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Sheath Cake

This is a recipe my mom has had for years and years, and it’s always awesome no matter who makes it.

Ingredients:

Sheath Cake

-2 cups sugar

-2 cups flour

-2 sticks butter

-4 tablespoons cocoa

-1 cup water

-1/2 cup buttermilk

-1 teaspoon baking soda

-2 eggs

-1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 400 F. Mix sugar and flour together. In a saucepan on medium heat combine water, butter, and cocoa. Bring to a boil. Pout the chocolate mixture into the dry bowl. Add buttermilk, baking soda, eggs, and vanilla and mix until smooth. Pour into a greased 11×15 in pan, or a greased 13×9 if you don’t have one. Bake for 20 minutes.

Icing

-1 stick butter

-3 tablespoons cocoa

-6 tablespoons milk

-1 box powdered sugar, sifted

-1 teaspoon vanilla

Bring milk, butter, and cocoa to a boil in a saucepan. Remove from heat and add the powdered sugar; not all at one time. Blend will, and lastly add the vanilla. Pour over the cake while it’s still hot..

 

A much smaller piece than you'll want; dusted with powdered sugar.

The buttermilk is what really makes the cake amazing and rich, and the icing is perfect. If you’re like me and you like to eat cake and brownies right when they’re out the oven if possible, this cake is awesome for that. When the icing is still warm on the cake, it’s sticky, sweet, chocolatey, and sort of soaks into the top of the cake. Incredible. After everything’s cooled however, the cake is just as good if not better. The icing hardens into a thick chocolate glaze perfect for the sheath cake beneath it.

Dulce De Leche Cream Cheese Marbled Brownies

I happen to love cream cheese marbled brownies. Especially when they’re slightly undercooked and fudgey in the middle. These follow the basic recipes on any box mix, but I had to make them that much better with a few twists.

Ingredients:

-1 box brownie mix (I used Betty Crocker Ultimate Fudge)
-3 eggs
-2 tablespoons water
-1/2 cup vegetable oil
-1 teaspoon vanilla
-1/3 cup sugar
-Dulce De Leche syrup*
-1 package cream cheese (8 oz.)

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease a 13×9 inch pan. In a large bowl, mix brownie mix, 2 of the eggs, water, and oil. Pour a little more than half of the batter into the pan.

In a separate bowl, mix the cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, and 1 of the eggs with a mixer. Add Dulce de Leche syrup to taste; the color of the cream cheese mixture should be a light tan color.

Pour cream cheese mixture over the batter in the pan. The cream cheese mixture should be viscous enough to pour. Use a rubber spatula to get all the cream cheese out. Use the spatula to spread the cream cheese evenly over all of the brownie batter so that none shows.

Now, take the remaining brownie batter and pour it over the cream cheese mixture. Use the same technique, and spread the batter completely and evenly over the cream cheese so that none of it shows.

Take a butter knife and stick it in the pan to the bottom, swirl the knife, dragging it along the bottom. I do figure 8 patters in different directions, and I also mind the sides, making sure to swirl the batter and cream cheese on all parts of the pan.

Bake in the oven for 27 minutes. Sticking a toothpick into the brownies can be used to tell if it’s done. A cooked brownie will not stick at all to the toothpick, but I like my brownies best when there is just a little bit of brownie stuck to the toothpick. The pieces sticking should be moist and baked, not raw and wet.

These brownies are amazing. Brownies in general prepared this way are awesome, cream cheese marbled brownies are incredible, but the addition of dulce de leche syrup to the cream cheese marbling adds an extra layer of flavor that puts these over the top.

*Dulce de Leche is a Spanish milk caramel. Traditional caramel syrup for ice cream could be substituted, but I got turned on to dulce de leche’s flavor while visiting Miami, and the Cuban influence there incorporates it in a lot of their desserts. I’d definitely recommend giving it a try.

Homemade Sushi

My brother and I were leaving our favorite local sushi place, and were heading to the store to pick up groceries. On the way, we decided that if we had the ingredients, we were confident we could make our own. Everything we needed was found at our HEB, Texas’ version of Walmart. You might have to look elsewhere for some of the ingredients in either your Asian/Oriental aisle or else at a specialty store, because I was able to find things like dried nori, sushi and spicy mayo sauces, and sushi rice at the fresh sushi bar we have in our HEB. Most Walmarts and Targets don’t have a sushi bar, so I can imagine some of the ingredients might take a little more digging that a traditional shopping trip.

