This Dog is my Sous Chef - Baking with Dogs

Don't be alarmed by the title

Left to Right: Kristi, Nikki, Ellie

For the past few weeks, I've been baking on Fridays with my friends Nikki, Ellie, and Kristi at Nikki's house. They're a pretty fun group of people to hang out with, and one of the best parts of baking is that there's often a dog in the house! Nikki actually fosters dogs for dpsrescue.org, and the latest little puppy to come through the program is Porter. Porter is rescued from (no joke) a dog meat factory in Asia, and I met him the first day he got stateside and he was extremely scared of humans. Literally no one could touch him(and it's still hard to get him to touch you) and when you looked at him he would just run away. Interestingly enough, I was able to look at him through a camera, probably because he didn't recognize that is people looking at him. Anyway, Porter is very much like a cat: even now he's licking himself clean, and if you're interested in adopting a loving dog who has been listening to A LOT of Shakira lately, check out Porter at the Palo Alto Food Express on Saturday March 4th from 1-4pm and Sunday March 5th 1-3pm.

Hard at work

So a few of things we've been baking includes lava cake, s'mores brownies, mango brownies, and today we made New York Cheesecake. If you're wondering about the difference between the two, New York Cheesecake gets its creaminess from the additional cream you add in, and this time we used sour cream. It was a rough process, but we eventually got to baking - we bought materials on Friday and Nikki put the cream cheese and sour cream in the freezer instead of the refrigerator. As you can imagine, everything was frozen solid. The cream cheese were just bricks and the sour cream was just a block of ice. So after a short trip to Lucky's to buy new sticks of cream cheese and sour cream, we commenced baking. It all went smoothly at first - we used a hand mixer to mix the initial blocks of cream cheese into the foundation for cheesecake, but right after we took it out to add in the vanilla extract and milk mixture, it broke.

That's right, it just stopped working. Even after clicking the button multiple times, putting the plug in and out of the socket, and even having it switch hands the rotors would not budge. With no other alternative and having just worked arms this morning, I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed a whisk and got to mixing. This is not the recommended way to mix things - every second felt like I was lifting a weight plate with one hand. Thankfully, this was the moment where we started adding eggs and other liquids, which eventually got the cheesecake mixture to be a bit softer on my arm. After that intense workout, the creamy mixture was slathered into the pan and shoved into the oven. And now for the six hour wait.

Waiting

You can find me on Instagram as @stumpyeatsfood and on yelp at theplumpcat.yelp.com. You can also check out more of my photos on Flickr! If you've got a restaurant recommendation or even a recipe that you think I should try, send it to me at ryanjchen2@gmail.com! Thank you for reading!