LetsLunch Guilty Pleasures: Homemade Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

And we're back! After two months away from LetsLunch, I finally decided to get back in the game this month for guilty pleasures.

It was tough choosing my favorite guilty pleasure. I pretty much love all food that can be considered a guilty pleasure. Cake? I love it. Potato chips? I can't even keep them in my house anymore. Pizza? My favorite food since age 4. Large quantities of ice cream? Keep me away.

In the end, I chose the ultimate breakfast food: biscuits and gravy. Biscuits are one of those amazing foods that are so perfect and versatile, yet hold zero nutritional value.

Every so often, I make a big double batch of biscuits (I'm partial to this very simple Amateur Gourmet recipe) and freeze them. I'll pretty much eat anything on a biscuit: jam, honey, cheese, chicken, and of course, sausage gravy.

These aren't exactly your perfect, round biscuits (you don't have to roll them out), but they are tender and fluffy. I think they also hold up really nicely through freezing and defrosting.

For the gravy, you can use any gravy recipe you like. I usually more or less follow this one from Pioneer Woman. One of my favorites is to substitute breakfast sausage for a nice andouille or even a chicken sausage (you need to add a little more butter for that, since it doesn't produce as much rendered fat).

Keep it hot until you're ready to serve, then break open the biscuits and pile on the gravy.
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LetsLunch is a monthly meet-up of bloggers from around the world. Check out everyone else's guilty pleasures below, or by searching the Twitter hashtag #letslunch. Want to join us? Send a tweet introducing yourself and use the hashtag.
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Cheryl's Japanese Crisp Choco Bites at A Tiger In The Kitchen
Lisa's Mars Bar Slice at Monday Morning Cooking Club
Lucy's Cheesy Apple Casserole at A Cook and Her Books
Tammi's Pulled Pork Shoulder with Crackling Chips, Sauce and Slaw at Insatiable Munchies
Grace's School Cafeteria Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars at HapaMama
Ann Marie's Breakfast Club Sammy at Sandwich Surprise!
Lisa's Nutella Cookies at The Little Good Ride
Elizabeth's Purple Yam Jam at Asian In America Mag
Linda's Dark Chocolate Whoopie Pies with Raspberries at Spicebox Travels
Annabelle's Fresh Figs and Ricotta at Glass of Fancy

Up, up and away!

Today was an awesome day for cooking/baking.

I took the opportunity to bake the cake inspired by the new Pixar movie "Up," from this Serious Eats Cakespy post.

Not a perfect cake by any stretch of the imagination. The cake was much denser than I imagined it would be, especially after I burnt the outsides and bottoms of the cake a little. The frosting was amazing though.

The main alteration I made to the original Cakespy recipe was using lemon zest instead of 2 tsp of lemon extract. Baking can be an expensive habit, so the thought of picking up food coloring *and* lemon extract didn't really seem worth it. Bag of lemons on the other hand? Definitely. So I zested 3 lemons and toss that into the creamed butter and sugar.

Speaking of the butter and sugar: 3 sticks of butter and 3 cups of sugar. The recipe suggested creaming the butter and sugar for 20 minutes. Yes. 20 minutes. Clearly, written by someone who owns a standmixer. Not this girl. My handy-dandy hand-mixer started to smell a little crazy after about 8 minutes, so I shut it down and let it rest a few minutes. I added a bit of extra time in between each of the 5 eggs, hoping to make up some of the remaining 12 minutes.

The original recipe also didn't have a specific number of drops of blue food coloring, so I guessed. I had about 7 or 8, but it turned out not to be quite enough. The yellow of the lemon turned it slightly green. I'd probably use more like 12 or 15 next time around.

Anyway, it looked beautiful once it was frosted. Again, lots more butter involved.

Tons of coconut pressed into the cake, and some bent DumDums pressed into the corner. Beautiful.

Inside view of the balloon cake.

Dreaming? of floating away in an adorable blue and white, coconut house with little candy balloons.

