Hydrangea Cupcakes: Ultra Victorian Birthday

For anniversary 23, it's flowers right? Well, Gone Girl never made it that far in Nick and Amy's arduous romance, so we many never know. Actually, a quick google search and a click to happy-anniversary.com tells us that traditionally, 23 doesn't get a gift, while the modern gift would be a silver plate. Apparently, in a traditional marriage you only get gifts every 5 years after 15 years. Don't be selfish?

So, my bad jokes aside, I've been itching to try out this decorating technique for several years now since I was first dazzled on pinterest or foodgawker. And its always been an amusing fun fact (for myself) that it was snowing on the first day of spring on birthday anniversary 0. Sadly enough, IT HAPPENED AGAIN THIS YEAR. I have so many mixed emotions about this happening. On one hand, I love symmetry and weird quirky patterns. Like the ones you'd read about in a John Green young adult novel. On the other hand, I am sick of being cold and having dry hands. Spring is such a tease in the you are so not worth it way. If spring were a person, I would not even be facebook friends with him/her.

 
Fortunately, even if its literally too cold outside for anything to grow, we can at least eat things that taste like flowers. Some may call a mixture of lemon-lavender cupcakes with rosewater buttercream extremely victorian, or steampunk, or just plain hipster, but I call it economical. Mainly because I have a lot of lavender and rosewater that I need to use up soon. But victorian and steampunk also sound super fun to me too, though I would think the color palette would be slightly darker.

Eating these was literally like eating a flower due to some slightly off ratios. The cupcakes were way strong on the lavender compared to lemon, so I would recommend upping the lemon zest to two lemons. The buttercream was such a mystery. Maybe it was because happy hour dulled my taste buds but I could not taste rosewater in the frosting to save my life and ended up adding at least 1-2 tablespoons in the end before giving up. But after letting the cupcakes sit overnight, it was very obvious there was rosiness coming off the cupcakes in scent and taste. So in the end, I definitely succeeded in the whole eating flowers thing.

 

Lemon Lavender Cupcakes adapted from Cupcake Project as follows (bolded lines indicate changes):

Ingredients	Instructions
1 cup (225 grams) granulated sugar	1) blend together sugar and lavender in food processor until buds are finely grounded
1 tsp lavender buds
1 3/4 cups (175 grams) cake flour, not self-rising	2) mix together cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in large bowl, then combine with 1)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup (57 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature	3) mix butter into 2) on med-low for ~2-3 minutes until a fine crumb forms (will be super dry!)
2 large eggs, room temperature	4  )whisk together eggs, sour cream, oil, vanilla, and zest in small bowl until smooth, then add to 3) until just combined
1/3 cup (75 grams) full-fat sour cream
1/4 cup canola oil or vegetable oil (60 ml)
1 tsp vanilla extract
zest of 2 lemon
2/3 cup (160 ml) whole milk	5) mix milk with 4) on low until just combined
Baking Instructions
Preheat: 350 F
Fill cupcake liners slightly above half full
Bake 14 minutes, should be very light in color, with no crumb when poked with toothpick.
Remove from pan immediately and cool.

Rosewater Buttercream adapted from i am baker. I used about 0.75 of the recipe stated, and added in rosewater and vanilla. I started running out towards the end, so definitely just use the whole recipe.

Hydrangea Tutorial also via i am baker. The piping technique itself is actually pretty straightforward if you have the right tips. It took me about 2 cupcakes to get a hang of it. Note that when she says to pipe with the smaller end out, it means the smaller end out as you draw a streak of frosting parallel to the long length of the tip, not perpendicular as I initially though.

Mini Rose Apple Pies: Pi is Romantic!

First, happy belated pi day of the century!
Second, I usually find that corny math/physics pick-up lines are a little gross. Like they were written by nerdy teens who, like all teens, giggle at any and all references to sex. Like the classic "I wish I was your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves." Though to be fair, those probably were written by nerdy teens who were like, woohoo calculus and boobs! 

