Made from Scratch Shepherd's Pie

I love comfort food and I love finding new ways to make it.  For Mark and I, Shepherd's Pie is normally something we will have when we go out to a restaurant but it is not even remotely difficult to make.  Here's my super simple recipe for really tasty Shepherd's Pie.

Made from Scratch Shepherd’s Pie

3 lbs                      Lean Ground Beef

2 cups                   Gravy (I used Low Sodium Gravy Mixes – 2 packets worth)

8                           Yellow fleshed potatoes

¼ cup                    Garlic butter

1 tbsp                    Parmesan & Herbs Seasoning

2 tbsp                    Worcestershire sauce, divided

1 tbsp                    Pepper

2 cups                   Mini carrots, chopped into bite size pieces

2 tbsp                    Balsamic Vinaigrette

¾ cup                    Parmesan cheese, grated

¼ cup                    Goat cheese, plain

¼ cup                    Maple cheddar, shredded

¼ cup                    Milk

PINCH                 Habanero Salt

I started out by steaming the mini carrots in the microwave.  In a microwaveable safe container, add in your carrots and 1 tbsp of water.  Microwave on HIGH for 4 minutes.  When the carrots are finished in the microwave, remove them and chop them into bite size pieces.  Hold to one side until the ground beef is finished cooking.

Next go on to making the gravy for this.  Simply follow the package directions to make the gravy and then once it is bubbling away, add in half of the Worcestershire sauce and the Parmesan and Herbs Seasoning to the mixture in the saucepan.

At the same time, start browning all of the ground beef in a large frying pan.  Once the meat is cooked through, drain off the fat and then return to the heat.  At this point, add in the Parmesan cheese, the remaining Worcestershire Sauce, the carrots, the Balsamic Vinaigrette and the gravy.

Chop the potatoes into medium size chunks and put them into another saucepan.  Also start a filled kettle boiling with water.  Once the potatoes are chopped and the water is boiled, start the potatoes cooking over high heat on the stove top.  Once the water is boiling, with the lid on, lower the temperature to low and set the timer for 5 minutes. 

Stir the ground beef mixture and start preparing your baking dish for the oven by spraying it with non-stick cooking spray.

Turn the oven on to 350°F.

Once the five minutes is up on the timer, drain the water from the potatoes and return the potatoes to the saucepan.  Add in the garlic butter, milk and goat cheese to the potatoes.  Using a masher, smash the potatoes until they are very smooth.

Pile the meat mixture into the base of the prepared baking dish.  Now it is time to add the potatoes on top.  You have a couple of options on how you want to do this.  The simple way would be to spread a layer of mashed potatoes on top but if you want to make it look fancy, using a piping bag and the largest star tip you have, pipe rosettes of mashed potatoes onto the top of the beef mixture.  Just a side note: Take your time with this step, especially if you have arthritis in your hands, as this gives your hands quite a beating.  It took me approximately 15 minutes to pipe all of these rosettes because I had to keep taking breaks. 

Having said that, the final product does look quite amazing when you sit down to enjoy it because you did take the time to make it look good.

Now it’s time to heat the mixture through completely and brown the potatoes.  This takes approximately 20 minutes at which time you will remove it from the oven, turn the oven to the broil setting, top the shepherd’s pie with the maple cheddar and return it to the oven to melt the cheese and allow it to start to bubble.  This will only take about 90 seconds so keep an eye on the oven at this point.  Once it has started to bubble, remove the Shepherd’s Pie from the oven and sprinkle the top with Habanero Salt.  Let it cool slightly before serving – don’t worry, the heat trapped beneath the potatoes will not allow your dinner to cool down significantly and will prevent you from burning your mouth off.

Makes 6 servings

Leftover cake...what to do with it

Isn't it always the case that when you have a cake, whether it be birthday, anniversary or wedding, there is always leftovers and you are sick and tired of eating cake?  I get like that quite easily - I think it comes from having the last of six birthdays in the month of December and Christmas along with it - so when Mark and I ended up with a ton of wedding cake left over after our big day, I started to think about exactly what we were going to do with it.

