Holiday Cookies!

So we had cake, and of course, we had to have cookies, too. Actually, it was a bit of a marathon baking day on the 23rd, but I had help from my sous chef littlest brother who you may remember from my Cupcake Sliders & Cookie Fries post. Of course, Charlie helped out, too!

We made some chewy chocolate chocolate chip cookies based on my stout cookie recipe. We left out the stout, added a tablespoon of water, and divided the batter in half. In one half, we added a bit of coffee extract and regular semi-sweet chocolate chips. In the other half, we left the batter plain chocolatey and broke up a candy cane/peppermint chocolate bar and used that as the chocolate chips. Both cookies were a hit!

As for the other cookies, we wanted to get some rolled sugar cookies happening, but we were running short on time, so we used some from a mix. They actually rolled out better than I expected them to, and then we made up a thicker version of the glaze in Irksome Iced Sugar Cookies. I’m not a world class decorator by any means, but we got a couple of cute ones!

The arthritis in my hands was really bugging me at the end of this. Anyone have any tips or tricks for keeping your hands from hurting with all this piping?

Chocolate Orange Christmas Bundt

Image is of a chocolate bundt cake on top of a red and green quilt. My mom made that quilt, isn’t it lovely?

When my dad and brothers eat out at a restaurant, they always order the “Death by Chocolate” dessert, so when I bake a cake for the family at Christmas, I always try to make something very chocolatey. If I don’t, I’ll get comments like, “This cake is good… but there isn’t enough chocolate.” Last year I made this Deep Dark Chocolate Cake, which was a chocolate layer cake made with black cocoa filled with raspberry jam and topped with both a whipped and poured chocolate ganache.

Chocolate and orange together have always seemed rather Christmassy to me, probably in part due to the seasonal nature of citrus during the winter, and also because my family has sometimes bought those chocolates that are infused with orange that you smack on the table and come away with individual slices of chocolate. This year, I planned a chocolate orange bundt with a poured chocolate ganache on top. (I’m finally ready to face bundt pans again after doing Micah and Casey’s many-bundt wedding cake in September.)

I’ve seen this Cook’s Illustrated chocolate cake recipe talked about all over the internet for ages, and it always seemed like a pain to me. Really? Cocoa and bittersweet chocolate? Boiling water for a cake? But here’s the great thing about using the boiling water – it means that you don’t have to melt down the chocolate in a double boiler, so you don’t have to wash that extra pan, but you still get the lovely richness from the chopped chocolate.

I’ve adapted the recipe to add orange extract and orange zest to add flavor without disrupting the dry/liquid balance of this tried and true recipe. It really came out wonderfully, a cake that wasn’t too sweet and was perfectly complimented by the poured ganache. It looked beautiful on our holiday table and was wonderful with a dollop of fresh whipped cream. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, it would be wonderful for the new year!

Ingredients

3/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa (2 1/4 ounces)
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
3/4 cup water (boiling)
1 cup sour cream, room temperature
1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), room temperature
2 cups light brown sugar (I used a scant two cups rather than packed two cups to cut back on the sugar a bit)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2-3 teaspoons orange extract
zest of 1 orange
5 large eggs, room temperature

1 batch of poured ganache

Directions

Grease and lightly dust a 12-cup Bundt pan with cocoa powder. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position; heat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine cocoa, chocolate in medium heatproof bowl; pour boiling water over and whisk until smooth. Cool to room temperature, then whisk in sour cream. Whisk flour, salt, and baking soda in second bowl to combine.

In stand mixer fitted with flat beater, beat butter, sugar, vanilla, and orange extract on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Reduce speed to medium and add eggs one at a time, mixing about 30 seconds after each addition and scraping down bowl with rubber spatula after first 2 additions.

Reduce to medium-low speed; add about one third of flour mixture and half of chocolate/sour cream mixture and mix until just incorporated, about 20 seconds. Scrape bowl and repeat using half of remaining flour mixture and all of remaining chocolate mixture; add remaining flour mixture and beat until just incorporated, about 10 seconds. Scrape bowl and mix on medium-low until batter is thoroughly combined, about 30 seconds. Add orange zest and stir. Pour batter into prepared Bundt pan, being careful not to pour batter on sides of pan.

