once upon a cupcake

adam's apple dumplings

2012-03-06T19:22:00.001-05:00

Are you confused as to whether or not these are apple dumplings that belong to Adam or dumplings made of Adam's apples? I didn't think so, but as an editor, I enjoy the word play.

Moving on, these were for Adam's birthday way back in the before time, in the long long ago. (Think, February.) I'd actually never made apple dumplings before, so this was a dessert first!

First off, we have the sauce that gets poured everywhere and bubbles up nicely when baked. Sugar, water, butter, and cinnamon.

It's always hard to catch a picture when making sauces. I'm too afraid my camera will plunge into the sticky pot!

Dumpling dough is next. Good thing I know how to use a pastry cutter from all my strawberry shortcake experience.

Those are not my tattooed arms. I can't roll dough at our island without being on a ladder, so Mark graciously steps up to the dough, so to speak.

We got these great apples at the Pittsburgh Public Market. Love it there. LOVE.

After I was done drooling over the apples, it was time to peel and core. Or core and peel, as the case may be.

The apples hung out while the dough was cut into squares for wrapping.

Each apple was placed on the dough, filled with honey, and then topped with a cinnamon/sugar/butter mix.

I didn't get any shots of them in the pan, wrapped up, but I managed to grab one before I dug in!

I'm a CakeSpy finalist!

2012-01-17T17:10:00.001-05:00

I recently entered a contest through www.cakespy.com, one of my favorite websites for all things cupcake and dessert related. I entered one of my best desserts - the banana caramel coconut cream pie with dark rum which I previously posted about. I just found out today I'm one of 30 finalists out of hundreds of entries!

To determine who the winner will be, they are asking people to weigh in on the best dessert on her website, Facebook, and Flickr accounts. I'm asking for your help in commenting on the blog, spreading the word and voting on Facebook, and commenting on the Flickr page. I'm entry #13 on the webpage and there's a link to my own blog entry about it. I stand to win a trip for two to Seattle to visit the CakeSpy headquarters! Competition is tough, so any votes you can send my way in these three mediums would be much appreciated! Feel free to spread the word - every comment and "like" counts!

On the blog: http://www.cakespy.com/blog/2012/1/16/so-you-wanna-be-a-cakespy-contest-finalists.html

On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.306558092714235.62424.187321311304581&type=1

And the Flickr album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cakespy/sets/72157628899555249/

the best cream pie you will ever eat. period.

2012-01-03T20:41:00.004-05:00

This is the story about a cream pie to top all other cream pies. Bananas. Caramel. Coconut. Dark rum. And the pièce de résistance? Animal cracker crust. Behold the glory that is the Banana Caramel Coconut Cream Pie with Dark Rum.

Start with butter, unsweetened coconut, sugar, and animal crackers.

Don't you just love animal crackers? They bring back so many good childhood memories and come in a box shaped like a circus car with a little handle. What's not to love? Especially when they are in a buttery pie crust?

The only part of the pie that is baked is the crust.

While it cools, make the simple caramel sauce. Just four ingredients total, but it's really the sugar and water that make the crazy transformation.

I tried to catch it as it changed from sugar water to caramel. Notice the color difference as it approaches "dark amber."

Because the dark amber comes at a moment's notice and will quickly lead to burnt caramel, I had to put the camera down after that last one. Add a pinch of salt and the cream to the pan, and after some furious bubbling, you get caramel.

Add more butter, because, well, naturally.

And into the pie crust it goes.

After the caramel cools off a little, you can add layer 3. Bananas, slightly underripe.

Next comes the coconut custard cream. Ingredients below, as well as a gratuitous egg shot and a shout out to Green Circle Farms for these amazingly beautiful eggs.

Notice the cream only uses the yolks. You could consider making meringue cookies or macaroons with the leftover whites. Start by making what looks like yellow paste with the cornstarch and egg yolks.

Here's where I missed a few photos, in making sure the heated ingredients didn't overflow on the stove. You heat coconut milk, sugar, milk, and coconut together and then whisk some of it into the egg mixture to temper it. (If you are me, you drip it down the side of the pot as well. Thanks to Amber for at least capturing this part of the process.)

Once it is tempered, you can whisk in the rest, and get a creamy yellow custard, to which you can add butter, vanilla, and dark rum, like this. Only it looks prettier in person and smells heavenly too.

Layer 4 complete.

At this point the pie goes in the fridge, with plastic wrap pressed down onto the custard. You make the last step (whipped cream topping with toasted coconut) when you are ready to serve the pie. Which in my case, was the next day. New Year's Day, to be exact. The first dessert of 2012.

Like any good, real whipped cream, mix it together in a bowl and beat it into submission.

Spread it on the top of the pie.

Add some toasted unsweetened coconut, and you have a pie.

Just looking at it again makes my stomach growl and my mouth dream of animal crackers and coconut.

I've heard from the people who ate this pie at Christmas and also those of us who had it again when I made it for New Year's, that it was the best cream pie in the history of cream pies. Anthony even unleashed his "this is delicious" face, reserved only for the most delectable of baked goods, which makes me quite proud, actually. I can't wait for another occasion to make someone's dessert dreams come true by making this pie.

annual gingerbread house

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

We have made a gingerbread house each Christmas that we've been together, so this year was our third one. We used a boxed kit since we had more important baking going on in the house. We also used the box icing for the first time, and honestly it didn't turn out as badly as I suspected!

We manage to work in the year on the back of each house. Here are the houses in progression from 2009 to now. Can't wait until 2012!

stone Christmas sampler 2011

2011-12-26T15:08:00.002-05:00

In a three-day annual tradition, our home was transformed into Santa's bakeshop, as we prepared our Christmas cookie packages. We made 24 total packages this year, including a tray for Mark's office. Instead of taking photos of the process of each, which would have added an extra day, I took final pictures of each item. Here they are, the items of the Stone Christmas Sampler, 2011.

Homemade Marshmallows

Grandma Stiffler's Molasses Cookies with Sugar Stencils

Chocolate Espresso Snowballs

Mark's Family Fruitcake

(these ones were decorated for my grandparents, hence the F and T)

Holiday Sugar Cookies

Eggnog Fudge

Chocolate Peppermint Biscotti with White Chocolate and Candy Canes

Sugar Plum Popcorn Balls

(with our plum jam!)

Candied Orange Peels with Chocolate and Almonds

Peanut Butter Truffles

Sci-fi Gingerbread

(Star Trek and Star Wars)

pumpkin cheesecake brownies

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

I made these brownies as the dessert for our pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner with Amber and Anthony. You can read about that on my other blog, Canning: The Next Generation. But here we have some delicious fall goodness, the last of the pumpkin desserts this season. I hand-mixed these, mostly with my trusty little whisk. As much as I love my KitchenAid, sometimes it's fun to remind myself that baking can be done without it!

The cream cheese topping I made separately, using a hand mixer to beat the cream cheese. (My little whisk couldn't cut it with that.)

We ate them with homemade pumpkin ice cream that Mark made (sans the nutmeg since he's an awesome husband and knows I hate it).

