Snowflake Pie

Santa brought me the most amazing snowflake plunger/cutters for Christmas this year! My mom and I put them to good use today: Mixed Berry Snowflake Pie!

My mom made this glorious filling, and the truth is that we used a Pillsbury crust. In order to use the plunger/cutters, we needed to have the dough at a very uniform thickness, so I cut corners here. Next time the crust will be home made.

Cooking, but not posting about it here...

Until now! Christmas cupcakes.

Chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting!

Harry Potter Cupcakes

Okay, I admit it, I'm a total Harry Potter nerd. Yep. My ringtone? Hedwigs Theme.

Nerd.

So what, like I'm not going to make Harry Potter Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting and White Chocolate Toppers?

 And I was too excited to go see Harry Potter 7.2 to take any decent pictures of these before they were devoured. They were, by the way, delicious pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting (adapted from Smitten Kitchen's lovely recipe). I added mini chocolate chips, which, if I say so myself, was a pretty

Rose Cake

I know you've seen this before, but...

maybe you haven't seen it quite like this: Rose Cake

In honor of having some really beautiful women over to my house this evening, I made a rose cake (like the whirly-gig cake, only better I think). This is strawberry with strawberry filling (homemade) and bourbon vanilla buttercream frosting. What do you think? 

Chomp.

Cake Decorating Part I

Show and Tell!

I enrolled in Wilton Cake Decorating 1 at my local craft store. Nothing fancy, but I am kind of having a blast learning how to decorate something larger than a cupcake. This is my first cake. Tada! This is a cream cheese pound cake with vanilla frosting. Numnums.

Happy Birthday to Me

Let's just see how big I can get the "cupcake" label in the cloud over here --->

A happy coincidence: A friend ordered a box of red velvet cupcakes the same week of my birthday. And happily, a batch of cupcakes is greater than a box of cupcakes. What to do with the extra cupcakes? Hmmmm. Happy Birthday to me! This time around I used Magnolia Bakery's recipe for the cakes, but played around with the frosting.

Whirly-gig swirly cake

The great thing about being at home, at least for me, is the huge and completely stocked kitchen my mom has. Even better -- she'll usually pick up just about any additional ingredients I need to try something new. I found a picture of a cake that looked sort of like this one if you squint and tilt your head a little, and it was on! Frostinnngg!

Rosy, swirly, whirly cake. This is just a typical chocolate cake. Two layers. Nothing fancy. But the frosting was ahhhmazing for a couple of reasons: 1. Almond extract. I love the stuff, but I can't usually have it because Lito (my better half) is allergic. Meh. 2. Cream cheese. I can't name a single thing that isn't improved by the addition of cream cheese. Think about it: Brownies? Check. Bean dip? Check. Cheesecake? You can see where this is going.

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.