Mardi Gras 2014!!!

Happy Mardi Gras, y’all!  As always, if you’re not in Louisiana, you can tune in to live parade coverage here:

Or Here: 

(PSsst:  Brush up on your Parade Knowledge here…)

Need a king cake?  We’ve got your recipe right here:

Or you could opt for cupcakes:

Need something cold to drink?  There’s a whole list of Hurricane Recipes you could whip up:

Or you could try out a King Zulu, made with King Cake Vodka:

Or, even try this frozen version that I whipped up last night:

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup ice

1 cup fresh pineapple

3-4 oz King Cake vodka

1 oz lime juice

3-4 large fresh mint leaves

2 dashes cinnamon (it brings out the king cake flavor)

DIRECTIONS:

Blend together until frothy, and enjoy!  Garnish with fresh mint and a wedge of pineapple that’s been dipped in purple sugar.

Perfect for studying!  (Which is why I didn’t have time to make a King Cake this year)

First Day Post-Daniel Fast: Chili Cookoffs & Toilet Seats

Well, I’m posting, which means we did NOT fall into a meat-sugar-caffeine induced coma.  Though…we tried.  Really.

Breakfast:  I’ll just let the picture tell its thousand words.

That’s biscuits, sausage, coffee (decaf) w/caramel syrup & some almond milk, and yes….CUPCAKES.  Half of each of the cupcakes that I brought home & froze after Amy’s wedding shower.  Because…I mean…CUPCAKES.

Then we headed over to the Sertoma Chili Cookoff to sling some tasty steak & sausage chili!

(We end up next to the Toxic Chili guys like, every year.)

We never win, but it’s still fun, and for a good cause.  After our shift was up, we headed out and tasted some chili!

(Oh…and beer, of course.  PS—the first person to figure out the clothespin thing was BRILLIANT.)

After we’d filled out still shrunken bellies with chili (which only took about 15 booths, or about 2.5 total cups), we wandered about to check out all the booths:

(Elks Lodge is on the left—they place pretty high every year.  Good stuff.  Waffle House…ehh, I was too afraid it would be ACTUAL Waffle House chili to try it.)

Then we headed over to The Scoop to take advantage of the awesome weather and pick up some trash on our Adopt-A-Street stretch! With all the snow & cold weather, we haven’t been able to get out there in a few months, and it’s…well…always an interesting experience.  We tend to find a lot of the usual:  empty beer cans & 50 mL bottles, fountain soda cups, random junk mail & newspapers… and then there’s the just plain sad ‘n nasty: socks, a couple syringes (needles gone), a tampon applicator (*gags*  WHO does that on the side of the road???)…. and then there’s the “WTF?”

Half-full bottle of E&J, and a TOILET SEAT.  (We also found a full set of keys, but that doesn’t beat toilet seat.  PS—Jo… I’m sorry my hubs is not wearing gloves. I was, just FYI. But I PROMISE he washed his hands as soon as we got back to the shop.)

After the trash pickup, we headed home so I could pack, since I leave for Louisiana tomorrow:

And then…what to eat for dinner?  With so much chili in our bellies, we weren’t really that hungry, so we snacked a bit (I had a few sweet pickles), and…well… we just HAD to have some ice cream! *grins sheepishly*

Blue Bunny “Perfectly Peppermint” + hot fudge.

So..while we managed to eat pretty much EVERYTHING that was forboden on the Daniel Fast (white flour, meat, caffeine, dairy, sugar, alcohol), we actually still only took in about 1600 calories.  And with all the walking around and trash pickup, we burned off most of those.  Not too bad.  Just gotta remember—if you want to eat the garbage, gotta be willing to work it off.

How do I feel?  Well…like not getting up off the couch for a while.  But that’s partly because my calves are still burning from our trash pickup adventure (our stretch of road is about 1.8 miles round trip & has some steep slopes).

Happy Mardi Gras! (& King Cake Cupcakes!)

The Big Day is upon us!  The day when all of my Louisiana friends are off work, enjoying parades or just lounging at home, recovering from the month of parades prior to today.

And here I am…in Missouri, with 40 degree weather, and yes…I have to work today.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t still celebrate a little bit!  Same goes for you!

