Rollin' Out the Red...

...Velvet that is. Yep, you know it's holiday time at Poodlevania when the kitchen looks like a set for Saw XXIV or whatever number that unholy franchise is up to now.

Seriously, I feel that it is my duty to seek out and consume as much red velvety goodness as I possibly can during the month of December...for some reason, it doesn't taste the same during any other time of the year. Probably goes back to my grandmother only making it during the holidays, so it really was a special treat.

(Do not get me wrong--you put a slab of Red Velvet cake in front of me in the middle of July, I'm eating it...don't even try to stop me. "Seasonal" only goes so far...)

So, I'm in the process of making my first one this year, and I have decided to try something new. I know, I know, it sound sacrilegious, but sometimes, you just have to think outside the cake pan.

I was going through the recipe folder in my inbox and found one for a Red Velvet Roll cake. Never having made a roll cake before, I thought why the hell not? Plus, I'm supposed to bring something to a party tonight, so why not experiment! These are probably famous last words...

Here's the recipe, and I'm not really sure where the heck I got it. I apologize profusely for not giving credit. However, I think I got it from the Baking Bites blog, because it seems to be the exact same recipe, but I am not 100% sure. I could have gotten it from somewhere else on the vast Internets, and that person swiped it from Baking Bites.

Red Velvet Roll Cake

3/4 cup sifted cake flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
4 large eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tbsp buttermilk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp red food coloring

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a jelly roll pan (approximately 17"x12"x1") with aluminum foil and grease it well with some vegetable oil or cooking spray.

Sift together sifted cake flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt into asmall bowl. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs together with an electric mixer on high speed. Once they are frothy, slowly add in the sugar. Beat until light, approximately 5 minutes. Beat in the vegetable oil, buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla and red food coloring. Working steadily, but gradually, mix in the cocoa mixture with the electric mixer at a low speed.

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for 12-15 minutes, until cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center.

While cake is baking, sift some confectioners' sugar onto a large, clean dish towel. When you remove the cake from the oven, carefully flip it over onto the dish towel. Peel off the foil (it should come off easily because it was greased) and roll the cake up in the dish towel, beginning with a short end.

Place cake, hot but wrapped in the towel, seam-side down on a wire rack to cool completely (at least 1 hour). Prepare filling (below) while it cools.

Cream Cheese Filling

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
3 cups confectioners' sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Beat all ingredients together until light and spreadable. When cake is cool, gently unwrap it and spread the inside with the filling. Re-roll and place on a serving platter. Dust with more confectioners' sugar before serving. Serves 8-10

The batter for this cake was extremely thin and seemed a bit more cocoa-ey than a regular Red Velvet. I jacked up the food coloring a bit, because I like my Red Velvet to be r-e-d. Otherwise, it's just a dirty brown chocolate cake. And, I was kind of worried about what it would look like, based on the sheer amount of cocoa...this was really leaning into the "dirty brown" category.

I used parchment paper as well, instead of foil, because I could and I had more parchment than foil in the cabinet. I don't know if that change contributed to the outcome or not...'cause you know there was an "outcome.'

The hardest part at first was trying to get the batter evenly spread over over the parchment lined pan. Of course, one side has to be thinner than the other, always. I envy people who can get their batters even for cakes...envy them.

So, I cook the cake for about 12 minutes, popped it out onto the dish towel and removed the parchment. I rolled it up in the towel, knocking over the box of vanilla extract on the counter. Hmm...it was a new bottle of vanilla, still in the box, which meant I forgot to put it in the cake. Yeah. Well, hell, with all that cocoa powder, who is going to notice if there's a wispy little note of vanilla or not.

I pulled the cake out and rolled it in the dish towel...so far, so good, but it really is more brown than red. I cooled it for the requisite hour, unrolled it, and spread the filling inside. During the unrolling process, part of the cake stuck to the towel...sort of like the "skin" of the cake. The resultant "log" looked like it had the mange or some other affliction.

