Whatever, Martha

If you haven’t seen the show Whatever, Martha, I highly suggest checking it out. Martha Stewart’s daughter and her friend watch old episodes of the Martha Stewart show and make fun of her. It’s hilarious! I promised you a story about our experience at the Martha Stewart taping:

Once again, we were the last people in line to get tickets, and it’s the same process with every show- wait a million hours to get in, go through security, wait again to be seated, etc. Martha’s set is HUGE! It’s exactly how it looks on tv, only bigger. You want to know the best part?? She was playing hip-hop music the whole time! Not just any hip-hop music, the good stuff from the 90’s and early 00’s. It was awesome. I guess she really did learn something in the slammer! I have a new found respect for Martha after that. In my previous post I mentioned that Rachael Ray didn’t feed us at her show. Not only did Martha give out delicious cookies that were being made on the show(ok, it was a swap out but still), she gave out Charles Grodin’s book(he was a guest that day), stuff for your pets, and a plant! Take that, Rachael!

Since Martha is now officially my homegirl, I decided to use another dessert recipe of hers and make it low-fat with fewer calories. I made a marble cake recipe for Rosh Hashana. It was actually my first time making a holiday dinner by myself and everything came out great, but since Allison went on and on with her dinner story, I’ll just stick to the dessert.

These are the original ingredients:

 Makes one 9-by-5-inch loaf

· 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pan
· 1 3/4 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
· 2 teaspoons baking powder
· 1/2 teaspoon salt
· 1 cup sugar
· 3 large eggs, room temperature
· 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
· 2/3 cup buttermilk, room temperature
· 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon Dutch-process cocoa powder

What I used to make it low fat, everything the same except:

- 1/4 butter and 1/4 applesauce (instead of using all that butter)
- 1 egg and 6 whites (I learned my lesson per- the egg white disaster.com)
- 2/3 milk and 1 tablespoon cream of tartar (instead of buttermilk)

I have no idea what the difference is between regular cocoa powder and dutch-process cocoa powder, so I just used the regular. You don’t really have to substitute the buttermilk, but I didn’t have any and I don’t like the way it tastes. Making this was a pain in the ass, and not as easy as I thought, and on-top of it all, it tasted like crap! I did everything right according to the recipe, but I think it was the cake flour that made everything taste bad. When Allison was here we tried to make an angel food cake from scratch and used the same Swan’s Down cake flour which also came out bad and didn’t taste right either. If anyone has suggestions of what cake flour to use, I would appreciate it because until then I’m not making another cake from scratch! I bought a loaf pan and everything, just to throw it all out.

I decided from now on that instead of making low-fat desserts from scratch, I am going to buy pre-made mixes and make them low fat and see which ones taste best, how many calories you can save, and rate them accordingly. It’ll be a guide for those of you that want to make a quick dessert without the added fat and calories, so stay tuned. So for now my Martha recipes are on hold, but in the meantime I encourage all of you to watch Whatever, Martha. I should get some kind of endorsement from her already: