Chocolate Birthday Cake!

I made a birthday cake today from whole wheat with oil instead of butter to see if maybe I could have a little bit of a healthier version than the standard (I said healthier, not healthy...). I ended up using this recipe for the cake and a combination of the icing recipe that follows the cake and this recipe for the frosting. I made it a double layer cake which I've never done before. This is what I did:

First combine flour, sugar and cinnamon.

Boil the cocoa, oil and water and then mix it in with the flour mixture. (I used canola instead of vegetable. I'm sure if it is a fairly tasteless oil you can use just about anything. I've also heard of people using coconut oil, which does have a flavor of its own, in sweet dishes which may be fun to experiment with.)

Add eggs, vanilla extract and baking soda dissolved in the buttermilk. Initially I was going to just stir all of this together but I quickly realized that I would need either biceps of steel or an electric hand mixer to make this as smooth as it needed to be.

Bake at 350 F. The recipe says 20 minutes and if you are doing a 1 inch sheet cake I would stick with that, if you are making a round, double layer cake you will need to bake it somewhere around 30-35 minutes instead. This makes the perfect amount of batter to fill two round 9 inch cake pans.  After cooking and letting them cool I cut the round top off of one of the cakes so it would be nice and flat.

Time to make the frosting! Since I combined recipes I'll write down exactly what I ended up using:
1/2 cup (one stick) of butter
1/3 cup skim milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup cocoa powder
4cup powdered sugar

Making the frosting is simple, bring the butter, milk and cocoa to a boil and pour into a bowl. Add vanilla and slowly beat in powdered sugar adding a little bit at a time.
This made plenty of really thick frosting so don't be shy putting lots of it in the middle part to hold it together. I thought that the vanilla was very noticeable so if you don't like vanilla, leave it out. I also think that about 3 cups seemed to make it plenty thick enough to still be a spreadable frosting. I might try that next time and just try to whip it up and bit to make it taste less sickeningly sweet and more fluffy.
And here is the finished product!

Mountain Coffee

I love coffee, a lot, and today I had a craving for coffee, but no coffee filters and really no other means to make coffee outside of a coffee maker. I googled it of course and found lots of different ways to make coffee, but none that were very accessible to me, except for putting it in a pan and boiling it. Some people called it "mountain coffee" I guess since it's what you do when you're camping (presumably in the mountains?) and what people used to do before they had coffee makers. This got me thinking of all the ways to make coffee so here is a list of my favorite kinds of coffee, why and how they came to be.

1. Cheap diner coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.

          I like the unassuming simplicity of this kind of coffee. It's the only kind of coffee that you get to just sip on endlessly and since you know it's cheap and possibly watered down, you can shamelessly dilute its bitterness with delicious cream and sugar without feeling guilty over ruining its flavor. I'm not totally sure where diner coffee came from since you never really know the brand but apparently the diner as we know it started out as a horse drawn lunch wagon and even then they sold coffee. 

2. Vietnamese Coffee

          This coffee is made by straining it directly into the cup using a brewing phin and mixed with sweetened condensed milk. I love it because the taste of the coffee is strong and the sweetened condensed milk automatically adds the right amount of cream and sugar to balance it out. It can be served hot or iced. The French introduced coffee to Vietnam as colonists and the sweetened condensed milk is used in place of fresh milk which is apparently hard to find in that area of the world. 

3. Iced Coffee

          It's like a summer treat because it's cold and refreshing but it retains the caffeine and bitter deliciousness of coffee. People made iced coffee on their own by putting coffee grounds in jars full of water and filtering it the next day long before it became popular in places like Dunkin' Donuts. If you are ordering it from a coffee shop I would advise you to make sure they have cold coffee instead of just pour hot coffee over ice. I once had a snide hipster chick admonish me for thinking that a mocha was like an actual drink and not just an espresso shot, after which she made me a latte and poured it over ice. It was gross...

4. Caffè Americano

          I like to be able to sit and sip my coffee for a long time. This combination of an espresso shot in hot water dilutes the bitterness and allows me to take my sweet time drinking it while still allowing me to taste the flavors of the actual espresso. I think this is something to be drunk black because its merit is in the subtle tastes of the coffee. Supposedly this originated when the American soldiers that occupied Italy during WW2 ordered their espresso mixed with hot water so that it would be more like the brewed coffee they were used to. 

That's about it. I do enjoy the home brewed coffee obviously and I feel very productive drinking coffee at home but I think its more of a staple and less of a favorite.