You can watch WWL’s live coverage of the New Orleans parades today on their website!

And…you can make cupcakes.  Like I did, for my coworkers.

These were really easy (aside from the ones that were really hard, but we’ll get to that in a minute).  I wanted to capture the flavors of a traditional king cake without all the work.  So we use a box mix as our base, but add cinnamon, brown sugar, and cream cheese.

 

Ingredients: (makes about 12-16 cupcakes)

1 box golden or butter cake mix

3 eggs

1/2 cup skim milk

1/2 cup applesauce

1.5 tbsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 oz fat free cream cheese, room temperature

Icing packet from a cinnamon roll tube (or you can make fresh glaze with 2 tbsp milk, 1/2 c powdered sugar, and a splash of vanilla)

purple, yellow, and green colored sugar (read more about making your own colored sugar here)

Muffin liners (DO NOT attempt this recipe without these!)

 

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350F, and prepare two 12-cup muffin trays with liners.  This is VERY essential.*

Beat all the ingredients together (except the glaze and the colored sugar), and then use an ice cream scoop (1/2 cup batter) to portion the batter into the cups.

Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown & cooked through.

Let cool for about 15 minutes on a baker’s rack, and then top with a dollop of glaze, and spread across the cupcake.  Sprinkle your colored sugars over the top in thirds to represent the colors of Mardi Gras (purple for justice, green for faith, gold for power).

Now…here’s the dealio.  I didn’t follow my own advice. I am giving you the “I screwed up, but here’s how to fix it” version.  I had a limited number of muffin liners, so I only lined one of my muffin tins.  The other I just spritzed with cooking spray.

But this dough (probably because of the brown sugar and cream cheese) is EXTRA sticky, so when I went to turn out the cupcakes… only the tops came out.

After I resisted the urge to throw the pan on the kitchen floor (where my pug would have happily devoured the stuck cupcake bottoms), my brilliant husband suggested trying to mold the pieces together using the ice cream scoop.  Which made me think of CAKE TRUFFLES!

So I mixed in the remaining glaze into this Bowl Of Disaster:

I tried a couple different molding methods—the ice cream scoop didn’t work out because the cake+glaze was too sticky, so instead, I used a small circle cookie cutter and just pressed the “dough” into the middle to make a form.  Then I dusted the tops with colored sugar.  It worked out perfectly!  They taste just like the cupcakes.  So now, I share this with the world, in case anyone else happens to screw up while making cupcakes.  All is not lost!  DO NOT THROW THAT PAN ON THE FLOOR!

Procrastination: AKA, things I do instead of blogging.

Occasionally I dream about being discovered as the next “Pioneer Woman” or “Smitten Kitchen”…but alas, my inability to blog daily (and the infinite number of OTHER food bloggers out there) will probably result in it never being a reality.  I don’t worry about it much.  This blog is for me, and for fun.  It keeps me sane after long science-laden professional work days that I can come home and be creative and a little silly.  And if some other people read it & enjoy it, then that’s just a super-awesome bonus.

So here’s a list of a few things that I do, for “fun”, when I’m not blogging.

What do you like to do when you’re not blogging?

 

Option A: Sabotage Coworker’s Cubicles.

 

(Confession: these pics are a little old, as said coworker no longer works with us.  …Um, I like to think that there’s no correlation between these events & her leaving.)

 

Option B: Play Final Fantasy XIII w/my husband.

Because it’s SOOOOOOOOOOO pretty…

 

Option C: Eat AmyCakes.

These weren’t actually neon—the neon signs at Finn’s just cast that glow & I thought it looked pretty cool.  And they were delicious as always.

 

Option D: Look at cute pug pics on the InterWebz.

“I’m super cute…but really…don’t you have a recipe or something you should be talking about?”

 

Option E: Chase my own cute pug around the house as he attempts to destroy everything that falls into his menacing little paws:

 (This lil’ monster is the reason I periodically have to scream, “NO!  We do NOT eat batteries in this house!!!”)

 

Option F: Work Out.  (hahahahahhahahaha….just kidding.)