They were really rich and thick, though you can't tell from this bad tungsten light photo. Definitely a good combination!

ninja fudge brownies

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Anthony requested fudge brownies for his birthday, so that's what he got. He didn't ask for ninjas, but thanks to Amber, he got those too. I used a fudge brownie recipe that had three kinds of chocolate (all fair trade certified, except for the last of the Hershey's cocoa we're using up so as to not be wasteful).

I really wanted to catch the egg mixture mid-drip.

I made a foil sling for the brownies so they could be easily pulled out of the pan and cut without damaging the pan.

Once cool, we added the ninja honor guard.

And once at the restaurant, flaming pirate candles, including a ship, a parrot, and a treasure chest.

The yellow ninja in this next photo looks like he's fist pumping.

The most rich, fudgey brownie I've ever eaten. Right here to the west of Bounty Bay and north of Parrot's Cove.

spooky cupcakes

2011-11-13T17:39:00.001-05:00

I'm obviously a little behind, still focusing on Halloween stuff, but these were too fun to not feature. They were also probably one of my top 3 cupcakes of all time, taste-wise. It was so hard to eat just one! I made these specifically for Mark to take to work, and thought it fitting to use his mixer for the job. (It's a vintage Kitchen Aid crank mixer. It belonged to his grandma.)

I only used the ginger and cinnamon, leaving out the other cloves and nutmeg (I hate both). I think it still gives a good "spice" taste.

Of course the cupcake liners had to be spooky skulls, being for Mark and all.

This is my favorite fall mug - and it seemed appropriate to house the spatulas for this particular project!

While the 36 (!) cupcakes were cooling, I worked on the cream cheese frosting. This was hands down the best cream cheese frosting I've ever made. Thanks, Martha Stewart.

I had so many to ice that I didn't pipe the frosting. Sometimes I like the look of the homemade, almost unkempt cupcake. I also usually don't deal with cupcake picks since they feel kind of wasteful since you just pull it out, but with the skulls and the pick your poison sayings, I made an exception.

I a

I had so much extra batter that I made an extra dozen cupcakes to take to my office to share. I ran out of picks so I used my other Halloweeney sprinkles and went to town.

And my favorite shot, since I took it right before I plopped this directly into my mouth. SO delicious. I almost want to make them for Thanksgiving!

seasonal treat: pumpkin gingersnap cookies

2011-10-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

Around this time of year, I love seasonal recipes and making things that remind me of fall. I made these for Mark this weekend, and though they turned out much more soft than what you'd usually think of as a gingersnap, they were still a great fall treat.

The black tar looking goop is molasses. I adore the smell of molasses and love cookies made with it. (Which reminds me I need to make a family recipe for molasses cookies soon...)

Batter for gingersnaps with molasses always looks gross until the dry ingredients are blended into the mix. Little clumps of butter and sugar everywhere.

There we go. This is better.

hawaiian wedding cupcakes

2011-10-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

We recently made cupcakes for one of my work friend's daughter's wedding reception. We attempted to make hibiscus flowers on top of bright tropical colored frosting. (They got married in Hawaii!)

We also made an almond cake for the bride and groom to cut into. The cake flavor got rave reviews.

grandma stone's concord grape cake

2011-10-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

I don't have process photos for this recipe, but after spying concord grapes at the farmer's market, Mark was reminded that he wanted to make his Grandma Stone's concord grape cake. It's basically an upside down cake with a concord grape topping, but don't let that simple description fool you. It was delicious. I'm glad my grandpa and parents picked and preserved a bunch of concord grapes for us so that we can make this at some point this winter. There's no grape like a concord grape.

alyn's birthday turtle cheesecake

2011-10-17T18:43:00.005-04:00

My title makes it sound like Alyn had a birthday turtle who liked cheesecake. But you know what I mean. This recipe had a swirled/marbled batter and a crust made out of chocolate graham crackers.

My springform pan isn't missing its bottom: it's glass. My grandma gave me this springform pan years ago when I was just starting to get into baking. It's Pampered Chef and is awesome. The bottom is glass, and it also comes with a bundt pan insert so you don't have to have two pans.

Sweetened condensed milk gave the batter a little bit of a caramel hint.

Time for the secret ingredient. You add it when you add the sugar. Can you guess what it is?

Corn starch! The tiny bit of corn starch helps to keep the cheesecake from cracking. Then it's on to the last bit of liquid, some vanilla extract.

After melting some chocolate bits (Sunspire chocolate!), you add in a little bit of batter and swirl to make the chocolate layer.

Each layer goes back and forth in the pan until it gets full.

And it goes into the oven, on top of a tray to catch any residual butter drippings from the crust. I also include a cake pan full of water to assist with the effort to keep it from cracking.

After letting it bake without opening the oven door to check on it and then allowing some heat to escape the oven after it's done so that it doesn't shock in temperature (and crack), it can come out to rest.

Topping time. Chocolate syrup, caramel syrup, and chocolate chips and pecans. That's the turtle part, I guess.

And once you get to the Spaghetti Warehouse for dinner and everyone finishes their meal, you can take it out to display on a red and white checked tablecloth. :)

I will spare Alyn and not post the photo of him in his balloon hat. But it was classic. That much I will tell you.

Decadent and rich, the key ingredients for deliciousness.

red velvet cupcakery review

2011-10-09T11:55:00.003-04:00

Over Labor Day weekend, we went to visit friends in Virginia. While there we did our customary vacation thing and stopped at a cupcake shop to sample the wares. This time it was Red Velvet Cupcakery. We only tried a few flavors as these were super expensive, which contributed to our general feeling of "meh" about them. Tasted just fine, of course much better than a nasty Giant Eagle cupcake, but still dry. What is it with people selling cupcakes thinking that letting them sit around for a day or two or somewhere that isn't airtight will not have an adverse effect on the flavor? Dry cake is one of my big culinary pet peeves. However, we're still glad we tried them out!

Cookies and cream.

Some type of chocolate/peanut butter, which would have been my favorite.

Espresso

Lemon and coconut

Campfire (toasted marshmallow and graham cracker)

Red velvet

Overall decent, with a good frosting to cake ratio. A little bit overpriced for what they were, but still good.

on a totally unrelated but important note

2011-09-01T09:04:00.001-04:00

On September 17, I will be participating in the Hemophilia Walk again in honor of my friend's son, Jeff, who died from complications related to hemophilia. Hemophilia patients can be faced with enormous medical bills that insurance will not cover, in addition to the cost of many trips to the doctor and the toll the stress takes on the patient and his/her family. The Western PA Chapter of the National Hemophilia Foundation provides DIRECT assistance to hemophilia patients and their families. Donations to this organization make a direct impact on people in need, in addition to also supporting research and raising awareness. My friend was a recipient of the support and services of this organization and now works diligently to provide that support to others in Jeff's memory.

If you would like to sponsor me, you can access the fundraising website here. When you make an online donation you will automatically receive an e-tax receipt from the Western Pennsylvania Chapter of NHF. You can also search for me under the team name, Jeff's Journey.

I appreciate any support you are able to give.