Bake at 350 degrees F until wooden skewer inserted into center comes out with few crumbs attached, 50 minutes to an hour. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then invert cake onto parchment-lined wire rack.

Prepare the ganache (Recipe is in a separate post here) and pour it over the cake. Let the ganache set (this could take a few hours). Keep refrigerated until a few minutes before serving. Serve with fresh whipped cream.

Chocolate Ganache

Image is of a wisk in a bowl of chocolate ganache.

I make chocolate ganache often enough now that I figured I should dedicate a whole post to it. It will be short (and sweet!) for now, but I may come back to this in a few days to report back after I use up some leftovers on truffles.

This particular post finally got put up due to my Chocolate Orange Christmas Bundt, but you can use it for all sorts of delicious chocolatey fun.

Nearly every ganache recipe I’ve seen is very, very similar, but I’ll link you to Joy of Baking because it’s got some helpful hints and tips on there, like that you should ideally use a chocolate with less than 58% cacao in it for textural reasons.

But look. Joy of Baking does butter in their ganache. I usually don’t. And then there’s all kinds of confusing crap between cups and ounces when we’re talking chocolate. But in my experience, if you take an average sized bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips (they’re usually about 10oz) and put that to a cup of cream, you’ll get a good ganache going. I’ve made it work with a little less. I’ve made it work with a little more. I’ve mixed bittersweet and semi-sweet. And the one time it all went wrong, it still tasted pretty darn good. Experiment a little.

Ingredients

9 ounces bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon dark rum (optional)

Directions

Chop the chocolate into small pieces and place it in a large stainless steel bowl.

In a large, high sided saucepan, heat cream over medium high heat, stirring frequently, until it starts to boil. Watch it carefully to ensure that it does not boil over. Remove immediately from heat and pour over the chopped chocolate.

Wisk the chocolate and cream together until the chocolate is completely melted and mixture is smooth.

For poured ganache, allow the mixture to cool slightly, then pour over the cake.

For whipped ganache, allow the mixture to cool at room temperature for about two hours, then use a stand mixer to whip the attachment into a fluffy frosting.

Store ganache in refrigerator.

Site Design

Trying out a new page design for the first time in a while… What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Is it more organized, or harder to read? Let me know!

An update and some favorite recipes from the past…

Hey Measuring Spoons Readers!

First off, if you celebrate a winter holiday, I hope it’s happy!

Secondly, I wanted to give a sort of general life update post, which I don’t do that often, but you know, sometimes I do particularly when I’ve been slacking off on the blog quite a bit… and I know that I haven’t been posting delicious holiday cookie or cake recipes. Believe me, I want nothing more than to be hanging out, baking cookies lately, but there’s been some stuff going on in my life that’s been keeping me out of the kitchen.

As you might have guessed (if you’ve been following the blog for a while, or you’ve read the About page), part of the reason I haven’t been around much is my health. I have a fancy new diagnosis (Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, Hypermobility Type), which is just another explanation for why my joints are all wonky and sore all the time. Plus, I’ve had some flare ups of an old injury, my RA, and my fibromyalgia, so I’ve been kind of achey and tired.

Charlie and I are also in the process of moving, which, as I’m sure you know, can be exhausting! We’re at a stopover for now with some family since we’re still making some decisions about where we’re going to live, what we can afford, and what our long-term plans before we commit to a lease. The great thing about this is that I’ve gotten to spend some time cooking meals for my 12 year old brother, who is way more adventurous with food than I was at his age, and he’s tried things like brussels sprouts and tofu and butternut squash lasagna and lentil soup and for the most part, really enjoyed the food I’ve made.

And here’s another cool thing. I’ve been focusing on my writing a bit. I’ve recently finished my first novel and will soon begin the editing process to see if I can turn it into something that anyone else will want to read! I’ve also been writing short pieces, fiction and nonfiction, and I’m happy to report that I just had a short piece published in an actual book, you know, the kind that you can buy on Amazon and everything. How neat is that?

So those are just a few of the things that have kept me a bit busy. I’m hoping to make some delicious things for the family this weekend, and if that happens, I’ll try to get them posted before the New Year so that you can them out.

