Garlic Cakes!

It's no secret around here that I love garlic. Like, a lot. It's my favorite food, regardless of the fact that most people strangely consider it a seasoning, and not an actual food!

And also, I love crab cakes.

Well, remember a while back, when I posted pictures of my first attempt at making homemade crab cakes? Here's a refresher:

It turns out, I was inspired by a comment on that blog post, from Hannah:

So because this weekend is when the Gilroy Garlic Festival takes place, and we don't get to go on our annual trip to over indulge in garlic (since sadly my hubs didn't want to travel across the country for it, pshhh!), I finally made us some garlic cakes!

Yes, you read that right. Like crab cakes, but instead of jumbo lump crab meat, I used roasted garlic cloves!

First, I roasted 3 heads of garlic in my roasting machine, which I've written about before.

Once cooked, I removed the roasted garlic cloves (I find it easiest to just stab them with a butter knife to pull them out, when they're still warm and moist from the olive oil they were cooked in).

Then, I decided I wanted to experiment with two different kinds of garlic cakes. So I split the garlic into two bowls, and made one exactly like the crab cake recipe I used before. Except of course I used the garlic cloves instead of the crab meat, and added an extra 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs, since I had less garlic cloves than crab, to bring it to the right consistency.

For my second batch, I added the following to my ~1 1/2 head of garlic cloves:

• 1/2 cup seasoned breadcrumbs
• 1 egg
• 2 chopped fresh basil leaves
• 2 tablespoons shredded parmesan cheese
• 1 tablespoon of garlic infused olive oil (just in case there wasn't enough garlic already!)
• squirt of lemon juice
• couple dashes of oregano, parsley, salt and pepper
• one small dash of paprika

Once I had my two types of garlic cake mixtures, I used a 1/4 cup measuring cup to press the mixture into, to form the cakes, and put them on a greased baking sheet.

Bake at 425 degrees for 10-12 minutes, and you have little garlicy, bready bites of goodness!

 

A couple of notes: I liked my basil/parm version of the garlic cakes (dipped in garlic butter, yum!) better than the crab cake recipe version.

The Worcestershire Sauce in the crab cake recipe is a good compliment to crab, but was a little overpowering for the garlic. I dipped these cakes in garlic EVOO and 18 year aged balsamic vinegar, and it covered the Worcestershire Sauce flavor pretty well, so maybe if I try this again I'll sub Worcestershire for balsamic vinegar. Or maybe just make the basil/parmesan ones with my full 3 heads of roasted garlic!

Mmmm, I'm drooling again just looking at these photos! Luckily we only ate half the garlic cakes last night, so we have more for tonight. And yes, as I said when I replied to the blog comment that inspired it all, I did in fact die and go to heaven when I ate these!

Thanks Hannah, for the marvelous inspiration! I'll definitely make these again for you, when you finally come visit me. :)