Easy to Cook Recipes

Heart Shaped Valentine’s Day Chocolate Cake

A simple recipe for a delicious chocolate cake, ideal for Valentine’s Day.

This chocolate cake is very easy to make and tastes superb. You can buy the heart shaped baking tins easily online (see Amazon for example). Decorate with strawberries, your own personalised icing message or Valentine’s Day cake decorations. Icing tubes and decorations are available from numerous online suppliers.

Read more: Heart Shaped Valentine’s Day Chocolate Cake
image by crimfants

Valentine’s Party Idea: Heart-themed Healthy Treats for Your Valentine’s Day Party

Since the tradition of Valentine’s Day celebration came about, the heart-shaped items always come to mind. A lot of people associate this day with sweets and chocolate indulgence. You can make your Valentine’s celebration healthier. Here are some healthy snack ideas to serve on your Valentine’s Day party.

Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes

Salad dressing can be quite expensive. Whether you want to make your own homemade salad dressing because of dieting, healthier eating, or because you don’t like all the unnatural chemicals manufacturers add to salad dressing, these recipes are sure not to disappoint.

Get recipes: Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes

Different Ways To Roast Garlic

A few people love garlic raw, some love it fried, and some love it roasted with that mellowed flavor and aroma. Among the best varieties of garlic you might use for roasting is the purple striped Guatemalan, but you may use whatever garlic is available in your kitchen.

A marvelous transformation goes on when you roast garlic. Its bite is muted as the slow cooking process zaps its sulphuric compounds. The innate sugars come out and the hard cloves are transmuted into a soft, squishy, and spreadable chunk of goodness. After the baking or roasting procedure, the garlic cloves can be squeezed out of with your fingers. What emerges is a buttery flesh of garlic entirely transformed for your enjoyment.

Here are various ways to roast your garlic:

1) IN A TERRA COTTA COOKER

1. Lightly rub off numerous layers of the papery outer cover of the garlic head by using your thumb. Slice at least a quarter inch off the top of every head, exposing the meaty part of each clove. By using a fork, prick the tops of the cloves.

2. Place the heads of garlic on the base of the terra cotta (preferably about 7 inches in diameter to hold at least five or more bulbs) and pour olive oil over the tops of each head being sure to cover each and every clove. Add a little salt and pepper to taste, or fresh dried herbs of your choice. Right away, cover with the lid.

3. Constantly follow the instructions of your terra cotta cooker. Place the covered up cooker in a cold oven. Turn the temperature to 300 degrees. Bake for at least an hour or until the cloves have gotten soft. Pull out the lid, and bake for 20minutes more or till the tops of the cloves turn brown.

4. Serve one head of roasted garlic for each person while it is still warm.

2) HIGH HEAT METHOD

1. Put some partly peeled, top sliced off, garlic head on an oven safe pan. Gently brush with olive oil and bathe with water or stock.

2. On a pre-heated oven of about 500 degrees, leave the pan in for 25-30 minutes. Leave to cool and serve. This process results in a more nutty flavored roasted garlic

3) BOY SCOUT METHOD (even a child can do this)

1. Utilizing partly peeled , top sliced off, garlic heads (1-3 pieces, depends on how much you need for the occasion) put on aluminum foil.

2. Fold up the edges of the foil to prevent spilling the oil

3. Drizzle the revealed tops of cloves with olive oil. Add salt and/or pepper to taste.

4. Wrap the foil around the garlic heads but be sure you leave the top open. This is to brown the tops and avoid steaming the garlic.

5. Pre-heat oven to 250 degrees. Put in the garlic heads and leave for 30-45 minutes

6. No fancy cookware necessary, clean up is a real breeze. The outcome is much closer to the ones cooked in a terra cotta cooker.

4) NO SPECIAL TREATMENT

1. Take a whole head of garlic, unpeeled and uncut.

2. Put inside an oven at 400 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

3. This will result in a somewhat blackened spots on your garlic but would be very soft. You'll need a spoon to draw out the flesh since the result is a much stickier garlic than the other processes mentioned.

5) NO-WASTE METHOD

1. Peel extra skin on the garlic head. Cut the head into half along the width

2. In a little oven glass dish, pour olive oil. Place garlic head, placing the cut side on top of oil

3. Cook for an hour at 350 degrees or till cloves are spongy.

6) DETACHED CLOVE METHOD

1. Break up the garlic head into single cloves. Take away excess skin

2. Place the cloves in a bowl, drizzle with olive oil. No need to put plenty olive oil since the strong garlic flavor will overcome it anyway. The idea here is to coat the cloves equally with the oil, not swim on it.