But not all math and physics romance lines are bad! It's really actually sad that when people think about math, physics, or science really, that they think of this cold, analytical subject devoid of passion, creativity, or beauty when its really quite the opposite. There's a certain learning curve when it comes to math and sciences maybe, but those "rules" that make things like creationism false and evolution real make the world more amazing and awe inspiring-- not the reverse. Like take this physics romance courtesy of the always favorite xkcd: 

Like such an action is absolutely futile compared to the gross mass of the earth and the even grosser mass of the sun, but in terms of romance, that's a lot more effort than building the perfect dream house for the woman of your dreams whose already married to another guy (Ok I'm not sure if that's what happens in The Notebook, but its been like at least 5 years since I last watched that movie).

 

But, of course, given this is a pi day post, and one about romance, because roses, I can't get away without pointing out the most relevant math pick up line- "My love for you is like pi- never ending." Which I'm honestly 100% ok with. As long as there is also a good supply of never ending pie, mainly pumpkin and apple if possible.

These little mini pies would be extra cute for Valentine's Day, not just Pi Day, though Pi Day is obviously the better holiday. The roses were made by rolling together half moon shaped apple slices together. This works a lot better with larger slices, so I would advise picking larger apples should you choose to make these. And possibly a mandolin to make slicing thin sections an actual possibility. With those tools, I think that making the actual roses shouldn't take that long. The apples are softened by a quick zap of the magical microwave. These obviously can be clustered onto a larger, real sized pie, but I read through a reddit post that suggests full size rose apple pies are actually quite annoying to eat. This is probably the first piece of cooking advice I've gotten from reddit, but it's also endorsed by Cook's Illustrated, if you're into the more traditional avenues of food authority.



Now, I must sadly confess that these are not actual homemade pie crusts, or even actual pie crusts, but rather puff pastry. My two or three tries at pie dough have all resulted in really pathetic failures, and I just couldn't risk the effort in making roses being ruined by shoddy pie crusts. Not to worry pie purists though, I will one day learn to make the perfect pie crust, just not today.

Recipe from FMITK: From My Impossibly Tiny Kitchen.

Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies: The Post-Holiday Sales

I think I love the day after holidays more so than actually holidays. Ok, so 100% NOT the case for Christmas. And, I do like coming up with absurd witty costumes (I was The Fault in Our Stars last year. I wrote faults on stars-get it?) for Halloween. But Easter and Valentine's Day? Meh. Easter is a significantly larger deal on the East Coast than it is on the West Coast I've noticed. Anyways, the best thing about these two said holidays is that Walgreens goes all out on the excess of holiday decor and holiday themed sugar. And the day after said holidays are over, everything goes on sale for like 50-75% off.

I realize this whole discussion/excitement I have for cheap candy is not really something I should be proud of. I probably sound incredible stingy, and probably have a slightly higher risk of dietary problems because of the vast quantities of sugar that tend to hang out in my apartment. But see, this is why I desperately need to live somewhere warm so that when the cold winter days come, I can still run around outdoors like the free running gazelle I was trained to be.

 

Fortunately, I'm not actually a gazelle, because things like chocolate oatmeal cookies are probably not a part of their diets. As its been rehashed multiple times, oatmeal cookies with traditional raisins are one of the most offensive types of cookies out there. I mean, raisins in general are offensive in desserts. Oatmeal cookies themselves are great. Granted, they can sometimes taste a little dusty, but adding a healthy dose of cinnamon and pumpkin pie spice to these cookies, and replacing raisins with chocolate made for a happily textured cookie. My America's Test Kitchen cookbook for small kitchens sues granola rather than oatmeal for their cookies, so I might try that in the future.

Thank you Valentine's Day for the dark chocolate M&Ms. I look forward to yellow, green, and blues come post-Easter. Recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction.

