Delicious in Dungeon #32: Sweet Dryad

 The last of the fifth floor throwback trilogy!

So what was that creature stalking us? well it was just a damn fool shapeshifter. I shifted its shape flat-wards.

So for sweet dryad, I don't really know exactly what those are... but for me what springs to mind is a fruit-filled cookie! (Well also a greek roxakia but I don't know how to make those.) Cookies! cookies! cookies!

I'm using a simple sugar cookie recipe I found online. Its got flour, a little baking powder, butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla extract!

Ah... I wish I had read ahead... it wanted me to whip the butter and sugar together in my mixer.. and i just filled the big bowl with the dry ingredients... DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, it was VERY RISKY to mix in a bowl this small, I had to use my advanced super strength gamer grip!

Now we can combine it all together, with an egg and the vanilla extract.

The mixer will turn it into some sort of scary looking crumble, but then you just take the whisks out and get your hands in to knead it back together...

Et voila! We have some good looking cookie dough! Let's put that in the fridge to chill while we do the next part.

So... I know previously we used pumpkin for the dryad fruit. But... I simply had something else in mind. I thought it would be really cool to use some tinned figs. Figs feel like such a medieval fantasy fruit to me, I dunno why. I've started by draining the syrup out, we want a mash thats not going to leak out of the cookie. I can use the syrup in some mixed drinks maybe?

The figs go in my blending cup and we add some SPICES! The obvious answer is still christmas style spices, so i've got ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice.

Success! The figs and spices have blended into a thick jammy paste.

Now we preheat the oven and shape the cookies.

As you can see, I've just sort of shaped them by hand, rolling them into a ball and pressing a bucket shape with my knuckles.

And put a spoonful of the dryad fruit mush in each. Sure it looks pretty good now, but when the cookies heat up... I don't know how much they will melt. I've made them a bit taller than they need to be, but it remains to be seen whether theyll melt into a a mixed up pile or not.

Well that's not too bad! The dough has spread out while the fruit has stayed firmly in place. I could spread it out a little bit with the back of a spoon I guess, but I'm pretty happy with it anyway.

*****

These are delicious! Its sugary, buttery, sweet and festive. It's a combination of pretty standard cookie flavours, but being home-baked makes even the simplest cookie feel special. And its a perfect pairing with a hot cup of tea.

Stardew Valley #29: Cookie

Ingredients: Wheat Flour, Sugar, Egg

Item Description: Very chewy.

Cookies! We like those. The description says very chewy, and I think I usually make quite soft buttery ones, so im going to google for a chewy recipe and just use the first one that comes up.

It's cold so my butter hard like my feelings, maybe we should melt it gently in a bain-marie? (like my feelings)

The recipe says half white and half brown sugar, I have the most delicious malty brown sugar, as we learned in the pie recipe, it smells so good. Might be a bit intense for choc chip cookies, but we'll find out.

Once it's melty enough we can whip it all together

Once thats mixed we add some wets, we've got an egg, a teaspoon of vanilla, and a whole teaspoon of salt!? Ok you're the boss recipe.

Crikey that makes a difference doesn't it. The power of egg!

Now for the flour, and a teaspoon of baking soda. I feel like the ratio of flour to sugar is kinda low on this one, I guess that will make the cookies more chewy.

Now we fold in the flour instead of power-whisk it. It's that something something gluten structures again. I don't know I'm not a bread scientist.

Now we bust in a load of chocolate chunks! I prefer bar chocolate to chips, as they typically need less stabilising agents so theyll be less waxy. I normally put dark chocolate in cookies, but for some reason I feel like Evelyn, (the canonical recipe keeper in stardew valley's world) seems like a milk chocolate kinda gal to me.

The recipe actually says to chill them 30mins-10hours if possible. I want em for tonight so they've had about 3 hours to chill, then we scoop em out onto baking paper and cook them in the oven for 15mins.

****

Oops I kinda overcooked these. I should have been more on the ball really, my oven is nice and powerful. They're dry and crunchy on the outer rim but on the inside they are indeed very chewy. They melted a lot and came out very flat. They're nice, but I'm pretty sure ive made better. They are a bit oily and sugary to me, I think next time I would use more flour and less sugar, and i'd use more white/golden sugar rather than the dark stuff. And I would definitely keep an eye on them and take them out sooner.

Super Paper Mario: Saffron & Dyllis Super Show #70: Roast Whacka Bump

Roast Whacka Bump is made from WHACKA BUMP, obviously

so this is like... so you hit this mole guy on the head right... and his swelling comes off and you can eat it i guess?? Anyway I think it looks enough like a japanese MELON PAN so lets find out how to make that??

ok so like, what is a melon pan? if you think it has melon in it, you already fucked up, bad news back to square one. for some reason it is a bread roll thats wrapped in a thin layer of cookie dough, yes you heard me. So first ive partially-melted some butter and "whisked" it a bit, im going to try and get my mixer to do the bulk of the work here.

