Strawberry Cupcakes with Orange Strawberry Banana Frosting
Emily came to visit me not long after her birthday – I know, we haven’t posted those recipes, and there were many delicious ones. They will come!
In honor of her birthday, I wanted to make her something truly Emily-esque. I’d made her strawberry cake before, but I wanted to take it one step further. I wanted to make orange strawberry banana frosting. Does that seem random? Not if you know Emily! Orange strawberry banana juice is to Emily like spinach is to Popeye. She often drinks it during our cooking extravaganzas.
I took this as an excuse to order lots of extracts and flavorings from Frontier Co-op so that I could play around with them. They were on sale, it made me happy, let’s move on. . .
I was very pleased with the results of my little experimentation, although for the second time, the strawberry cake/cupcake recipe I used frustrated the heck out of me. It was delicious and everything, but it makes a mighty mess – and I have a pretty decent sized mixer. I would recommend blending the butter and sugar first and then adding the other ingredients, but I haven’t tried this yet.
I also recommend not trying to frost these cupcakes at 1:00 a.m. As a result of lacking the right Ateco tip and being generally sleepy, I made this monstrosity before deciding to go the first-grade birthday cupcakes route and just spread the frosting:
To be fair, I actually think that was a good thing. Having that much cream cheese frosting on these cupcakes would probably be way too much – first-grade style worked much better.
My final recommendation before we get into the actual recipe: let the pureed frozen strawberries thaw after you puree them and before adding them to the cake. This time, I had very cold frozen strawberries and when I pureed them, they were powdery, not liquidy. It caused me problems, I think.
November days (persimmon tart)
I did something I’m not proud of recently. As someone whose favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, whose birthday falls about a week before that date, and who despises winter, I guard the sanctity of November with my life. November – that fall month when you can show off sweaters unencumbered by heavy jackets; when you’re invited to an enchanting outdoor theater of reds and oranges and yellows; when your plate is never empty and gluttony is always acceptable; and when you can celebrate the people in your life just because, without the pageantry of presents. November is the month I live for and I almost forgot that this year.
So what did I do to destroy that? A few weeks ago, I was having a rough go of it with work, meetings, and the general grind. I hadn’t had a second to breathe and things I can’t even remember now were causing me to fret and worry the way we do over silly things when we’re stressed.
So what did I do? I pulled out some flour, a fruit I’ve never experimented with and put on Christmas music.
garlic mashed potatoes
I love Thanksgiving and secretly wish we could have Thanksgiving at least twice a year. I like that it’s a rare enough occurrence to remain special, but I also wish it were acceptable to make such obscenely large meals on a somewhat more regular basis.
This Thanksgiving, we visited my Aunt Jo in Louisiana. When my Aunt Jo said grace before the meal, she expressed gratitude for both our American heritage and our family heritage. It made me think about one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving: how the meal is an expression of our family heritage. My family is scattered across the country, and especially after getting married, my family tree has a lot of branches–we can’t possibly spend the holidays with all of them at once. But at Thanksgiving, we can eat food made with recipes our various families have been using for decades. Some of the recipes have even been passed down by people that are no longer with us, but are with us not only in our hearts but — especially at Thanksgiving — in our tummies. And I love that.
This Thanksgiving, we had pecan pie from the classic Karo recipe. I can’t remember whether my mom’s parents or dad’s parents first used this recipe, but I do know that whoever first used it served it to the other set of grandparents, who then asked for the recipe. The response was that the recipe’s on the back of the Karo bottle. Why people use any other recipe for pecan pie is beyond me, although I do recommend a splash of bourbon (my mom’s dad’s addition).
We also had my mom’s cornbread stuffing. It’s phenomenal. According to the beloved carnivore and my Aunt Jenny, it tastes good on a leftover turkey sandwich with green bean casserole. I think that sounds repulsive and refuse to try it.
With some help from the beloved carnivore, I made his mom’s fried sweet potatoes, which were delicious, although I think I messed them up a little bit (but there’s always next year to try again).
And, of course, my grandmother’s rolls. The only rolls in existence which make perfectly rational (mostly) family members argue about whether the children in the family have had more than their fair share of rolls. We also had a debate about whether or not we should cover them with Saran-Wrap or dishtowels while they were rising. I was firmly in the dishtowels camp, but Aunt Jo was worried that her dishtowels were too heavy. Like the amazing mom & aunt that she is, she just cut up an old shirt to cover the rolls with. I’ll never forget it.
