Cranberry Sauce for Fakers

It's Thanksgiving Eve! And I'm so thankful for my darling friends who read this oft-neglected blog. I thought I would post a little something I just made -- cranberry sauce. I should have typed "made" because I cheated and used a can (gasp!) of cranberry sauce. I do love figuring out how to doctor up decent food into good tasting stuff. No, not gourmet, but if you are honestly making everything for a full thanksgiving dinner from scratch without any help, then you're reading this blog because you're amazing and you just want to make me feel good about myself. Bless you.

I am no cranberry connoisseur -- my family always had this cranberry jello salad that secretly no one actually likes. Which means that this little recipe tastes pretty darn good to me. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Saladita!

Imagine this: a vegetarian who didn't really like to eat veggies. See also: Me, approximately a year ago. I was what I like to call a "vegaquarian" (a vegetarian who eats fish, er pescatarian). That lasted four years until I drove past an In and Out Burger. But that's another story. The real story here, folks, is that I found a veggie dish that I actually crave. Here it is:

Shake it up.

Hi friends -- I've been taking a break here because, let's face it, my behind needs to take a break from all the cupcakes and cookies and ice cream. Time to start posting some healthier options that I've found that are still pretty yummy.

Exhibit A: The breakfast fruit shake of glory. This fruit shake is delicious and (I'm told that) because it has protein powder, it doesn't shake up your blood sugar level as much as other sweet smoothies do.

Ahoy!

In honor of Halloween, of no longer being sick (after ten days in bed), and of Lito going back to work (despite the fact that he still has a very mean esophagus that hurts him), I give you: Pirate Cupcakes.

Pre-Halloweening Mini Cheesecakes

Is it just me, or did all things Halloween seem to begin on October 1st? Target and Old Navy are full of fun stuff, and I have to admit that for the first time in a while, I'm actually pretty excited about All Hallows Eve. So naturally I started by trying a new recipe. Cookies and cream cheesecakes made Halloween style with special edition black and orange Oreos.

I used a whole Oreo as the base for the mini cheesecakes. The Oreos have cats, ghosts and jack-o-lanterns on them. Check out the awesome orange layer under the cake. (I wanted to type "bootiful" just now. I'm really glad I didn't.)

Oh Martha.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cupcakes. Sounds good, right?

So yesterday my husband, Lito, was like, Heeyyy.... you haven't made cupcakes for a while...and the guys at work have heard a lot about how awesome they are.... The gauntlet was thrown. Cupcakes had to be made. So I sent a list of possible cupcake flavors I'd like to try, including PBChocolate, and that, my friends is what I made.

I returned to my perfect-bound Martha Stewart cookbook and flipped through to the loveliest picture of warm, perfect cupcakes. And I made the recipe. Here they are with frosting:

Bah.

So, here I am, expecting to be able to post on the magnificent maiden voyage of the kitchenaid mixer, and it was lovely, truly, so I should post on that, but instead, I'm going to tell you about some really lovely pretty cupcakes that didn't taste that great. That's right. They were okay. And maybe it should be preceded by the following caveat: I have no baking/culinary training whatsoever, other than what I've picked up along my quest to eat delicious desserts.

See? Aren't they pretty? The frosting tasted (tastes) fantastic BTW, but I knew it would -- butter cream frosting always tastes good.

So I tried Martha Stewart's buttermilk cupcake recipe. Yep, I'm calling out the queen of all things domestic and lovely. But here's the deal: other people have tried this recipe and liked it, so, ya know, maybe don't write her off entirely. Maybe just think before you make these particular cupcakes.
It looks like a Ferris Wheel of delicious cake.

So here's the scoop: the recipe, first of all, said that it yielded 36 cupcakes. When I made it, I came out with over 48, for a family of two, that is way too effing many cupcakes. Even for me.

Second of all, the cake wasn't dry. But it wasn't moist either. Someone explain to me how a cake that calls for EIGHT eggs (five whole and three additional yolks) can not taste like a dreamy dream loaf? Perhaps the eggs were the problem. The cake was dense but kind of stuck to the roof of my mouth. Irritating.

But absolutely lovely. No?

Mixer Bliss

The strangest thing happened today -- As I was walking through the living room, I noticed that there was a big cardboard box out on our fenced patio. How did it get there? Did our lack of doorbell scare off the delivery guy? Did Brownie magically make a cardboard box appear? (She does find some random stuff to play with out on that patio...) But wait! When what to my wondering eyes should appear! Does it say Kitchenaid? Does it?

It did. So I very carefully opened the box and peeped inside to see if it could be true.

Chocolate Cupcakes

Last Thursday was my darling friend, President Susan's, birthday. I sent her a ridiculous one-liner email, "Do you like chocolate?" And this is what resulted. Happy day.



So instead of doing what normal people do, which is call before you randomly show up at someone's house, I just loaded up the cupcakes and drove over to where I thought her house was. Don't worry that I'd never been there before. Or that when I got there they had a security gate. Seriously, who wouldn't let you through a security gate if you had cupcakes? Note to all would-be criminals: begin baking.

Cookie Cookie Cookie Starts with "C"

So here I was at home minding my own business when the desire to eat homemade chocolate chip cookies hit me like a mack truck.