Next you add sugar, and here's where i already deviate from the conventional recipe. Since it's a ROAST whacka bump I wanna give it some dark brown appearance, so im using dark brown sugar which i mix with the butter here.

now the recipe says to use 25g of egg! who says that? so what we've got to do is beat and egg and then weigh it out, looks like its almost exactly 50g so im just gonna pour in half by eye lol

for the cookie part says to use "cake flour" which is a weird american thing, slightly smoother than plain flour but you can lighten it up a bit with a tablespoon of cornflour. It also says to add a pinch of baking powder. Wait do you normally use baking powder in cookies??? wait i guess so yeah.

after its mixed and gathered and kneaded a bit by hand and suddenly we have a perfect little sausage. Now we pop it in the fridge for ages while we do the rest, because cookie dough needs to be hella chill to work with.

Now for the bread, we're using BREAD FLOUR, a tiny bit more sugar but ill just use white this time, a pinch of salt and then we unleash the yeast!! For this small batch it said to use 3g of years but guess what my scales fucked up and now i have no idea how much yeast is in it hooray

then you want to add WARM AND WET ingredients... heat the milk to lukewarm/body temperature, im just gonna mix it with the rest of the egg, and they want a tiny bit more butter in there too. Sure.

Notice i've switched to dough hooks for the mixer, by the end you just wanna mix it a bit by hand and shape it into a ball. Then it has to do its FIRST PROVE! im going to leave it in a sunbeam.

Its gotten bigger! I poked it with my finger and it feels... puffy.

now we split it into five uh... roughly equal parts and attept to wrap each ball of bread dough in a disk of cookie dough. this cookie dough was disasterously unwieldy, and needed a truly generous amount of flour just to do anything. The rolling pin was even a lost cause, I ended up mashing it flat with my cold dead bitch hands

anyway thats come out alright in the end i think? Then you have to make the classic melon pan cuts in the top surface, and an extra sprinkle of brown sugar on the top. AND THEN wait get this, you actually let it PROVE for another 40 mins (i did it in the oven set at 30c) and then you bake it on full whack (180c-ish) for 12min

*****

This is the best one, they came out a lot flatter than they ideally should, but oh my goddd these taste amazing. All that effort? WORTH IT.

Super Paper Mario: Saffron & Dyllis Super Show #1: Sweet Cookie Snack

 First recipe is a selection of chocolate and vanilla cookies made with simply a CAKE MIX. But i have plenty of simple baking ingredients so ill just follow a regular cookie recipe, and just aim to do 1 cookie design because I aint wanna be here all day. I'm going to do the checkerboard looking one because that seems iconic!

So we've got 3 cups flour, 1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1tsp baking powder, 1tsp vanilla. And some cocoa for half of the dough.

Hello stand mixer! I expect we'll be seeing more of you in this challenge. When its mixed enough, we split these in half and add 1/3 cup of cocoa powder to the half and mix it some more. I guess it will be drier, but... eh, probably fine?

ooh look at how cocoa-y that looks! Using the aid of a tupperware box and some slapping we've managed to get two roughly matching rectangles, you want them looking 1h:2w ratio so theyll be square when cut. BUT FIRST you can refridgerate them for about an hour so that they're much less floppy, then you can adjust them as much as you like. Then you slice the rectangles and arrange them all... yknow.. checkerboard-y.

oh man these are kinda big already, they're gonna come out pretty chunky lets hope they dont fuse together. Baked for about 7-10mins at 190c

****

Stylish AND delicious! These are a simple buttery cookie recipe, so nothing that adventurous but who can say no to a fresh homemade cookie?

Harry Potter Birthday Cakepocalipse

Mode: Massive Multiplayer Office Game
Hardware: Pretty much every piece of cutlery, tray, and bowl in my kitchen.
Accessories: Joy and wonder.

So as you may know, it's customary at my office to provide cakes for your co-worker when it is your own birthday. Because I'm a massive show-off, each year I get as many of my family members over as possible for a weekend of family fun and then ask them to help me make a metric FUCK TON of cakes. Cakes designed by me.

Why the Harry Potter theme? Well the LEGO Harry Potter series is currently being worked on by a lot of my hardworking peers who have been doing much overtime (holla!) But also there's the fact that I thought there's kind of a lot to work with, thematically speaking.

So it all begins with a shit load of cake mix. The foundation for pretty much everything here. Butter, flour, eggs, sugar.

I made 4 kinds of cupcakes, using my cupcake maker. The cupcakes are going to be themed around spells...