The traditional dishes–of which there were many, many more–also made room for some new, if not terribly original recipes, like my mashed potatoes. These mashed potatoes were made a gajillion times tastier by my Aunt Jo’s brilliant idea.
wedding bells & wedding mints
Sorry for the radio silence. Emily’s busy being really important (no, seriously, she’s got stuff to do), and also I got married in the middle of Hurricane Irene (at which hurricane wedding Emily was both a bridesmaid and an indispensable friend who helped keep us sane).
At our hurricane wedding, one of the wedding favors was an origami box (made of paper lovingly stamped by hand with cherry blossoms) filled with wedding mints dyed to be our wedding blue. You can dye them any color you want or leave them white.
I made eight batches, and it took me about six hours total, but in my not-so-unbiased opinion, they’re pretty darn tasty and a lot yummier than the wedding mints you can buy online these days. In fact, I made them exactly three weeks ago today, and I just ate one while I was taking these photos. They were harder than they had been on the day of our wedding, but still tasty. I can’t, however, make any claims about whether or not the FDA would approve of consuming these mints so long after making them.
Heaven bless my mom, brother, and sister, who folded 125 of these boxes.
Is there such a thing as too much cheesecake?
Today we introduce a new one-day feature to emandam. LIVE BLOGGING!
It’s great to be posting under the joint ‘Emily and Amanda’ account again. Amanda’s in town and it’s been such a relief to indulge in some girl talk and Oaxaca chips. (Those chips will be our downfall.)
Today – the last day of Amanda’s trip – was necessarily set aside for cooking. It’s possible that Amanda and I prepared a less balanced meal than we normally would. It’s been forever since we had a Smitten Kitchen day. We’re both just too damn busy. Trying to cull our lists of wants and needs a couple nights ago was in parts comical and disastrous. I was cautious to even open my list of bookmarked recipes. I’m at the same time proud of my organizational skills and ashamed that I have a need for 3 layers of recipe folders. Yes, 3 layers. It would be preposterous to put the quick breads links with the yeasty breads’ after all. We all agree on that, right?
But before we can talk about bread (oh and there will be much talk of it), we need to snack. We normally don’t have a true lunch on these days, instead opting for an incredibly healthy fill-in like a lemon cheesecake cheese ball with crackers and apples (see! healthy!). This is the only finished part of the menu as of yet. With the lemon-y overtones it manages to taste light, in spite of the cohort of creamy friends lemon mingles with in this spreadable goodness. It’s a perfect party treat, whether or not your party involves a dozen hours of cooking.
Some of the other prep has already happened or is currently happening. I just divided the dough for some light brioche burger buns. Since most of the leftovers will be staying in Connecticut with me, I felt less guilty asking Amanda to indulge my quest to make my own frozen burgers to keep on hand. If our trial run of black bean patties goes well, expect my fridge to be permanently stocked with these hereafter.
Amanda sliced some bananas for our five-minute chunky monkey ice cream. The lime curd I made for lime curd cheesecake bars is hanging out in the fridge, just chilling. I bought all the ingredients to make these a week ago, hoping for them to serve as a nice accompaniment to (or distraction from?) a scientific presentation, but in the end decided to actually finish preparing the presentation instead.
Amanda also sliced some strawberries and threw together the insides for strawberry cheesecake truffles that she’s currently working into balls. Are you starting to see what I mean about a lack of balance? It’s hard to let reason get in the way when you’ve been talking about making truffles together for 2 months. We can’t just not make them because there are two other cheesecake items on the menu. It’d be like lying to ourselves for weeks and weeks, and Amanda and I both value our honesty and integrity more than that.
To finish off our menu of ‘let’s take summer and turn it into a dessert’ we’ll throw together some cherry-vanilla scones. We’ll leave some cherries unadulterated atop slices of bread with accompanying cheese and jicama for a fresh cherry crostini. And the corn we picked up at the farmers’ market will end up in corn, buttermilk and chive popovers.
As a last foray, we’ll jump back to spring for a pea pesto linguini, which could go perfect by itself or with some easy little bread. That is, if we were a normal couple of friends making a normal dinner. I hope we never are though.
Okay, back to cooking! Tune back in later for our reports on how everything tastes, but in the meantime enjoy the cheese ball recipe and links to everything else.
Lemon Cheesecake Cheese Ball
Recipe from Annie’s Eats
10 oz. cream cheese
2½ tbsp. sugar
Zest of 1 large lemon
4 tsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 graham crackers
Stir together cream cheese and sugar in a medium bowl until well mixed. Add lemon zest and juice and stir until smooth. Shape into a flattened ball, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm. The original recipe suggests refrigerating for at least 3 hours, but we were impatient and only waited about half that, including some time in the freezer.
