Thanksgivukaah 2013: The random pictures

Well, its been less than an hour since I finished eating Thanksgivukaah dinner (though it was more just straight up Thanksgiving for my family since we're not Jewish). Of course, the necessary thing is to now relive the entire cooking, baking, and eating experience through pictures. I've cooked and baked enough to have several blog posts to tide this poor blog over till my next baking (and maybe cooking) opportunity, so ya'll will get to relive each bit and piece of Thanksgiving throughout the merriest time of year--finals bwahahaha.
But first, since words are lame, here are some general Thanksgiving pictures. Aka the random ones that don't fit nicely in a future post.

 One of the few "in action" cooking shots since, lets face it, messing with your phone while your hands are wet, sticky, floury, etc is hard. Some roasted garlic for what would become mashed potatoes. 1PM. Back when I thought it was tots feasible to get everything done by 5PM.

 Like seriously, our house has TWO ovens so we were able to cook the turkey while baking all the other necessary yams, crescents, cookies, sprouts ect. Even then, we didn't finish till like 5:45PM, almost an hour after our ETA (estimated time of arrival) to the dining table. How do you single oven households do it?

 Of course, if you leave me in charge of dessert, you'll basically get a second dinner spread of just desserts. Individual posts and recipes to come!

To finish, here's a messy picture of pumpkin pie and some very very special ice cream. My cousin accidentally crushed the pie a little while serving, but pumpkin pie is picture perfect no matter what in my opinion.

Vanilla and Vanilla: Cupcakes for a Belated Birthday

It's finally Thanksgiving break. It's finally home after 8 months. It's finally baking in a clean kitchen. It's finally time for belated birthday cakes.
While I'm personally not a fan of celebrating my own birthday (something off-putting about celebrating just turning an age older), I'm a fan of the excuse it brings to make cake. Thanksgiving break has over the past 3 years become my birthday-cake-baking-season to make up for all the birthdays I miss while away at school where kitchens don't lend themselves well to baking.

First off, vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream for a suddenly teenager little brother. Seriously, his voice was like an octave lower since the last time I saw him. He's always been a vanilla person. Like, to the point where he will eat an ice cream sandwich by eating the middle and throwing out the chocolate wafers (true story verified by the mother).



Vanilla beans are one of my favorite food obsessions. They just make everything vanilla or cake related 1000x times better. Plus, they're surprisingly satisfying to slice and scoop out. The empty pods can then be recycled and left to sit in sugar to make freaking amazing vanilla sugar. xx.

This past weekend was also the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary. While I found the episode to be quite disappointing (but not unexpectedly so), I kinda love the fact that Doctor Who has such long, deeply intertwined history across multiple generations. Since I couldn't make anything during the actual weekend, I wanted to add a little Doctor Who nod to the desserts I made this week. No one else in my family is a Doctor Who fan, but I'm willing to hijack their desserts to demonstrate my love. I originally wanted to do make mini-TARDIS to decorate the cupcakes, but that went a bit awry (think candy melts seizing thanks to the slightest amount of water getting mixed in). As an alternative, I tried decorating with white and blue swirls to represent time-vortex timey wimey things with some gold dust mixed in a well. It's a bit of a stretch, but A for effort? (lolz, jk, not in elementary school yo).



Vanilla cupcakes and buttercream recipes are from Cupcake Project, hands down my favorite food blog ever. I aspire to be as creative as she is in my life.

Dark and Stormy Cupcakes: 21st Birthdays

Ah 21. Its strange, but not unexpected, how many milestone birthdays you hit in your youth. 1st for obvious reasons. 5th because its probably around the age you start making big kid school friends. 10th because you get to says you're a decade old. 11th because its symmetric. 15th because heyyy permit time. 16th because heyyyyyyy drivers license. 18th because woot voting and democracy. 20th because congrats, you've survived teen pregnancy. And of course 21st, because heyyyy drinking.

