Union Utopia Cookies

Fall is fast approaching and classes are starting up again. Now is the perfect time to reflect on the summer that has past. From enjoying concerts on the square to weekends spent strolling around the farmers market and laughing with friends, it has been on fast, successful few months. I, unfortunately, had to endure this warm Wisconsin summer without the luxury of an air conditioner. But one special treat made it more bearable; BABCOCK ICE CREAM! As Food Science majors, we like to consider ourselves experts on all things Babcock, especially the ice cream. UW-Madison has a dairy plant located inside Babcock Hall, the Food Science building here at UW-Madison. In the dairy plant, students along with professional staff make magical milk, incredible ice cream, and creamy cheese. All of the products that come out of the dairy plant are delicious! (Promise no one is paying us to say that, it’s just the truth!) One classic flavor of Babcock ice cream is Union Utopia, a vanilla ice cream with swirls of peanut butter, chocolate and caramel. I will miss enjoying a dish of Union Utopia at the terrace as the days get shorter, colder and that craving for the cool, sugary snack will be replaced with a similarly intense sugary craving for something warm and mouthwatering. In order to satisfy this new fall craving, we have Union Utopia cookies! A peanut butter cookie base with chocolate chips and caramels baked in. It is the perfect replacement for the ice cream counterpart to share with friends at study groups or potluck dinners (or don’t share and eat them all while binge watching Netflix, TREAT YO SELF). A few batches of these cookies over the next nine months will make summer 2016 get here in no time!

½ cup butter (1 stick), softened

½ cup granulated sugar

½ cup packed brown sugar

½ cup peanut butter

1 egg

1 ¼ cup all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

½ cup chocolate chips

½ cup caramels cut into squares (similar in size to chocolate chips)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F
2. Mix together dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
3. In a separate bowl, beat the butter until creamy. Add sugars and beat for another two minutes until combined. Mix in peanut butter and egg.
4. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet. Once your dough has been formed you can refrigerate it for an hour (it’s optional if you are in a rush but it will help rest the gluten which makes the cookies   softer and they don’t spread out as much)
   
5. Form the dough into balls and place on a cookie sheet. This type of dough does not spread out as much, especially if you refrigerate it, so you can flatten the dough out on the pan
   
6. Cook the cookies in the preheated oven for 15ish minutes until they are brown around the edges.

Ultimate Mozzarella Sticks and Sriracha Mayo

As a college student I am often tempted to go down the street to the McDonalds to get some fries or some other greasy food to feed my craving. While different factors tend to (thankfully) inhibit me from doing this for every craving, we thought it would be nice to find a tasty, easy, food to satisfy that greasy food itch without leaving the house. Going to school in the land of cheese (On Wisconsin!), it seemed the perfect thing to fry up for our yummy snack.

After putting our heads and taste buds together, along with the help of Jenna’s parents, brother and grandma, we came up with the ULTIMATE mozzarella sticks recipe (Jenna’s mom even tried one before it was cooked so you know the breading was THAT good, the raw egg was only a minor setback; you should definitely cook them…). And to compliment them, instead of a typical marinara sauce, we decided to shake things ups a bit and make a sriracha dipping sauce! We love spicy foods, so the sauce was perfect for us! If you are a little cautious when it comes to spice we gave this sauce a 4 on a scale from 1-10 (1 being water and 10 being WHOLEY MOTHER MY MOUTH IS ON FIRE GIVE ME A GALLON ON MILK, STAT!).

ULTIMATE mozzarella sticks:

12 pack of mozzarella cheese sticks [We used low fat (not fat free, eww)], cut in half

 ½ cup of flour

2 eggs

1 Tbs. milk

1 cup bread crumbs

½ cup parmesan cheese

½ tsp. garlic powder

¼ tsp. cayenne pepper (officially called a tad, fun facts learned in Eureka Springs, AR!)

¾ tsp. rosemary, chopped

¼ tsp. fresh ground pepper

Pinch of salt (which officially 1/8 tsp. but we just eye balled it)

Vegetable oil for frying

Cover the bottom of a frying pan with vegetable oil. Heat the oil and pan on medium heat; you want to get the oil to about 190°. It is important to get the oil hot so the sticks can get brown but not stay in the oil too long where all the cheese leaves the scrumptious breading.

Place flour in a bowl and set aside. Beat eggs and milk together in a bowl, set aside. Combine the rest of the ingredients in bowl and set aside.

Cover the already sliced cheese sticks in flour, followed by the egg mixture, and then the bread crumb mixture, set aside.

Now that you have all these bowls set aside and have the oil heating up, grab a coloring sheet and make a beautiful picture. Then hang it up on the fridge.

Now back to cooking.

(The coloring is optional… But fun.) Place the breaded cheese in the hot oil. Cook the sticks for 30 seconds on each side. For safety and convenience purposes, flip the mozzarella sticks with a pair of tongs. If they stay in the oil too long the cheese starts oozing out and makes a bit of a mess. The oil should be hot enough to get the mozzarella sticks brown during the minute.