Spinach Pizza: Easy Peasy Hello Again

Hello again! Things have been rather quiet around here since 2014. Its been a solid 2 months of 2015 with no new blog posts. Meanwhile its March, the start of springtime birthday seasons, and yet its still snowing here. I'm having a particularly bitter relationship with the snow this year. I still maintain that it is quite beautiful when its fresh and in abundant quantities, but it makes doing life things really difficult. I've been trying to go to Trader Joe's literally since New Year's. Trader Joe's is sadly not within walking distance so I have to zipcar, but every trip I have reserved has had to be canceled due to snow/winter storm weather. Granted, I think that I could probably learn how to drive in light snow, but its really not something I'd like to do while wasting time on a zipcar, you know? Anyways, the gist is that snow is making me starve (not really because I can walk through the icy tundra of unsalted sidewalks to get to Stop and Shop, but I'm just exaggerating for dramatic effect).

Despite being limited to walking distance grocery stores that stock items in a confusing way, cooking, baking, and eating have been occurring to a relative degree. January was my last month of traveling for interviews, so I'm just finally getting back into the swing of having a kitchen I can restock on a regular schedule. And regularly restocked kitchens generally mean better food for Helen, and fewer sad American cheese quesadillas (truly my low point of this past year of real adulthood).

While this spinach pizza is only marginally more difficult to make than an American cheese quesadilla, it tastes significantly more amazing. Unless I just got really lucky this time around, I think I've finally found a whole wheat pizza crust recipe that I really like! Its soft, with maybe not as much crunch as you may like for a crust, but definitely not as chewy and dense as my last batch. Spinach is still my favorite leafy green (sorry kale), and its kinda hard to go wrong when you have both goat and mozzarella cheese. And that's basically it-spinach and cheese. No giant can of sauce for one tiny pizza! The cheese itself mixes and melts with the spinach to create a pseudo-white sauce.

I added some caramelized onions and mushrooms I had in my fridge to make the pizza even more delicious. See- adding in random ingredients I have in my fridge was totally something I couldn't do a few months back, so kitchen stocking success!
Pizza recipe from BudgetBytes.
Whole Wheat Pizza Dough also from BudgetBytes.

As a generally blogging note, I think I'm going to start posting over weekends, ie Friday-Sunday rather than keeping myself to a strict 9AM Friday deadline. Thursday evenings can be kinda hard.

Bonus side note- Something I definitely don't need, but would totally want.

Maple Cheesecake and Charred Pears: No Cracks!

This was my first official homemade cheesecake, and I'm proud to say there were no cracks! Granted, there were definitely some small air bubbles in the batter because I turned the mixer to high for 5 seconds before I remembered that was probably a bad idea...but still! Even if there were cracks to be found, I guess it wouldn't have mattered too much since I covered the whole thing with pears anyways.

Being me, I couldn't aspire to make a ~normal~ cheesecake for my first cheesecake attempt, but no some gorgeous one I found on the internet made with maple syrup and the most beautiful burnt pears delicately laid out on top in a circular pattern. While I don't think I "nailed it," I definitely didn't fail. The pears on top were all supposed to be 1/8th inch thick, but unless you have a mandolin and super skillz, it seems pretty impossible to get evenly thin slices of pears, which is why I have a smattering of burnt and not-so-burnt slices on top. I think that's a sign that I probably shouldn't go into anything surgical in the future.

 Speaking of future and completely not food related, I just wanted to share with the world that I've been accepted into some medical school programs after several months of interviewing (and one more month to go), so there's a lot in my life I'm very happy and thankful for at the moment. It's a great feeling knowing that you'll actually get to pursue what you want to do and that all your hard work paid off and that the faith that wonderful, intelligent randos put into you was worth it. Ok not randos, but you get the gist of that incredibly run-on sentence.

Anyways, back to food. While the cheesecake did taste, as I quote my sister, "pretty good" (which is a huge compliment from her), it didn't actually taste like maple cheesecake? More like a normal cheesecake, which was a bit disappointing. After all, what's the point of putting in some real grade A kirkland signature maple syrup into your batter if you can't actually taste it? The crust was also supposed to be made of digestive biscuits, but since we're in America and shopping at Vons, I only found butter cookies. I think there must have been salt in the cookies to begin with because the crust ended up being a little too salty, and a little short. Maybe double the crust recipe next time since more is probably better than not enough, even if it looks ~rustic~.

