Tag Archives: Desserts

Tuesday Two Minute Tutorial: Fresh Whipped Cream

For this week, we have a guest tutorial from Leah, Harris’ daughter. In the video below, Leah demonstrates how to make fresh whipped cream, infused with Grand Marnier. If you decide to give it a try, just beat 1 cup of whipping cream, 2 tablespoons confectioner’s sugar, and 1 teaspoon of whatever flavor you prefer. Feel free to warm up any flavor with vanilla as well.

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Recipe: The Dads’ Perfect Chocolate Cake!

Who can resist a bite of this delicious, decadent Chocolate Cake?!

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Chocolate Cake

Cake Ingredients:

1 C Unsweetened Cocoa
2 C Boiling Water
2 ¾ C Sifted All-Purpose Flour
2 t Baking Soda
½ t Salt
½ t Baking Powder
½ lb. Unsalted Butter – softened
2 ½ C Sugar
4 Eggs
2 t Vanilla

In a bowl, combine cocoa and boiling water. Mix with whisk until smooth. Allow to cool completely. When cooled, preheat oven to 350°. Grease and flour-dust three 9 inch layer cake pans. Cut rounds of wax or parchment paper and place on bottom of cake pans to help remove cake from pans after baking.

In large bowl whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

In large mixing bowl, at high speed cream together butter and sugar for about 5 minutes. Add eggs and vanilla. At low speed, alternately beat in 25 percent of flour mixture and chocolate mixture until fully incorporated – do not over beat. Divide equally into the 3 cake pans and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until the top springs bake when gently pressed with fingertip. Allow cake to cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan. Allow to completely cool on rack.

Chocolate Frosting

Ingredients:

1 10 oz. Package of Semisweet Chocolate Chips or Squares
¾ Light Cream or Half & Half – Room Temperature
¾ lb. of Unsalted Butter
3 ¼ C Confectioners Sugar

In saucepan on low heat, melt and combine the butter and chocolate. Add cream and sugar. Whisk until smooth and holds shape.

Assemble and frost the cake. Enjoy!

Harris’ Homemade Flaky Pie Crust!

Harris shows you how to make an easy pie crust, made in the food processor. No Pilsbury used here!

Flaky Pie Crust Recipe
*This recipe yields two 9 or 9 ½ pie crusts or one covered pie crust

Ingredients
2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup of unsalted butter – very cold – cut in tablespoon size pieces. You can substitute ½ cup butter and ½ cup shortening if you like.
1/3 cup plus one tablespoon of ice cold water

Directions
Combine flour, sugar, and salt in large bowl. Cut butter into flour mixture with pastry fork or by pulsing a food processor until you have some pea size pieces and some the consistency of course breadcrumbs. Drizzle in water while pulsing the food processor or mix with rubber spatula until a ball starts to form. If ball doesn’t form add on additional tablespoon of water.

Divide in two, form two disks, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes to allow dough to rest. Roll out dough and place in pie pan, poke holes with fork on bottom and refrigerate again for at least 30 minutes to allow dough to rest before baking.

1 Day Left!

1 more day!

After quite the adventure, Melissa, her husband and their 2 friends, finally arrived last night. The heavy rain and holiday traffic caused their bus to show up 2 hours late, leaving them to wait outside in the freezing rain with hundreds of people. We hope your holiday guests aren’t having similar issues!

We finally made the Pumpkin Cheesecake and Pumpkin Pie! Additionally we made 2 batches of our Pecan Tassies, but of course as soon as the kids came home, they ate about 10 of them!

Today we’ll be making the floral centerpiece. Since we made the crusts for the White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Pie and a Lemon Meringue Pie, we will be baking them as well.

Dave’s sister Carol has been staying over the past couple of days and has been a big help. She’ll be making her traditional Sugar-Free Trifle today, for those with diabetes and the diet conscious. Perhaps, we’ll have to have her give up the recipe and share it with you!

Finally, we’ll be making our smoky salmon ball tonight.

Believe it or not, this year we will be having the least amount of guests for Thanksgiving in years. Typically we have around 20 guests. But this year we’ll only have 12. We had to downsize this year because we have been building an addition to our outside porch. So, with all of the construction, we just couldn’t have that many guests over this year.

Tomorrow’s main cooking event begins at 6:00 AM to start smoking the bird! What time will you be starting?

All the best,
-The Dads: Harris & Dave

The Dads Pecan Tassies

Our Pecan Tassies that we made last night!

Melissa’s Pre-Thanksgiving Dinner!

Dave’s daughter, Melissa & her husband hosted a Pre-Thanksgiving Dinner at their loft, last night with their 12 guests!

Their friend Joe who is a Sous Chef in NYC, played head chef for their dinner party! Melissa helped in the cooking & baking of course, but she says she was so busy keeping up with the cleaning, that she barely got a chance to watch his amazing techniques!

Joe selected 3 dishes from The Dads’ recipes that we posted here that he wanted to try. We felt so honored when we heard about this! We hope they saved us a plate to bring over for us to try!

What 3 dishes did he select and how did they turn out? Watch the video above to find out!

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