My Little Strawwwwbery!

This post is brought to you by the lovely and talented Nicole. If you're alive and you know where a grocery store is, you've probably realized that strawberries are craaaazy in season.  And having so many strawberries requires an easy way to make a whole bunch of them into something awesome. I give you: the do-it-yourself chocolate covered strawberry:

I have to apologize to Nicole at this point -- I took all of the pictures of the process and final product with a vintage camera app that doesn't really do justice to how pretty (and delicious!) her chocolate covered strawberries are.  Just imagine a perfectly ripe strawberry wrapped in Guittard Chocolate. 

[FYI, did you know that Guittard provides the chocolate for Sees Candies? Nicole says Sees acutally covers their chocolate truffles with Guittard chocolate! Wikipedia says it's true, so I'm going to believe. 

It's so good. I mean, it's so good.]

retro-post: cinco de mayo & margarita cupcakes

I grew up in a culture that generally doesn't imbibe much. At all. So I remember the first time when my family vacationed in Mexico, my mom ordered a virgin margarita to enjoy out by the pool (or the pond) and the bartender replied, So you want lemonade? Right?

And maybe he wasn't being snarky. He was probably just making sure he understood that we all wanted fancy drinks with little umbrellas without the complimentary (at that hotel) booze.

So for Cinco de Mayo, in honor of a culturally irreverent/irrelevant gathering at my apartment, I made "virgin" "margarita" cupcakes. Which is code for lemon cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and a twist of lime that made the frosting taste ridiculously good. Look at that lil twist! I'm smacking my lips right now.

Soup!

Uh, hi there. Sorry I left you all hanging here with nothing new. See, the problem with this blog is that it entices me to make delicious treats ALL THE TIME. So I thought, okay, I'm going to eat healthier and blog about THAT. But that didn't happen (the eating or the blogging). Until now.

This morning I had a rude little awakening that I am a considerably larger person now than I was a year ago when Lito and I got married. Eugh. Let's not dwell on this any longer than is necessary. The point is that it lit a fire under my buns to figure out how to something healthy, maybe even weight-loss-ey, that actually tastes good. So here we go.