Ingredients:

-dried nori (seaweed) sheets

-2 cups white, short-grain rice/ sushi rice

-2 tablespoons rice vinegar

-2 cups water

-2 tablespoons sugar

-1 tablespoons salt

-sushi sauce

-spicy mayo sauce

-soy sauce

-cream cheese

-crab meat

-cocktail shrimp, deveined, tail off

-Wax paper or preferably a bamboo rolling pad

Directions:

Pour rice into a bowl and swish with cold water, not the 2 cups listed. Drain the now cloudy water off, and repeat this several times until the water being drained is clear.

Put the rice in a saucepan with the 2 cups of water. Keep the cover off and bring to a boil, and then immediately turn the heat down very low. Cover with the lid and walk away, leaving the lid on for 15 minutes. After this amount of time, keep the lid on, remove the pan from the heat, and let it sit for 10 minutes.

In the meantime, mix the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt in a small bowl. It will be grainy. Heat this mixture in the microwave for 45 seconds. Your kitchen may now be perfumed with the pungent smell of rice vinegar. Remove this mixture and mix again with a fork.

After the 10 minutes are up, put all of the rice in a glass bowl and pour the vinegar mixture over it. Mix and fold gently with a rubber spatula or whatever you find easiest. Try and get an even coating on each grain of rice. Your rice should be fluffy, soft, but very very sticky.

Now you start to assemble your sushi. You need to decide if you want the rice on the inside with your filling of choice, leaving the bare nori on the outside, or if you’d prefer the nori to wrap your filling and have the rice be on the outside of the rolls.

Either way, start out by laying a sheet of dried nori in the center of the bamboo pad. We have yet to obtain one of our own, so we settled with laying the sheet in the center of a piece of wax paper. Then, get clumps of rice out of the bowl with your hands and press them into one layer across the nori, not one grain thick, but not a ton of rice. This will be MUCH easier if you keep a vessel of water nearby to wet your fingers before every time you touch the rice. This will prevent the rice from sticking like crazy to your fingers.

Now, if you want the rice to be on the inside, and nori on the outside, skip the next step. If you want the rice to be on the outside, put another piece of wax paper on top of the rice/nori, slide your hand underneath the first piece of wax paper, carefully flip the sheet over, and remove the wax paper now on top. You should have rice touching the sheet of wax paper with a sheet of nori flat on top.

Regardless of how you chose to prepare your rolls, you now have a flat, squarish surface sitting in the middle of either wax paper or a bamboo pad. Arrange your toppings in close, touching lines a little to one side or the other of the middle of the nori/rice. If you put everything right in the middle you’ll probably end up with overlapping rice/nori outside that will be difficult to trim, or else will create a thick lump of rice in each of your rolls.

We put a line of shrimp that we’d sauteed in garlic and butter near the center of the square, but closer to the side where we were standing. If the shrimp seemed too large or irregularly shaped to be even, we cut them in half. We lined an even row of cooked crabmeat up against the shrimp. Our last filling ingredient was cream cheese. We cut a thin strip off of one of the 8 oz blocks and lined that up right against the crab meat.

You can fill your sushi with whatever ingredients you like. My brother and I have come up with dozens of ideas for creative, nontraditional sushi rolls that I’m planning on posting about later. This is YOUR food. Traditions or definitions are irrelevant, so put whatever you want and whatever you think tastes good in yours.

If you have a bamboo rolling pad, this next step will be infinitely easier. If you don’t, you’ll have to make do like we did. Slide both hands under the wax paper. Try and keep the roll even and keep the filling ingredients in place, and try not to let them fall out. Fold the closer half of the ingredients over the farther half. Then, continue rolling the rice/nori by gripping both of your hands around it through the wax paper. Finish rolling over, and trim the excess nori from the other side if you want to. Use the wax paper and your hands to squeeze and grip the roll to tighten it. You don’t want to squeeze the filling ingredients out of the sides, but you definitely want the roll smooth, tight, and even.

Now you’ll want to transfer your roll onto a cutting board. Be careful not to let the roll fall apart during transport. Hopefully you still have the vessel of water from earlier around. Get a long, sharp, non-serrated knife. Dip the blade into the water, and then cut the roll in half. Try and hold the roll steady and use long, back-and-forth, sawing motions to slide through the roll cleanly.

