Happy Birthday To Meeeee!!!

Well another year has come and gone. I'm now seventeen. Ya, I know it's old. Okay well relatively speaking not that old but seventeen seems a lot older then sixteen. I feel old! But I also feel slightly more awesome and slightly more insane so it's all cool.
Have you ever found that even when you expect your birthday to just be so-so and not too special it turns out to be amazing? Well, for me that seems to happen. I didn't plan a party this year or even plan to do anything special and I got two surprise parties thrown for me. Best year ever! Last Sunday a very dear friend of mine hosted one for me and then on my actual birthday my parents threw one for me. And on top of that it was sunny and warmmmm all day on my birthday. Mmm, I do love sun. I got to go for a long walk/run/skip/dance/Alyssa went a bit crazy thing. It was awesome. I know I got a few weird looks from people in cars as they drove past me skipping down the road singing loudly to a One Direction song. But who cares, I was happy and that's all that matters.
But anyway, my reason for posting on my bog was not to rant about my awesome birthday but to tell you about my amazing cake. I had told my mum that I wanted something with either chocolate or strawberries. And I got both.  She found this amazing recipe for "six layer dark chocolate cake with strawberry swiss buttercream meringue" Mmmm, just saying the name makes my mouth water.
It was a rather complicated cake that took us quite a few hours to make, but oh it was worth every minute of slaving over a hot stove and back breaking labor. Okay, I'm joking it wasn't that hard.

But annnnyyyywwwwaaayyyyy. The cake part had coffee in it as well as a bunch of chocolate so it wasn't too sweet, but still sweet enough. We baked three layers and sliced each in half to make six (I know, I can do simple math! Amazing, right? ). The frosting was made by dissolving sugar in egg whites in a double boiler and then whipping them up in an electric mixer for about fifteen minutes before adding a ton of butter and a couple other ingredients.

The most amazing frosting I've ever worked with.

We spread the frosting between all six layers agonizing over whether the layers would be perfect enough. It was a long process of setting the layer on, squinting at it, moving it a centimeter here and a millimeter there until it was as good as we could get it.

Tall layers

So after spreading frosting between all the layers I did a quick crumb coat. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's in the name. It's a thin layer of frosting to hold all the crumbs in so the top coat of frosting can look amazing and flawless. So that chilled in the fridge for what was supposed to be half an hour but turned into and hour and a half because I kinda ran off and forgot about it for a while. (Hey it was sunny!)

Crumb coat

After I finally came back to it I took the remaining frosting out of the fridge and was like "Oh well it's a bit hard so lets just mix it up to soften it" I'M AN IDIOT! But I'm sure you all already knew that... The frosting curdled. Never to return to a usable state. My mum and I tried everything. Nothing worked. So we had to make another half batch of frosting. After that escapade I was tired and honestly just about ready to bang my head against the wall and yell at myself. Can I not bake/cook anything without messing something up? I mean seriously how stupid can I be?

Well I put the top coat on smoothing it and smoothing it all around trying to get it as perfect as possible. One of the charms of this cake seemed to be in the perfectly smooth frosting and so I knew it had to be decently perfect. It actually ended up pretty well. My mum and I thought so at least.

Top coat of frosting.

Then it went back into the fridge for another chilling time and then came the scary part! Okay no not really scary, just a little bit scary. We melted bittersweet chocolate and butter in a double boiler (my great-great-grandma's if I remember correctly) and then poured it over the top of the cake carefully soothing it out a bit so it would drip over the edges.

Ta-Da! All finished!

Perfection.

The cake ended up being super tall. So the pieces were like twice the height of a normal piece, which in some ways was awesome and in other not so much. But it looked really amazing!

Six layers of chocolatey yummyness

Can you see the loving look on my face as I stare at my baby? Ya, I held great affection for that cake. 

I'm telling you blowing out 17 candles is hard! Like really hard. Like embarrassingly hard. Like I either need to stop getting older or stop blowing out candles type of embarrassing. 

Thank you to everyone, friends and family, who made my birthday extra special this year. I will never forget how amazing you all made this birthday be. I am truly blessed to have you all in my life and I am eternally thankful for everything you all do for me. I love you all so very much!

~Alyssa <3

Pesto Perfection

I have never felt so Italian in my life. But really after making pesto I felt more Italian then I've ever felt before. Maybe eating pesto makes my 1/8 of Italian expand and swell into something a quite a bit bigger? I don't know but oh, it was an amazing moment. You can ask my family, the whole time I was making and eating the pesto I had an expression of pure bliss on my face. I think I have officially found my favorite food. Pesto seems to make any food ten times better, I plopped some on chicken and I felt like I was eating a gourmet meal, I spread some on a cracker and I felt like I was eating a fancy hors d'oeuvres at some five star restaurant. If one simple taste of pesto can do that for me, then why should I ever stop eating it?
Oh and did I mention how easy it is to make pesto? It's ridiculously simple, easy and fast. Making the basic pesto probably took me around 10-15 minutes. Yes, I did say that short of a time. Hmm, I may have just found my go to food to make me look like a pro.

So, pretty much all you do is toss Basil, Romano (or Parmesan), olive oil and garlic into a food processor or blender.

Then blend it all up until the basil is thoroughly chopped. 

 And you are done! Yes, that is all you have to do. It's as simple as that. 

I also tried a couple variations to the basic pesto. I Substituted the leftover oil from sun dried tomatoes and ended up with sun dried tomato pesto and I also made a batch with pine nuts. I really can't quite decide which is my favorite. They're all so delicious. 

