Instagram Made Me Do It: Macaroni & Cheese By Quinton Washington’s Mom

So, it’s been a minute since something on social media has caused me to run to the store to get the ingredients. But……. I saw a video on BuzzFeedTasty’s (@buzzfeedtasty) Instagram account, and off I went to the store! Quinton Washington shared his mother’s Macaroni & Cheese recipe. Here is my take on it.

Recipe:

• 8 oz. mild yellow cheddar cheese
• 8 oz. sharp cheddar cheese (his was white cheddar, mine was yellow cheddar)
• 2 large eggs
• 1 (12 oz.) can evaporated milk
• 1 T kosher salt
• 1 T sugar
• 1 t black pepper
• 1 (16 oz.) box elbow macaroni
• 3 T butter (his was unsalted, mine was salted) – plus more for greasing the baking dish
• 4 C shredded cheddar cheese

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• Start a large pot of water heating to boil.
• Cut cheese bricks into ½” cubes.  (I have no idea how big that is, so I just chunked mine.)

• In a medium bowl, add eggs, milk, sugar, salt, and pepper–whisk to combine.

• When water is boiling, add macaroni and cook for 5–8 minutes. (I cooked mine for 8 minutes.) Turn off the heat and let the macaroni sit in the hot water for 3 minutes until tender. (I gauged 3 minutes while I was doing the other prep work.)

• Drain the macaroni and return it to the pot. (Here is where I drained the macaroni and then added the butter to the pan and the cheese. Then I re-read that I was supposed to put the macaroni back in the pan already–so I grabbed the macaroni and put it in the pan.)

• Turn the heat to low, add the butter and the cheese to the macaroni. Stir until butter and cheese are melted.

• Pour the macaroni into the 13 x 9 that you buttered. (Here is where I layered it. I put some macaroni in then added some of the cubed cheese, then added the rest of the macaroni, and then the cubed cheese on top.)

• Add the egg and milk mixture and cubed cheese. (My cheese was already in there, and I just poured the egg and milk mixture over top). Carefully fold into the macaroni until well combined. (All I did was pour it over the top. I didn’t mix anything).

• Bake for 25 – 30 minutes ( I did 30 minutes), or until cheese is bubbling and the top of the macaroni is golden brown.

A final note from me is–try and not eat the whole thing in one sitting. YES, I made this for MYSELF. Yes, it is 8 servings. Well, it is supposed to be 8 servings. I’m guessing my serving size is not the same. Let’s not get into that right now, though.  

Pinterest Made Me Do It: Maple Caramel Carrot Cake

So, I have a Pinterest,  and I keep track of my popular pins. One of my popular pins seemingly every week is this Maple Caramel Carrot Cake. There is someone almost every week that is repinning this onto one of their boards. After seeing this month after month, I decided that it was high time that I actually tried making the cake to see how it would turn out. That’s what this post is about.

Here is the recipe from the pin:

INGREDIENTS

Carrot Cake:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 3/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• pinch ground cloves
• 1 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs room temperature
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 3 cups grated carrots lightly packed, approx. 4 large carrots

Maple Caramel:

• 1 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 Tbsp unsalted butter

Cream Cheese Frosting:

• 2/3 cup unsalted butter room temperature
• 4 oz cream cheese full fat, room temperature
• 2 cups powdered sugar sifted
• 1 tsp vanilla

Assembly:

• 4 Tbsp pure maple syrup
• 1/4 cup pecans chopped, toasted

I went to the store and picked up the ingredients (well, almost all of them — we’ll get to that)

I started by assembling the dry ingredients:

 

Flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, pumpkin pie spice

Dry ingredients for Maple Caramel Carrot Cake

As you can see instead of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves, I only have one bottle — pumpkin pie spice. Surprisingly, those are the ingredients for pumpkin pie spice. So, one bottle will do! I did need to worry about how much to put in though. I was thinking of calling my sister because she is good at all that figuring. Me? Not so much. I decided to just wing it. Instead of putting all figures into some calculation, I put in 2 T of pumpkin pie spice.