P.S. For additional information about the Western Pennsylvania Chapter of NHF and the National Hemophilia Foundation or this year’s Hemophilia Walk, please visit http://www.hemophilia.org/walk.

just a bite!

2011-08-29T20:51:00.022-04:00

One of my favorite snacks from childhood was a soft pretzel. We often had them in the freezer for a treat and we could pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds, drown it in salt, and enjoy. Last year I wondered if I could easily make soft pretzels myself, and I found this recipe from Two Peas and Their Pod. This weekend I decided I needed a relatively low calorie, salty snack with a side of nostalgia. So, while it's a stretch for a typical baked goods blog, they are technically a baked treat and are delicious, which seems qualified enough for me.

By the way, these are really easy to make. It would also be easy to spruce up with different flavors, and I could also see kids making shapes with the dough to make their own pretzels. (Maybe that's because next time I want to make shapes myself...)

First you get the yeast started with some brown sugar, butter, and water.

Add in the other ingredients after it's had time to activate, and use the dough hook to mix it around.

Eventually the dough will start to pull away from the side of the bowl.

Put it in an oiled bowl in a warm place and let it sit for an hour. It will go from this:

To this:

Chop the dough into 8 pieces, and roll into logs.

Cut into one inch bites.

Then prep your baking soda solution by boiling some water and adding a whole bunch of baking soda.

It will foam like crazy when you add it in.

Get your bites ready, dunk for 30 seconds, and fish them out.

Prepare the egg wash and place the little wet bites on a sheet tray to go in the oven.

Salt generously!

After about 10 minutes (in our HOT oven), you get these delightful snacks, which are warm, golden brown, and hard to resist.

vanilla bean cream cheese cupcakes

2011-08-28T07:43:00.022-04:00

Though I often like to try an adventurous cupcake recipe, sometimes simplicity is the way to go. My friend Jess had a birthday recently and requested vanilla cake with vanilla bean frosting. I ended up making cream cheese frosting, which was an interesting combination with my classic white cake recipe. (Adapted from the Magnolia Bakery cookbook.)

(I like this method of ingredient shots better; once everything is prepped it's much easier to get the recipe done with minimal mess. Though I'm pretty brand loyal to the ingredients I bake with, so if you ever want to know what brand/type of ingredient I use, just ask!)

This next shot is a good visual of how the bowl looks when being scraped by a beater blade. It's a Kitchen Aid mixer blade fitted with rubber scrapers that keeps the bowl scraped down as it moves around. My classic blade that comes with the mixer started chipping (!!!), so I had to throw it out lest I get paint pieces in someone's birthday treat. Thank goodness Amber and Anthony had given me a beater blade years ago for my birthday! It's now my trusty blade for most everything!

Cupcakes in the oven? Time for the frosting!

Not-so-secret special ingredient? Vanilla bean. Terrible shot, but using vanilla beans is easy. Cut down the middle with a paring knife, open the bean and scrape the seeds out.

The recipe I use for cream cheese frosting is rich. A little goes a long way, so I don't pipe it on cupcakes in piles. However those who believe that cake is merely a delivery method for icing would probably beg to differ.

Since these were for Jess' birthday, they needed something a little extra. A party on top.

to boldly go...a new direction

2011-08-14T16:00:00.000-04:00

One morning while I was clearing the dining room table of the previous evening's canning jars and silver bands, I said jokingly, "This week on Canning: The Next Generation, Joanna vows to never eat another bean again." We watch a lot of Star Trek in my house, particularly due to my wish to complete my list of 30 things to do before I turn 30, and watching every episode of every Star Trek series and all of the movies is on the list. We are currently on Season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I had probably just finished watching an episode or had just woken from a dream I was on a mission in deep space when I made that off-hand comment.

But it stuck in my head, especially as I've been thinking that this blog really isn't the place to talk about sweet corn and pickle brine. So I've decided to separate the posts, and leave this one to baking and books, and the other to our adventures in canning and preserving. You can find it at http://nextgencanning.blogspot.com. I'll update both blogs at the pace that we accomplish canning/baking/food projects, which is sometimes a full schedule and other times less often than I hope. (Oh full time work, you are so overrated.)

So head over to Canning: The Next Generation for more green beans than you can imagine and vegetables aplenty.

blueberry swirl birthday cheesecakes

2011-08-11T08:00:00.001-04:00

My friend Jenn at work had a birthday earlier this week. So I brought in a few blueberry swirl cheesecakes for her to share. This was the first time I tried this recipe, and it worked out relatively well. At least the office food vultures seemed to devour them quickly enough!

The cupcake liners get a crust made out of the typical cheesecake crust ingredients: graham crackers (ONLY HoneyMaid - generic graham crackers are garbage), butter, and sugar.

While the crusts set in the oven, make a blueberry sauce. Fresh blueberries of course. (These ones were from our CSA last week.)

Puree in the food processor and then press the juice through a fine mesh sieve. Add sugar and whisk.

While the crusts cool, make the cheesecake filling.

You swirl the cheesecake by using a toothpick in the drops of the fruit sauce. I forgot to take photos after they came out of the oven, but they looked pretty much the same. And tasted great!

grandma's peanut butter swirl bars

2011-08-09T19:57:00.014-04:00

I promised Mark when he got a Darth Vader cookie jar for his birthday from Amber and Anthony that I'd make him some cookies to "go in it." Even though the cookies didn't make it into the jar and made it to the freezer instead, these were meant to serve the empire. They're Mark's favorite cookie, and one of my grandma's signature cookie recipes. She made these for my sister and me all the time in our cookie care packages in college.

Side note. Chocolate has become a problematic ingredient for me as of late. Most conventional chocolate providers in this country are not fair trade, and child slavery is rampant in the cocoa industry. More than 1/3 of the chocolate we consume in this country comes from the Ivory Coast, where human trafficking is a huge problem. There are groups that work to get children out of this life (www.stopthetraffik.org/ourwork/chocolate). I've tried to stop purchasing chocolate that hasn't been verified from a third party to have not come from the work of child slaves, and so I picked up these SunSpire chocolate chips. More expensive than a bag of Nestle chips, yes, but I know it's coming from farmers who do not enslave children and who are compensated fairly for their goods. Something to think about, certainly. Luckily there are several brands of chocolate that are recommended that are confirmed to not participate in child slavery which are fantastic. SunSpire is just one, but Green & Black's is a great gourmet chocolate that also makes bars for baking.

But on to the baking! Beginning with peanut butter, my all time favorite.

Once the chips are in the pan, you put it in the oven for just a few minutes, until they look like this.

Then swirl!

Bake them up, and you get one giant cookie, ready to be cut into slabs and devoured. I am pretty sure we didn't even let this cool.

blueberry lime jam

2011-07-26T20:37:00.017-04:00

We made yet another variety of jam recently: blueberry lime. It had a really surprising flavor - something you wouldn't get from Welch's in the store, but it is delicious. Our amount of blueberries gave us about 6 half pints of jam. All fruit jams have an inordinate amount of sugar in them. (This one didn't have that whole container, just 5 cups. Which is a lot anyway.) This is the first recipe we canned using my grandma's jars.

beans that are green

2011-07-25T20:56:00.024-04:00

Mark and I canned our first veggies in a pressure canner this weekend: green beans. (You must can green beans in a pressure canner because a hot water bath cannot get hot enough to kill any botulism in the jar, leaving you susceptible to food borne illness.)

