cupcakes

I made fun cupcakes today! Yeah! They are yummy. I used the recipe for fast fudge cake in Alice Medrich's Chocolate holidays book. The cake is awesome, very moist, chocolatey, and easy to make. I think this will be my fool proof cake recipe from now on. It took me 5 maybe 10 minutes max to make the batter and only 20 minutes to cook the cupcakes. The other cool part is that I had everything to make the cake in the pantry and most people would have it too. Very delicious, almost brownie like but not as heavy. Then I made the frosting, which was another winner. I got the buttercream recipe from the CIA Baking at Home cookbook. I made the regular buttercream and the mocha buttercream. Both of them are very yummy and taste amazing. I love the recipe because you don't have to make a sugar syrup and then add it to the butter while its creaming. I always get a mess that way and nothing edible. This recipe was fast and easy and you cream the butter and then added powdered sugar. It's well worth making and the recipe will also be my standard frosting recipe from now on. Now I need to work on my decorating skills. Yum Yum.

Fun tourist shots!

These are fun photos from my trip up north this summer with my folks. I personally think went all the way to Montana to she the giant penguin, but the offical story is to see the parks, teton, yellowstone, glacier, and Banff. I also like the shot of my dad "the Exhibit," but my money shot is of the lake in Glacier. I took it on 120 also but it's not the same becuase by the time I got the camera out of the car, my dad had moved the car down the road to the bathroom, the water had ripples on it. Never leave the car without all needed gear.

hmmm

I just wanted to say I was big when I was little.

I made a real pie!

I did it. I mean I really did it. I made a real pie. Yes, it was not pie soup, but real old fashioned blueberry pie. This time I mixed the berries with sugar, cinnamon and lots of flour. It was awesome. The crustt was very flaky and the inside was good and juicy and held it's shape like pie should. Now I think I can do it. It is a step in the right direction.

Biscuits!!!

Yeah, I love biscuits. These were good ones, too. I tried the buttermilk biscuit recipe in the CIA book and they were great. The best part were they were flaky. I folded the dough as I rolled it and I think that is why there were distinct layers in the dough. The cool part was that you could pull off layer by layer of the biscuit. yum yum yummy. I will make them again.

Muffins!!

Muffins make me happy. And the blueberry muffins in the CIA book make me very happy. They were easy to make and they are some of the best all around blueberry muffins I've ever had. Rick, my husband, liked them but thought they were a little too sweet and too light. I think poo poo on him. They are awesome and yummy in my tummy.

pie

I can not make Pie. But, in the next few weeks I am determined to learn how. I decided to make a blackberry pie using the crust recipe in the CIA book. Well the crust was good, but I have another crust recipe I like a tad bit more. The bad thing was that like usual I had pie soup. Way too much liquid. I even added cornstarch to thicken it. It didn't work. The thing, pie I mean, was ok if you can drain it first. I did look nice. Stay tuned for more pie making atempts.

Blackberries!!!

I love pick your own berries. This past week I went up towards Fredricksburg, Texas and picked blackberries. It was fun, but HOT!!! The sad thing is the farm that I pick at, like other farms in the area, was hit with terrible weather and doesn't have a single peach on their trees. Peaches of course are their main crop. But, they had yummy blackberries. They are the coolest people and gave me some of their surplus squash and cucumbers.

white bread

I made another recipe in the Baking at Home with the CIA and it was yummy. The recipe, White Wheat Bread, was easy to make and pretty quick for yeast bread. The bread reminded me of the hot white bread loaves you get at restaurants before dinner. The only trouble was scoring the bread. I really need a straight razor to make a clean neat cut. I also need to make a deeper cut. Hopefully I make another loaf soon.

cool site!

I have found a very cool website. I think I might just have to get their catalog. The site is www.boiledpeanuts.com. They sell southern food a staples for those of us who can not get their favorite southern snacks like boiled peanuts!!!! I love boiled peanuts! The coolest thing is the t-shirt with the solgan, "I brake for Boiled Peanuts." I might just have to get me one of dem.

more bread

I received a wonderful book for my birthday, CIA Baking at Home. It is great and it teaches you how to make bread,s pastries, cakes, desserts and all good things baked. So, I read through the intro to the book and decied I would try and bake everything in it start to finish. I don't know if I'll be able to meet this challenge, but I will try. The first recipe is a honey wheat yeast bread. The recipe is one of the easiest yeast bread recipes I've seen. The bread turned out o.k., but it browned to fast. The only problem was the instructions for putting the bread in the baking pan. I ended up up with good tasting bread that was a little too brown and had a skinny center. All and all it was a good recipe with decent results.

Red

This is great movie advertising for Nacho Libre. I hope it is as funny as it looks. I got a cool medium format photo of this too.