The picture above right is all the dry ingredients in the mixing bowls getting ready to be whisked together.

Now onto the wet ingredients.

Eggs, vanilla, white sugar, brown sugar, vegetable oil

Here are all the wet ingredients assembled together. I kind of cheated in this picture because I have the “good – picture ready” brown sugar instead of the gnarly hard as a rock little bag of dark brown sugar that I used. I put the brown sugar in a microwave safe container and placed a damp paper towel on it, then zapped it in the microwave for 20 seconds to re-soften it. It had lumps, so I put the hard-ish lumps in with some of the oil and white sugar into a Magic Bullet® mixer, tossed in the eggs, and whipped the lumps out.

Wet ingredients in the bowl

Here are the wet ingredients assembled in another bowl. (This was before the lumps were scooped out and Bulleted away.) I tried to mix this by hand, but the lumps were getting on my nerves. They needed to go. At this point, I had not actually preheated the oven yet, so I did. I wasn’t sure how long all my assembly was going to take and it’s hot here, so I was going to turn the oven on as late as possible.

Now comes assembly time! I purchased already shredded carrots to make sure there were no shredded fingers in the cake with the shredded carrots. See how nice the wet ingredients look? Magic Bullet®.

wet ingredients, dry ingredients, shredded carrots

I ended up buying too many carrots. I am not good at eyeballing how much I need. I used one bag for this cake.

carrot cake batter poured into pans

Here is the carrot cake batter poured into pans. What pans did I use?  I used foil throw away pans that were under $2 for 3 at the store. I greased and floured the pans and used a cookie sheet under it because I wasn’t sure if it was going to cook over, or if the pans would get weird because they were foil. They were fine: I didn’t actually need the cookie sheet. In the oven they go. Now onto the caramel.

Okay, I’m a dork and I used to go to the Geauga County Maple Festival in Chardon, BUT I wasn’t interested in buying REAL maple syrup because it’s expensive, and I have no use for it after this recipe. I picked up some cheap not so maple pancake syrup from the store. Then began to fret because it wouldn’t get thick and sit right on the cake. So, I looked up a caramel recipe instead and made that.

 

sugar and water on stove

sugar bubbling away

This is a cup of sugar and 1/3 c of water in a saucepan. The idea is to NOT STIR this and put it on medium heat until the sugar melts and it gets all bubbly good. To stop the sauce from cooking, you pour in 2/3 cup heavy cream.

 

heavy cream

issues opening heavy cream

chip clip to close heavy cream

As the old cartoons would say, “Fricka Fraka Bricka Bracka” Why can’t I open this damn thing normally. It reminded me of the nightmare at lunch trying to get the little carton of milk open without spilling it all over the place. I gave up after trying the one side and just ripped the whole top open. Think you’re going to show me up Mr. Heavy Cream! Oh, and I didn’t need the whole amount for this recipe. What’s a girl to do?   Well, a handy dandy chip clip will close that right up for ya! I ended up pouring that into a cup of coffee I made.

 

sugar and water on stove

cooked caramel

At this juncture, I can hear my grandmother sighing. “Girl, you have no patience! You needed to heat that longer so it would actually brown. It’s too light. It doesn’t look like the picture.”

Oh well.

I finished that with the heavy cream and 2 T of butter then called it done. Oh, and for good measure, I threw in some pancake syrup in case there was even a hint of some kind of maple in there.

So, it’s light. It’s still tasty. Now it is frosting time!

powdered sugar, butter, cream cheese

The frosting is simply powdered sugar, butter, and cream cheese. Yum! Apparently, I didn’t think it was important to take a picture of the frosting. Just picture a small round bowl with white delicious cream cheese frosting in it. Time to take the cake out!

sun photo

 

The carrot cake looks lovely (better than that seasoned cookie sheet), and I let these sit in the pan for 10 minutes before I put them on plates to finish cooling. This had to happen in the fridge because, as stated earlier, it’s hot here.

cooked carrot cake

carrot cake cooling on plates

As you can see, the foil baking rounds created a lovely edge for the cake. Now to level the layers, so the cake sits evenly.