In the meantime, here are some favorites that are great for the holidays:

Deep Dark Chocolate Cake
Darling Clementines
Cranberry Sauce Almondies
Irksome Iced Sugar Cookies
Carrot Cake with Bourbon Cream Cheese Frosting
Dressmaker’s Double Stout Cookies
Holiday Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls
Spiral Herb Rolls

Again, happy holidays, and I hope to be baking and posting more soon!

Cocoa Cranberry Oatmeal Muffins

Oatmeal in the morning on a cool day is an awesome thing, right? But sometimes you don’t make enough, and other times (especially when you set it up in your slow cooker and then people rush out the door without breakfast anyway) there is tooooo much oatmeal. You don’t want to throw it out, but if you save it, do people really eat the leftovers? They will if you turn them into muffins! Say, Cocoa Cranberry Oatmeal Muffins?

I’m not sure that I got a photo of these muffins, but they were really tasty and they’re pretty healthy – I substituted nonfat yogurt for some of the butter and reduced the sugar, used whole wheat flour, and of course, they’ve got the healthy power of oatmeal in there, too! I was surprised at how light and fluffy these came out. I’ll definitely make them again when we have oatmeal leftovers, and if you don’t have cranberries, throw in raisins or chocolate chips or nuts or anything else you can think of!

The basis of this recipe originates here, which was a great help since I wasn’t quite sure how my oatmeal leftovers were going to factor in.

Ingedients

1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup nonfat greek yogurt
4 medium eggs (or 3 large)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups leftover cooked oatmeal (our leftovers were steel cut oats)
1 cup cranberries, sliced

Directions

In a large bowl, combine flour, cocoa, cinnamon, ginger, brown sugar, baking powder and baking soda.

In another bowl, mix together melted butter, eggs, oatmeal, yogurt, cranberries, and vanilla. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened. The batter will seem thick, but don’t worry. Adding more liquid may make the muffins too crumbly.

Spoon batter into 24 greased muffin cups.

Bake at 350 degrees for 18 minutes, or until the muffin centers are slightly firm.

Slow-Cooker Seitan Pot Roast

I don’t have the best picture of this because of low lighting, but it did come out pretty nice looking! Photo is of a vegetarian roast with a few slices taken out, surrounded by veggies.

I’ve been wanting to make Vegan Planet’s Slow-Cooker Seitan Pot Roast since the moment I heard about it, and that was ages ago. Over a year ago, for certain. It just sounds so delightful – pretty much, the part of Thanksgiving that’s been missing for me the past 15 or 17 odd years, namely, the turkey, but more importantly, the ridiculous sandwiches of turkey and cranberry sauce and whatever else you could cram between two pieces of lovely bread the next day.

Finally, finally, Bo and I took on this project. It really wasn’t hard to put together at all. In fact, the wheat gluten worked in quite magical ways, as one minute it was this powdery dry stuff, and the next, when you poured the liquid in and stirred maybe two or three times, it had become a solid-ish, bouncy sort of object. SCIENCE!

Anyway, I’ll be totally honest here. This seitan roast was not the seitan roast of my dreams. It came out pretty darn rubbery, and I can’t say whether we overmixed it in trying to get it to look sort of like a roast (or at least one contiguous blob) or if we left it in for too long or not long enough. Slow cookers are a little wonky as you’re never quite sure if yours is the same as the person’s who wrote the recipe, and times can vary quite a bit. There’s even a note to that effect in the recipe.

But hey. This blog is subtitled “recipes and experimentations,” right? I’ll give this another chance, and if that still doesn’t work out, I might try it in the alternate/oven method, especially since our veggies that roasted in the oven came out far superior to the ones in the slow cooker. But you know, we had a veg*n Thanksgiving roast, and we had leftover sandwiches (albeit rubbery ones) and that was pretty cool.

Note: Since we were roasting a whole tray of veggies separately, we did not put the full amount of veggies in.

Ingredients

1 yellow onion, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 pound carrots
1 pound small red-skinned potatoes, halved or quartered
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup vegetable stock
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
2 cups wheat gluten flour
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 1/2 cup water or vegetable stock, or more as needed
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon ketchup or tomato sauce

Directions

Note: You may need to adjust your cooking time according to the quirks of your own crockpot. The one I used for this recipe cooks fast — if I had used one of my other slow cookers, it would have taken nearly twice as long.