We used green beans that have had the "string" of the typical string bean grown out of them. Thus, when we snapped the ends, we didn't have to pull the string down before we chopped the beans.

The amount of beans we had ended up making 11 pints. The canner only held 10 pints, and rather than process twice, we plopped the last jar in the fridge to use up in the next few days.

Timeout while the green beans are canning. This next photo is only a fraction of the jars that my grandpa gave us, which belonged to my grandma, who canned in them for years. There are many different varieties, many of which I doubt you can buy anymore. It's really special for me that I'll be able to can in jars that she used. It's amazing that the jars are strong enough to hold up over generations of use. I can only imagine what was canned in these over the years. I can't wait to make HER applesauce this fall in HER jars when the local apples come to the farmer's market.

Later this week, I'll post about the first recipe we canned in her jars: blueberry lime jam.

Green beans are done! :)

I look at my photos and realize I will never really be the kind of blogger that sets up a light box and poses the food I make for the optimum look and feel. I guess to me it feels more real to see a photo of finished jars cooling on a pink valentine's day kitchen towel, next to a pile of bands to be dried and a pen to write labels, with a plastic bag and a tray full of garlic scapes and garden peppers in the background. Because that's what it looks like when canning overtakes your kitchen: chaos. It's not particularly glamorous, and it is SO very hot (I refrained from taking photos of us sweating to death). But it's the process of "putting up" -- preserving the summer bounty for the cold winter nights where I'll think, you know? I could really go for some garden beans right now. I'll just go down to the root cellar and get some.

Side note. In another example of not staging photos very well, I failed to remove an extra plastic pipe that extends the shelves, as well as a catnip mouse that we leave for Maggie in the basement from that photo. We do not have rodents invading our makeshift root cellar. Just so you know.

vanilla and coconut cupcakes

2011-07-19T20:33:00.019-04:00

We traveled this past weekend to Erie for my family reunion. This was the first reunion where I made my own contribution to the food. As you can guess, I had to do cupcakes. I was even going to take photos of my family enjoying them, but to be honest it was too hot to be alive so my camera stayed in the bag. I made my favorite white/vanilla cake recipe and made a new coconut buttercream with toasted coconut.

Into the oven and on to the icing!

They melted a bit in the heat, but the coconut seemed to help the icing stay on the cupcake and we avoided disaster!

blueberry birthday

2011-07-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

We've been getting amazing fruit from local farms at our farmer's market, so I took advantage of some of our blueberries to make my mom's blueberry muffins for Mark's birthday breakfast. These muffins taste almost like cupcakes; they're irresistible!

I also used Kerrygold butter, pastured buttermilk, and the amazing local farm eggs we get. I think it made these even more delicious!

geek out: Harry Potter butterbeer cupcakes in Star Wars wrappers

2011-07-12T16:58:00.033-04:00

Mark turned 32 last week, and this time I didn't let him choose his birthday dessert. Last year I had purchased the Star Wars cupcake kits (wrappers and picks) from Williams Sonoma intending to save them for his birthday in case they were limited edition. (You can still buy them, as well as a ton of other awesome Star Wars kitchen stuff, by the way.) I told him I was making cupcakes, but that's all he knew. I chose butterbeer cupcakes (after the drink in the Harry Potter universe) because of Mark's love for butterscotch and all things geek. So that's how we got Harry Potter cupcakes in Star Wars wrappers.

Three days ago, in a kitchen just downstairs....

The "beer" part comes from cream soda in the batter.

Light side or dark side? Rebels or empire?

With the cupcakes in the oven, the butterscotch ganache filling is up next.

(Notice I had to switch whisks. The silicone one wasn't cutting it.)

On to the butterscotch frosting!

Fill cupcakes with ganache, and frost!

Adding the characters gives the final touch. (Though admittedly a dark one, considering I didn't switch the white balance and I have no idea what to do in photo editing software.)

sweet relish (are the cucumbers gone yet?)

2011-07-08T07:30:00.000-04:00

By the time we made some half pints of sweet relish, I was about ready to start feeding cucumbers to Maggie or peddling them door to door. We gave some to Amber, who was there and helped us with the canning operations that night.

That would be Amber chopping the peppers. Ooh shiny!

This is another recipe that sits for awhile in salt and water. Cucumber, peppers, onions, salt, and water.

While they soak, you can prepare the brine.

Relish actually cooks in its own brine on the stove before going into hot jars.

On to the top shelf!

how our garden grows

2011-07-06T20:00:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd post a few photos of our garden, especially since I'm particularly proud of the work Mark has done with it and how well it's doing considering we haven't used any fertilizer or pesticide, etc. and we also didn't really have much of an idea of what we were doing.

Can you name the plants?

Mark is growing tomatoes upside down in Lowe's buckets that hang on our back porch. They are showing real promise!

pickles, part deux

2011-07-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned before, we had so many cucumbers that we had to make several varieties. We made long dill slices in quarts and then made more in pints that were circle slices. But the most ambitious were the bread and butter pickles, which stained our island yellow from turmeric and made the kitchen smell like a giant humid cloud of vinegar. These are a favorite of many people, so I'll be excited to try them in August when they're ready. (The jars have to sit 4-6 weeks for the full flavor to soak in.)

First, cucumbers and onions have to soak together in ice and water with some canning salt.

Time out to see how the island was sprawling with canning and pickle paraphernalia.

The brine for bread and butter pickles has many more spices that get mixed into the vinegar.

We got 8 pints from this batch. We then also made more dill pickles in half pints. The shelf is growing!

cherry jam, or how my fingers turned purple for 4 days

2011-07-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

We got some (relatively) local cherries a few weeks ago that I wanted to turn into jam (as our strawberry jam is disappearing fast!). Little did I know it would take an hour to pit them and that my fingers and nails would be purple for days. It was worth it, because it turned out great.

These cherries weren't as juicy as the strawberries we used for jam earlier in June, so they had to macerate for a bit under a giant pile of sugar.

Cat time out. Sometime I'll catch Maggie without a suspicious look on her face.

Actually, we had company over, so I didn't get a photo of the jam while it cooked. But when it was done, it looked something like this.

We got 8 half pint jars out of this batch. The shelf is really starting to fill out!

a quest to find a pickle I will eat...

2011-07-01T21:39:00.019-04:00

I really don't like pickles. At all. Being exposed to the nasty deli tray pickles at work pretty much all the time (and every time you open the office fridge door) doesn't help, but I can't recall liking pickles since I was little. I remember not minding dill pickles, and also the ones that my grandmother made. And she was famous for her pickles.

So when Mark and I got the chance to get a case of organic cucumbers at a really reasonable price, we jumped on the opportunity to can them in a few varieties. First up, dill pickles, made with dill from our own garden.

We also used canning salt (the additives in regular salt can make your brine cloudy), which the brand name for some reason I keep calling Mrs. Pickles instead of Mrs. Wages.

