Monthly Archives: April 2012

oh no!

A five hour bus trip to buy groceries is consuming all of my free time this weekend (I don’t have much of it) so I probably won’t have time to cook anything substantial this week! But I’ll try to keep you updated anyway — I am really excited about a certain couscous recipe

Image

just like this cat

thank you for reading !

key lime cupcakes

Every time one of our friends has a birthday, Corey goes to great lengths to throw a party. She plans it, reminds everyone to go (no small feat), collects money for dinner (pizza or going out to one of those cheap restaurants we frequent), finds weird little gifts, and more often than not, baking the cake. This last year she & dmitry threw me a very sweet surprise party.

the cakes of birthdays past

Of course, the rest of us help her (I am often involved in the cake baking) but she is really the driving force behind these parties – and there are quite a few of them. Her birthday happens to be in June, so we aren’t at school, and can’t celebrate it.

So a few weeks ago, a friend of ours decided we should throw her a surprise party. (she was very surprised)

Matt and I made the cake.

Well, cupcakes. Coco likes to read Joy the Baker  (link here) and had recently commented on how good the cupcakes looked. Matt and I agreed that these spring cupcakes would be perfect.

A week later, I dragged myself awake at 10:30 am on Sunday morning about five hours after I had gone to bed and went to the kitchen to bake these suckers. (to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have made it if Matt hadn’t called me around then.) We had an hour and a half to bake the cupcakes before we were supposed to meet everyone for lunch.

Despite a pounding headache and the lack of any labor saving technology like mixers, these were still pretty easy to pull off.

Key Lime Cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (closely Adapted from Joy the Baker)

  • 1 cup  flour
  • a scant 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • pinch of salt
  • 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • juice of 2-3 small key limes

Prep 10-20 minutes, bake time 20-25 minutes

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda together. Add the butter (which seriously needs to be softish if you don’t have a mixer. Put it in the microwave for a few seconds if it’s too cold. But let it sit out if you can). Mix it up until it has a “sandy consistency.” You can use a spoon to do this, or even your fingers. Gradually pour in half of the milk.

Whisk the rest of the milk, the egg, the vanilla, and the lime juice together, and then mix it in to the dry ingredients.

Line your cupcake pan, then spoon the mixture in evenly. (it will be a little more than halfway). Pop them in the oven. Her recipe says 20-25 minutes, but ours were done in just under 20, so play it by ear depending on your oven.

Meanwhile, make the frosting

Cream Cheese Frosting

  • 1 package of cream cheese (8oz), room temperature
  • 1/2 stick of butter (this is 1/4 cup or 4tbs), room temperature
  • 3/4 – 1 cup of powdered sugar
  • 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract
  • juice of 2 small key limes, to taste

Sorry college students, you really do need powdered sugar. Frosting turns out kind of weird if you use the granulated kind. It’s not very expensive though, and you can make quite a lot of frosting with one bag.

Anyway, mix the butter and the cream cheese together. If they are not at room temperature they will not mix very well (and you will end up with something lumpy and weird.) Let them come up to temperature, or put them in the microwave for 10-15 seconds – you don’t want them to melt, just to be soft. Once they are reasonably mixed together add the vanilla and lime juice and add the sugar a little at a time. Mix it up! It will get shiny as the sugar is mixed in.

You can make this as sweet or tangy as you want. We settled on about 3/4 c sugar and 2 limes, and it was pleasantly tangy and not too sweet. This recipe makes a ton of icing, so half it or be prepared to have leftovers.

Ice the cupcakes! Ideally, you should wait for them to cool. They’ll look prettier but sometimes you don’t have the time (or patience!). There are tons of fancy ways to ice – but I haven’t mastered any of them yet. (Share any tips you have!) I decorated the top with a small slice of lime.

result of 15 minutes decorating time!

And away we went!

A few hours later, we returned to eat the cupcakes.

VERDICT: AWESOME, reminiscent of key lime pie

I thought so and I totally hate cupcakes most of the time!

They were denser than your average cupcake, and the outside had that delicious carmel-y texture that muffins sometimes get. The cupcake itself was pretty sweet, but this was nicely offset by the tangy frosting. Squeezing the slice of lime on top turned out to be pretty tasty.

They garnered high praise. I wish I had had more time to take photos but my friends were getting pretty impatiant waiting for their dessert

It didn’t take them long to polish these off, and the party drifted apart (it was ~3:30pm after all)

At which point I promptly fell asleep for the rest of the afternoon

If you want a good cupcake recipe, try this one – I know I’ll be making it again. it’s easy, delicious, cute. GO FOR IT

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Dmitry’s “advanced” chicken salad

Dmitry is on the HUNT for PROTEIN

that doesn’t take the form of beans or cafeteria food!