Crush the graham crackers coarsely and transfer to a bowl. Roll the ball in the crumbs until evenly coated. Serve immediately, or refrigerate until the temptation gets the best of you.
Other recipes
Fresh cherry and goat cheese crostini
Corn, buttermilk and chive popovers
Vegan black bean sliders on light brioche burger buns
Five-minute chunky monkey ice cream
weeknight baked salmon and asparagus
I have taken the bar exam and can now return to the land of the living – although I may descend from that world again when I get the results, but that jury is out for a few months, so here I am.
Last night, I made a simple dinner for the beloved carnivore. It was too hot to make an elaborate meal, but I wanted to cook for him because he’s been taking such good care of me the past two months.
I went to Whole Foods and picked up a little less than a pound of Atlantic salmon. Salmon is one of those things where it’s worth buying the slightly more expensive stuff. Actually, I feel that way about all seafood, but I digress.
While I was walking to the seafood counter, I saw some yummy-looking asparagus, so I threw that in my basket, too.
Sloth Food (sesame lime kohlrabi slaw)
Writing here that I hate KFC coleslaw (which seems to be almost foodie mantra) would probably get me disowned by my dad’s side of the family. It would also be a bold faced lie. I love that stuff. Alone or on top of one of their golden biscuits soaked in the coleslaw’s juices. I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it. Hungry and desperate for a good family gathering with little buckets of sides; cousins and aunts and uncles all around me.
This slaw is completely different though. It really shouldn’t even be in the same food group as KFC’s slaw. In fact, the citrus and the carrots are the only ingredients that overlap, since this slaw isn’t a standard cabbage slaw. No, the base and inspiration here was ‘cabbage turnip‘ a.k.a. kohlrabi. I brought some home on a whim and then wondered what on earth to do with it. What do people do with kohlrabi anyway? It almost looks like it came from another planet, the stalks shooting up haphazardly probing our atmosphere, or perhaps sending satellite feed back to Planet X. Read more…
Lavender shortbread
I’ve been wanting to bake with lavender since attending a cooking class with my mom a year or two ago. Together with some other mother/daughter teams, we watched the chef slice and dice and elaborate on his slicing and dicing. Truth be told, I wasn’t all that impressed with the chef’s teaching style – especially when he implied that no home cook would bother to make their own curry. Clearly the man didn’t know his audience. Nevertheless, a few of his culinary ideas weren’t total garbage and a couple may have even found permanent residence in my kitchen. One is a shrimp grilling trick I keep meaning to share here, and another was the lingering memory of a lavender crème brûlée.
I can count the crème brûlées I’ve had on one hand, so it’s not much to say that this one ranked near the top, but it stands out. Like salt minus all that, you know, saltiness, lavender provides a contrasting, even intriguing, je ne sais quoi to a dessert recipe. It seems counterintuitive that it’d be there, but then ends up being just so, so right. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that crème brûlée recipe, but before you do, make these shortbread cookies. Read more…
Fourth of July cookies with Royal Icing
I’m taking my head out of the law books for a minute or two to share some photos of the Fourth of July cookies I made. I made them a week early because I wanted to make cookies, and I’d bought Fourth of July sprinkles, and I’m just about to hit the point in preparing for the bar exam where I stop having time to do anything else (did you notice that Emily’s been carrying the full weight of the blog on her shoulders for a month now? she’s awesome like that). Plus, if I didn’t make them till the Fourth of July, sharing photos and ideas wouldn’t be as useful to other people – until next year at least.
Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to make cookies. Studying for the bar exam is not fun, people, and I miss my kitchen – I don’t even have a kitchen where I’m living now and have to run over to the beloved carnivore’s apartment if I want to bake or cook. Not that I mind having an excuse to see him, but still. I miss my kitchen.
Farewell Spring! (fava bean and rice soup)
The farewells keep coming. Since watching Amanda drive off into the distance, it seems like every week brings a significant goodbye. Next in line was Captain Jack (no not that Captain Jack) at the food pantry. Then my co-worker and one of my biggest mentors departed for an amazing new job. And now, as a final blow, spring and it’s beautiful fresh fava beans have left us behind as well.
The first three goodbyes involved food celebrations. Amanda and our friends attacked numerous bowls of our favorite free chips and salsa on her last night in town. We managed to picnic amidst a rain storm to send Jack off. And the lab has thus far had a total of 3 food-filled goodbyes for Gary, with another slated for August. Either we’re really lazy gluttons, or Gary really was that significant to our lab culture. Probably both. Read more…
emandam 