(As you can tell, we had a ton of cucumbers. The ones stacked on the island behind the bowl were only part of them. We still had a half a case that we hadn't touched yet.)

My spice bag had larger holes than was useful, so some of the spice got out, but it's okay if it ends up in the brine in the jars.

(Mark is using the blue stick to remove air bubbles from the inside of the jar. That tool doubles as a head space measurement tool, which lets you know if you have the proper amount of space between the lid and the contents to affect a good seal.)

We got 6 quarts out of this batch. Here's the shelf update!

Cherry jam, bread and butter pickles, and a garden update still to come!

more adventures in preservation

2011-06-20T19:09:00.016-04:00

Mark and I have taken to canning and preservation like fish to water. I'm excited to continue to can each week as the harvest starts to appear in our CSA box and in the store/farmer's market. For various reasons including quality and the welfare of workers who pick our out of season tomatoes in this country, we are going to try to can as many fresh tomatoes as we can handle this year so as to try to not have to buy a fresh tomato in the store during the winter (and to give up eating fresh tomatoes on salads and sandwiches during that time as well). We also hope to can plenty of other veggies, sauces, salsas, and fruits as the season progresses.

Canning for us is a first step in trying to eat more locally, as well as a part of our continued efforts to give up chemically processed foods and eat organically. It also is special to me because I have a lot of memories of canning from growing up. I feel like in some small way I'm honoring my grandma's memory by canning like she would. (Come apple season I will be making some applesauce, mark my words.)

Anyway, we got more strawberries in our CSA this past week, so we made a half batch of strawberry lemon marmalade. (Recipe from the Ball Blue Book. Our copy is already sticky. Is that a good sign?)

Now that we're starting to have piles of jars in our dining room, we had to make a shelving area in our basement for the jars to be stored in a cool, dark place. Each time we can something, I'll take a photo of how the shelf is filling up to show our progress. Coming up later this week, cherry jam, dill pickles, and bread and butter pickles. (OK, the pickles aren't really sweet, and will be the first savory type thing I'll feature here, but as canning will be the name of the game in the summer, I'm going to include them.)

In the store so far, 9 half-pints of strawberry jam and 4 half-pints of strawberry lemon marmalade.

strawberry jam forever

2011-06-13T18:02:00.026-04:00

Our CSA had flats of strawberries available this week, so we took advantage of them and filled our fridge with quarts of farm fresh berries. You just can't buy berries in the store that taste like berries straight from the farm. Tiny little buds filled with sweetness and ripened on the vine. Drool.

We had so many that we decided to try our hand at canning strawberry jam through the method we learned at a canning and preserving class we took at CCAC. (If only I would have paid attention as a child when my mom and grandma would can in the summers!) So we used the recipe in the Ball Blue Book for regular strawberry jam and got to it!

(Dutch oven of jam cooking down, stock pot of sterile jars, canning pot full of boiling water makes for a very full stovetop.)

So then what do you do when you have one leftover quart of ripe strawberries? You make shortcake.

There is a test in my family when someone is first given the family shortcake, to see if they are a Freeman or not. Mark is not a Freeman. Here is his non-Freeman shortcake. Notice the element that makes it "not Freeman."

I, on the other hand, am a Freeman. A strawberry shortcake purist who thinks the gift of the shortcake and fresh berry topping needs to be enjoyed unadulterated. Behold, the best summer dinner in the world.

foodie book roundup

2011-06-07T17:22:00.008-04:00

I realized that it had been some time since I've talked about any of the food books I've read, and since this is one of my favorite genres of books, that list is always growing. Here are a few that I've read recently and would recommend.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love - by Kristin Kimball
This is a memoir by a woman who gave up her life as a journalist in NYC to start a farm from the ground up with her husband. It's beautifully written and tells the story of the nitty gritty reality of running a farm. Her descriptions of meals made lovingly from the fruits of the work of their own hands were captivating.

It also made me glad that we participate in a local CSA which helps small farms survive in the day and age of horrid factory farming and industrial agriculture.

Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms - by Nicolette Hahn Niman

Niman is ironically a vegetarian. She is an attorney who worked for Robert Kennedy's Waterkeeper project, and in her work began to discover the ugly truth of factory farming -- not only what it does to our food, but the animals, the water supply, and the environment in general, as well as the livelihood of farmers and industry workers. This book is partly a description of her own journey of discovery, but also gives practical advice on how we can make a difference and vote with our forks. Her husband was the founder of Niman Ranch, which raises animals in humane and sustainable conditions. This book is just one of the many voices that convincingly argue that we can choose to take back our knowledge of where our food comes from and how it is made, and make both practical and moral/ethical decisions we can live with based on that knowledge.

Fannie's Last Supper: Two Years, Twelve Courses, and Creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook - by Christopher Kimball

Christopher Kimball (of America's Test Kitchen and Cooks Illustrated fame) lives in Boston, and made it a project to discover as much as he could about Fannie Farmer and about how cooking and daily life would have been in her time. The book is devoted to the preparations for a 12 course, turn of the century meal that he and his staff prepared for a group of guests, in almost exactly the same way Fannie would have cooked such foods herself. His team even made their own gelatin from calves feet! Along the way Kimball discusses American culinary history, as it pertains to the different types of cuisine he was preparing and testing, using Farmer's famous cookbook as a reference. You would have to be really interested in food history and culinary arts to want to read the entire book, but it was truly fascinating, and I appreciated Kimball's dry wit. I'm glad that this book did not let me down, since I am such a devotee of ATK and Cooks. (The most foolproof recipes you will ever find, hands down.)

Also in my reading list since 2011 were two books about Julia Child. One, her memoir My Life in France by Julia Child, and the other, As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto edited by Joan Reardon. If you have any interest in Julia Child, these are both fantastic books. We sometimes forget that people who become celebrities (especially those that unlike the Kardashian sisters are deserving of their notoriety) had lives and relationships of their own. The book of letters was a fascinating glimpse into a friendship, and also a time where letter writing was important and something that people considered was a worthwhile expenditure of energy. I wish I had that patience. Of course Life in France is also a gem, describing her life and perceptions of living in France with her husband Paul while working on the manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking. If you read and enjoyed or saw the movie Julie & Julia, these books are far superior. Definitely give them a try.

Next on my food-related book list is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver.

candy bar cupcakes part 2

2011-05-23T16:47:00.026-04:00

Time for Snickers cupcakes. I made these for my dad's birthday; his favorite candy bar has been Snickers for as long as I can remember. First up, photos of the cake; peanut brown sugar.

Side note - my gramma Taylor used to have one of these nut grinders when I was little. One of my favorite things to do was have her give me some walnuts or peanuts to grind in the little yellow nut grinder, even if we weren't baking anything. We got a similar grinder recently and it grinds those nuts better than a food processor could ever hope to.

This time the mug was Boston - procured on our honeymoon last fall.

Into the oven, and onto the stickiest and messiest topping I have ever made for a cupcake or dessert. Peanut butter marshmallow nougat.

Cake is done!

On to the chocolate frosting!

Assembly!