Now, what to do with the pesto. I could just eat it all by the spoonful, but I think my family might protest.

I took a baguette sliced it into half inch slices, lightly toasted it in the oven on both sides, spread pesto on each piece, sprinkled diced tomatoes and Romano on top and then toasted in the oven until the cheese was melted. 

Mmm, deliciousness I'm telling you! 

Well, I still had some pesto left over. Now what to do with it? How about pasta with pesto?

I quickly cooked up same pasta, threw some butter and the rest of the pesto in with it. I then added chopped chicken and sauteed tomatoes to it. Ahhh! So good! Looked like restaurant food. And if I do say so myself it tasted just as good. 

And so I invite you to join me in the land of pesto love. It an amazing place to be. I think I shall stay here for the rest of my life.

~Alyssa <3

Ravioli!

My mum and dad gave me a pasta machine a few years ago as a birthday present after me seeing one and falling in love with the idea of making pasta from scratch. Well, since I received it I have only made past once. A while back I made fettuccine and it was so good.  But a few months ago a good friend of mine and I conceived the idea of making ravioli. After putting it off and not being able to find a day that we had enough time on we finally got our act together and found a time. It was definitely an experience. It all started off pretty umm, well... interestingly. We got out what I thought was semolina flour, it had an odd smell but I just ignored it. As we started trying to mix the dough up it just wouldn't mix properly. So I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what could be wrong but I couldn't figure it out. Just as I'm about to give up I look at my friends face. There was a look of absolute disgust on it. She told me to taste the dough. I did and immediately spit it out. It was disgusting. It finally dawned on me what the odd smell was: yeast. Yes, we had used brewers yeast to make dough. Let me tell you it didn't work. We thew out that 'dough' and started back at the very beginning. We just used pastry flour this time and it worked with no problems. We then whipped up a simple cheese filling that tasted sooo good. 

Once we had finally made our dough and filling we then moved on to the exciting part. Time to actually use the pasta machine! We got it all rolled and made into ravioli. It comes out in these long sheets which break apart into separate raviolis. They looked amazing. It's always so cool to make something and then have it look how it should! 

 Here's the pasta machine! The lower part is for rolling the dough out thinly and the upper is the ravioli attachment. 

 Here's a closeup of how the machine makes the actual ravioli. 

Coming out of the machine. 

 All finished!!!

But then we had to make our second mistake. And this one was even worse. We without thinking piled all the pasta on top of each other onto a plate to wait to be cooked. Well as we went to pick the pasta up and put it in the pot of boiling water we realized our mistake. All the pasta was stuck in one big lump. Oh snap. really? We had to be that dumb? But we had to come up with some solution this was our dinner! We decided to go ahead and cook the pasta in it's lump form anyway and see what happened. It couldn't get worse then it already was right? So we cooked the pasta plopped it into a casserole dish, put the left over ravioli filling on top, then added some red sauce and Mozzarella cheese. Then we cooked it for a bit (until it looked done, no I don't know how long that was.) It actually tasted really good. So congrats to us for using our lil ol' brains and salvaging what could have been a complete failure.

Here's the little bit of pasta we managed to salvage.  

With some nice red sauce. 

And so after about four hours of laughter, tears and sweat we succeeded in making a dinner which even though it wasn't what we wanted or expected tasted quite good.

~Alyssa <3

New Years Dinner

For Christmas this year we all (yes all eight of us kids) decided to make dinner for our parents. And well as some of you know we don't like to do things by halves at our house. Nicole (the oldest sibling and the one who really did most of the work) did some planning and found recipes for almost the whole dinner. After finding quite a few she and I looked them over deciding which looked the most gourmet and delicious. So New Years day starting at about three we commenced to make an amazing dinner for our parents and Nonna, who is visiting for a bit. After two hours of madly dashing about the kitchen preparing dish after dish. We were ready. Amazingly with five girls tripping over each other in one kitchen there hadn't been any tears or arguments. Everything worked out and we were ready. We notified our "guests" that their table was ready.

For appetizers we had made Calla Lilly Crepes and Cucumber Roses. 

The original recipe for the Calla Lilies said white bread but as white bread is pretty much against my every belief we were going to try whole wheat pita pockets. Lets just say they failed. So I quickly brainstormed and came up with crepes. They worked wonderfully! Oh and so much fun to make, not to mention how yummy they are. :)

The cucumber Roses were made from thinly sliced cucumbers soaked in very salty water and rolled into a rose shape held together with toothpicks. 

They even looked a bit like lilies! 

For the first course we served Sweet Potato Soup with Cranberry Garnish. I normally hate soup but this was actually extremely good.

The Cranberry garnish added a nice touch.

The second course was my favorite. Qinua Stuffed zucchini. Brilliant. We stuffed halved zucchini with a quinua, cannallini beans, tomatos and almonds with freshly grated Parmesan sprinkled on top. Sooooooo good. :)

For our main course we served Chicken Cacciatore. Definitely not my favorite part of the meal. But it was pretty good too, not as gourmet as the rest of the food but not bad either.

For our last course we served Massaged Kale and Mango Salad. Yes, I did say massaged. And yes, I did mean massaged. We literally massaged the kale with our hands until it was soft, so no cooking just massaging. It was weird. But oh, the end product was amazing. One of the most delicious salads I have ever eaten. 

For desert we served Chocolate Raspberry Cream Pie. It had a graham cracker crust, a chocolate ganache layer and raspberry cream filling all topped with raspberry's and drizzled chocolate. It looked amazing and tasted even better.

~Alyssa <3