Homemade Margherita Pizza

Let's be straight-up with each other for a moment. I have a serious fear of failure. "What?" you say. "That's impossible, because you've never failed at anything in your life!" Or, more likely, you'd say, "What? That's impossible, because you've failed at so many things in your life! (see: earlier posts about exploding cupcake disasters.)

When it comes to high-stakes situations, I need assurance that I won't fail. I won't even attempt something if it carries a chance of failure. And on Thursday, I'm facing my most high-stakes situation ever.

MY BIRTHDAY DINNER PARTY.

Compared to this, applying to college was a cinch! I've been spending hours looking up recipes, but not just any recipes -- recipes that are doable in Kenya. Not the easiest task. I've created a tentative menu, and because of my fear of failure, I need to make SURE these recipes will work before I try to make them on Thursday. Because I have this nagging haunting vision of me dissolving into tears in the kitchen over a pan of burnt blackened FAILURE. Oh wait... that's already happened. More than once.

Anyways, my first project was PIZZA. I was totally daunted by the idea of making homemade pizza. Anything that involves dough rising is a new concept to me; so far, my primary experiences with yeast have been with Saccromyces in a microbiology lab, measuring gas output per concentration of organisms. Nerd 4 lyfe.

PIZZA. right. moving on. Pizza is actually really easy to make! How do I know that? Because if it was even slightly difficult, I would have ruined the whole thing! I adapted this whole-wheat crust recipe because, let's face it, if you asked a Kenyan for a bag of whole wheat flour, they'd give you a bushel of wheat stalks. White flour it is, then.

RECIPE (adapted from How Sweet It Is):

Dough:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon dry active yeast

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup + 2 tbsp lukewarm water

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon honey

(Note: 1/2 cup water wasn't enough to get all the loose flour off the bottom of the bowl, so I added a bit more).

Combine flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Add water, honey and oil, mixing with a spoon to form into a ball. Continue mixing with your hands and knead for about 60 seconds. Lightly oil bowl and add dough back in. Cover and let rise for 2-3 hours.


And if you let it rise for a bit more, that'll work, too. How do I know this? I took a serious nap and missed the three-hour mark. I'm developing excellent time-management skills, I know. 


Toppings:
I made two types of pizza: Margherita, and green-pepper-onion-tomato. For each, I added about 1.5 cups of shredded mozzarella cheese and a half-cup of parmesan, then layered the toppings and sprinkled with about a quarter-cup of feta. The combination of cheeses worked really well! The recipe for this is quite simple:

1. Grate cheese unsuccessfully for approximately 5 minutes until you realize you’re using the wrong side of the grater. 

2. Switch sides of grater.

3.Grate cheese for what seems like 5 hours and curse the pizza gods for placing you in a place without pre-grated cheese. 

4. Chop up an entire bell pepper and arrange it in a sunburst pattern around the pizza because it looks really pretty. Chop up other toppings and just toss that shit on the pizza.

Margherita pizza!

Onions, peppers, tomatoes!

Bake for 30 minutes at 375 degrees, or somewhere between 220 and 250 Celsius. Who knows if my oven dial is right or not. It's Kenya!

Oh, and I also made hummus (another fear-of-failure experiment in preparation for an appetizer for Thursday. Although it was tahini-less, after fruitlessly visiting four grocery stores.

Also, it turns out hummus is not very photogenic.

But delicious nevertheless!

Ginger Cake Donuts with Nutella Glaze and Snickers topping

Yum.

Apparently being in Kenya has made me a better baker, because I've made two fantastically yummy things in the past two days.

Baking here isn't easy. There's a very limited selection of supplies, so I've had to improvise a bit. For example, there isn't any buttermilk here. I've seen one tub of cream cheese, but it looked suspiciously like cottage cheese. Corn syrup is called "liquid glucose" (literal, isn't it?). And originally, when I couldn't find a cupcake pan anywhere, I bought a mini donut pan instead. (Does anyone else think it's strange that they have donut pans, but not muffin pans? Or is it just me?)

One of my favorite snacks in Kenya is ginger nuts, little gingersnap crackers. I decided to try and make a cupcake (and then a donut, per my limitations) inspired by these yummy little noms. I used a ginger cake mix with a few pinches of cinnamon thrown in, made a Nutella glaze using 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1 tbsp Nutella and 2 tbsp milk, and crumbled some Snickers on top.

Please take the time to admire my food styling, and the use of paper towel as background. 

Dee-licious.

Hannah makes real food

Here's the thing: I'm not so great at making real food. Yeah, I can bake a mean hand pie, and I can frost a cupcake so prettily you'll swoon. I can even make a pretty darn good sandwich. But dinner food? Not so much. I'm not sure if you know about the forgetting-the-water-in-the-Easy-Mac-and-almost-burning-the-house-down story. I think you get the point.