When we were first years* Dmitry used to eat these little tins of Vienna Sausages that his parents bought him — “you won’t starve with them!” — but now he is on the quest for more delicious, more nutritious forms of meat.

He tried tofu, but is worried about eating too much of it. He likes protein powder but it is $$expensive$$. And sometimes a boy just gets tired of frozen turkey balls.

If only we could eat this all the time.

So he tried making some chicken salad.

Dear readers, fear not. Dmitry’s advanced chicken salad is actually the easiest recipe ever. It’s good for sandwiches and quick lunches, & though I think it needs more acidity he really likes it.

Ingredients (approximately – he actually didn’t measure anything)

– 4 cups of chicken

– 4 stalks celery

– 1 c. green onions

– 1 1/2 cups of artichoke hearts and their liquid (these were supposed to be green olives. improvising!)  

– 2/3 cup mayonnaise (“thank God it’s low fat”) 

– “a couple teaspoons” of lemon – or one very large slice

– 1 1/2 tbs spicy mustard

– a little salt & pepper – don’t add too much salt though! There’s salt in the ingredients already! 

It’s easy! 

Step 1: Chop everything up into bite size pieces

Step 2: Mix it all together

Step 3: Get your tub of Mayo and glob it in! Dmitry just approximated it and then licked the spoon while reading the nutrition facts. (Cue my horrified face!)

Step 3.5: go back to your room to pick up all the ingredients that you forgot

Step 4: Add yer mustard and yer lemon juice, yer salt and yer pepper and mix it together. Exclaim “man this seems like a lot of mayonnaise!”

Verdict: YUM

Dmitry is pleased — “Man, can I make a chicken salad or what!

He can dear readers, he can.

*our school doesn’t have freshman, WUT

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chili

As spring break draws to a close, I am on a small cooking spree.  In a few days I’ll be back to my overloaded  class schedule and cooking will be limited at best.

For today at least, I have the luxury of making bread, focaccia and chili! And hopefully these cookies later…

it looks so pretty!

Regular loaf bread is fairly easy to make and if you are interested, I recommend browsing around the King Arthur Flour website. They have pretty good instructions (though they can be overly fussy sometimes, and you can use regular flour instead of their brand) and good resources if you run into problems.

The focaccia  recipe I use is from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice  by  Peter Reinhart and it makes one of the most delicious breads I have ever tasted. Alas, it is far to complicated for this me to put on the site (for now?). HOWEVER if you like bread making and you want to improve your skills, I highly recommend this book. The recipes are great and it will help you prefect your technique. It’s not the cheapest, and the recipes can be complicated, but if you’re into bread it is totally worth it.

So

On to the chili.

I have never made chili before. Will this be good? Terrible? It is a mystery to me! But 9 hours from now (and by the end of this post) hopefully we will learn it is delicious together.

Okay, so I started with a 2qt crock-pot that my dad bought for me once, a bag of dried beans, a red pepper and some tomatoes.

For the 2qt, I used a 16oz bag of dried pinto beans, one pepper, one tomato and about a half can of tomato paste.

Rinse the beans and pick out any icky ones. Cut up the pepper and tomato (a little bit but not too much! or it will cook away to nothingness) and then stick it in the crock-pot over low heat.

About three hours later I chopped up an onion and put it in a pan with some ground beef, and cooked it on medium heat until the beef turned brown (and stirring occasionally.) this did not take very long. Then I added it to the crockpot. Or tried to anyway – it turns out that these quantities don’t quite fit into a 2qt crock-pot. Beans expand when you add water (which I forgot about – oops) and it was hard to fit the meat in.

Oh well!

9 hours later – tasting time!

result:

DISAPPOINT. It was not delicious!

It is okay, but a little bland. I should have added cumin and lemon at the beginning of this as well as salt. There was chili pepper, but it kind of disappeared flavor-wise and left only a vague spicyness.

Verdict: okay, but boring.

The next day I discovered that a liberal sprinkling of lemon juice, feta cheese, cilantro and sirarcha sauce makes it pretty tasty. Seriously, sirarcha sauce will fix anything (and actually so will the other three things – so it’s practically an invincible combination!)

Next time I will have a much higher meat-to-beans ratio, add spices at the beginning and include more vegetables. I’ll make sure to post the updated version at that time.

For now, I’ll just stick to bread.

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