I include this only for sheer irony, since my typical excuse for not going to the gym involves thinking, “yeah, but I should REALLY go home & finish that blog post.”  It’s a vicious cycle, yo.

 

Option G: Laugh at my husband’s mastery of “Silly Faces”.

(Sometimes I cannot wait to see what he’ll be able to come up with when he’s old & can remove his teeth.)

Sugar Cookies: A not-so-secret family recipe.

My extended family (which is VERY extended, since my mom is the middle of 15 kids) shares a love of baking that is probably the origination of my love for sweets.  Food was the glue that held an impossibly large family together.  I grew up living next door to my grandparents, and every Saturday, their house was a-buzz with 30+ family members…the aunts in the kitchen with my grandmother, uncles watching sports or racing in the living room with my grandpa (who always wore denim overalls, even though they moved away from the farm in the 70’s), and us cousins careening through the house as an unstoppable squealing human locomotive, pausing for brief seconds in the dining room to grab veggies & pickles off a relish tray before crashing through the back door to play “Houseball”…which is a lot like volleyball, except the house is the net.
Christmas was a time when several aunts would meet together at one of their homes to have a Bakeapalooza (they didn’t call it that, but you get the idea).  Divinity, chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge, fruitcakes, and the centerpiece—my Aunt Loyce’s sugar cookies. 
These are not the sugary, crispy cookies.  No.  These are the delicious, fluffy, delicate, melt-in-your-mouth sugar cookies that grocery stores try to replicate before adulterating them with half a pound of sprinkles & neon pink icing.
I don’t actually know if my aunt is the originator of this recipe, or if it was handed down to her.  But once upon a time when I had my first computer & learned how to do some very basic desktop publishing (circa age 14), I printed her recipe with fancy font & a fancy background & framed it for her.  She still has it hanging in her kitchen, which makes me smile every time I visit.
The other day (aka Easter) I was craving some of these cookies, so I dug out my copy of the recipe, and have decided to share with you. 

Ingredients:
2 cups white sugar
1 cup shortening (Crisco, butter, light margarine—whatever you have around the house.  We use light margarine.)
1 cup thick sour cream
3 eggs
1 tsp baking soda
1.25 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt
5-6 cups flour
(Note: these measurements are for 5 dozen cookies.  You can pretty easily divide it in half if you don’t want 5 dozen cookies hanging out at your house)
 
Directions:
Heat your oven to 375 degrees F.
Combine the first 8 ingredients in a mixer & beat until well integrated.  Then slowly start adding flour, with your mixer set at a low speed.  Stop periodically to scrape the sides if needed.

Continue to add flour until the dough holds together well, pulling away from the sides of the bowl & is only slightly tacky to the touch.
Spread out a layer of wax paper (TIP: I tape mine down to keep it from shifting), and sprinkle it with flour.  Place the dough ball on the wax paper & lightly sprinkle the dough with flour so it won’t stick to your rolling pin.
Roll out to 1/4” inch thick—any thinner than this and the cookies will end up a bit crunchy on the bottom.  To help with getting perfect thickness, you can either use rolling pin rings along the outer edges, or, I go with Alton Brown’s tip of stacking rubber bands to get to the thickness you want.

Now—grab your cookie cutters!

(The cupcake one gets a very special icing treatment—stay tuned!)

My favorite, however, is my dinosaur sandwich cutter:

(Bear in mind—I do not have a child.  I bought this for ME.)

Begin cutting out your shapes.  Cut your cookies as close as you can to each other, because yes, you can take the trimmings, ball them up, and re-roll them out to do a second round, but the more times you do this, the tougher and drier your cookies are going to be.

Move the cut out shapes onto non-stick or lightly sprayed cookie sheets.  Bake for 8 minutes or until the bottoms are just slightly golden, but not crispy.

Now, Aunt Loyce typically makes her own frosting for these as well.  Her recipe is:
1/3 stick butter
1/4-1/2 cup milk
powdered sugar to thicken
 
However, we had some leftover white cream cheese frosting in the house, so I used that to make small batches of colored frosting.  (3 tbsp frosting + 2 drops of food coloring = enough for about 8-10 cookies)

(I am by no means a professional froster, as you can see.)

