Cuppa Cupcakes!

My boyfriend's 21st birthday was this past week and so I decided to take a day off of work and mess up my entire apartment making cupcakes. Keeping with the event, I made them with a little fortification. Now, you might remind me that heat causes alcohol to evaporate and thus, my cupcakes were not actually taking advantage of his new found majority. To this I reply, you just have to make sure you use enough extra to let some of it boil off, or put it in about 5 min before you're going to take them out (this does mess with the consistency a tiny bit though.) Also, the icing never sees any heat! I brought them to the cook out we were having, and a party guest's kids were running around. It is so heart breaking to have to deny cupcakes to children.

So the first type I made were Irish Car Bomb cupcakes from here. I halved the recipe actually, which made thirteen. So the recipe is... well why don't you go to that lovely blog and follow the directions already so carefully written out! The only variations was that my friend left the whiskey and Guinness in a cereal box on my front door step. Which is to say, the front door step of the apartment down the block. And while he was apologetic and brought me some Guinness in the morning, unfortunately while 7-Elevens are open at 7am Monday morning, ABC stores are not. Therefore, I used spiced rum for the ganache instead of whiskey. Warning about these cupcakes: you won't have to worry about the booze in the cupcakes (and boy are they boozy, especially that ganache) because they are so rich that you couldn't eat more than one at a time! (But oh so good....)

The second type I made were Creme de Menthe Dark Chocolate cupcakes. What I did was basically loosely from here. But I'll give you my more specific recipe since that link isn't even alcoholic!

Creme de Menthe Dark Chocolate

1 cup coconut milk
1/3 cup oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/3 cup dark chocolate, chopped
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Creme de Menthe

For Frosting:
1 cup butter or margarine, room temperature
2 tablespoons soymilk
1 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
some chocolate powder
creme de menthe

Mix the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients (separately) and then combine them. Put into the oven and bake 20 min at 350 (until done, clean toothpick and all, which was more than 20 min for me.) 5 min before they're done, pull 'em out and pour a generous (or less generous if you don't want them strong) amount of creme de menthe on each cake. Let them finish, then cool. The icing, just combine it all. Look at the original recipe if you want to make it all special and perfect. Then ice! -Note- the cupcake liners were sticky from the liqueur so I double bagged them!

These were my favorite cupcakes. Don't get me wrong, ICB's were good, but SOOOO rich. These were just amazing. Other people agreed!

So, I'll go into the next two now. Pina Colada and Margarita cupcakes. The Pina Colada ones were controversial and the Margarita ones were generic. The problem with the PC ones (from here, although I deviated a lot, mostly by adding a lot of rum, and not using powdered coconut milk) was that they didn't feel like cake. That doesn't mean they were necessarily bad, but they were weird. Some people said they were their favorite, other people couldn't eat them. I had problems with them compared to all that chocolate, but they weren't horrible, particularly if you're into more fruity, less fatty/sugary desserts (although that is probably just an illusion, the health aspects). The Margarita cupcakes, from here, were good, although I had to add way more lime to the icing and I wish I had for the cakes too. The cake was a good consistency but really boring tasting. Also, I didn't like the cream cheese icing for the cupcake, I would have made something like the ICB icing, but with tequila! No one disliked them, but they weren't anyone's favorites either.

So in conclusion, I spent ALL DAY making these. I woke up at 7, went to the grocery store to buy ingredients, finished baking all the cakes by 1, took a 2 hr break to write an essay due at 5, and then finished icing just about at 5:45. (People were coming over at 6:30.) I still had to shower, clean, get together cook out stuff, and oh yeah, make the burgers. The result? The people who arrived at 6:25 walked into my messy apartment where I was frantically grubbing around in ground beef and blue cheese. (I made blue cheese burgers! Easy recipe! Ground beef + some msc amount of blue cheese depending on how much you want. Roll it into a ball then squish it and grill it.) My apartment still has bowls of icing and powdered sugar on the place mats and empty cupcake wrappers and empty bags of powdered sugar. But it was so worth it :) Happy 21st Birthday!

Feta Cheese Crazy!

I have been very into feta cheese lately. I'd been wanting to do something with feta and pesto again, and when I went out to a restaurant on Sunday night, I got a feta/mozzarela/pesto calzone.

Quick interlude. I have no pictures of any of this because my frickin' camera will take $130 plus tax and shipping to fix. AKA I need to buy a new camera. This was taken a while ago, but I wanted to experiment with decorating with fondant, so I made a firefly cake in honor of the summer! Here it is!

So then on Tuesday, I made a really yummy pizza with a pesto sauce with mozzarella and feta cheese. Quite yummy!! It was a lighter dish, but we ended up eating the whole thing between two of us, which was probably unnecessary. I wish I'd had leftovers. All I did was just make a basic pesto (a cup of basil, 1/4 cup olive oil, small amount of walnuts, 3-4 cloves of garlic, half a cup of parmesean cheese) and blended it. I say blend, because I don't own a food processor, and that's what I'm supposed to do, food process. Then I just spread it over a pre-made pizza crust (no time to make that) and put a light layer of mozzerella, then a thick layer of feta. Put it in the oven at 450 for 10 min (ish).

On Wednesday, I just made chicken, boneless chicken breasts that I forgot to marinate in advance, no less, but it turned out really well. I marinated it in a mixture of olive oil and milk, with a little garlic, salt, pepper, basi, and a LOT of rosemary. I only marinated for about 20 min, then cooked the two chicken breasts at 350 for half an hour (I always forget how long... THAT'S how long.) They were on the pinker side, so longer than that if you worry, but I really hate overdone chicken so I err in the other direction. ANYWAY, when I took it out, I generously sprinkled feta cheese over it. My boyfriend's reaction to it was, "Damn it, you watch too many cooking shows. This is really good."

Last night I made a shrimp scampi. I wanted to put feta cheese on it (because I'm so into feta right now) but I was convinced into parmesean. It was still pretty good. I'm also still eating the homeade fudge I made last week.... which was really easy! I mean, it wasn't fun to clean out the sugar-evaporated milk mix, but the results are really amazing!

As far as cooking in the future goes, I'm not really sure what I'm going to be making next week and whatnot. Groceries are getting pretty expensive, and while I'm in a feta cheese mood, I'm not really too inspired right now. Plus, I'm getting more and more busy, since I'm starting classes in addition to working a research job and 30+ other hours a week. But in any case, I'll try to blog more. Hope you're eating yummy things!