A note if you make these cupcakes. They are delicious. But approximately 5 minutes after I took this photo, I noticed the toppings starting to slide all over the place. The marshmallow nougat likes to spread out under the weight of the chocolate frosting and the residual heat from the cupcakes (though I thought they were totally cool!). By the time I was done frosting them all, the first few had disintegrated. By the time they got to Erie for my dad's birthday, they were a disaster. So use the nougat sparingly. And only when the cupcakes are 100% cool. Allow for some spreading. But make them. Because they are delicious!

candy bar cupcakes part 1

2011-05-17T17:23:00.029-04:00

Some time ago I found a feature in Food Network Magazine on cupcakes that replicated the taste of classic candy bars. I ripped out the pages of course, and requested the chocolate peanut butter Reeses impersonators for my birthday cupcakes. Recently I went back to the list of recipes and made the Almond Joy and Snickers rip offs - one for a party and another for my dad's birthday (the king of all Snickers lovers). Here are some pics of the Almond Joy cupcakes in process. (I'll cover the Snickers ones in a second post.)

Humor me while I learn my camera. You'll notice that the Almond Joy pictures are darker due to the horrible tungsten light in my old kitchen. The Snickers cupcakes were the first I made in our new house, so in a way they christened my oven for future baking endeavors.

I had never used cream of coconut before. These cupcakes had three forms - regular shredded coconut, cream of coconut, and coconut extract.

(Love me some wall-e cupcake wrappers.)

The eggs have different shell colors because of the different heritage breeds of chicken they come from. We get our eggs from a local farm that does delivery drop-offs in Pittsburgh and also has a booth at the Pittsburgh Public Market (love!). They are on the pricey side, but crack them open and the yolk is a vibrant yellow (from the chicken's diet, not from the dye in your typical grocery store eggs).

(Eggs and cream of coconut about to be whisked with a Rorschach pattern of vanilla.)

That gets set aside to deal with the dry ingredients and butter. It should have a crumby consistency.

Beat in your egg mixture, and it starts to look something like this.

Side note. I have a habit of using a random coffee mug from my way too large collection to hold spatulas between scrapings. I'm going to try to start documenting them as part of the process. Here is one of my beloved Pittsburgh mugs, doing its duty.

The cake portions go in the oven...

...so that you can work on the coconut candy topping. It is basically cooked milk and coconut. This is Mark's awesome measuring cup that I smashed to smithereens when we moved. Sad face.

Cupcakes are done!

Time for some chocolate.

Get the coconut topping off the stove and cooled for quite awhile. Then start assembling.

I had a ton of leftover coconut for 24 cupcakes, so unless you want to dig in to the bowl with a giant spoon afterward, you'd probably be safe halving the coconut topping portion of the recipe.

a house to call home

2011-05-06T16:48:00.007-04:00

It's a good thing I didn't actually make a resolution to write more. Or else I'd feel guilty for not writing more. But, things have been busy around here.

For one thing, I got a new camera, which enabled me to take photos of things like Mark's cat Maggie:

You can see she's really personable from that photo. Or maybe she didn't like me laying on the floor with a big camera in front of her face.

Also, some banana bread that Mark made.

Some other miscellaneous assignments for my photography class (like water bottles and more Maggie scowls) were captured. But finally, this is the most important one. The one that's been keeping us busy for the past 4 months...

This is a piece of the sign that blew off in a recent windstorm which previously stood in front of the house we just purchased and moved into. Yep, a house. We moved to Carnegie, slightly west of the city and home to Papa J's restaurant and a one block walk to the bus for me and a ten minute commute for Mark. We are beyond thrilled to finally be living somewhere without the stomping of drunk neighbors above or the smell of pot smoking hippies below. It's peaceful, spacious, and perfect for us. There's even an old brick church next door which is where Honus Wagner used to attend when he lived in Carnegie.

I have no idea why I took shots from every angle inside the house, but never took one of the outside. The photo from the real estate listing will have to suffice.

So that's the big news that has kept us occupied for months now. I did do a little bit of baking in that time, and finally took photos with my new camera on one of the projects which I will update another time. But for now, I'm alive and a homeowner. And I have a shower curtain to put up.

back at em

2011-01-16T17:04:00.012-05:00

In lieu of resolutions this year, I'm making an effort to work on my 30 before 30 list. I turn 28 this week, so I have just about 2 years to complete my list, which includes everything from mastering puff pastry from scratch to buying an SLR camera and beating Mark at a lot of types of Trivial Pursuit. One of the items is to update this blog at least once a week, but that also requires me to have something to say or a photo to post. I'm hoping to buy my new camera in the next several weeks, so I'll hopefully be posting some better quality photographs as I learn the ropes of the camera's settings.

Here's a general recap of the last 6 weeks or so in baking and cooking around these parts.

Gingerbread House 2010 - the first ones with the Stone sign out front. :)

A combination flourless chocolate cake and cheesecake with candy cane pieces and furiously- dumped-on milk chocolate.

Mark preparing Shirley, the goose we roasted with the de Almeidas for New Year's Eve. Shirley was greasy, yet delicious.

Carrot cake cupcakes with vanilla bean cream cheese frosting for Erin's birthday!

Amazing chocolate peanut butter mini cupcakes that Mark made for my birthday dinner this weekend. They were rich and divine.

I'm reading a few food books this month, so hopefully I'll be able to share some of those soon as well.

a belated Thanksgiving feast

2010-12-05T19:46:00.008-05:00

Last night we (Mark, Amber, Anthony, and I) put on a thank-you belated Thanksgiving dinner for special friends of ours that have been a blessing to us this year. Everyone went home full and blessed. Here's a few highlights.

Here's Mark with Lil' Wayne, our turkey that he butterflied and made with the greatest glaze I've ever had on a turkey.

Our googly turkeys made from Oreos, PB cups, Whoppers, and candy corn.

The feast! We each took parts of the meal and cooked all day.

Dessert #1 - Pumpkin bread pudding with vanilla creme anglaise and spicy caramel apple sauce. (This is the dessert Bobby Flay made in his Throwdown with Pioneer Woman. It was delicious!)

Chocolate caramel bourbon pecan tart. Delicious, except for the fact that the caramel bubbled over the tart in the oven and burned around the edge of the tart pan. (And also set off the fire alarm and dripped in their oven.)

nintendo power

2010-11-28T19:56:00.008-05:00

Our friends Theresa and Andy got married last weekend, and Mark and I made Nintendo cupcakes to contribute to their cookie table. I made the red velvet cake with white whipped frosting, and Mark did the fondant designs. (I can't figure out how to flip some of these photos, so bear with me.)

the last few months

2010-11-15T19:48:00.017-05:00

Here's what I've been doing/baking/making the last few months.

Mexican hot chocolate cookies (chocolate, cinnamon, and chili pepper)

Raspberry Lemon Cake (a wedding cake flavor test)

An AMAZING German chocolate cake for Mark's 31st birthday

Star Trek sugar cookies with the custom cookie cutters I had made for his birthday.