The amusing thing is that all these age restrictions we have, 16 for driving, 18 for voting, 21 for drinking, don't really mean anything. Sure, the government says you can do something, but you as an individual are most likely somewhat different from the averaged out young adult that was used to set these age restrictions. Heck, there are probably 10 year olds who are more responsible voters than 35 year olds. Some 16 year olds may NEVER be responsible enough to drive a vehicle that kills around 30,000 people per year. Health and development wise, maybe at 21 you are still undergoing some of the important developmental changes that the averaged young adult may have gone through already. Plus, France and the UK seems to think you're done growing enough to have alcohol at 18 or 16 or whatever. So its not exactly like at the glorious age of 21 some switch flips in your body or some maturation cycle has ended that makes you bright and ready for alcohol. But we kinda celebrate it like it is. Not that most people actually abide by this rule either.

But regardless of whether its a milestone 21st, 30th, or 50th, or 75th or even 100th birthday, birthdays at any age equally deserve the same amount of cake, or in this case cupcakes. And in particular, boozy birthday cupcakes for the college-age student. I have a small obsession with making desserts with alcohol, though I'm not sure where it stems from. It's not like cakes baked with alcohol are actually alcoholic since it all burns off so no, I'm not trying to find more ways to incorporate alcohol into my 20s lifestyle. Since the birthday girl's favorite drink was a Dark and Stormy, my lovely suitemate and I baked these for her birthday party. Since she is also Canadian, and it was the night before Halloween, we attempted decorating skillz that ended up creating a spectrum of results from things that could pass off as a red and white canadian roses to things that probably resembled squished brains (mine were the squished brains obviously).

Overall I think they were fairly successful. I refrained from eating one myself to save more for the guests, but the bite I tried definitely had a rum-like bite to it thanks to the overnight rum soak I gave them cupcakes (which incidentally also made them moist). I had a small headache a little afterwards which I'm going to pretend was due to the cupcake so I can say that I had a cupcake hangover.

Recipe was from CAKE (RE)MIX with some adaptations inspired by Beantown Baker.

• Recipe based off of a box mix= necessary for short college hours.
• No one has time for fancy pineapple salsa fillings in college age kitchens.
• Buttercream was a surprising success. I'm thinking that maybe I've been making buttercream wrong all these years and need to start loving it.

Next time, I'd love to try to bake the cake from scratch using the recipe on Beantown Baker. I saw it on several other websites and it looks great!

Pumpkin Pasties: Anything from the Trolley Dear?

This semester, I'm taking a class called Christian Theology and Harry Potter. I know, it sounds like the epitome of "liberal arts education." And to be quite honest, it probably is. But, hey, I'm a senior, and 3.5 years ago, I made the gut feeling choice to go to Yale because I could have that option to take random non-STEM classes. In retrospect, I should have realized that STEM encompasses boundless fields of amazingness that I could probably never get bored even if I did go to a certain institute. But hey, on the other hand, I wouldn't get to tell people I took a class on Christian theology and Harry Potter. If you want a review of the class, you'll have to talk to me in person since this isn't a hey, lets talk about classes blog.

gotta love the pro iphone photo skillz

But, in terms of food, as part of the course, some students wanted to have a Harry Potter movie marathon one weekend. How anyone in college has the time to watch 16 straight hours of Harry Potter seems pretty impossible and was definitely impossible for our class. I believe in total, the most dedicated students got through movie 4. While I only stayed for the last half of Chamber of Secrets, I thought that this would be the perfect excuse to make Pumpkin Pasties--something that has been on my to-bake list for eons. Pumpkin pasties just sound so flipping delicious. I mean, it was the first thing Harry ate off of the trolley (which is apparently called a cart in the US edition). As I quote:

"Starving." said Harry, taking a large bite out of a pumpkin pasty. (Sorcerer's Stone)

Ok. so maybe this is my general pumpkin obsession getting away. After all, Harry's actual favorite treat is treacle tart.

woohoo face shot

Unfortunately, no one in my class (except for me) actually tried them because they forgot to get them from the kitchen where I told the viewing party to get them from. However, my suitemates and friends who got to eat them after I realized no one from my class actually ate them enjoyed them quite a bit. They were the perfect handsized, portable version of a pumpkin pie. It's like the pumpkin pie version of a hot pocket--to get all American here. And yet, 10000x better than a hot pocket could ever be.

check out those delicious innards

Recipe from Braised Anatomy with small modifications.