Take the two halves and set them together, touching side-by-side, not end-to-end. Now, cut these two rolls in half as well. You should have 4 identical rolls. Cut each one of these in half, remembering to dip your knife in water between each cut to ensure a clean edge and minimal rice sticking, keep the rolls steady when cutting, and use that slow sawing motion. You should end up with 8 bite-sized pieces of sushi.

These are your sushi rolls with your ingredients in them. On ours, we put both sushi sauce (a black sauce we found at the sushi bar) as well as a spicy mayo sauce (a pinkish, orangey, thick sauce that has a lot of heat, but it’s good on sushi, especially if you don’t have wasabi on hand and are missing the spice); we also poured some soy sauce for dipping. Whatever you decide to put on them, in them, or put them in is fine by me. Actually, I’d like to hear it if you did do something untraditional with yours, wether concerning ingredients, toppings, or dipping sauces.

Following this recipe has yet to fail us, even without the bamboo mat deemed completely essential by many sushi enthusiasts. We’d definitely prefer using one, and we’ve already got our eyes on a few prospects, but this is completely possible without specialized equipment, and the results speak for themselves.

We enjoy the ability to control exactly the flavors of our sushi when homemade. The type and proportions of ingredients can be altered precisely, so we got to eat the “perfect” sushi that we never seem to be able to find in restaurants. Yes, I love ordering sushi and trying new kinds, but there is never a time that I eat sushi out and don’t say “Man, that one would be so good if it had/didn’t have _____.” Now I don’t have to complain, because I control every aspect of mine, customizing sushi to my exact specifications.

Garlic butter shrimp, crabmeat, and cream cheese sushi roll before cutting.

Let us know your ideas for new, untraditional sushi. Either things you’ve tried out, at home, or think would be great.

New Orleans “Barbecue” Shrimp Pasta

Ingredients:

-1 pound of shrimp

– 1 stick butter

-1/3 cup Worcestershire sauce

-1/3 cup cream

-1/2 lemon’s juice

-1 1/2 teaspoon minced garlic

-1 teaspoon Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning

-black pepper to taste

-Parmesan cheese

-parsley

-Farfalle pasta

Directions:

Mix Worcestershire sauce, cream, lemon, garlic, Tony’s, pepper, and shrimp in medium heat pan.

(Unfortunately, we are devoid of good, fresh seafood here in central Texas that we had been used to on the Gulf Coast. We used frozen, deveined shrimp, tail-on. We would recommend using jumbo Gulf shrimp, shell, tail, and head on.)

Reduce heat to low. Add cold butter, little at a time and whisk constantly, emulsifying the butter into the sauce. Only add more when all the butter has melted and been emulsified. Add prepared, al dente pasta. We used farfalle. Add your favorite Alfredo sauce, less than amount of sauce already in the pan. Heat and let thicken and let pasta absorb liquid. Top with parmesan cheese and parsley.

This dish is spicy, flavorful, and rich. It takes a leaf from a New Orleans staple restaurant and their specialty. Mr. B’s in the Big Easy is famous for their succulent barbecue shrimp. In the Crescent City, “barbecue” refers to a butter sauce that divines much of its flavor from Worcestershire and spicy cajun seasonings, not A1 Steak Sauce.

We deviated from the New Orleans classic when we added alfredo sauce and pasta. The alfredo works well with the garlic of the barbecue shrimp, but actually lightens the flavor with the addition of the lemon juice, the acid of which cuts through the heaviness. You can use any kind of pasta, or none at all. We happened to have farfalle in the pantry, but we’d gladly remake this with fetuccini or penne.

The Beginning

My name’s Hunter Steele, and food is my favorite thing. I’m 19 and currently live in Texas, though I was raised in southeastern Louisiana. Consequently, I have a taste for spicy cajun meals like crawfish étouffée and gumbo, good seafood like fresh Gulf shrimp and fried calamari, and Deep South traditions like biscuits with homemade sausage gravy and my grandma’s creamy lemon pie.

My brother and I cook at home, though neither of us has any professional experience. We cook from fanatical knowledge possessed from hours of Food Network and Cooking Channel as well as by recreating variations of the best food we’ve personally eaten across the United States.

We come up with original recipes that are derived from base recipes that we enjoy, but always with our own twists and variations; other recipes are completely unique, formed just by conceptualizing and combining flavors, textures, and ingredients we both enjoy. I enjoy everything we make, and hopefully you will as well.