Strawberries and Cream

I seem to be stuck on Strawberries. I have so many strawberries now I am getting tried of them. This is a dessert I made for Easter lunch. It's a light and yummy dessert perfect for spring. I made strawberries and white chocolate mint cream in a cookie cup. I got the cookie recipe from this month's Martha Stewart Living Magazine and I got the mint cream recipe from Alice Medrich's Chocolate Holiday's book. If you like mint you would love this. I used El Rey white chocolate which really makes a difference. The cream was heavenly. This is a fun easy dessert that impresses, but doesn't take a lot of work and is somewhat healthy.

strawberry shortcake

In honor of the wonderful strawberry season I decided I should go strawberry picking. After a couple of days of nursing sore muscles from bending down and picking berries, I decided I needed to do something with the over 5lbs of berries that I picked. Then I opened up the May/June issue of Cook's Illustrated and saw exactly what I needed to make, "The Best Strawberry Cream Cake" on page 24. It was a fun and pretty easy recipe to make. The cake tasted like a perfect strawberry shortcake. It was sweet but not too sweet, you mostly taste the fresh berries in the wonderful whipped cream. The chiffon/sponge type cake had a good structure and I did a decent job of cutting it into three layers even though it was my first time cutting a cake into layers. The cake cut easily next time I need a longer knife. I also think it might be a good blueberry cream cake, but I might add more cream cheese and sugar to the frosting for a slightly different taste. cheerio.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today I made brown bread for St. Patrick's day. I got the recipe from the March 2006 issue of Saveur Magazine. The recipe is for Doris Grant's Brown Bread. It turned out pretty good but very dense. I still haven't found recipe that tastes like the stuff we ate in Ireland with every meal. I was very tried of brown bread when we left after a week on th emerald isle, but after a few months I craved it again. I guess finding good brown bread is a good excuse to go back, huh. If I could only convince my husband that that was true. This recipe was good if you put some butter and maybe a little orange marmalade on it. I hope everyone enjoied their Guiness and Corned Beef and Cabbage.

Mmmm Chicken

I have found the best fried chicken around. Yes, the best. The best was at one time in my home town of Pensacola, Florida at Hopkin's House. But, alas, Hopkin's is no more and the chicken is gone. Then there is Babe's Fried Chicken in Burleson, Texas, 10 miles south of downtown Fort Worth. It's a family style restaurant where you get yummy fried chicken and unlimited sides and biscuits. I get to go to the mecca of chicken goodness once a year after the Southwestern Photojournalism Conference in Ft. Worth. It's a tradition for everyone to go after the conference and a good tradition at that. This year I showed a part of me that few people see and became a Babe's Hokey-Pokey superstar. I was honored. I cna't wait for next year.

mardi gras

Last week was fun. I went home for an extended weekend and photographed Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama with my dad and some friends. I then hung out in Mobile some with my friend Carisa it was a blast. I ate enough moonpies to last me a long while and as the photo shows they were everywhere. Carisa is a moonpie purest and says you should only eat the original Moonpies, but I just say as long as they're orange flavored then they're good. The other photo is of beaded nuns on Fat Tuesday in Mobile. I saw this and it made me smile, but I was chicken and Carisa had to kick me just to go shoot it. It's just a portrait but it makes me smile. I especially like the short nun on the right.
More to come soon of this weekend's photo conference and Babe's Fried Chicken in Ft. Worth.

fortune cookies!

Happy Valentine's Day!
Here are some fun Valentine's day cookies. These easy to make and you can write you own messages or fortunes on the ribbon. They taste wonderful too, much better than those conversation hearts. They are also good for parties of all kinds. Have a great day. The conversation hearts do have their place though.

danish anyone?

This week I decided to make a Danish Braid. The recipe is from the book, Baking With Julia. The danish took a couple days to make because you have to chill the dough overnight. The making of the danish wasn't hard or really too time consuming and the finished product looked similar to the photo in the book. The cool thing is that the dough can be refridgerated for a while and you can use it for other pastries, the recipe for the braid only used half the dough recipe. The end result is very pretty and impressive even though it is not too difficult to make. The down side is that it taste good but not great. I used a berry filling with pastry creamfor the inside and it tasted like those nutri-grain strawberry and cream granola bars. Then I cut another piece and sprinkled some of the coffee sugar glaze on it and it tasted better. I think the second piece had more of the cream and that helped, the first piece was on the end. My conclusion, make it if you really want to impress with a fancy looking danish but throw away the end pieces and definately pour on the glaze. It was fun and now I can say I made a danish, plus I got to use my food processor I got for Christmas for the first time. Adios!

Mmmmm Chocolate Cake.

This was fun. I made this chocolate cake this week. I went to a chocolate class taught by Alice Medrich, the chocolate queen before Christmas and learned how to make this cake. A friend's birthday was this week so I made it for his birthday, but I really was just looking for an excuse to make the cake. The cake is three layers of devil's food cake with a whipped choclate ganache between the layers and coated with a bittersweet choclate glaze and chocolate fans attached around the sides. I used Scharfenberger semi-sweet and bittersweet chocolates and a little white chocolate on the fans to create a color contrast. The cake was fun and I would meke it again but only for a special occasion. First, it's not a cheap cake to make, between $30 and $35 dollars if you use the good chocolate, and second it is time consuming, you can make it over a few days but the day you assemble it requires a least half a day.
I have to say the cake is worth it. It has so many different flavors of chocolate and melts in your mouth. It is very rich though and a small slice will satisfy anyones chocolate cravings for days.
Adios!