I had a little more fun with the cupcake ones.  I used tinted frosting to make the “wrapper”:

And then piped on plain white frosting in a back & forth pattern with a small star tip and a piping bag made from a Ziploc baggie.  Then they all got a “cherry” (actually a Nerds jelly bean, leftover from our nephews’ Easter candy).


I love the look of these.  So fun & spring-y!  And, of course, DELICIOUS.  My hubs & I kept about a dozen at our house & then the rest went to my work (I frequently use my coworkers as guinea pigs.  So far—no complaints.)  They disappeared before lunch.
Shared on 33 Shades of Green's Tasty Tuesday, Crazy for Crust, The Sweet Spot, The Kurtz Corner, Michelle's Tasty Creations and It's Overflowing.

Stuffins!

At some point, along some time between now and a year ago, I somehow accidentally got signed up for a Disney Family magazine. 

At my work address.

So once a month, a copy of this very family-friendly magazine  full of kid-friendly games & crafts & vacation ideas shows up in the mail room in my inbox, and inevitably, a coworker will see it & say, “Oooohhh, is there something you’re not telling us???  Hrrmmmm???”

Yup.  …I am secretly harboring a fugitive Guatemalan family inside my filing cabinet. 

And they all REALLY love cupcakes with Oreo mouse ears.

Originally, I just threw these away in our recycling bin, since as a non-mom & have very little need for popsicle stick craft project ideas or notes on how to make a sunflower using bendy straws… but one day I actually started flipping through them, and discovered RECIPES.  Quick, fun recipes designed for letting kids help you cook….i.e. EASY stuff.  Which is ideal because, I know this may come as a shock to you, but I do NOT cook 5-star meals each night.  Sometimes, I actually CRAVE Hamburger Helper.  Or a grilled cheese with deli turkey & sliced tomato.  I also occasionally eat Ramen at my desk while daydreaming about take out sushi.

A while back, I saw in one of these magazines the idea for “stuffins” – stuffing prepared in a muffin pan & baked.  I love stuffing, and I love muffins… so I ripped that page out of the magazine & then quickly shoved the rest of the booklet into the filing cabinet for the Guatemalans—dog-earring that cute “cherry pie cupcake” tutorial for them while I was at it. (Don’t look at me like that—they have a flashlight.)

The stuffin is the ideal side dish—but I wanted to make it more of a bite-size meal option.  So we’ve added meat & extra veggies!

Ingredients:

1 lb spicy smoked turkey sausage, diced

1 box Stove Top (+ boiling water as noted on the box)

1 egg

1 tbsp dried chives or chopped green onions

1 cup canned corn

 

Directions:

Heat your oven to 375.

Cook your sausage in a large skillet until browned. Drain.

Prepare boiling hot water in accordance with the box of Stove Top.

In a large bowl, combine the dry Stove Top Mix, corn, onion, and boiling water.  Mix well & let stand for a bit (5 minutes), then fluff with a fork & add the turkey sausage & the egg.  Mix well.  (The egg is important—I made my first batch without it & they wouldn’t hold together).

Scoop into your muffin tray—you should have enough to make about 12, so divide evenly.

Bake for 20-30 minutes or until nice & brown.  Serve while warm.  This  pairs well with a salad, a warm bowl of chicken soup, or other finger foods, like the bacon-wrapped peppadews from last week.  They also make a pretty snazzy quick savory breakfast when you reheat the leftovers.

NutriFacts (1 serving = 3 stuffins)

Calories 425.9 (142 per stuffin, if you’re not eating 3 of them)

  Total Fat 10.8 g

  Saturated Fat 3.7 g

  Polyunsaturated Fat 0.4 g

  Monounsaturated Fat 0.6 g

  Cholesterol 100.4 mg

  Sodium 1,558.8 mg

  Potassium 211.9 mg

  Total Carbohydrate 41.4 g

  Dietary Fiber 1.9 g

  Sugars 7.2 g

  Protein 19.9 g

Monday Morning Shoutout: AmyCakes!

