Choices choices

R was in charge of choosing dinner last night because I had committee late. Hotdogs or actually cooking delicious meatballs and simmering them in sauce to serve over pasta with garlic bread.

What did he choose?

Weekend partay

Had a schmall partay yesterday. Made some beef (BEEF!) and whoopie pies, both recipes I grabbed from other food blogs. The beef was the Chipotle Maple BBQ Beef Brisket from Wellfed, the whoopie pies came from Eat With Me.

Here's the precooked beef. I can't even show the post-cooked beef - things went awry. My pan basically annihilated the meat. I was able to salvage it, but only by cutting off the outside bits of meat. I'm not entirely sure what or how it happened. It was pretty good, and the sauce was nice. I did not use 3 chipotles for fear it would be too hot (I've had issues with over-chipotling in the past) but it definitely would NOT be too hot, this sauce barely had any heat at all, so go forth and use all three with no fear. I just served with some cheap-o on sale hamburger buns, pasta salad, sister-in-law's antipasto pasta salad, and the whoopie pies.

The whoopie pies came out well. On the left, a large pile of whoopie pies awaiting their mascarpone-cream filling.




On the right, the finished product. These were flavored with Kahlua, but you couldn't really taste it. In the future, I might just skip the Kahlua in the cake, and put Bailey's or something fun in the filling. Yum. Yum-O even.

Daisy's Birthday

Yesterday was "little" Daisy's FIRST birthday! YAY! She made it to ONE without being killed by R! I did NOT follow through with making the horrible tuna/peanut butter cake that I'd threatened, although she would have loved it. She did get a special dinner of dog food mixed with tuna and "tuna juice" and a day at doggy day care AND a special "beef stroganoff" flavored rawhide retriever roll. Mmm. Delish.

At first, she was confused by it.












Then, she was very excited about it, as you can tell.

Baking Day

Yesterday was baking day, in order to 1) use up bananas and 2) make blueberry muffins I'd seen on an episode of Barefoot Contessa that just looked really good. Both recipes were Ina recipes, b/c I heart Ina.


I've made the banana bread before, from a variation on Ina's Banana Crunch muffin recipe. The muffins were new to me, Ina's Blueberry Coffee Cake Muffins and were delish. I did learn the very very hard way that you MUST use muffin cups on them, or else they do not come out in one piece. We have many muffins with conical bottoms from being cut out of the muffin pan. Also, a thrilling recipe this one is - it actually made MORE muffins than the recipe stated. Another bonus - I used a bag of frozen blueberries and it worked wonderfully!

Cake

I made a random cake on Friday. Just felt like making a cake. So I made the cake I'd had my eye on from the Baking Bites blog, a marble cake. Came out fine, although I think I slightly overbaked it, and I certainly didn't marble it quite right, as it ended up essentially being just blobs of chocolate on top, white on bottom, much less marbled than the cake in that picture. I also punked out on the frosting and just used a can of chocolate from the pantry. Yes, I'm a pathetic excuse for a human being. Forgive me.

M and R learn to decorate cakes

R decided he wanted to make a cake and decorate it yesterday. It was quite amusing. Let's just say, it was on par with giving a toddler fingerpaints and letting him go wild. We made a box cake (white) and filled it with strawberry jam (it was what we had on hand). Meanwhile, we made the signature buttercream icing from The Whimsical Bakehouse cookbook. Or a half-recipe at least, I didn't think we really NEEDED eight cups of icing. Then we got to decorating.

First we practiced a bit.










Then we iced the cake, and we both put a border around the bottom of the cake (we each did half).









Then we went crazy on the top practicing with various tips. It was fun. But the finished product is not quite ready for prime time. :)

Tarts and vicars...minus the vicars...

For a lovely dinner with Miss Maura, I needed a dessert. A quick and relatively easy dessert. I looked to Paula Deen to provide me with a dessert that included fruit and cream cheese but did not require much baking. Her fresh fruit tart did the trick. I modified it, of course. I only used strawberries and blueberries. And I did not make her glaze, it seemed overkill. I just heated up a small amount of apricot jam with a tiny bit of OJ and brushed that on. But it worked, and was quite delish. And EASY. I highly recommend getting a tart pan and making tarts. Very easy and they look purty.