Arrange the onion, carrots, and potatoes in the bottom of a lightly oiled slow cooker. Season the vegetables to taste with salt and pepper and add the stock, garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon each of the thyme and marjoram.

In a large bowl, combine the wheat gluten flour, onion powder, garlic powder, the remaining 1/2 teaspoon each of thyme and marjoram, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper. Add the water or stock, soy sauce, and ketchup. Mix well, adding a little more water if the mixture is too dry, then knead for 2 minutes until smooth. Shape the gluten to fit inside your cooker and place on top of the vegetables. (You can place it on top of a piece of aluminum foil or wrap it in cheesecloth, if desired, to keep its shape). Put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on LOW for 4 to 6 hours (or longer, depending on your slow cooker – we did about six), or until the seitan and vegetables are cooked.

To serve, remove the vegetables and seitan from the slow cooker. Cut the seitan into slices and arrange them on a serving platter. Surround with the vegetables and spoon the cooking liquid over all or transfer the cooking liquid to a saucepan and thicken into a gravy.

Serves 4, more when you’re making Thanksgiving dinner with lots of sides!

Red (Purple!) Sweet Potato Pies

Charlie and I went shopping at the Ramsey Farmers Market the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We were looking for veggies and picking up our eggs from Farmer Matt. We got our eggs and wandered around tasting yummy things, and then we buckled down and bought some veggies and fruit.

The sweet potato bin at one of the veggie stands was getting very empty, but the bin next to it was labeled “Red Sweet Potatoes” and it had some of the largest sweet potatoes I’d ever seen in my life in it. “What’s the difference?” I asked the farmer. He told me that the red ones weren’t really orange on the inside – that they had a deeper color – but that they were good. I decided we’d try them out.

I googled them when we got home, and I kept finding results that looked very purple. I was very delighted when we peeled the sweet potatoes and found that they were bright purple!

Photo is of a large sweet potato with a bit of skin peeled away, revealing the purple flesh.

Photo is of the peeled and cut purple sweet potatoes.

We cooked and mashed them, following the recipe for Mom’s Sweet Potato Pie. We couldn’t wait to see what they’d look like, cute and tiny and purple!

Bo began to decorate the mounds of sweet potato with nuts and marshmallows.

Photo is of one of the mini red sweet potato pies.

Isn’t it amazing?

Photo is of Bo holding a tray of mini sweet potato pies.

And here they are, fresh out of the oven. They were delicious! I’d definitely get these red/purple beauties again. Yay for trying something new!

Frosting for the Cause

 

Today, one of my recipes is being featured on Frosting for the Cause. I heard about this story months ago and got involved because I do know women who have died from cancer, and in my post there, I told the story of a lady who was really important to me.

I also posted a recipe for Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cinnamon Ginger Buttercream with a great packaging suggestion if you want to hand them out individually. My cupcakes are being donated to a local hospice that visits people in their homes.

I also made a donation to the National Breast Cancer Coalition. I picked this organization because they have put out a call to action to end breast cancer by 2020. They tell us that the numbers of women dying of breast cancer are nearly the same in 2011 as they were in 1991. Basically, they are saying that we can’t put an end to cancer with hope and pink products. We need people to take action.

It sounds impossible, but here are some other things we did in less than 10 years.

You can help this action by donating now like I did.

There are also a list of other ways to give here.

And most importantly, here is how you can take action yourself to really support breast cancer. Not by posting a Facebook status. Not by buying pink candies in October. But by doing something.

Thanks for reading today. There are lots of people with stories to tell and delicious recipes to share over on Frosting for the Cause, so check it out!

Happy Thanksgiving

My friend Bo and I had what we called a rogue Thanksgiving this year. We didn’t want to celebrate colonialism or massively slaughter turkeys or sit down at a table to be “grateful for our food” when societally, we don’t show a lot of thanks to farmers. We didn’t want family drama. We wanted to celebrate slow food and friendship, so we broke off from all the other obligatory celebrations that were happening, and we stayed home, listened to music, and cooked delicious things all day. It was leisurely and unpressured. We used almost exclusively local ingredients: stuffing made from local bread from Balthazar; Hudson River Valley apples (some were in the stuffing and some will be made into a magical dessert tomorrow); roasting veggies like swedes, beets, potatoes, and parsnips from a New Jersey farmer’s market, grown in NY and NJ, and red sweet potatoes that were actually an incredible purple color from the same market; and Jersey fresh cranberries.

