King of Calzones

I decided to try making calzones again (it's been ages) but using a King Arthur Flour recipe. I seem to get pretty good results with their recipes so here's hoping it works! Interesting note to their recipe is that the dough is really just their Hearth Bread recipe.

The recipes makes two calzones the contents of which I decided to be...

#1 Mushrooms sauteed in olive oil with garlic. I used spaghetti sauce as the base and threw in some farmer cheese that I had on hand for the salt factor. Damn that stuff is salty!!

#2 Gravlax. Hey, I made 6 lbs of the stuff! I gotta get creative here. I threw it with ricotta cheese to balance it out.

So how spectacular are they to be worthy of being King? In this case, size matters. They were both one foot long and nearly as wide!! As for taste...not bad. There's lots of potential hiding in these pockets of dough. #1 tastes better than #2. Or maybe I'm just tired of eating pound after pound of oversalted gravlax. It'll be a while before I revisit making that! I thought I added enough cheese for both, but nope. I needed way more! The farmer cheese just disappeared into the mix as if none were added! The gravlax overpowered everything else including the bread, but was made extra salty by the ricotta. Here I thought it wasn't all that salty. Well, it was salty enough. So something to counter the heavy aspect of the salmon would have been nice. Alas, the bread was too bland for that. Maybe an herb (dill since it's gravlax?) or a veg would have been better. Either way, I won't be putting that into a calzone again unless I'm truly inspired by something. Maybe I should put in horseradish!!

Regardless of the innards, the bread was great though a bit too crunchy since it was so flat. I should have rolled it as recommended though the foldover (combover?) was given as an alternative. I could definitely make the bread part just as a loaf. I enjoyed the flavor of the crunchy crust, while there were a lot of holes on the inside "meat" of the bread. Overall though, these calzones are funny looking. =P

For dessert, I made Nigella's Chocolate Fudge Cake but without the fugde. As usual, I forego the icing part. At this point, I'm starting to lose faith in her desserts. I never found her desserts to be that wondrous, though there were a few here and there that were pretty good. The rest were mostly average, a few were just downright trash. This fell into the average spectrum. Not enough chocolate flavor. The seemingly sumptuous additions of fat in the form of sour cream provided very little to the cake aside from higher cholesterol. Though the cake was fairly light in texture (ok, the sour cream probably helped here), the lack of flavor killed its effect. It only made the cake even more bland as if I were truly eating air. However, I did enjoy the top which had a nice slight and unexpected crunch. I actually made one 8x8 square cake and then a bunch of muffins instead of a 2-tiered cake. Since I was so underwhelmed by the results, I chose not to give my friend any of the cake in muffin form.

I suppose frosting fans could say that the cake is fantastic with the sugary topping, but I must disagree. The cake part should be able to stand on its own. The frosting should merely enhance the beauty already there. Also, the cake itself was plenty sweet enough, though not quite overwhelmingly so. It was a tad over just-right. The addition of frosting would have been sugar overkill especially since it would have been in cloying fudge form. No thanks. I'll take my cake without a side of diabetes please.