Sunday night was the return of big family dinners but it was also the day I had a date with my sisters to see Mad Max: Fury Road (which is epic and awesome, by the way). So while I wanted to make something super tasty for dinner, I wanted to do it while also seeing the movie.
Good thing Crockpots exist, right? They come in so handy when you’ve got important things to do, like spend time in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy (seriously, the movie is rad, go see it).
Because both my sisters have long been fans of the orange chicken at Panda Express, I decided to go with an orange chicken recipe in the Crockpot for dinner. It was pretty simple, just: orange marmalade, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, brown sugar, cornstarch, and chicken. I didn’t make any substitutions to the recipe this time around BUT (cause there is almost always a BUT) I did twice the orange sauce recipe because the chicken breasts TheFather procured were around twice the size of normal chicken breasts and I didn’t want them to cook up too dry. I also added some extra orange marmalade and some actual orange juice to the sauce when initial taste-testing led my taste-testers to declare it not orange-y enough.
The chicken dish was simple and I served it over long-grain white rice, which seemed to compliment it well. If I make this recipe again I may add in some vegetables as well. I think perhaps broccoli or peppers might be tasty with it.
Dessert was where this Sunday meal got tricky. TheFather had seen a recipe for one-minute lava cakes online and decided he wanted to try them. I found the same recipe on Pinterest and accepted the challenge. Ingredients included; Pillsbury fudge brownie mix, eggs, vegetable oil, water, Dove Milk Chocolate Promises chocolates, French Vanilla ice cream.
First up, let me remind everyone that baking is not my strong suit. I’ve had more cakes and brownies and cookies end up barely edible than tasty and delicious, but I’m always willing to try try try again to come up with a perfect baked good. And baking something for just a minute in the microwave sounded so easy I figured there was no way I could mess it up.
I think it is important to mention here that I didn’t “mess it up” per-se. I just … didn’t make lava cakes that looked like the ones in the recipe. I used the brownie mix I was told and the exact brand of chocolates for filling (though the recipe said dark chocolates and I got milk chocolates). I even added the extra egg for cake texture and used clear custard dishes for baking.
But …
Sigh.
The point of lava cakes is that you get this perfect little chocolate cake and when you cut into it a wonderful surprise of melt-y chocolate flows out.
With my lava cakes (which took about two minutes on 70% heat instead of one minute on high heat in my microwave to bake) the chocolate melted right through the cake part and was all over on top. It definitely didn’t pour out like a wonderful, sweet surprise.
However, the vanilla ice cream melted well on the top of the cakes and once they cooled down enough to eat they were pretty tasty. When cooking they looked a bit like the brownies that used to come in frozen dinners, but they tasted way better than that when they were done. In fact they were too sweet and too dense for all of us to finish. If I make them again sometime (and I probably will just to see if I can ever get them to bake up right) I might make one for every two people instead of one for every person. Just to make sure they all get finished up.
So this week, between the orange chicken and the lava cakes, I’d call dinner a WIN=DRAW situation. The chicken was pretty good but the cakes needed some work.
2015
SOURCE – Slow Cooker Orange Chicken
SOURCE – Microwave Brownie Lava Cakes