Recipe from SippitySup

Holiday Cookies: Seasonal Seasonings and an Apology

Contrary to my incredibly passive personality that some may consider weak-sauce, I can be incredibly judgmental about things. Like how sometimes food blogs will just go MIA for months on end, and then randomly return. Or just disappear and never come back. I do a lot of judging of online food people it seems (see food photo ramblings in earlier posts). And yet, it seems the more I judge, the more I end up doing the exact same thing. So clearly I need to cut the world of internet people some slack here (someone write up a Pride and Prejudice- Food Blogger Edition or something).

Anyways, while I haven't been posting recently due to a variety of excuses I can make, I have been baking and cooking regularly. I made things for thanksgiving, I failed spectacularly on some meringues, and even made a pot of soup large enough feed a small country's army. But for now, lets just focus on the holiday season that is coming up.



Even though I don't follow or believe the religious affiliations of Christmas, and nowadays not much of the whole gift giving consumerism thing, I still find holiday music and holiday decorations to be fantastic. Not so much nativity scenes, but I'm all about the lights, wreaths, and big fancy trees in all the buildings. It just makes everything so cheery regardless of what you may or may not believe. Then again, I've grown up in the US where Christmas traditions has become deeply embedded in just the general majority culture without much thought of exactly where they came from or why we do these things. I mean, the way we count years is also based off the birth of a guy? And presents come from a clearly unhealthy man?


Obviously being a food blog, I am mainly about the cookies, not the historical accuracy or cultural implications of the holidays. Ok, so that was totally grammatically incorrect, because I'm literally a person. Not a food blog. All of that is rather fascinating, and something I could/should google if I really wanted to delve into it.



Anyways, words. Look at these gingerbread and sugar cookies. Side note: molasses tastes terrible on its own even though gingerbread is delicious. I think I'll try making a gingerbread house at some point in the future--one of the classic holiday baking projects I have yet to complete.



Gingerbread recipe from food.com.
Sugar Cookie recipe from the kitchn.
Royal Icing from Bake at 350 (I used the one batch and was able to decorate with plenty of colors with no problems).

Banana Chocolate Chip Pancakes: A Week Long Devotion

Do you ever build something up in your head to be this great, wonderful thing, only to find that when you've finally achieved that item, that its just an utter disappointment? And not because the thing sucks or anything. Rather, it can be pretty great objectively. But nothing can compete with the nonsense if your imagination. Except for yourself. When you just ~let it go~.

Well, yea, I kinda did that with pancakes this week. Banana chocolate chip pancakes to be exact. It all started with some depressingly cold weather, that ended up being only mildly cold later this week. The cold weather, plus, absolutely no desire to really think about my meals this week resulted in a very narrow mindset- pancakes, pancakes, pancakes.

So when I finally did get around to making these pancakes, needless to say there was a lot riding on them. I mean, I was eating american cheese. Yea, that plastic wrapped, floppy goodness thats really only good like once every 4 years when a wave of nostalgia hits for wonderbread and plastic cheese. And I didn't even have wonderbread! But thats another story.

After thinking about it, I believe this may have been the first time I've made pancakes from scratch. We usually have a very large, costco-sized bag of Krusteaz mix at home, so it delighted me to see the bubbles and rise that came out of these pancakes. I did substitute half the flour for whole wheat though, so my pancakes seemed to deflate quite a bit when I flipped.

And if you're noticing the rather er, burnt, tinge on these pancakes? Well, lets just say my stove has basically a very hot setting, and an off setting most of the time. Banana chocolate chip-flavor wise, the banana didn't really come through. Not sure if thats because I used frozen bananas or what. The pancakes did taste better the next day when I had them for breakfast. Anyways, pancake experimentation will continue the next time I harbor a week-long desire for ~pancakes~.

Recipe from All Recipes.