Pumpkin Smiles

Hello punkin’!

This happy pumpkin-faced donut made my morning. Happy Friday!

spooky donut!

The perfect shopping basket

Just recently obtained a new collapsable basket/tote that could be useful for many things, but happens to be perfect for a quick trip to the grocery! How cute and functional is that?

Colorful salad for a rainy day

I am fortunate to have the most wonderful boyfriend, Mike — AND that he loves food as much as I do!

During my last visit to the East Coast to see him, we spent the better portion of the weekend eating (and planning what to eat next!); this is completely normal for us.

He just moved into a new apartment that is full of character and charm, and it also happens to be just a block up from a twice-weekly farmers market. On Friday afternoon we popped down to the market to find some fresh-picked produce for the weekend, and walked back with a big bag of mixed greens, orange cherry tomatoes, a green pepper and a red onion. The perfect start to a salad! What would later become a Southwest salad.

From there we put our thinking caps on can came up with the idea to make steak quesadillas to accompany the salad. A trip to the store later, and we had all the ingredients for our creation. Setting all of the items out on the counter, we divy’d up the work; Mike would start the steak while I started prepping the salad. Easy enough.

I start chopping away as Mike pulls out the cast iron skillet and proceeds to turn on the stove. There’s a ‘click click’ from the stove, but no fire. Doesn’t smell like gas either. The gas line appeared to be connected, but nothing was happening. Hmm…guess we’ll nix the quesadillas!

Onto the salad! Since this was now to be the main course, it had to be good. Mixed greens, orange cherry tomatoes, red onion, green pepper, corn, black beans, cheese and cilantro with a squeeze of lime and a healthy dose of Brianna’s roasted red pepper dressing. Without the ‘dillas, a loaf of sourdough bread and some sharp white cheddar became impromptu side dishes. Perhaps the meal didn’t end up as originally intended, but it sure tasted good!

quite the colorful salad, no?

More details on our weekend of food excursions to come later…

There’s something about the glass bottle…

I recently tried some milk from a local dairy on recommendation of a friend. The dairy sells their milk in glass bottles. The man who sold me the milk told me he could no longer drink milk from a plastic bottle because he could taste the plastic.

I’ve gotta tell you – this milk is fantastic! And how fun is this bottle??

Gimme some of that moo juice!

 

 

Babycake

There’s one thing about baby showers that is guaranteed – you need cake. For a baby shower I attended last week, I jumped at the opportunity to make a “fancy” cake – one that required a trip to a super fun cake supply store, and a lot of butter.

My automatic go-to cake inspiration books are from The Whimsical Bakehouse books. This time around I opted to make their chocolate butter cake with Matt’s Fudge Icing as filling, and their house buttercream for the outside and decor of the cake.

Chocolate butter cake batter? I'll lick the bowl!

The cake itself was constructed from two 10″ round cakes, with the fudge icing in the middle. With a crumb coating of buttercream, it looked like a giant Oreo! Really wanted to take a bite of it at that point…

Crumb coat of cake

For the outside buttercream, I really wanted to try and create a tie-dye effect. Since this was a shower for a baby boy, I tried for a teal blue, green and indigo blue mish-mash of colors. With the three frosting colored dyed, I dropped blobs onto the cake and tried to ‘smooth’ them out into a fabulous swirly design. It kind of just melded into an odd teal-y purple color, so I’ll have to work on my tie-dye icing skills. With the buttercream in place, all that was left was to decorate the cake. What goes best with a teal-y purple cake? Orange swirls of course! Using some remaining buttercream and a healthy does of orange and yellow food coloring, along with a #10 round tip, I piped swirls and curlie-q’s on the cake. The final decorating of a cake is the most fun, I think – aside from eating.

The finished cake

The end result tasted quite good, although I don’t have photos of the cake cut. It disappeared before I could snap a pic!

Welcome Fall!

Well, it’s been a full year since my last post. That is not to say that I haven’t been eating, cooking, baking and finding delicious things to share, I’ve just apparently been too busy to sit down and force myself to collect my thoughts.

Time to change that. Time for fall. Mmmm…I do love fall.

Food Memories

Have you ever had the experience where certain smells take you back to a specific place and time? I occasionally have that with food too; a distinct memory of a meal or dish that magically transports you back in time to the happy moment when you first tasted that deliciousness. This recipe experiment goes back to a trip I took to San Francisco with my dad about 3 years ago. We had arrived in San Fran mid-day, hopped in our rental car and did our best to see as much of the city as possible in an afternoon, ending up at Fisherman’s Wharf in the evening, excited, exhausted and most noticeably – hungry!

We decided on a restaurant with a view of the bay, and dove into entrees bursting with fresh seafood, a big deal for us Michiganders who have no oceans close-by. This is where I ate the delicious garlicky seafood pasta that has stuck in my mind since. As I’m not afraid of making something up, I thought “it can’t be too hard to replicate”, so I set out for the ingredients for greatness, and a relaxing evening of cooking.

