Happy Valentine's Day!

My attempt at a pretty cake... I said 'attempt'. It tastes good at least! Chocolate 2 layer cake with my mom's recipe for confection sugar frosting.

For dinner we had rib eye steaks that we aged, sauteed shiitake mushrooms with scallions and butter, and red potatoes done in the skillet with garlic, rosemary, and butter. The wine was a Pinot Noir by Cavit.

Aging steaks is easy, but I don't know how much it really adds to the meat. I think 4 days was too long this time, and we do better with just the overnight age. The ultimate goal of aging meat is for better flavour. To achieve this, the meat must loose excess moisture and should end up weighing about 1/2 of what it did when you purchased it. I prefer my meat nice and juicy, so an overnight age tastes better to me personally. The biggest thing to remember when aging is to replace the paper towel under the meat every day, and allow plenty of air flow. 

The steaks as we bought them

Aging the steaks in the fridge day 2

Day 3 of aging 
(I flipped the lower right steak bottom side up for the picture to show the difference better)

Day 4 of aging

By day 4 (the day we cooked them) you can really see the difference. They did end up weighing almost 1/2 of what they did when we first bought them (due to the diminished moisture content). We also salted the bottoms of the steaks on day 2 in order to help wick out moisture. It's important to always keep the same side down while aging.