I dutifully cut the ends off to tidy it up and ate them and was extremely disappointed. It was dry and too chocolatey...not red velvety enough.

The ends/edges were drier because the batter didn't spread evenly, but there really was way too much cocoa powder involved in this train wreck of a cake. I think if I were to make it again, I would definitely reduce the amount of cocoa...and feel free to chime in with suggestions of your own. Also, more red food coloring. Don't care that it might make me crazy or cause tumors, I want me some R-E-D velvet cake. Besides, I think I already are crazy.

I had some serious misgivings about the amount of cocoa in the recipe, because this is not really a chocolate cake...I've read articles and other blogs' posts about it being just a "chocolate cake colored red," but it's not. Most of the recipes call for 2 tablespoons at the most, which is half the cocoa in this recipe. IMSBO (that would be "in my seriously biased opinion," the cocoa's purpose is to give more complexity and depth to the cake's flavor and not be overwhelming...sort of like all those fancy wine descriptions that involve "hints of oak and notes of kumquat." (When kumquat start writing you notes, then you know you've had too much wine...I'm just sayin'.)

However, the one good thing to come out of this is that the parchment paper was a great success in keeping the cake from sticking. I like that part.

And, all was not totally lost for the day, because I made a smacking good dip, which was the main thing I was taking to the party anyway, and I'll post that recipe in my next entry, 'cause I'm tired and I have to get some sleep and put on my game face for the customer tomorrow...kind of like the Fat Dog.

Aloha and mahalo for all the mochi!

Yikes!!! I realized when I looked at the last post that it had been waaaay over a month since I last posted. Sort of hard to have a blog if you don't post, isn't it?

Stuff happens, as we all know, so I hope you forgive me when I tell you all about the much needed vacation that I took over Thanksgiving. As you may have figured out from the title and the photo accompanying this post, I had an exotic tropical vacation in Hawai'i...Honolulu to be specific. ( I just love saying "Honolulu"... it's such a fun word!)

During the summer, a friend invited me to spend the holiday with her and her extended family, who live on Oahu, and after emptying my frequent flier mile account, I was on my way to paradise.

I had a direct flight from Atlanta to Honolulu, and let me tell you, 9+ hours is too freaking long to spend on a plane and not be in first class...why, oh, why Delta, do you not let people who redeem their frequent flyer miles have a shot at the upgrade lottery? (That's all the whining I'll do, because it was so worth the ride!)

Hawai'i has always been a source of fascination for me...and not just for the whole Magnum, PI thing, either. It's always seemed so exotic and unattainable, and the closer it got to checkin time, the more I was bouncing off the walls in anticipation.

This trip was not the usual tourist trip--I saw and did some touristy things, but this was more of a "hang out with the locals" kind of trip...sort of doing a Bourdain and heading off the beaten (and expensive!) paths. For Hawai'i is nothing if not expensive...except for food. I found the food to be very reasonably priced, especially since we ate at a lot of local Honolulu spots.

I didn't do a luau--gotta save something for the next trip--but I did have a great Thanksgiving dinner with a decided Asian twist. And, since this blog is about food and the cooking and eating of it, let's get to it!

Day 1 in Paradise included a sojourn into Chinatown and a tour of the downtown area--gotta have your picture made with King Kamehameha, you know. Honolulu Chinatown is a wild market place, full of amazing little markets, exotic produce, and street food. My friend's dad, henceforth known as "Granpa," took us on a winding little tour through a market and down several streets. He would pop into a shop and come out with some little delicacy for us to sample. We had a giant rice noodle tube stuffed with pork and onions, drizzled with shoyu (soy sauce), and cut up into pieces that we ate with our hands. He passed around a bag of "dragon eyes," which turned out to be a fruit, longan to be exact When you took the outer shell off, it looks like the inside of a grape and has about the same texture. It was sort of sweet and tangy.

