My boyfriend and I decided to make garlic bread while watching Commando the other night. Yes, that Commando with Senator Arnie and Alyssa Milano. Anyhoo, a little about my thoughts on garlic bread. There are some people who love garlic bread so much that they'll eat those slices of bread slathered with butter, green flecks of who-knows-what and a tinge of something that is similar to garlic. Yknow...the types you get in those chain restaurants on the side of your platter of from-frozen pasta. Then there are those who know what roasted garlic smells and tastes like when the tops have been cut off and drizzled in olive oil and when you smush it all over a piece of toasted baguette....oh man, that is good.
So anyway, I can't remember the last time I made homemade garlic bread. It probably a baguette, a drizzle of olive oil and copious amounts of fresh garlic. It was probably in the kitchen of our current house and I was probably being helped by my mother who, back in the day when we were little, loved to cook with me and my two brothers.
Being that I couldn't remember the last time I made garlic bread, I couldn't really remember how I made it and so Sean and I concocted a recipe that we thought would be suitable: half a whole wheat baguette, copious amounts of fresh garlic and a bunch of margarine. I say a bunch only because I can't really remember how much he used. The boyfriend peeled and chopped the garlic and then mixed it up with some margarine in a bowl. We slathered it onto our baguette that had been sliced in half horizontally and put that sucker in the oven at 350C for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes barely anything had happened so I figured it wouldn't hurt to leave it in for another 3 minutes and this time at 375C so the garlic isn't totally raw. Well...I was SUPER wrong because this is what resulted:
Words cannot begin to express the amount of epic fail that occurred in the above photo. Not being one to waste food, I told the boyfriend, Sean, that it would still be good if we just sliced off the edges and so he did and so garlic fingers were born. Yum!
But since we did have another half of our whole wheat baguette left, we decided to try again. This time I mashed the garlic with a little bit of salt in a mortar and pestle and then mixed it into the margarine, though this time not as much. We slathered it onto the last half of the baguette and stuck it into the oven for 15 minutes at 350C. What resulted was this:
It was good but there was still something missing, I just can't put my finger on what it was. Anyway, that was the epic tale of garlic bread and it also taught me about just how finicky each oven is. You see, I know my oven. I know it's 25 degrees over what it actually says. I know that when I bake something I have to lower the temperature 25 degrees despite whatever it says in the recipe I'm using or not. I also know that there's a hot spot in the back to the left so I have to rotate the pans or whatever it is I've got inside the oven. Sean's oven though...I have no clue how it functions. That was a lesson I had just learned.
That time seems really slow and it probably is considering there was a total of approximately 4100 climbers and Sean and I were in the 3900s, but whatever, I have asthma and I used my puffer more than I should have and hey, I finished the climb without passing out! Yay for me!!
Apologies for the terribly-lit second photo but it was nighttime and I was too tired to take a nice photo. The first photo is a shot of the mini cupcakes and the second is of the regular-size cupcakes. I decided to go with the strawberry buttercream mainly because I only had enough room temperature butter for one buttercream and had already started with the strawberry jam as an add-in. I love the chocolate flavour of these cupcakes. This time around I used Lindt's Madagascar 65% dark chocolate and the usual unsweetened cocoa powder.
And later I'll post pictures of them fully dressed in all their glory. Oh, before I go I should talk about the recipe a bit. First off, I have no clue where the recipe came from. I read so many various food blogs now that the only way I remember the source to a recipe is if I bookmarked the website and unfortunately I didn't do that with this recipe. I'm sure that if you just typed all the ingredients into Google, you'd come up with the source or at least a close cousin. Anyway, I wanted to discuss the recipe because I absolutely love it. Knowing that I hate chocolate I'm always a little bit leery of making chocolate cupcakes because I'm afraid I'll have so many leftover because a) no one else in my family will eat them because they don't like chocolate and b) I don't like chocolate so I don't want to be forced to eat them either. These cupcakes, though, they're like fluffy and moist pieces of chocolate heaven. I don't even know what the heck that's supposed to mean but they're just damn good! I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I ate two standard size cupcakes and two mini cupcakes and I waited for them to cool down just enough so that I could peel away the cupcake liner. I need more self-control, ugh.
Words cannot begin to express the amount of epic fail that occurred in the above photo. Not being one to waste food, I told the boyfriend, Sean, that it would still be good if we just sliced off the edges and so he did and so garlic fingers were born. Yum!
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