From the TV Casualties Cookbook: Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Icing

What goes better with TV than food?  Especially food of the sugar coated variety!
If you’re going to be a fat ass couch potato, you might as well get there eating awesome food.

This recipe was originally from Bon Appétit, but I’ve made some improvements.  Take my advice and don’t go fouling it up with raisins – or worse – nuts.

Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Icing

Ingredients
Cake:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (or a mix of nutmeg, ginger, and allspice)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup yogurt
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 4 large eggs
• 3 cups grated peeled carrots (about 10 average sized carrots)
• (optional) 2 tablespoons crystallized ginger

Icing:

• 10 ounces cream cheese (if you only have 8 ounces, substitute an additional 4 TB of butter)
• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup pure maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F and set out the cream cheese and butter for the icing so it can get nice and squishy soft.
Grease two 9-inch-diameter cake pans. Whisk flour, baking soda, salt and spices in medium bowl to blend. Whisk sugar, oil, and yogurt in large bowl until well blended. Whisk in eggs 1 at a time. Add flour mixture and stir until blended. Stir in carrots and crystallized ginger. Divide batter between prepared pans.
Bake cakes until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, about 30-35 minutes. Cool cakes in pans 15 minutes. Turn out onto racks and let cool completely.
Using electric mixer, beat cream cheese and butter in large bowl until light and fluffy. Add powdered sugar and beat at low speed until well blended. Beat in maple syrup and vanilla. Chill until just firm enough to spread, 30 minutes.
Place 1 cake layer on platter. Spread with about 1/3 of the icing. Top with second layer. Spread remaining icing over entire cake. Garnish with cinnamon or crystallized ginger (optional).
We think this cake is really best after it’s been refrigerated (not that we can wait).

Kitchen Nightmares: Gordon Ramsay Takes a Bite Out of Culinary Crime

“We’ve got fucking fur on fucking potatoes.”

This is one of Gordon Ramsay’s many gripes about the first restaurant he visits in the original UK “Kitchen Nightmares“, which is finally available on DVD.

Had I been left to my own devices, I probably never would have watched this show. I made it through the first episode of “Hell’s Kitchen” a few years ago, but Ramsay was such an unbearable prick I couldn’t stand to watch another. “Kitchen Nightmares” came highly recommended by a friend with good taste in television (Hi Justin!), so I decided, begrudgingly, to watch.

The general idea of the show is simple: Ramsay spends one week with a failing restaurant and tries to turn it around. The problems for most of the restaurants stem from the same basic ingredients – naive owners that don’t have the balls to confront their lazy, arrogant chef(s) whom are often attempting to serve “fine dining” cuisine without the skills to back it up.

The producers of “Hell’s Kitchen“  seem to have based their entire show around the first episode of “Nightmares“, culling Gordon’s signature “moves” directly from it – mainly berating the contestants and either spitting our their food or dumping it on them.  (Episode 1 has an F-word count of 75, in case you were curious.) However, unlike “Hell’s Kitchen“, in which Ramsay comes off as fake, melodramatic, and a bully, “Nightmares” shows Ramsay as someone who is passionate about food and the restaurant business. His anger is warranted. The chefs and owners in “Nightmares” are essentially throwing money away. After a few minutes of watching the chefs in action, I generally feel like they have it coming, and some of them are producing such disgusting food that I’ve questioned ever eating in a restaurant again. While he may engage in a bit of theatrics (like when he dumps an unsatisfactory dish into a potted plant), he genuinely cares about saving these struggling restaurants.

Overall, “Nightmares” is really entertaining, especially for a food show. It focuses more on the practical side of the restaurant business, and though it has a documentary style format, it still has the life-and-death feel of an elimination show without the phony judges and politics. The actual public ultimately decides whether these businesses succeed or fail. Ramsay is brutally honest, but the asshole knows what he’s talking about.

Food Fight, Round 1: Top Chef Masters vs. Next Food Network Star

The Food Network hates “Top Chef.” Apparently so much so that they’ve forbidden their on-air talent from appearing on Bravo’s highly successful food show. Beloved judge Ted Allen, for example, will make no more appearances on TC now that he’s landed his own show, “Food Detectives,” on Food. When asked for the reason behind this, Tom Colicchio referred to Food Network’s “little policy.”

Get ready for food puns: This “beef” between networks adds a little “bitterness” to the competition between their reality shows, both of which “served up” “fresh” seasons this week – the fifth season of “The Next Food Network Star” and the debut of “Top Chef Masters,” an all-star spin off. So how do they compare? Allow me to achy break this down.

Judging the Judges:

“Top Chef Masters”: “Masters” brings fresh faces (and an alternative scoring system) to the judging table rather than using the regular “Top Chef” crew. Reality shows are largely built on familiarity (“pack your knives and go,” the same pieces of music every week, etc.), so there is some risk in changing things up like this. After 5 seasons in 3 years, however, the franchise runs the risk of getting stale – these new judges are a welcome breath of fresh air.

The new regulars are “New York” magazine’s insatiable critic, Gael Greene, and food author and editor, James Oseland. London food critic, Jay Rayner, joins them in the series premier. Oseland dominates the discussion and provides the most colorful comments. His lisping enthusiasm is balanced nicely by the dour Brit Rayner. Greene actually doesn’t seem to say much.