We traveled to the downtown area and saw the state capitol, which tells the story of Hawai'i by it's very structure. The building has a little reflecting pool around it, which represents the water surrounding the islands. There are two pillars visible underneath each side, which represent volcanoes and support each side of the legislature. Each of the legislative chambers is decorated in colors that reflect the island--one side is reds and oranges (sun and lava) and the other is greens and blues (for the sky and rainforests). Grammy walked us around the area and told us many interesting things about the downtown buildings, and having a local tour guide really made the day even more special.

We finished up with lunch in the food court of the Ala Moana Center, a very large, high-end shopping center/mall. Yeah, yeah, food court is not exactly what one has in mind when visiting a tropical paradise, but there was a lot of local places in the food court that were just screaming to be tried. Al Moana Poi Bowl was the place of choice for lunch, and I got the Local Boy special plate lunch, which was pretty much a tour of local Hawai'ian food--kalua pig, lau lau, lomi salmon, and poi.

Ah, poi...that's some mystical stuff...mystical icky stuff. Light purplish-gray, with a thick, pasty consistency, and it's got a wang to it. Evidently, it works better if you dip some food into it, sort of using it as rice. Let just say that I probably wouldn't order it again. I like taro for the most part--taro fries, taro chips are good, but poi is has no "joi" for me.

Laulau is interesting...the one I had was roast pork and a piece of butter fish wrapped in taro leaves and steamed. The taro leaves were like a bitter spinach, which I dunked in the poi to see if that made the poi edible (sort of). The pork was tender, and the fish was a little surprise, because I wasn't expecting it. The kaula pork was like salty barbecue--lightly smoked and very tender; I ate every scrap of that, of course.

There was also lomi-lomi salmon, diced salted raw salmon mixed with tomatoes and onions, along with rice and macaroni salad. It was finished off with haupia (a coconut pudding-style dessert), which was wonderful. This lunch was a version of the Hawaiian culinary staple, the plate lunch. Plate lunch, Hawaiian style, is usually 2 scoops of rice, a scoop of macaroni salad, and then a protein/entree; I subbed the poi for the rice, because I had to try it. Plate Lunch is a lot like the Southern "meat and 3" plate lunch.

I'm a big fan of plate lunches...a big fan, and we had another one at L&L Barbecue, a local chain that is slowly franchising on the Mainland. I can only hope that it comes this way soon. Plate lunch at L&L consisted of rice, mac salad, and some yummy Korean-style barbecue ribs. Forget the haute cuisine--I can eat Asian street food at every meal.

We went to L&L after a day of flying kites and hanging out at the beach, and then we followed up the meal with fresh hot malasadas from Leonard's next door. Malasadas are the Portuguese version of beignets, but better, because they're covered in regular granulated sugar rather than powdered sugar.

And, I did have a fine dining experience of sorts...we went back to the Ala Moana Center for shopping on Saturday after Thanksgiving, and we ate lunch at Alan Wong's Pineapple Room located on the top floor of Macy's.
Remember this post about the disasterous project in Regional Cooking? The Chiclet and I had Pacific Rim cookery, and I pulled together a great PowerPoint that included the 3 big names in Hawaiian cuisine--Roy Yamaguchi, Alan Wong, and Sam Choy. So when D's sister suggested this Alan Wong outpost for lunch, I was all over that!

Chef Wong is into local and sustainable products and features them on his menus. I had the Pineapple Room Burger, because I was just craving a burger for some reason, and I truly think it was one of the best burgers I have ever eaten. From the menu description: Kiawe-Grilled Kuahiwi Ranch Natural Beef Burger, Onion Rings, Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, and Avocado Salsa. There were two onion rings on the burger, one of which I had to remove to even pick the thing up. Those onion rings were made from Maui onions, and I have never had a more tasty onion ring than those. Those onion rings were just works of taste art.