3. Put the cloves in a single layer, on a parchment lined baking sheet

4. Bake for twenty minutes making sure it doesn't burn. Check on it every five minutes. When the clove gives below your finger when you press down on it, it is set to be served. It is known that this technique gives a higher yield as compared to the whole head process, where some of the cloves don’t even emerge.

Refrigerator Cake 101

How to make the refrigerator cake commonly known as float cakes and no-bake cream cakes. A simple recipe with precise instruction that even a first time cake maker can successfully accomplish.

The Refrigerator Cake is an easy to do desert which allows the cake maker a plenty of room to make it his/her own. They are sometimes called floats or no-bake cakes. It is called a refrigerator cake because you “bake” it in a refrigerator instead of an oven. Confused? Read on and you will understand how simple it is.

Get recipe: Refrigerator Cake

Tips on Using Your Leftover Brewed Coffee or Espresso

Coffee is among the world’s favorite beverages. There are times however, when there’s too much of a good thing, leftovers happen, even with good old brewed coffee. Don’t waste that precious beverage. Here are some of the many things that one can make with a leftover brewed coffee or espresso.

Save it Later Use
The simplest way to save your espresso is to store if for later, so you have an instant brewed coffee the moment you crave for the beverage. This is not implying that you should save your 5-day old coffee. No! If you do that, chances are that the flavor will be gone from the beverage by then. However, if you think that you likely will be craving for another serving in a few hours or anytime within a day, then you better save that coffee. After it has cooled down, simply put it in the refrigerator until your next use. This won’t hurt the flavor at all. Heat it up later through a steamer, not in the microwave, and you will still get that rich flavor to enjoy.

Flavor For Your Baked Goods
This may probably be one of the most uncommon methods, but several people actually use leftover brewed coffee, most particularly the espresso, for baking. One suggestion is to use it to bake brownies, cookies and cakes! Brownie and cake mixes that have an added touch of coffee flavor to the mixture will taste great. This goes well with other pastries, too. Naturally, the espresso mixture may be better off in a denser or chunkier batter just like those of the brownies mainly because it can hold the espresso better. Try experimenting with coffee in your baked goods and you may just create a unique coffee flavored pastry.

Use for Chilled Drinks
Another way to use leftover brewed coffee is in the beverages that you will have later. One suggestion that a lot of people use is to make coffee ice cubes. Coffee-flavored ice cubes can be an excellent addition to milk, vodka (mudshake), blended to become a frappe, or simply added to a cup of black coffee. Just because coffee is generally consumed as a hot beverage doesn’t mean that you are limited to what you are able to do with it.

All of these things are just a few of the ways in which brewed coffee can be used as leftovers. Be creative and enjoy!

©2010 Athena Goodlight

How to Make Chicken Adobo

"Adobo" is one of the best dishes cooked in Philippine cuisine. Although Adobo comes from the Spanish which means "sauce, seasoning or, marinade", the cooking method is indigenous to the Philippines. Adobo is slowly cooked soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic, bay leaf, and black peppercorns and often browned in the oven or pan-fried afterwards to get the desirable crisped edges. Adobo was also called the quintessential Philippine stew, served with rice both at daily meals and usually at feasts.

Get recipe: How to Make Chicken Adobo

How to Make 1950s-Style Holiday Cookies, Recreating the Old-Fashioned Holiday Spirit

If you are longing for the good old days this Holiday Season, you can recreate them easily and inexpensively. Here is a recipe for old-school, 1950s-style Holiday cookies to give as gifts or to serve at parties. They are easy to make and inexpensive, especially when compared to the price of packaged cookies and bakery sweets this year. All you need is a pinch of creativity, a sprinkle of time spent thrift store shopping, and a desire to walk down memory lane and recreate an old-fashioned Holiday spirit.

Get recipe: How to Make 1950s-Style Holiday Cookies

Traditional Raisin Fruitcake for Christmas

The perfect substitute to a traditional fruitcake is a traditional raisin cake. A thick and sweet fruitcake is sometimes too sweet and too thick to serve as a dessert for a Christmas dinner. If you are thinking of serving cake for dessert during Chrismas a tradtional raisin cake is the perfect substitute to a traditional fruitcake. This recipe is also great for those who don’t drink or who can’t mix food that has alcohol in it as a traditional fruitcake does have alcohol poured on top to moisten.

Need a fruitcake that doesn’t taste like a fruit cake? Try this! Your guests will love you and their sweet tooth will be tickled pink!

Get recipe: Traditional Raisin Fruitcake for Christmas