Yellow flavoured with lemon juice, Blue flavoured with Peppermint essence, Green flavoured with vanilla essence, and red flavoured with fresh carrot, cinnamon and chili powder.

 

For the centerpiece cake, Mum (codename pending?) worked on a large tray of chocolate brownie, and two vanilla sponge cakes made in curved bowls, in order to fit them together to create a cauldron shaped cake.

 

The chocolate tray portion is decorated with melted chocolate to look like a wooden desk.

 

 

With some fondant icing (which just happened to be blue for some reason) the cauldron is shaped over the 'ball' of spongecake.

 

...and painted black with some black food colouring. painting it instead of dyeing it means it could have a sort of 'glazed' look that actually makes it look a bit like cast iron. We also pressed in chocolate chips for rivets, and plaited licorice laces into a matching handle.

For these battenburg type sponge cakes, there would be one for each of the Hogwarts houses, with a matching colour scheme and appropriate flavour combination. Lime and coconut for Slytherin, blueberry and coffee for Ravenclaw, banana and chocolate for Hufflepuff, and strawberry and orange for Griffindor. I used whatever I could find for flavouring. Some were cordials, some were fresh fruits, as well as cocoa and coconut milk, etc.

 

When the cakes were baked, we cut them into strips and alternated them, rebuilding a cake and sealing them together with an appropriate flavoured jam and coating them in an appropriate coating.

Honey and marzipan for Griffindor, lime jam and coconut for Slytherin,  nutella and chocolate icing for Hufflepuff, and bramble jelly and coffee glazed marzipan for Ravenclaw.

 The final job before transporting was to ice the cupcakes. 3 of them were made with buttercream icing, flavoured to match the cupcake, but the green ones were topped with lime jelly.
 

 

My sister had a recipe she likes to use, where she makes edible shards that look like broken glass out of melting down boiled sweets or sugar. I used these to decorate the blue cupcakes. I also had various sprinkles and some edible glitter handy.

I don't seem to have any pictures of the cookies we baked, but I also made sugar cookies out of a big log of cookie dough which we cut in half really zig-zaggy, added some food dyes, and re-assembled and sliced into cookies and baked.

While me, my mum and my sister did all this, Ben H wrote down the display cards for each cake in calligraphic handwriting, for that authentic wizardy-feel. I'm not sure why wizards hate computers, but they do. Except for installation wizards.

Phew! That was 2 days of work, but don't worry we went out for dinner and a cinema trip to relax in the evenings. Cowboys and Aliens was pretty decent.

The next day we drove all the cakes down the road to the office, and badgered a couple people into helping me carry them up the stairs. But we're not just finished yet!.

I had to arrange ingredients in the cauldron cake, add pocky wands to the 'spells' and slice the battenburgs.

...

Okay, NOW It's done. Here you go, guys. I'll type out what it said on the display cards.

CAULDRON CAKE

Indulge yourself with a slice of thick CHOCOLATE BROWNIE wizard's desk with DARK AND MILK CHOCOLATE coating.

Or take a chunk out of the Cauldron itself, made from VANILLA SPONGE and FONDANT ICING joined with NUTELLA

Or just pinch some INGREDIENTS

GRIFFINDOR

If you are the bravest sort, you will have to try some STRAWBERRY and ORANGE&MANGO sponge joined with HONEY and coated in MARZIPAN.

RAVENCLAW

 If wit beyond measure is your greatest treasure, perk up with some COFFEE and FRESH BLUEBERRY sponge joined with BRAMBLE JELLY and coated in MARZIPAN.

HUFFLEPUFF

 If you're warm of heart and quite loyal to chocolate, have a big slice of CHOCOLATE and BANANA sponge joined with NUTELLA and coated with CHOCOLATE FONDANT.

SLYTHERIN

If you're the devious sort with unusual taste, try LIME and COCONUT sponge, joined with LEMON AND LIME JELLY and iced with DESSICATED COCONUT

(Dairy Free)

LUMOS

 If your workspace is dark and needs illumination, try a LEMON flavoured spell with LEMON BUTTERCREAM ICING

REPARO

If you're feeling broken down, fix yourself a PEPPERMINT SPELL with PEPPERMINT BUTTERCREAM ICING and PEPPERMINT SUGAR SHARDS

INCENDIO

If you're a little under the weather, heat up with a spicy CARROT AND CINNAMON CAKE with a hint of CHILI, coated with NON-DAIRY CINNAMON ICING

(Dairy Free)

STUPEFY

Dare to be stupid? Plunge headfirst into a VANILLA SPONGE and LIME JELLY spell. 

(Not suitable for vegetarians!)

CRUCIATUS COOKIES

Post-mortem: ***** TEN POINTS TO RED VALKYRIE HOUSE.