A Momofuku spin on tteok

David Chang, owner of the Momofuku restaurants and writer of the cookbook, is Korean American and describes his memories of having tteok bogi as a child. 

Tteok bogi is a big favorite of Jake's, so it was a natural sidedish to go with the ssam I was cooking last night. Chang writes about his grandfather's method of pan roasting the tteok, so I decided to give it a try.

I parboiled the frozen tteok (though, I imagine if you were using fresh, you could skip this), then scraped the burnt pork off the pan and tossed in the tteok with a little oil spray.

The results? Jake and I both decided this kind of tteok isn't always for us - but would definitely be welcome from time to time. The tteok gets crisp on the outside, but are still wonderfully chewy on the inside. The grit from the pan adds a little smoky flavor to the dish.

Pan-roasted tteokbogi, inspired by the Momofuku cookbook. I made the sauce the way I usually do (diverging from Chang's recipe here) in a separate, small saucepan and poured it in at the end of the dish, then allowed it to thicken.  Bring 2c water (use the water you par-boiled the tteok in, to capture any starch that may still be left - it will thicken your sauce nicely), 2-4 TBS gochuchang (Korean red pepper paste), 2 tsp sesame oil, 1/2 TBS sugar to a boil, then reduce to about 1 1/2 c. It should coat the back of a spoon and drip slowly, more of a syrup than a total liquid.

Mmm chocolate

Anyone looking for proof that chocolate makes EVERYTHING better? 

 

For instance, let's say you pipe four trays of pate a choux discs, and in your attempt to keep them from burning, you open and close the oven a bunch to rotate them, and they end up looking like this: 

 

 Rather than this: 

So, you melt a bag of chocolate chips with a little vegetable oil, stir in some half&half and dip away:

Pop them back in the freezer, and you've got chocolate eclairs. Problem solved! 

Dreaming? of a frozen eclair with perfectly formed chocolate shells.

Makin' whoopie (pies, that is!)

Saturday night, and we're still snowed in. The big win for today is the fact I was able to master whoopie pies! :) YUM. 

Here's how it all went down: 

First, amazingly chocolatey batter. I used this recipe from epicurious.com, except I found myself without buttermilk, yet again. I substituted 6 oz yogurt, 1/4 c half and half, and 1 1/2 TBS white vinegar whisked together.

I also finally found a use for the melon baller my mother slipped into my stocking a few years ago (after a conversation when I asked what on earth people would use a melon baller for. Today was the first time I've used it!) I also kept a little dish (it's a condiment dish I nicked from Applebee's a few years ago) of vegetable oil nearby, and dipped the melon baller in it after each one. This keeps the batter from sticking and generally causing a mess. It also coated the balls with oil, and gave them a nice shiny crisp.

BAKING!!!

Cooling -- this recipe made about 4 sheets of cookies.

In the mad rush that was the pre-blizzard snow storm, I forgot to grab marshmallow fluff. Giant, very bizarrely keeps this with the peanut butter and jelly, not with the baking supplies, nor with the other marshmallows. 

 

The recipe doesn't call for it, but I had a little cream cheese (about a two-inch piece) that I threw in, as well as an extra half stick of butter and more fluff. I also used about 2 TBS half and half to help thin it out a bit. 

  

In the end, they were perfect. The insides fluffy and tasting of marshmallow, the outsides soft and cakey. YUM. 

 

Pudding pie update

So, unfortunately there are no photos, as I ate the evidence, but I'm officially throwing in the towel on chocolate pudding pie.

I had some leftover pudding yesterday (and really needed to use the bowl for other things) so I threw the rest of the graham cracker crumbs into a container with the pudding and topped with the the leftover whipped cream (again, needed the container) and popped it back into the fridge.

HELLO chocolate pudding-graham-whip-yummy parfait of delight. Insanely easier to make. More graham crumbs than the crust meant an added crunch.

I'm in love with this alternative route to pudding-pie goodness.

Dreaming? of a world where whipped cream + chocolate pudding = 0 calories

Caramello Koala!!

A co-worker brought these in to work today, a gift from her Australian friend. Super cute AND delicious!