Sriracha Sauce:

3 Tbs. mayo

1 Tbs. Sriracha

1 tsp. Lime Juice

¼ tsp. Soy sauce

¼ tsp. (less than) sesame oil

Combine all of the ingredients. Enjoy, it is really that easy!

If you have extra sauce after you are done with all the mozzarella sticks we have some suggestions for you!

-Eat it on a sandwich

-Dip veggies in it

-Use in place of regular mayo for a sriracha infused chicken salad 

-Eat with crackers

-AND MUCH MORE!

FOOD ADDICTS

Nutella Frosted Rainbow Layer Cake

IT IS HERE. The first recipe.

Firsts can be scary. Your first day of school, first time driving, first date, first time bungee jumping! They can sometimes make you vulnerable and you never know what to expect. So be nice to us, we are newbies! We’ll get better.

One way to battle nerves, or prevent them from happening in the first place, is to be comfortable in what you are about to do. And we know desserts; we are comfortable in desserts, we LOVE desserts. A true meal is not complete until your taste buds have been fully saturated with some sugary deliciousness that fills your dessert stomach up to the brim until you are officially full (since you always have room for dessert right???). 

Now besides two of Jenna’s roommates [one who is allergic to tree nuts (poor thing), and another who has some weird thing against chocolate (crazy thing)], what is that one thing that makes meals complete better than anything else? NUTELLA. So we decided to cover our dessert with the best buttercream Nutella frosting we could make! Now we had to think what would make the inside of this Nutella covered goodness be the perfect start to our vlogging blog (video blogs intermixed in a blog)? Being a big fan of colors, the answer seemed like a no brainer: RAINBOW. As mentioned in our “about us”, we have a plan to fill our blog with a mixture of blog posts filled with pictures along with vlogs where you get to see our lovely personalities show you exactly what we are doing while making our food. (That we devour as soon as the camera is off).

To find the perfect recipe for our rainbow layered cake, we compared some basic vanilla cake recipes to come up with this one. While we used wheat flour, all-purpose flour works well, and if you don’t like the wheaty taste, it could even be better! (Ignore the measurements we said on the video. The following recipe is doubled and correct for 6 layers!)

5 cups all-purpose flour

4 cups sugar

2 cups milk

1 cup of butter (2 sticks)

8 eggs

4 ½ teaspoons baking powder

4 teaspoon vanilla
Food coloring

1.     Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease three 9-inches round cake pans, or how many you have. We could only fit three in the oven at one time so we baked then in two rounds. We also did 6 layers so keep that in mind. If you want to do fewer colors you obviously would use fewer pans.

2.     In a large mixing bowl, beat sugar and egg with an electric mixer until they are combined and thickened. Add flour, milk, butter, baking powder, and vanilla and beat until the batter is smooth and creamy, about a minute.

3.     Equally divide up the batter into six bowls (or how many layers you would like). You might notice that it appears that you have a lot more batter then we did. This is good!! We didn’t have enough to make six layers so we had to go back and double our recipe.

4.     Add food coloring to the batter and mix. Adjust color until you are content.

5.     Pour each color into a different pre greased pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 17-25 minutes.

6.     Let them cool and then cut out the cakes and put them on a drying rack. Wash your pans, REGREASE them and put the next set of cakes in the oven.

7.     Once all the cakes are out of the oven and cooled, shave the top of the cake off to form a flat top.

8.     Now the layers are ready to frost!

Here is the Nutella frosting recipe! We found it at mybakingaddicition.com, there are a bunch of tasty recipes there!

2 sticks unsalted butter, softened

1 13-ounce jar of Nutella (It seems like a lot but you won’t regret it!)

Pinch of fine grain sea salt

4-6 cups of confectioners’ sugar

6-8 tablespoons heavy cream or milk

1.     In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and Nutella until they are combined, thick and fluffy. This takes about 5 minutes, though it is combined within one minute keep mixing it until it’s thick and fluffy; you will see the consistency changing. Slowly add in confectioner’s sugar, continuously mixing until well blended.

2.     Add salt, vanilla, and 3 tablespoons of heavy cream or milk. Blend on low speed until moistened. Add the additional heavy cream or milk (and/or more sugar) until you get your desired consistency.

3.     Go frost your cake! Or finger J

As mentioned in the video don’t limit yourself to a simple rainbow cake, we encourage creativity! Here are some other suggestions we came up with:

Make a faded/ombre cake with all the same color of dye just different intensity

Color the layers your school colors for graduations

Make it the color of your favorite sports team (professional or college, Let’s go Red!)

Color it for holidays! (Pink/red/white for Valentine’s Day, black/orange for Halloween, red/white/blue for 4^th of July! Your options go on and on)

ENJOY!