bridal shower cupcakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'.