Anyway, it was my turn to cook at my new apartment in Kenya the other night. So I spent about two hours looking online for a simple recipe to make. And then I spend another two hours having multiple small panic attacks in the grocery store. (No mushrooms? Are you serious? Wait, is this all the cheese you have? You're telling me that you don't sell anything but whole milk? Is that a joke?) Etc, etc. 

Eventually I settled on a simple pasta, tossed with chicken cubes and tomatoes in garlic olive oil. I was positive it was going to be a mushy mess.

BUT IT WASN'T! HAPPY TIMES! 

Okay, I know it's really, really hard to mess up pasta with olive oil. But you're talking to the girl who baked the same cake (from a cake mix) 5 times and has yet to successfully keep it from collapsing. Or perhaps my mother just sabotaged each one so she could claim the Happy Cake crown.

That's beside the point.

Here's a lovely picture of my first-ever homemade dinner!

About the wine: I'm legal, in Kenya. SO THERE

Cupcakes in AFRICA

 Ahhh... It feels so good to bake again. I missed it more than I thought I would. Although it was generally a success, I had to totally wing the frosting. We didn't have a hand mixer, so I kind of creamed the butter by hand and guesstimated how much powdered sugar I needed. And then the butter fell apart. But they turned out pretty well!

The box of cake mix -- ingredients in Italian, Spanish, French... and Arabic.

I figured out where all the cockroaches live! It's... in the oven! And they were really upset with me when I decided to turn it on. Sorry, pals. 

This is how you (attempt) to make frosting by hand.

My sister Jero giving me some help!

 So... this happened.

And also this happened.

And here are the glorious results of my first foray into Kenyan baking! (They actually taste delicious, by the way. Although I'm anxious to get home and make sure that there aren't any ants living in the fridge where I'm keeping them. I'm serious. These are my primary concerns.)

Be on the lookout for a guest post from my part-time lover and full-time friend, Kyle McDaniel! 

Pumpkin Scones!

Okay, I know it's not pumpkin season. I know pumpkin treats are supposed to be consumed from October-December. I have also decided these guidelines are ridiculous, because everyone knows that pumpkin is good ALL THE TIME! After my successful blueberry scone experiment, I decided to tackle one of my own favorites: the spiced pumpkin scone.

When I was in elementary school, my dad would drop me off at the bus stop every morning on his way to work. It was always a pleasant trip, filled with Black Eyed Peas and Elton John tunes. Too cool for school. On Fridays, though, I'd set my alarm 30 minutes early for our special Starbucks escapade. We'd make a detour at the 'Bux, and I'd always get a vanilla-flavored milkbox and... a PUMPKIN SCONE! It was such an indulgence, and I savored that scone each week with my good ol' dad. 

However, my homemade pumpkin scones are better. But oh! you say. The injustice! Trivializing your childhood memories! I respond by telling you that my dad himself declared these scones the best thing I've ever baked.

WHAT?!

Just make them.

http://www.foodbuzz.com/recipes/1893629-pumpkin-scones-with-spiced-glaze

Yummers.

Thanks to Karen Wellman, my food stylist.

PIE IN MY MOUTH

Hand pies.

Oh, yes. Take out all the bad things about pie (messy, needs utensils, etc) and you get HAND PIES!

As Duff Goldman would say on Sugar High, my new favorite show ever, ever ever... "I'm going to eat that... IN MY MOUTH!"

This recipe was adapted from Martha Stewart's Pies and Tarts book, which I saw at the grocery store and immediately fell in love with. I filled the hand pies with Pear preserves, Raspberry-Peach Champagne preserves, and Triple Berry jelly. Next time, I'm going to put real pie filling in there because these ones just tasted a little too much like they were filled with jam.

Which they were.

Wow! This looks so great! Hannah, you're such a good baker!

So cute! They were a little big, so next time I'll use a smaller circular cookie cutter. My family did manage to eat the entire batch in two days, though. Now that's a true compliment!

Blueberry Scones

Scones: Not as hard as you think they're going to be. My family went NUTS over these lil guys. Although amorphous, they were fluffy and moist. 

The cutting-in-the-butter part can be done with your hands (after you thoroughly wash them. You're welcome, mom) instead of a food processor or two forks. It's the easier way to do it. I know these things now because I'm a professional baker. (Watching Food Network counts as culinary school, right?)

Here's the recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/blueberry-scones-with-lemon-glaze-recipe/index.html

You might need to add more dairy in there, or the dough won't come together. Also, the lemon glaze was a big derp. Watery and runny... I'll have to find another recipe for a better glaze. 

AWW YEAH