Our menu included…

a wheat-meat roast
stuffing
butternut squash lasagna
roasting veggies mentioned above plus carrots and a TON of brussels sprouts
red sweet potato pie
steamed green beans
steamed asparagus
mashed potatoes
cranberry sauce
pumpkin pie

We adapted some of these recipes, which I’ll mention in another post with a bunch of pictures! But some of the pictures are on Bo’s camera and he’s tucked into bed, so I won’t disturb him for now. We also have a super awesome surprise dessert coming from the apples that we’ll make tomorrow. We didn’t get to it today, and since there wasn’t pressure from anyone, there wasn’t guilt, there wasn’t disappointment… we’ll just make it tomorrow instead.

We are grateful for the farmers who work so hard to grow us food, especially the ones struggling to maintain small family farms under ethical conditions. We’re grateful that we have access to farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture and co-ops, and that our access includes geographical location, transportation to the sites, and funds that we may choose to spend there. We’re grateful to have been been privileged enough to have met some of the farmers who have grown our vegetables, raised the chickens that laid our eggs, and started seedlings that we could grow in gardens of our own.

We’re grateful for friends, chosen family, and the people we love. We’re grateful for the ones we shared with today and will share with in upcoming days, and we’re grateful to those who understood why we wanted to do something different today, even if it meant breaking with tradition.

Why are you celebrating? How can you make your celebration even more positive? Is there something you can do to make your thanks more genuine with a small change? Remember, you don’t have to wait til next year!

Sage & Butternut Squash Lasagna

This recipe was born for two reasons, the first one being that I love butternut squash (any squash, really!). The other is that one person in my family isn’t supposed to eat a lot of tomatoes, so I was trying to make a delicious lasagna dish that was tomato-less. This dish is great for the holidays, and although it’s got some rich ingredients, it’s also got a healthy balance with whole wheat pasta and some veggies (which you can always add more of).

Make sure you use fresh sage in this one – it’s such an important ingredient that it really needs to shine.

Ingredients

1 box of whole wheat lasagna noodles, prepared according to package directions
1/2 large butternut squash, peeled and sliced into circles (use the top part only and save the bottom part where the seeds are for another recipe)
2-3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
2-3 cups of fresh spinach
1 .75oz package of sage, divided (if you’ve grown your own, grab a big handful)
1 32oz tub of ricotta (I used part skim)
up to 3/4 teaspoon of nutmeg, depending on your taste

For the white sauce:
1 1/2 cups of milk
2 tablespoons flour (I used whole wheat)
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons of your sage, chopped
a few cloves of garlic, minced (optional)
1/3 cup parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Begin by making the white sauce. In a small saucepan on medium heat, melt the butter. If you are using garlic, cook it briefly in the butter (2-3 minutes). Next, add the flour to the butter and whisk it together until smooth. Cook for about 3 minutes, stirring regularly. Gradually add the milk, stirring constantly, making sure that the flour/butter mixture incorporates with the milk. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to low and simmer for 5 minutes or until the sauce is thick and creamy. Don’t forget to stir frequently. Add the sage and the parmesan cheese about 1-2 minutes before removing the sauce from the heat. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Mix the nutmeg into the ricotta cheese.

Assembly!

Now you should be ready to assemble. Spread a layer of white sauce or ricotta in the bottom of your lasagna pan. Drop the circles of butternut squash down in the pan side by side – you should be able to get at least nine in there depending on the size of your squash and the size of your pan. Layer the noodles, spinach, mozzarella cheese, remaining sage, butternut squash, white sauce, and ricotta until you run out or fill the pan. Be sure to save some mozzarella cheese for the very top to lock in some of the moisture.

Bake in a 400˚ oven for 40-60 minutes or until the slices of squash are soft. You may want to cover the pan with aluminum foil until the last 10-15 minutes to prevent it from over browning.

Annnd lasagna is not the prettiest thing to photograph, especially during dinner rush with the family, but here’s a picture of the finished product.