The burger was served with Wasabi Potato Salad, which was good, but not bowl you over good. The wasabi imparted a nice little bite and cleared the ol' sinuses for a moment. D had the “Mac Garlic” Chicken Sandwich, which was chunks of a garlicky teriyaki type of chicken and topped with Furikake Macaroni Salad. Furikake is a salty Japanese condiment with seaweed, sesame seeds, and fish flakes, plus some other seasonings. If I ever made it back to the Pineapple Room, I'd have that next!

Hawaiians are big on snack food, and the one thing that I discovered that I really like is mochi. Japanese in origin, mochi is made from pounded steamed glutinous rice. It becomes a dough-like substance that is usually wrapped around a variety of fillings--peanut butter mochi was a particular favorite of mine. We also had mochi ice cream, which consists of balls of ice cream encased in the mochi--most tasty. Of course, I want more and am trying to figure out how to get it here. I may need to pay a visit to the Asian markets here in town and see if I can find some, or better yet, the Buford Highway Farmer's Market in Atlanta.

Monday after Thanksgiving was our military history day and my last day in paradise. We got up really early and went to get tickets for the USS Arizona Memorial tour. There's a lot of construction happening at the site, progress on a new visitor's center, and unfortunately, the Missouri was in drydock, so we didn't get to tour it.

When you go into the visitor's center, you file into a little theater to watch a film about the attack on Pearl Harbor. The park rangers are very clear that this is NOT a tourist attraction, that it is a grave site, and respect is the order of the day. After the film, a very solemn crowd filed out and onto an open-sided boat for the 20-minute ride out to the sunken ship. On our boat, we had a veteran...he wasn't a Pearl Harbor survivor, rather someone who w

as stationed there right after the attack. It was his first time back to Pearl Harbor since that time, and the staff gave him a special pin and allowed him to get off the boat first when we arrived at the memorial.

When you first see the marble wall at the opposite end of the memorial, listing the names of everyone who perished in the attack, it clutches at your heart to see how many are chiseled into the wall. War sucks, no matter what side you are on.

After the visit to the memorial, we had breakfast at McDonald's. And, yes, I really wanted to go to McDonald's, because I hadn't had that one staple of Hawaiian cuisine...drum roll, please!...SPAM!

At Hawaiian McDonald's, you have some choices that aren't available stateside. There's taro pies, haupia pies, both of which were not available, McTeri burgers with teriyaki sauce, and McSaimen, a noodle dish. And, for breakfast, there's the Local Deluxe Breakfast platter. The Local Deluxe consists of 2 scoops of rice, omelet-style scrambled eggs, 2 slices of grilled Spam, and 3 slices of Portuguese sausage. Best fast food breakfast ever, hands down.

(And, the coolest thing was that the trash cans said "mahalo," which is Hawaiian for "thank you")

After breakfast, we hiked around Punchbowl, the National Cemetery of the Pacific, where some of the Pearl Harbor casualties are buried. The view from the top of Punchbowl crater encompasses a large part of the Honolulu shoreline and is amazing. The 30-foot tall statue of Lady Columbia looking out over the grave sites is awe-inspiring as well. If you are of a certain age or watched Nick at Night, you may remember her from the opening credits of Hawaii 5-0.

For my last meal in Hawaii...and yes, I think all I did was eat and gawk at how amazing it is there...we went to Nico's at Pier 38 at the Honolulu Harbor, near where the daily fish auction happens. I had the Furikake Pan Seared Ahi w/ Ginger Garlic Cilantro Sauce and rice, and it was so very very good. I'm usually not a big tuna fan--hate the canned stuff with passion--but like it as sushi or sashimi. We had ahi poke one night at a family dinner, and I fell in love with it, so I ordered my Ahi rare to try and replicate that experience. It was a great meal to end my stay, and I really wanted it to never end. I'm going back one day, and hopefully sooner rather than later...heck, I'm just a winning lottery ticket away from retiring there, as one of my Facebook friends commented.

I mean, how can you not love a place where you see rainbows every single day?

(If you look closely, you'll see it's actually a double rainbow.)