Hi folks!  I did a good bit of cooking this weekend, but thanks to a bit of a hectic work schedule it’ll be a day or two before I can get everything typed up & posted.  So instead, I figured I’d just do a quick shout-out post to my dear friend Amy of AmyCakes here in Springfield!

I met Amy about 2.5 years ago while we were playing together on a trivia team at Finnegan’s Wake (which happens to be right around the corner from Amy’s bakery).  Back then, Amy was just getting her bakery up & running, after purchasing the bakery from Barb Baker (formerly The Bakehouse). 

(308 W. McDaniel in downtown Springfield, MO)

Prior to buying the bakery in 2009, Amy concocted her craveable creations using the kitchen at Finnegan’s (then “South Avenue Pizza”).  During the last 3 years, Amy’s made a big name for herself & her business around town by doing what she does best—making some of the most amazing baked goods on the face of the planet.  And I’m not just saying that because I’m biased or a fiercely loyal friend.  It’s a fact, Jack.  And I’ve had my share of cupcakes & other baked goods from AmyCakes (I’ll spare you the photo of my muffin top that proves it), because one of the fringe benefits of hanging out with someone as awesome as Amy is that aside from just generally being a super fun, super sweet, super creative person who hosts the best Murder Mystery parties in town, is that, well, Amy brings cupcakes. :)  And I, for one, have NO problem whatsoever in being my friend’s guinea pig when it comes to sweets. 

 

(The only REAL question is, which one to start with???)

 

Last year, my husband & I hired Amy to make the cake & cupcakes for our wedding.  We got married in July…on what ended up being the hottest day of the year to date at that point.  And yes, we had an outdoor wedding.

 

And when people come up & talk to my husband these days, after the inevitable (and utterly trite) question of “So how’s married life?”, the topic always shifts to discussing a) how hot it was that day, and b) how we had some of the best wedding cake said person had ever had.

We did a small cake with about 40 servings, and then the rest was cupcakes.  Our cake was vanilla with a tart triple berry filling and vanilla buttercream:

(The combination was AMAZING—sweet & tart & fruity & delicious.  I hungrily eyeball the top layer that’s still sitting in our freezer, taunting us until our 1st anniversary)

And for the cupcakes we did a “strawberry lemonade” (lemon cake w/strawberry filling) and a cookies-n-cream (chocolate cake w/a whipped cookie crumble frosting).

 

And birthdays with Amy have never been boring!

 (Death by (mostly) Chocolate: Double Chocolate, Chocolate Mocha, Junior Mint, Chocolate Peanut Butter…and Strawberry, to round it out.)

 

And during a recent Murder Mystery Party, which was pirate themed, even Amy’s cupcakes got into character!

(Blood red velvet, of course!  YAR, MATEYS!!!)

 

Alas, a few weeks ago, AmyCakes made the announcement that they were no longer going to offer a walk-in case, and would be moving to custom orders only (with the exception of downtown’s First Friday Art Walks, when the case will still be open & you can buy an individual cupcake…or seven).  I know it really troubled Amy to do so, but she wanted to be able to have more time to focus on her custom cakes and cupcake orders, which have really been picking up.  While it saddens me that I can’t run by & grab a cupcake any time I feel like it anymore, I’m so excited that she’ll be able to use this opportunity to grow her business (and perhaps have time to come play trivia with us a little more often).

FYI—as a small compromise to her regular walk-in customers, AmyCake’s famous giant cinnamon rolls (which topped the charts in 2011 as one of 417 Magazine’s Five Best Cinnamon Rolls) are now available in the cooler for take-and-bake. YUM.

Of course…this DOES afford me something of an opportunity to try out some of the other walk-in cupcake eateries around town.  As previously mentioned, I’m a fiercely loyal friend, so I actually haven’t tried any of the other cupcakes that are available here in Springfield, because it felt like “cheating” on Amy’s bakery (plus, I mean, why go searching when you already have a great go-to cupcake???).  And while I can still pre-order 6 or more cupcakes from AmyCakes if I need to bring something amazing to a party (or just pig out at home with the hubs), I DO, on occasion, just NEEEEEEEEED a cupcake “likeOMGrightnow”.

Soo…maybe some experimentation + reviews are in order, yes?  :D