March 6: National White Chocolate Cheesecake Day and National Frozen Foods Day

National White Chocolate Cheesecake Day

Here's another day where I wish I had done a little more planning.  When I first saw that it was National White Chocolate Cheesecake Day today, I thought, "I have white chocolate.  I have cream cheese.  I'll be able to whip up something after work."  Oh, how innocent I was.  The most highly rated white chocolate cheesecake recipes take a minimum of 8 hours.  There's a lot of chilling time involved.  Ah, well...  It's probably better for my waistline that I don't celebrate with a cheesecake today.

If you do feel like celebrating, try this white chocolate raspberry cheesecake recipe.  Just be aware that it will take ten hours.  Really.

Or just see if your local bakery has any ready.  Or, y'know, the Cheesecake Factory.




National Frozen Foods Day

Now, I'm fairly certain that "National Frozen Foods Day" was mainly established to sell you the kinds of frozen foods that you just heat up and serve.  The kind that you just remove the outer packaging, stab holes into the plastic film, and then microwave for a minute or two.  Maybe you have to stir it before it's done.  I've had those meals before, but I don't really buy those anymore.

Primarily, the only frozen foods I buy these days are frozen vegetables, fruits, and fish.  Frozen vegetables are great for those middle of the winter days when all the farmer's market has is lots of potatoes and cruciferous greens (and you just can't eat anymore of those!) or when the vegetables in the produce section look so sad and limp after traveling so far.

I also like freezing the foods I cook.  It's great for frugal food planning - make a large batch of something and store individual portions in plastic containers.  (I like using plastic containers because they're re-useable.)  One of these days when I finally settle down, I'll get one of the large, stand-alone freezers.  If you're not sure about freezing food or you want to read up on it more, there are a lot of cookbooks out there devoted to recipes that are perfect for freezing.

February 10: Cream Cheese Brownies Day

It's Cream Cheese Brownies Day!  I figured that cream cheese brownies just meant that cream cheese was mixed into the batter before baking.  Well, it can be, but there are quite a few variations on cream cheese brownies.  Some recipes call for the cream cheese to be a separate layer on top of a chocolate layer, while others use the cream cheese to create a marbled effect.  Here's a quick round-up of recipes I looked at:

• Smitten Kitchen's Cream Cheese Brownies is a marbled brownie recipe adapted from Cook's Illustrated.  It was also tweaked a couple of  years later.
• Stylish Cuisine has a layered recipe that she declares is the best brownie she's ever had.  Supposedly, these are best straight from the freezer.
• This cream cheese brownie recipe is a marbled type, but tatkes the short-cut of using a brownie mix.  So does this Betty Crocker recipe. 
• I really wanted to try this Joy of Cooking recipe, but I don't have any metal bowls.
• Like raspberries?  Then you might want to try this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker that uses raspberries.

Eventually, I picked this recipe from Kraft.  Since I have no large microwave-safe bowl, I melted the butter and chocolate using my Micro Pitcher set from Tupperware (that thing is awesome!) and then poured the melted butter and chocolate into a mixing bowl.  Otherwise, I just followed the recipe as it is written.  One little puzzle I ran into was that the cream cheese mixture was a lot of mixture!  I was expecting it to be a smaller amount but there was enough that I could have probably made it a layered brownie.  Also, swirling the two batters together was a bit problematic - the chocolate layer was really thick.  The recipe says to swirl gently which I figured was just cutting a knife through in various directions.  Nope!  This took some actual swirling to get the batters to mix in a nice swirl pattern.

Here's my attempt at getting the swirl, but not really getting it....

 I put it in the oven anyways, wondering if the two batters would mix more while baking.

I baked it for 40 minutes and, since I also had trouble spreading it evenly in the pan, it cooked a little unevenly.  The top of the cream cheese portion browned a little in spots. 

It was tasty and the smell was so good that the brownies were cut long before it was completely cooled.  It's a good recipe - very, very sweet - but definitely not a good recipe for those concerned with their weights.