 

leveling the carrot cake

close up of carrot cake texture

After leveling the cake, I took a close-up photo to show the texture of the cake. Also, with the leveling, I got to sample everything before it was assembled into the finished cake. Bonus!

finished carrot cake

sliced finished carrot cake

I frosted the bottom layer and drizzled some caramel on it, then put on the top layer repeating the process, and finished it off by sprinkling some shredded carrots on top. Obviously, my grandmother would be mentioning that the caramel could have been darker. I also drizzled some pancake syrup on it again for the desired possible hint of maple effect. It does not look like the photo from the pin, but we’ll just say I made it my own from the creative end. Oh! I almost forgot; you’ll notice there are no pecans on the cake. Yeah, I forgot to buy those.  Still delicious!

Breakfast Lasagna – My Style

I think I have come to the conclusion that I could be Betty Crackpot when it comes to cooking. (Did you get the reference above?) Anyway, saw a recipe for Breakfast Lasagna and wanted to make it. Really it was the bacon in the photo that got me :-). So I went to the store with the recipe. Okay, I forgot the recipe I was going to bring, so found it on my phone when I remembered that I forgot it. Anyway, not important…..let’s move on…..

So looked at the ingredients:

Maple Bacon Sauce

1 lb of bacon (had that)

¼ c of flour (had that)

1 c maple syrup (had that)

½ c heavy cream (needed that) *

* Yeah, that turned into just using milk that I already had

Sausage Gravy (did not make this so needed none)

Pancakes (I used a mix so just needed to add water)

Scrambled Eggs **

** I only used the eggs of that recipe, didn’t even use salt.

Then I decided that I wanted to add hash browns to the recipe, so I picked up a 20 oz  package of shredded potatoes.

For the cheese the recipe called for, instead of 1 lb of shredded, I got an 8 oz pkg of Co-Jack slices. I also didn’t put it in the eggs like the recipe said. Such a hellion!

So I decided to figure out what to do first – seemed best to follow some of the recipe (LOL). So I put the bacon in first at 400⁰, and let it cook for 20 min. I just put it straight on the cookie sheet.

While that cooked, I turned to the pancakes. As stated earlier, I used the “just add water” kind and made the 12-14 pancakes recipe. I figured that it should make 9 or so “noodles”. Pulled out the griddle and proceeded to figure out how to shape them.

I found that I needed to turn them with two spatulas to make sure they didn’t break.

                        

When that finished, I kept the griddle going and made the hash browns.

                      

I halved the potatoes and cooked them in two batches. I figured there would be two or three layers, so it would be best to break them up.

After the hash browns, I made the eggs. Instead of cooking 12 at once, I made 6 and then 6.

                       

Once those were done I switched out the bacon with more bacon, and poured the bacon grease in a mug. Then when all of the bacon was done cooking, I poured all the grease in a saucepan.

I stirred in the flour, then added the syrup and finally the milk. It thickened up like when making a box of cooked pudding.

                           

Now time to assemble.

                           

I put the four “noodles” in the bottom and realized I had more room then I thought, and the bottom layer was not going to be “touching” like the recipe said. Added the syrup mix next and then the eggs.

Now, this is where I was going to put the first layer of cheese, but I forgot and put the hash browns on next. D’OH!

                         

I will remember for next layer.

I also realized that there would be only two layers like the recipe stated. I thought my “noodles” would have been longer, but they fit perfectly the way I placed them. So I put the cheese on the hash brown, and proceeded to put another layer of “noodles”, syrup, eggs, and then I did it AGAIN! I put the hash browns on the eggs instead of the cheese. Placed the cheese, in the wrong place AGAIN, and then put the bacon across the top.

I noticed that my before and after cooking photos looked pretty much the same. I cooked it in the 400⁰ oven for 15 minutes.

Then I actually let it sit for a bit, while I made myself do something else, so that it could actually sit for a bit.

After waiting, I cut a piece.

                              

The verdict is that it was delicious! I liked how after it cooked you could see the different layers, and the hash browns were still crunchy and the bacon was cooked to perfection.

Definitely making this again….probably after many, many hours of exercise!