Cupcakes for my bridal shower - lemon with lemon cream cheese frosting and white cake with toasted coconut buttercream and chocolate filigree hearts

Sugar cookies for Amber's bachelorette party

Mark and I also did an entire practice run of our wedding cake, which was a two day ordeal that I'll recap at some point with photos of the actual cake.

But if you want to see some professional photos, from the wedding, you can click here. The great photos make us look more sophisticated than we actually are, but the smiles on our faces are totally real.

still here

2010-10-19T06:36:00.011-04:00

I've obviously neglected this blog for awhile, which I promised myself I wouldn't do. I blame being generally busy with large life changes for my lack of updates. However, I've been busy with baking during that time period as well. So to start yet another phrase with "once the wedding is over," I promise to fill you in on the in between time when I can.

In the meantime, here's something to tide you over. We'll be baking our own wedding cake starting tomorrow morning. These photos were from the practice in July. Tomorrow it's on for real...and when I return to the blog, I will have made a three tiered wedding cake and married my love, the icing to my cake...

(These photos are by One Way Street Production. A great photographer couple that really humored our awkward non-photogenic selves.)

bridal shower blossoms

2010-05-12T20:19:00.009-04:00

I didn't do any new recipes for these cupcakes, but the design was new. Vanilla cake with coconut buttercream, and chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting. And cherry blossoms. Because they are Amber's favorite, and after all, it was her shower. The cupcake papers were AMAZING - Bake It Pretty rocks. We also put glitter dust on the cherry blossom petals, which were made from fondant and punched into shape with a ball tool and foam. The branches were melted chocolate.

better than just girl scout cookies - amber's birthday cheesecakes

2010-05-12T19:43:00.014-04:00

For many a long month, we had some Samoa cookies sitting in the cupboard. They were being saved for the right moment - and that moment was Amber's birthday. I tried out a new pan (mini tart pan with removable bottoms) and it was FANTASTIC. I took a basic cheesecake recipe and improvised a little to come up with a crust that would work. My first crust was an epic fail, since using the actual cookies proved to be a big mess when the chocolate in them melted. Not good for crust. So here's what I did.

My improvised crust was made from coconut (toasted of course)

Chocolate graham crackers...

Add some butter. And behold the deliciousness (which actually looks like a pile of mud, but tastes like heaven).

Fill the crust in the little wee pockets. (I lurve this pan. I'm telling you.)

The filling comes next. The usual. Cream cheese, sugar, and some cornstarch (to prevent cracking - which actually didn't work b/c they all cracked, but it worked to my advantage. but i'm getting ahead of myself).

Cream it together and add the eggs.

Crush some Samoas and mix them in. Like a blizzard.

Chop some Samoas into little baby pieces for garnish...

Once the cheesecakes are done, push the baby Samoa piece into the crack at the top. Sprinkle some leftover toasted coconut on the top. And....

Heaven.

And birthday heaven.

bridal shower cupcakes

2010-03-27T20:00:00.005-04:00

Last of today's catch up posts, and this one is actually timely. Mark and I made 72 cupcakes last night for my coworkers/friends Sharon and Dorie whose niece/daughter had a bridal shower today. I didn't take a million pictures during the cake baking/frosting making part, but here's the finished product(s).

celebratory desserts

2010-03-27T19:45:00.006-04:00

On March 19, Mark and I visited Six Penn Kitchen for dinner. We were got three desserts, since it was a celebration and all. And since we'd be sitting for the rest of the evening watching Celtic Woman at the Mellon Arena. (Time out for a little squeeeeeee!)

We got bananas foster cake. (Excuse my terrible photos - they don't do these fantastic desserts justice.) It had the most wonderful fried banana chips on the top; they were crispy and light and not at all greasy like the dried ones you get in trail mix.

My favorite dessert was called the Six Penn Circus. Homemade cotton candy, whoopie pies, cinnamon doughnuts, and caramel corn. It was really fun to eat and everyone's eyes got big at the surrounding tables.

And finally we had grasshopper cake. It came with a thin shamrock cookie on top, as well as some fitting decorations...courtesy of our fantastic server and the pastry chef.

When she found out we had just become engaged an hour before dinner, she thought she'd ask for something special. :) I won't gush too much in this post, but the whole evening was something special. I'm glad we started the next chapter in our lives with good food and delicious dessert. Seems fitting, don't you think? :)

homemade monkey bread: or why waiting 6 hours for brunch can pay off

2010-03-27T17:33:00.017-04:00

I had the genius idea that I'd use up some of the week's buttermilk by making homemade monkey bread for brunch one Sunday. If I had read the recipe ahead of time carefully (which you should always do, btw), I would have known that this recipe takes a lot of time - there are two points at which the bread has to rise.

But let me tell you. It was 100% worth the time spent on it. It ended up being an afternoon snack, but it was so incredibly delicious. Worth every second. Truly.

Get the dry ingredients ready in the mixer with the dough hook. Can I just insert here how much I love my KitchenAid?

Whisk melted and cooled butter into the other wet ingredients. I also love giant Pyrex measuring cups. And mini whisks.

Get the dough hook going and add in the liquid a bit at a time.

Until it looks like this...

And then like this:

Then it's time to knead. (But not as much as I would without the KitchenAid.)

And cover and let it rise. For the first time. You have to let it double in size.

After it rises, you mix up the brown sugar and cinnamon, and then cut the dough into little chunks.

Melt some butter, dip the chunks in that melted goodness, and roll them in the brown sugar.

At this point you throw the covered chunks into a bundt pan (I didn't have a bundt pan large enough, so I used my big removable bottom Wilton tube pan.) and let it rise again. I have no idea where about 5 photos went, so we'll skip that part, but you get the picture. Throw it in the oven. Bring it out, and with the assistance of someone else, flip it. It will smell like heaven.

But it's not over yet. There is a glaze to top it off. Oh yessssssssss.

Confectioners sugar, milk, and vanilla. Delicious.

Dump it on. Behold the glory.:)

Thirty seconds after it was finished, this is what it looked like. That should tell you something.

st. patrick's day cupcake craziness

2010-03-27T16:53:00.015-04:00

I decided I wanted to make cupcakes for St. Patrick's Day, but I didn't really want to make green ones. Especially since I had seen a recipe in a Real Simple magazine for raspberry cupcakes with a swiss meringue buttercream. So I thought I'd just put the cupcakes in St. Patrick's Day wrappers and make shamrock chocolate filigrees. Let's start with those.

I drew some rough shamrocks on one side of parchment paper with a pencil. (I say rough because I am by no means an artist. You will see what I mean in a moment.)

I melted chocolate and put it in a frosting piping bag with a small round tip and traced the shamrocks on the non-pencil side. Then for extra support, I made squiggly lines inside so that they would stand once frozen. Into the freezer they went until later! (Notice the 2 cans of Diet Coke in the photo. I am an addict. I admit it.)

Now it's time for the cupcakes. We actually found fresh raspberries that weren't $5 a package. Hooray!

I got the dry ingredients and the milk/vanilla combination ready first.

Cream the butter and sugar, like usual, and add eggs.

Add dry ingredients and alternate with milk/vanilla.

And now my favorite part of the cake making process: when it looks like this...

