Skip to content

Chocolate Cake Revisited

The second half of the frozen chocolate cake came out for a dinner party in November.  I have a report that it seemed a bit stale, but I thought it was pretty good, and that the contact time spent between the cake and the icing made for mushier boundaries between the two, making the whole thing like a dense icing-cake rather than fluffy cake layers separated by icing.  I can see how that might not be to everyone’s taste.  I think the moral of the story is that this cake freezes OK, but don’t leave it sitting in the freezer for too many months before eating it.

Cookie Dough

I know, this one is obvious.  People put chunks of raw cookie dough in ice cream and eat it just like that.  People have frozen tubes of cookie dough to make Christmas cookies for as long as I can remember (and probably longer).  But I don’t think I’ve ever really done this myself.

I didn’t want a plain old cookie dough, like the kind that gets icing on it once baked at Christmas, so I decided to freeze leftover dough from a giant chocolate chip cookie I was making, from a recipe that I found online.  I froze the tube, in this case only for a few weeks before I needed it for “emergency” cookies.  I thawed the dough in the fridge for a while, perhaps not quite long enough since the chocolate chips and chunks were still pretty solid when I was slicing it up.  The tube wasn’t completely round so the cookies were a bit oblong, but otherwise they were pretty good, a little thinner than I’ve typically been making them since the dough is really sticky when it’s at room temperature so it’s hard to mash the balls of dough flat when I’m making them fresh.  I’ll definitely double my batch in the future and freeze some of the dough for later.  If I’m getting out all the ingredients anyway, might as well mix double.

Risotto

Apparently freezing risotto is a great way to make mashed potatoes.  I am trying to be the guinea pig for my frozen food experiments, but due to circumstances of timing on this occasion, my wife volunteered (or I volunteered her – the result is the same, anyway) to try a serving of frozen leek risotto with goat cheese.  The goat cheese was not frozen, and was added upon reheating.  Apparently it all just turned into mush and the flavour of the leeks disappeared.  Good to know – risotto makes for good leftovers, but not out of the freezer.

Pineapple

At one point I had cut up a fresh pineapple but didn’t have enough time to eat it all before it was going to spoil.  We were probably going away on a trip or something.  So I froze about 2 cups of nice bright yellow pineapple chunks in a clear bag.  For six months I’ve been eyeing those pieces of pineapple in the freezer, waiting for the perfect time to pull them out and eat them.

The time finally came, so I transferred them to the fridge.  After a day or so, they seemed to be mostly thawed, so I figured I’d put them in yogurt the next day.

The next day, the pineapple was starting to turn brown, but most of the pieces still looked quite edible.  I decided to just put half of it in a bowl to try to eat plain.  It’s hard to describe the flavour.  It didn’t taste “off” like the way old watermelon does.  However, while it still had a pineapple flavour, the sweetness was essentially gone.  It was like I had created a savoury variant of pineapple.  This may be exactly what some people are looking for, but it’s not what I was after.  I guess freezing pineapple doesn’t work.

Chocolate Cake

McCain does it, so why can’t I?  But my cake doesn’t need to be flavourless despite its claim of chocolatiness, and I don’t need an inch of perfectly peaked fluffy icing on top.  I’m talking about good old chocolate layer cake covered with a normal layer of icing which is heavy on the sugar and butter.

Searching the web for a good recipe for chocolate layer cake for my wife’s birthday, I came across this one which actually claims that it can be frozen.  Oh, but wait, it just says you can freeze the freshly baked naked layers.  Rest assured that if anything is getting frozen here, it’s the completed iced cake.  Not being one for inefficient food production, I figured if I’m making one cake I might as well make two (it was also to hedge against running out in case a lot of people came to the open-invitation party).  And so it was that I had an entire cake left over and space designated for it in the freezer.  I first froze the cake fully exposed on a plate, so that I could then pull it out and wrap it in waxed paper and then aluminum foil without messing with the icing spread patterns on the top and sides.  When I thawed it a month later, aside from some pesky condensation which took hours to disappear in the July humidity, it was as good as new.

But at that second party, we only ate half of the thawed cake.  What to do with the other half but to repeat the process?  I know you can’t refreeze meat (note to self: think about this for a future post), but nobody ever told me I can’t refreeze cake.  That half cake is still in my freezer, just over two months old now, and I’m torn between running a six-month experiment (i.e. resurfacing at Christmas) and just pulling it out and enjoying it in the next few weeks.  I’ll let you know when I decide.

Beet Freeze-off

Beets are undeniably messy, but they are healthy and don’t require much dressing up in order to look and taste like a proper side dish.  But who wants to get stuck with stained red hands from scrubbing dirt off the beets every time you want to eat them?

So I’ve frozen some scrubbed halved beets for later cooking, as well as some cooked and diced beets, perhaps for a blind taste test at a dinner party on a future date.  I expect this to be successful in a way that I can’t reasonably hope for some of my upcoming experiments, for example resurrecting frozen beet greens, which will be a whole other story.  I can’t see uncooked beets turning to mush, even if I drove a car over them.

Introduction

Having left the corporate world in order to feed my family during the school year (among other things), I’m faced with the endless culinary possibilities of today’s internet-based recipes and globally sourced exotic foods, while at the same time wanting to take advantage of local and healthy meat and produce where possible.  I derive a certain enjoyment from food preparation but I often find it disappointing to put in all that effort only to have everything be gone in far less time than it took to prepare.  I’d rather prepare larger batches and have food ready to be thawed for dinner.

I know that industrialization of food production has been done to death, and that’s not quite what I’m looking for.  However, I would like to explore the use of the freezer as a way to put together good healthy food ingredients as well as near-fully prepared meals or dishes, whether in family- or single-sized portions.  I can test these concoctions on myself during lunches, since I will eat pretty much any thawed mush, but I will hopefully discover frozen food secrets on the internet and in my own kitchen through my experimentation, providing a healthy and happy eating experience without necessarily slaving away between 4pm and 6pm every day.