I think this has something to do with wanting to be home again, eating the good stuff my mom would make. I had spent part of the day thinking about how awesome it would be to come home from school and have warm cookies on the table....

(Don't worry that I'm not in school any more, I'm just imaginative.)

The favorite red bowl, the essential Azteca vanilla (seriously), and the dough, whipped up with the hand mixer.

Shout Out to My Mom, Part II

Comfort food. Usually conjures up images of mashed potatoes, shepherd's pie, stroganoff... ya know. But I've found that the brownies my mom makes (and has made for years) have that same comforting appeal. So much so, that I've made them twice this month and have only managed to snap a couple of pictures of them in various states of half-eaten-ness.

Homemade Brownies with Frosting. These will kick your chocolate sweet tooth in the butt. If a sweet tooth has a butt. I'm furrowing my brow. This metaphor is all wrong.

But the brownies are so right.

Shout Out to My Mom, Part I

Last week my cute mom came out for a little visit and we did all things delicious during her stay, including a trip to the local farmer's market, where we couldn't resist picking up a small flat of strawberries. And they smelled so good. I mean, if smell-0-vision had ever made it past the dream phase, I would be permanently tuned in to fresh strawberry -- they smelled that good.

And since we had more strawberries than we could hope to eat in a lifetime, my mom showed me how to make strawberry freezer jam. I'm converted. It was really easy and it's SO GOOD.

Beach Vacation Cupcakes

Here's the latest in cupcakery around the house: The Beach Vacation Cupcake. Yeah, that Teddy Graham is wearing a pink frosting bikini. I know.

PS. Sorry my pictures are a little blurry...camera settings are off, I guess, because pics look fine in the viewfinder screen, but turn out like this after all the goods are eaten and no more pictures can be taken.

Here's another take of the finished product, complete with Teddy Graham in green board shorts.

And a couple of the process, because you want to see the gigantic mess I made.

For the record, I have approximately no idea where this idea came from.

At the Risk of Going Overboard

Here's what happens when you make a whole pan of brownies and there are only two people in the house to eat them. (We're new around these parts and don't know a ton of people who are ready to be taste-testers yet.) We turn the brownies and the extra dulce de leche into some pretty amazing ice cream.

This post also serves as a shout-out to my Uncle and Aunt NordShop who gave us an awesome Cuisinart ice cream maker for our wedding. It's their fault Lito and I are getting fat.

Chocolate plus Dulce de Leche

I fell in love with dulce de leche last year in Chile. Lito and I spent about two months zipping around South America like we owned the place. On one fantastic occasion, our darling friend Chacha introduced us to crepes with dulce de leche, which she called pancake (pronounced pan-que-que, or something like that).

So when another amazing foodie friend forwarded me the recipe for David Lebovitz's dulce de leche brownie, how could I resist? How?

Especially when it turned out that making dulce de leche was seriously easy.

Here's what you need:

*1 can of sweetened condensed milk

*kosher salt or coarsely ground salt if you have a fancy grinder

Here's what you do:

*Pour the sweetened condensed milk into a glass pie plate, or another shallow baking dish that can fit inside another baking dish.

*Put the pie plate in the other baking dish (I used a jelly roll pan), and fill it with warm water, so your pie plate is a little island of sweet joy in the center.

*Sprinkle the milk with a little salt. I probably used 1/4 t, max. I think this is where the pros say "salt to taste," then cover the pie plate with aluminum foil.

*Bake at 425 degrees for 75 to 90 minutes. Check on it a couple times to add more water if you need to.

*Once the sweetened condensed milk has turned goldeny brown, let it cool completely and then whisk it up. Eat it on a spoon, on toast, on ice cream (more on this later) and definitely swirl it in your brownies.

Something about this swirling makes me think alternately of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, ala, swimming in chocolate, and/or tree bark. Really delicious tree bark. And when you've got one really sweet thing that's brown and tan, well, then another sweet thing isn't really out of the question. Our new little pup bore enough of a resemblance, so we named her Brownie.

One more of the chocolate, just because

These brownies, as Lebovitz himself says, are truly better the next day. They're ridiculously rich and totally worth it.

Adapted from David Lebovitz, Living the Sweet Life in Paris

French Toast Cupcakes with Bacon

Several months ago, Lito and I saw something on the Food Network about a freshly made doughnut dipped in bacon crumbles -- people were raving about the amazing combo of the two amazing breakfast foods. You can see where this is going. The title of the post already gave it away. I did a little internet research and found an incredible recipe from lifewithcake.com.

I stayed pretty true to the recipe listed, including the instructions to cream the butter for 10 minutes, despite the fact that I'm working with a pink hand mixer rather than a stand mixer.

Adding the dry ingredients looks cuter when you do it with heart-shaped measuring cups.

Secret tip: (well, maybe it's not a secret, but I thought it was a good idea anyway) Use an ice cream scooper to dole out the batter into even portions. The cake here is "French Toast" flavored -- a white cake warmed up with nutmeg and cinnamon.

Cooled. Frosted with maple frosting. (I added Mapleine flavoring to a regular butter cream recipe.)

And topped with delicious, crunchy bacon. They were a revelation. The sweetness of the maple frosting, plus the crunch of bacon was amazing. The cake had a fantastic flavor, but was a little on the dry side. Careful not to overcook.

Delish.