The new scoring system uses a 5 star scale, with each judge getting a vote after both the quickfire and elimination challenge and the sums totaled at the end. It’s interesting to have transparency in the voting process. Perhaps even more interesting – new host Kelly Choi, despite having much more food background and experience than Padma Lakshmi, does not get a vote. “Top Chef” certainly implies that Padma has a say in results.

Score: /5

“Next Food Network Star”: Here the faces remain the same. Bobby Flay serves as one member of the selection committee with some of the hosting duties as well. One of the network’s biggest stars, Flay is likeable and comes across as the most genuine of the 3 judges. Adding him as a regular judge (which started last year) was a big plus. The other two members of the committee are network executives Bob Tuschman and Susie Fogelson.

You hear a lot of trash talk about TV executives, and now we know why. To put it in food terms, Bob and Susie are phony balogna. Their judge’s table comments sound as if they’re being read directly off a producer’s cue card. Every (scripted) word is setting up season long stories for each contestant, with catch phrases and talking points repeated throughout the season. (This is somewhat ironic considering “you’re too fake” is among their favorite complaints.) I don’t believe it when they laugh. I don’t believe it when they make puppy dog eyes at a contestant’s sob story. I don’t even believe it when they smile.

Score: /5 (Bobby Flay gets all 1.5 stars to himself.)

Judging the Contestants:

“Top Chef Masters”: The masters are comprised of wicked awesome chefs from around the globe. The star studded group includes a couple of familiar names in Hubert Keller, Rick Bayless, John Besh, and Wylie Dufresne, all former guest judges from the original series.

The contestants of the original show are often confident bordering on arrogant. The masters are a more mature lot. The confidence is still there, but these guys are secure enough to avoid the ego outbursts. They still take the challenges seriously, but they also look like they’re having a lot more fun than the non-masters. (The winnings go to charity, which does likely take some of the pressure off.)

All of the week 1 contestants were interesting. Frenchman Hubert Keller is the one that will move on, and he’s probably the coolest dude of the lot. He says if he wasn’t a chef, he’d be a DJ, and there are funny photos to prove it.

Score: /5

“Next Food Network Star”: There are a couple of chefs among those vying to win their own TV show, but most of the contestants are just people that want to be on TV and like food in that order. People with little ever hope of fame and fortune have their one chance here.

Their desperation shows. In some this manifests itself as crippling anxiety that derails their hopes early. Most just go way over the top. They may be aiming for Rachael Ray style peppiness, but they only succeed in being obnoxious, smarmy and essentially unwatchable.

Judging by the first episode, a contender for this year’s most annoying will be Brett August. His version of “high energy” seems to be talking to everyone like they’re children. It’s not that he’s a Gordon Ramsay style confrontational jerk – in fact, on a surface level he is being nice – he just never treats any of the people around him like they’re his peers.

Score: /5

Tallying the scores:

Top Chef Masters: Though perhaps a slightly watered down version of the original, “Masters” still works because the people involved have a passion for what they’re doing. The focus remains on the craft of cooking, and that is still interesting to watch.

Score: /10

Next Food Network Star: I am a fan of several Food Network shows. In fact, “Good Eats” really sparked my interest in food shows in the first place. There is something fundamentally demeaning about the way “Next Food Network Star” is handled, though, that makes me not really like any of the people involved. The contestants are too eager to sell their souls (which they may or may not have ever had), and the judges (outside of Flay) lick their chops wolfishly watching everyone grovel. Looking back, it was like winning the lottery to find a natural entertainer in Guy Fieri through this process. I posit that he will be the only winner to have real success.

Score: /10

Trailer Trash: Weekend of 6/12/09 Trailers

Not a big week for new movies. Here they are, though, ranked in order of how much I’d like to see them (from most to least):

Moon

A thriller in space starring Sam Rockwell.  The basic premise, a guy stationed alone in space for 3 years, reminded me a ton of the George R.R. Martin scifi short story “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” which is one of my favorite pieces of short fiction in any genre. “Moon” currently sits at 100% fresh on rotten tomatoes (out of 13 reviews), but it’s a limited release, and I doubt it will be anywhere around here.

Food, Inc.

A documentary about the reality of food as an industry and how far it is from the images used to market food to us. This might be like the opposite of watching food porn like “Top Chef,” but I’m still curious.

Street Dreams

Rob Dyrdek (of MTV’s “Rob & Big“) wrote a movie. There’s about a 110% chance that it won’t be very good.

Blast!

A documentary about astrophysicists living fast and not dying young. I’d be shocked if this came around here. I’ll give pretty much any doc a chance, though, so I may find it on DVD down the road.

Tetro (opens June 11)

Francis Ford Copolla’s new movie. Will it be his first good movie in 30 years? Doubtful. At least with Vincent Gallo as the lead, it’s guaranteed to be moderately annoying.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Synopsis: John Travolta takes a bunch of hostages and many cars flip over. This is the third feature film adaptation of the novel by John Godey.

Imagine That

Eddie Murphy kids movie that reminds me of Jim Carrey’s “Liar Liar.”