything in the mixer:

Baking took 90 minutes, which is the longest thing I've ever had to bake. I was holding back the urge to open the oven and take a peak like every 20 minutes. 

When it came out of the oven my entire house literally smelled like heaven. The top of the cake was almost crispy because of how dense the cake turned out. After ten or fifteen minutes I decided to try and pop the cake out of the pan, but it was seriously stuck in there. I figured I should give it another ten. Finally almost thirty minutes after the cake was out of the oven I tried to take it out again and it was still stuck. 

I ended up getting it out by taking a plastic knife and sliding it into every little crack where the cake touched the pan. A tedious task, but it worked!

I really think it turned out great, it was really soft but dense at the same time. I think my favorite part is that you can taste the tiny bit of lemon extract in it, it's like a little something extra. Julia Klugherz's birthday is actually Wednesday of this week (HAPPY BIRTHDAY JULIA), so I brought some of the finished product in for her (except she wasn't in school so...), and I dressed it up a little with some berries. 

Yay! Success! 

Crepe Nation

Famous last words: "I've decided to start simple... I'm making crepes!" French crepes are truly the opposite of simple and I have no idea where I got the idea that they were. My friend Priya was with me to help document the process (and taste test!) So all the photo credit goes to her. Here goes...

I laid out all the ingredients and equipment, (1 cup flour, 1 tsp sugar, 1/4 tsp salt, 3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 2 tbsps melted butter, 1 griddle) and prepared myself to start crepe making! Once everything was properly mixed together and I had (what I thought would be) a good consistency of batter, I poured my first one on the griddle...  

And then that happened. So, it wasn't the prettiest of crepes, but I figured it had to be impossible to make the perfect crepe on the first try. Then came time to flip it. Which did not go as well as planned. "It takes practice," I had to keep telling myself. So I ended up switching spatulas because the other one was just not working. After another folded over mess I needed a new game plan. The website where I found the recipe had said to use either a griddle or a frying pan over the stove. I figured I would give the frying pan a shot. 

The pan I had was a great size, my new spatula fit perfectly, and I could tilt the batter in the pan and make a perfect circle. Everything was going great! Until it wouldn't come off. I had sprayed it, and used butter, there was absolutely no reason it should be sticking! Time for plan C. I grabbed a fat slice of butter an spread it in a circle back on the griddle, and poured the batter in the middle, and it was actually working. I made a bunch that were (almost) circular, a little bit browned, and looked (kind of) yummy (also a bit like potato latkes?). I pretty much figured they weren't going to get any better than this. 

When I had just enough batter left for about three or four more, I decided to try it without any butter on the griddle. I felt like the butter was making it shinny and really bubbly on the outside (which was freaking me out). Literally was the best decision of my life. They were suddenly thicker and prettier and did not look like potato pancakes anymore. I seriously wished I would have made them like that way before. 

I had finally finished off all the batter and I was ready to make them beautiful and delicious with strawberries, bananas, cool whip, and Nutella. Finally I had a finished product!

I decorated this thin one, and inside were only a few strawberries and bananas, This one was purely, for show, when the ones that tasted the best were stuffed and ate like tacos!

So I made crepes, the majority were pretty ugly, it took way longer than I expected, cleaning up almost took longer than actually making them, and I ate them totally wrong. But they tasted so good and I had a lot of fun! I had them for breakfast the next morning too. I would definitely do it again and I plan to. French Crepes were a great way to start my genius project!

Jenna fait la nourriture!

This week I traveled to France! (Well technically not yet because it's hell week so I haven't gotten home any earlier than 9pm every night, but by Saturday the 2nd I will have travelled to France!) Since my project is entirely desserts now I've decided to start simple, but in bulk. I've been doing a lot of research from big sites like foodnetwork.com to the tiny and hidden food blogs of the internet. A couple issues I've run into have been finding authentic recipes from parts of the world. Depending on the recipe that I'm looking for, it's either really difficult to find a recipe that isn't edited with someone else's 'secret ingredient,' or I run into 17 billion of the same exact recipe and that's pretty much all I'm going to get.

So, for my first dessert, I'm going to start with making crepes! The first time I had crepes was when my parents came back from france almost five years ago. They had had them at a restaurant there and wanted me to try them (since I was ten and still hadn't something as super simple as crepes). We made them with rasberries and blueberries and I loved them! So I asked my parents for some help remembering that recipe, and when I make these, I'll be basing the recipe off of this one:

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp white sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups milk
• 2 tbsps melted butter

Directions

1. Sift together flour, sugar and salt; set aside. In a large bowl, beat eggs and milk together with an electric mixer. Beat in flour mixture until smooth; stir in melted butter.
2. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 2 tablespoons for each crepe. Tip and rotate pan to spread batter as thinly as possible. Brown on both sides and serve hot.

Of course this is going to be really simple, but I wouldn't want to have a horror story on my first dessert. I have a griddle that we always make pancakes on that I'm excited to use. For the inside and the toppings, my favorite fruits are definitely strawberries and bananas, I was hoping to have some fresh slices of those, some whipped cream, and for sure some Nutella! My family has loads of fruit so when i make these tomorrow we'll be experimenting. I'm going to make another blog post after I make them tomorrow night with pictures and how they went! I'm really excited!