All the goods for greatness.

The original dish included shrimp and scallops, but I settled for just starting with shrimp. This coupled with onions, tri-colored bell peppers, tomato and mixed Greek olives, set the stage for success.

First I drizzled some olive oil – probably 1.5 T – in a big saute pan (my favorite pan because it does everything) over med-hi heat and threw in 2 or so cloves of minced garlic, along with some salt and pepper, stirring until fragrant. Then I tossed in my shrimp (I used frozen here for ease) and cooked them until they were pink, adding in a splash of white wine while they were heating through. It was about this time that I started the water for the pasta to cook.

Shrimp, peppers, tomato, onion and olives.

I then added in the chopped, pitted olives, chopped tomatoes (a couple Romas, or even canned tomatoes would be good here) and the tri-color peppers and onion, and let them all soften up and cook through while the pasta boiled. With the pasta al dente, I used some tongs to pull it out of the water and transfer it to the pan, stirring to mix. From there, the only thing left to do was dish it up, sprinkle with parmesan cheese, and pour a glass of wine.

Finished product.

For an experiment, this turned out fantastically well, and brought me right back to the wharf. Cheers!

Easter!

This posting is only possible with the creative minds over at Martha Stewart for giving me an endless supply of ideas for Easter food craft, as well as the recipes contained in the Whimsical Bakehouse book (if you’re into baking and haven’t seen this book yet, you should).

What better to celebrate Easter and the warming of the weather than mini bluebirds in nests and purple chrysanthemums in cupcake form? I couldn’t agree more.

Vanilla cupcakes baked, filled, frosted and ready for birds.

To start, I mixed up two batches of cupcakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse; classic vanilla cupcakes and chocolate butter cakes. Once baked, the cupcakes were filled with whipped cream (yeah…the real deal, whipped with just a hint of powdered sugar and vanilla) and frosted initially with white buttercream.

Tweet tweet!

From this point, the fun started. Coconut was toasted for the “nests” and then rolled around the edges of the cupcakes. Blue buttercream was piped on in three “bird” shapes (fat, little dollops using a #10 round tip) and then melted chocolate was painstakingly dipped on each bird to form eyes. Thank you to my loving boyfriend who ‘gave sight’ to all of the little blue birds. The chrysanthemum flowers were made by using a #80 pastry tip (or any one of the “smile” shaped tips), laying down a row of petals, and building up and out from there.

Happy Easter!

Aren’t they cute?

Back to the start of 2010

The finished product!

Having baked, created and experimented with a lot of recipes and ideas already this year, it makes sense to kick it back to the beginning. Well, almost back to the beginning.

Let’s start in March at a bridal shower for my cousin Kelly. I was tasked with making the cake; the term ‘tasked’ being used loosely because I insisted that I make the dessert so I could try out some fun new baking ideas. With that settled, I immediately ran to my newest cookbook addition, the Whimsical Bakehouse’s Little Cakes book to see what designs they shared that could be translated into an appropriate wedding shower cake. That book is fabulous, as with everything in it, but I decided to try a spin-off on the mini lilac layer cake.

Started with a base of Italian Creme Layer Cake,  a rich, delicious cake that somehow managed to be light in texture, despite all of the goodies baked within it. (A shout out goes to my mom here, who rescued the entire operation by making the actual cake, after I had a snafu with the cake I was making – ever learning the hard way that baking soda and baking powder are really important to baking.)

The frosting was made from the Whimsical Bakehouse’s recipe for House Buttercream frosting, which was used in covering and decorating the cake. Two layers of cake covered in white buttercream, with more than enough left over to color the violet and green for the lilac bunch and leaves.

This design was actually much easier than it looked. Using a two shades of violet buttercream combined together in a pastry bag, I piped little teardrop shapes layered on top of one another in a rough shape of a bunch of lilacs, up the side and on the top of the cake. The process that took a little while, but once a good base was established, I made a few three-pronged “flowers” over top of the teardrops. If you try to make this, you may need to do it in two phases, as the buttercream gets a little soft and melty with the heat of your hand. Once the flower bunch was done, I used a leaf tip to pipe some bright green buttercream “leaves” around the base of the cake and amidst the lilac bunch. And voila! My first fancy decorated cake is complete and a success!

Most importantly, the cake was well-received and tasted even better than it looked. Yum!

At long last!

This has been a long time coming, and I’m so excited to finally take the plunge and join the blogging world. It’s a bit silly that it has taken this long, because, let’s face it; I’m not short on conversation when it comes to food. I LOVE food. All food. Love cooking it, baking it, sharing it, talking about it, and most of all eating it. And now I have a place to share that is a little more collected, and will hopefully be better received than the random photos that I send to family and friends from my phone.

Stay tuned for new posts a-coming…I’ve got lots to share.