Our wedding cake was a four tier cake made by my cousin and each layer was something different.  After the wedding was all done, we divided it up, wrapped some of it in tin foil, took the top layer and froze it in the freezer and put it aside for another day.  Last week I decided I wanted to do some baking and, while I had an idea of what to do with the cake, I was not exactly sure how to go about doing this.  A few years ago, the big thing was cupcakes...now it has become cake pops.  At the time, I was not a huge fan of the cupcake phase but when cake pops came along I loved the idea of it.  To me, it was just the right amount of cake to me and they could be decorated in a million different ways.  However, instead of doing cake pops, I thought "let's do mini cake bites".  You see, cake pops are made from scratch and baked in the oven and we already had baked cake to work with.  While I probably could add the cake pop stick, by doing mini cake bites, it removed the extra step and the number of extras I would have to pick up to make these.  You see, I regularly have baking chocolate and/or chocolate chips around the house.  I also had sprinkles and coloured sugars kicking around as well to decorate the coated cake bites with.  Everything I needed was in the house - I just needed the time to make them.

So, with all the ingredients ready and the cake completely thawed, I set about to make these mini cake bites.  The leftover cake I was using was a slab of marble pound cake that was 2" wide by 12" long and 4" high.  There was a layer of fondant icing surrounding it and there was a layer of filling halfway between the cake.  It had been in the freezer for several months so I let it take two days to thaw completely.  Once it was thawed, it was time to make the cake bites.  I piled the cake, breaking it down with my hands, into a mixing bowl and then mixed it all together so that it was one large helping of cake batter with the icing and filling

holding it all together. One thing I would recommend is using gloves when you are doing this - rolling the cake batter into balls can be quite messy and, since the icing on our cake was sprayed a bright blue colour, it prevented my counters from changing colours while I was working with the cake.  Depending on the size of the cake bites and the amount of leftover cake you are working with will determine how many mini cake bites you end up with.  In the end, we had 40 mini cake bites which I laid out on a parchment paper lined rimmed baking sheet to dry just a bit.  This should only take about 20 minutes.  What you are looking for is the outside of the cake pop being slightly hardened but still easy to squeeze.

Next step is to coat the cake bites in chocolate.  This time around, because we had dark chocolate in the house, I used a combination of 4 Dark Chocolate squares and half an open bag of dark chocolate chips.  When it comes to melting chocolate, you need to use indirect heat so I set up a water bath (bain marie) using my largest saucepan and a metal mixing bowl.  To get the chocolate squares to melt quickly, I took a

knife through them so that they were in small chunks or chards of chocolate.  At this point, set up another rimmed baking sheet but instead of the parchment paper, this time rest a wire baking rack inside the baking sheet.  This will allow any excess chocolate to drip down onto the sheet but not adhere the entire cake pop to the baking sheet.  Once I had the water in the saucepan up to a rolling boil, I lowered the temperature to a simmer and added the mixing bowl of chocolate to the top and, with a spatula, started moving the chocolate around until it melted completely.  I removed the mixing bowl from the water bath and then started coating the cake bites in chocolate.  Do this one by one so that when you are removing each coated cake bite from the chocolate, it is easy to remove excess chocolate.  Once you have finished coating each cake bite in chocolate and they are resting on the baking sheet, take the decorations (i.e. sprinkles, coloured sugar, etc) and start topping each cake bite as you want.  Have fun with this and, if you have kids around, get them to help out too.

Once you have decorated all of your cake pops, move them to another room to chill quickly so that the chocolate hardens.  If you have room in your fridge that works but, since I didn't have room there, I moved it to a room downstairs where it was colder than the main floor was.  It will only take 20 minutes for these to harden and then you can store them in an airtight container or cookie jar.