Raspberry Curd Filled Cupcakes

It’s a busy birthday time around here, so I made my dad some birthday cake, too. I’d been planning to check out this awesome marscarpone frosting recipe that I saw on a baking community, but I was short on time and the first store I went to didn’t have marscarpone. What I did have (which I’d been planning to use with the marscarpone) was a bunch of lovely raspberries, and I wanted to put them to use somehow.

Generally, I make a cake when it comes to my parents, but since I had to run out to somewhere, I didn’t have time to leave a cake in the oven for that long. Cupcakes it was!

I started to play around with the idea of a filled cupcake, and I imagined different ideas for the raspberries. I settled on making a raspberry curd, which maybe wasn’t the best idea because I could only find a very small strainer, so it was an extremely comical process to filter out all the seeds… but, it came out really delicious and very raspberry tasting.

I have three brothers, and the middle brother, Matt, happened to be home from college the night that I made these. He called me a few days later and told me that the diner near his college was offering a chocolate raspberry cake free with your dinner. He said that he got excited about it because he knew he liked the combination.

“Let me tell you,” he said. “After eating your cake, the cake they gave me was such a letdown.”

*grin*

Ingredients (for Raspberry Curd)

1 heaping cup raspberries
3/4 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1/2 stick unsalted butter
Pinch of salt

Directions

Mash the raspberries with a fork.

In a small saucepan on low-medium heat, add all the ingredients together. Gradually raise the temperature to medium heat (you want to avoid cooking the eggs straightaway). Stir the mixture together for 8-10 minutes. Remove from heat. Pour through a strainer to remove seeds. Cover with heatproof plasticwrap (make sure it touches the surface) or put into clean jars and refrigerate. The curd will thicken as it cools.

To prepare the cupcakes, first bake your favorite vanilla cupcake recipe. Let them cool completely. If you’ve never filled cupcakes before, there’s a good tutorial here showing a few different ways. I used the cone method.

Fill the cupcakes with the cooled raspberry curd. Top with a whipped chocolate ganache. (See Deep Dark Chocolate Cake if you need directions.) Garnish with a raspberry.

Cupcake Sliders & Cookie Fries

I have absolutely neglected this blog lately, and for that I am sorry! As I probably mentioned, September I spent almost all of my baking time testing cake for our dear friends’ wedding because I wanted it to be just right. It was a success! I haven’t gotten any pictures back yet, but when I do, I’ll be sure to share them.

Last week, my youngest brother came to me and told me that he needed to bring in cupcakes for his class for his upcoming 12th birthday, and he wanted my help. He told me that one of the moms from his class actually had a gourmet cupcake business, and so everyone had been super impressed when they’d brought red velvet cupcakes for the class.

We started talking about what my brother likes. We talked about doing colossal mocha brownies, or pumpkin blondies, or tiny pies. Then we talked about things that were more like novelty items, like cake pops. I showed him Bakerella’s site with all the fancy cake pops on there. Then, I remembered something that Bakerella had posted a while back. Something they called Fast Food Fun.

“I know what to do,” I told my brother, and I pulled up the photos. The idea is to make a little “hamburger” brownie, on a cupcake “bun” and serve it with sugar cookie “french fries.”

My brother thought it was just about the most awesome thing in the world. I hardly ever use box mixes, but I told him that if we were going to be making brownies, cupcakes, cookies, AND decorating, we were going to use mixes.

We got little red and white paper trays at a party store to serve the treats in, and before he came home from school one afternoon, I prepared a family size box of brownies in a disposable pan. I made about 30 cupcakes out of a mix that’s supposed to make two dozen, figuring that if they were a little short, it would be more realistic, and he’d have a few more to go around. I doctored the cake mix a bit, adding some cinnamon (to make it look like it was flecked with grains) and some citrusy and vanilla extracts to bump the flavors up a bit. I waited until my brother got home to do the cookies so that he’d be involved in the baking process.

We cut slice & bake cookies into strips, and then cut them again when they were still cooling to get them into thin, french fry shapes. It was a bit painstaking, but not as painstaking as making rolled sugar cookies would have been, since you know how I love doing that.

Finally, it was time for the exciting part. We cut the cupcakes in half. We mixed the store-bought frosting with gel food coloring to make mustard, ketchup, and lettuce. We filled my piping bags, and we went to town!

Here I am pretending to pipe so my mom could take some photos. That’s my brother’s hand sneaking in there to put some bun tops on, but he’s a little young for me to be plastering pictures of him all over the internet. (Give him a few years and he can do that for himself!)