Chop some raspberries, and put some in a food processor. Add the raspberry "slurry" to the batter.

After it's mixed, add the chopped raspberries.

I then tried to make the swiss meringue buttercream, but since the oven was on all day and the weather was warm, the frosting basically tasted like melted butter and virtually fell right off the beaters. Epic fail. So I hurried and found some lemons and improvised a lemon cream cheese frosting, which I made green. And in the rush, I didn't take a lot of pics. I had made little mini cakes as well for the chocolate filigrees, since there was leftover batter. So it ended up like this.

The raspberry cupcakes were amazing - so points to Martha Stewart for the recipe. And the lemon frosting was a great complement to the raspberry. (The recipe made about 10 times the mini cupcakes you see there. I was pawning them off on people for days. Luckily it wasn't too hard to find takers. :) )

blueberry almond coffee cake

2010-03-27T16:28:00.010-04:00

It's time to play catch up, since I've been busy baking this month and have lots to share. This was a coffee cake I made for a Saturday morning branch group. The recipe calls for fresh blueberries, but I used frozen since they are crazy expensive at this time of year. It actually worked out really well because I think the extra water made the cake a bit more moist.

This cake is also really tasty because of the buttermilk. Buttermilk makes an ordinary cake extra special. I try and make several things with buttermilk when I have to buy it because it's a shame for it to sit in the fridge and get gross. But I digress.

This coffee cake is made like a muffin. Prepare dry ingredients and wet ingredients. Mix.

Add blueberries to the batter. Mix it, put it in a prepared pan, and then dump some more on.

Make the topping: yum, yum, and yum. Almonds, brown sugar, and cinnamon.

When it's done, it's golden. I don't even have a photo of a piece out of the pan because we basically devoured it. Next time you need a quick brunch item, definitely make this cake.

foodie lit roundup

2010-03-03T20:31:00.007-05:00

I had this amazing plan to blog about this out of this world pound cake that I've made twice now, but each time I go to take photos, I get caught up in making it and forget to take a photo of the finished product. And that's the best part! I will just need an excuse to make it again, I guess.

But in the meantime, here are some of the foodie books I've read so far in 2010.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
By Ruth Reichl

Since it was my turn to host my book club in January, I chose 5 foodie books as the selections. The group narrowed it to this Ruth Reichl memoir, the tale of Reichl's time as the restaurant critic for the New York Times. I had only read one of her personal memoirs before (Tender at the Bone). Reichl went on to be the editor of the (sadly) now-defunct Gourmet magazine. She's a great food writer in that you can practically smell and taste the food she is describing. She makes you want to try things you would never think you'd be brave enough to try. Though I thought her tone bordered on self-absorbed by the end, the majority of the book was really interesting and it illuminated parts of the food world that aren't always public knowledge. Reichl takes on multiple disguises so that she can eat at restaurants and see how "regular people" are treated. It makes for interesting twists and turns. (Like how the NY Times critic is a walking paradox: both respected and reviled, sought after and ignored, an icon and a scapegoat.) If you are a NY Times junkie like me or a food writing junkie, you will probably enjoy this book. And if you aren't a NY Times junkie, you should be. Just saying. :)

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual
By Michael Pollan

Alongside my addiction to the New York Times, I have a food literature love affair with Michael Pollan. His food writing will change the way you look at food altogether; The Omnivore's Dilemma was the first book of his that I read (and I highly recommend it). His new book is a compilation of "rules" that we can use in evaluating the decisions we make about food, ideas that are passed through generations that have taught us about our relationship to food. The book is pocket sized and you'll zip right through it, but the rules will stick with you: "Never fuel your body in the same place you fuel your car." (Almost all food in gas stations is processed and full of high fructose corn syrup.) Pollan argues in much of his work that one of the reasons we have problems with obesity in America is because we've lost our connection to the production of food we eat. Fried chicken and ice cream are no longer really treats for special occasions because we can get them anywhere at any time; we no longer have to spend a whole day churning or cooking to get to the end product. We eat food that's been made far away, overly processed and beefed up with chemicals, and then wonder why we see poor results in our health. I'm not an organic food freak or anything, but what he has to say is really good food for thought and it is so wonderfully written, that it's hard not to get sucked in. For any foodie who prefers journalism or non-fiction over memoirs or fiction, Michael Pollan is your man.

The Gastronomy of Marriage: A Memoir of Food and Love
By Michelle Maisto

This book is the current front-runner for best book of 2010. It is rare that I finish a book and am saddened that it's over, and that was certainly the case with this one. It hit me in the shower the morning after I finished the book that the reason I loved it so much was that it is the book I've always wanted to write: a story about an independent female with feminist tendencies who loves to be in the kitchen and who loves a boy. And how those traits can peacefully co-exist. Michelle Maisto writes of the intersection of her love of food with her love of her fiance, and how it both brings them together and differentiates them. It was absolutely beautiful and tender-hearted, at once assertive and delicate. Treat yourself to this book and the recipes inside. I am so glad that I did.

Next foodie book on the list will be Julia Child's My Life in Paris. Have you read anything good lately?

anniversary pots de creme

2010-02-24T20:31:00.009-05:00

There's probably not a better way to get back into the swing of blogging than to talk about chocolate pots de creme. Basically the French version of chocolate pudding. Rich chocolate pudding that is so decadent you have a few bites and you're done. Perfect to celebrate a life changing year with a special someone. That's as gushy as it's going to get, for now.

Onto the chocolate. And my cute pink ramekins.

Yeah. That's a lot of cream and chocolate and deliciousness. Sir Sous Chef knows it too.

Chop some chocolate. Separate some eggs.

I didn't use the whites. Obviously. Or I wouldn't have been lazy and stockpiled the shells in the bowl.

Next comes the long and tricky part. Continuously whisking the custard while waiting for it to slowly reach the right temperature for custard consistency and not sugared scrambled eggs. Because I sadly broke my candy thermometer by dropping it before its first use, I had to use our electronic thermometer and hold it suspended in the liquid for 20 min. I'm glad this stuff turned out so great because it took a loooooong time.

After it finally heats up, you let it sit in the bowl of chopped chocolate for awhile until it melts the chocolate.

And whisk some more, adding the espresso and vanilla. Starting to look good now...

Fill em up!

After filling your ramekins and letting them set in the fridge for awhile, top them with some homemade vanilla whipped cream, and then my personal favorite, dark chocolate covered espresso beans and dark chocolate cocoa powder.

And enjoy. I wish I had a picture of Mark's face when he took the first bite. I'm a pretty lucky girl. Just sayin'.

turning 27 is pretty sweet

2010-01-24T15:12:00.003-05:00

This month I had a birthday. I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a custom piece of art by Jessie Olseon of Cakespy. Knowing how much I love her artwork, Pittsburgh, and baking (cupcakes in particular), Amber, Anthony, and Mark conspired to create a most wonderful birthday present. Jessie Oleson was kind enough to send me a scan of the image so I can share it.

The four of us as cupcakes, sharing dinner together with the city in the background! So much stuff that I love in one painting! What wonderful friends! :-)