We finished up by brushing the tops of the cupcakes with water and sprinkling sesame seeds on the top. Here’s one of the finished trays:

I think one of the funniest things about this is that I haven’t eaten a real hamburger in about 17 years. (I’ve had veggie burgers, of course, but I haven’t eaten beef in that long.)

We put them in a giant cake box for easy transport.

They really do look like we’re serving sliders!

This was a super fun project. Thanks to Bakerella for the idea!

Late August Garden Update

We’re about to get hit with a hurricane, which is kind of unusual for these parts. This morning, I went out and bought bottled water, and then immediately after that, I went to the garden. I took down my container plants from high ledges and set them in protected alcoves and under the eaves of the house, hoping that they wouldn’t be trashed from the storm.

There’s some great stuff happening out in the garden. The accidental tomatillos are growing wildly out of control. There are so many that the fruit just falls to the ground if we don’t go out to collect it often enough, and we’ve already given some away to multiple neighbors. This morning I went and picked as many of the ripe and nearly ripe fruits as I could, realizing that the strong winds of the storm would likely knock them off the plant.

My second sowing of broccoli is up and a few inches tall, but the small green cabbage caterpillars have been hard at work eating the leaves away. I thought I’d brushed away all the eggs that had been laid by the evil cabbage moth, but I must have missed some, as a fat caterpillar sat on a holey broccoli leaf today.

The second sowing of peas is up, too. Only a few of the very first ones that I planted came up, so I resowed a week or two after that. The very first ones have some peas forming on them already, and the others are a few inches tall and will flower soon. After their predecessors drowned so terribly in the spring, I’ve tried very hard to keep them under cover during heavy storms. The lettuce planted around the same time is also coming up nicely, though it seems that one variety is beating out the others.

I’ve got about three of these little sugar baby watermelons growing…

And we harvested a handful of ears of corn! (Before the squirrels got to it, unlike last year!)

Look how yellow it is on the inside!

I also have a burgundy bean plant climbing right up in this container…

And apparently, one of them that I planted in the yard did survive! Check out these awesome beans!

They’re this deep purple on the outside, and bright green on the inside, just like some of the peppers that we get from Farmer Rich.

Speaking of peppers from Farmer Rich, we got one pepper plant from him, and it’s fruiting now, too. If I recall, it’s supposed to turn to an orange-ish color, so they’re not quite ready to pick yet.

And finally, the pumpkins. The only variety that is really thriving is the Jack-Be-Little variety, both in the container and in the ground, and I’m attributing this to the fact that I started all of them in a container and then transplanted them. The ones in the container are much too large for the container but seem to be doing ok.

There’s that little pumpkin starting!

Epic Midnight Snack (Grilled Cheese with Red Onion and Avocado)

Sorry for the crappy picture, folks, it was, indeed, midnight, and I got a new device that I’m not used to yet!

Today was our annual pie eating contest, and we had a long, busy day, especially since a huge storm knocked out our power last night and cut out quite a bit of our prep time. By the end of the night, we just wanted to relax. Our September issue of Real Simple magazine magazine came in the mail today, and I paged through it. It had a delicious looking page of recipes about how to jazz up grilled cheese sandwiches in three different ways.

One suggestion was to add currant or fig jam, bacon (I’d use tempeh bacon!), and a thinly sliced pear to the basic cheddar on white bread sandwich. Those flavors sound amazing together – I’ve eaten baked brie with pears on Christmas with my family, and cheddar and chutney sandwiches when I lived in the UK. Another suggestion was hugely appealing to Charlie, who loves pesto on just about anything – add pesto and thinly sliced tomatoes to the sandwich.

But the sandwich that I had for a midnight snack tonight was to take thin slivers of a red onion from our farm share, pair it with slices of avocado, and get that sucker grillin’. It was super delicious, and I definitely want to eat this again. You’d think that I’d have eaten enough during the pie eating contest, but since I don’t compete, and I was hosting, I spent about half the day making pies, then half the day making sure people had enough food, and by that time, I barely ate anything myself! I definitely tasted a bunch of the pies, but I need to pay more attention to feeding myself on days like this… or making really delicious midnight snacks like this. Yum!