• 4 inch circles seemed a bit large for finger food purposes, so I used around 3 inch circles with the top of a mug. Actually, I might just be terrible at gauging inches.
• I seemed to need more than 12-15 minutes for my pie dough to fully bake, but I was working with a questionable oven and cheap pie dough, so many many many sources of error.
• I forgot salt. Which was actually perfectly fine, but I read somewhere that every dessert recipe asks for salt because it acts as a flavor enhancer by activating different taste receptors on your tongue. So maybe there is a dimensionality to these pasties I'm missing out on.

Midterm Mojitos

Note: Actually having a mojito with your midterm would be quite possibly one of the worst ideas ever. Do not do this just to make my cheesy alliteration true.

The middle of October is officially midterm season. Actually, officially, the midterm is marked by October break I believe, but thats just boring administrative stuff. Regardless, midterms always seem to cluster together--2 in one week, 2 papers and 1 midterm, 2 midterms in one day (that would be my poor sister). On one hand, yes, its nice to just get it all over with. On the other hand, it results in locking-myself-in-a-room-never-seeing-daylight behavior where all I want to do is wear yoga pants 24/7. A friend and I were having a particularly struggle-bus week, mainly because of a class called biochem. It's like if biochem was a baseball game, and the students were a baseball player on steroids, if pre-meds were not concerned about the health and ethical consequences of doing such things. Anyways, I digress. That was really a terrible joke analogy full of horrible stereotypes.

To celebrate the finish of this midterm (amongst others), my friend made mojitos! She's a super legit bartender, so she's been practicing her skillz on us so that when she's famous for fantastic mixed drinks and fighting health inequality, we can be like "hey, I once got a drink made just for me by her."

I mean look, she even muddled the ingredients and everything. I didn't even know that muddling was a thing you did for drinks, though that makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

What the Elle: An excuse for swanky bars

This year, a few friends and I decided to start a Young Adult book club, aptly named What the Elle because we live in entryway L this year, so Elle = L get it? Plus, we're all girls, so Elle is the appropriate pronoun. Last year, we spent a dinner time reminiscing about all the great young adult books we read and decided to start a club to read them together as a way to re-live our childhood and to relax. As John Green aptly said on tumblr, adults are just so...boring.
Although we were supposed to read Young Adult books, we ended up starting with The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling. While going out to a nice bar like Ordinary was not part of the original plan, we also at some point decided we wanted to become regulars, so we moved meetings to Ordinary which was one of the best ideas we've had thus far (and its only been like, a month!).
We planned to meet each time we finished a "part" of the book, which had 4 total. The first time, we ordered this fantastic cheesy bread sticks platter with marinara sauce. Of course, it came with the classic pickles all Caseus grilled cheese come with. Caseus being a cheese shop/restaurant knows have to make some pretty quality cheese bread. If this isn't incentive to make Ordinary your favorite bar, wait till you see the interior (I swear I don't get paid to swoon about them).

Sorry for a- instagram filter and b- bad lighting

 After this first time, we ended up not meeting till we all finished the book thanks to some speed demon reading skillz one of us had who finished the book about 3 days after our first meeting. We made a promise to return to Ordinary after we finished the book to order yards (beer in those tall glasses if you're clueless about drinks like I am). We all must have been really motivated by those yards because we actually all finished in about 3-4 weeks, which is pretty impressive for a "fun read" given the fact that I stopped fun reading when I got into college for a combination of sad reasons. For my celebratory yard, I ordered a pumpkin beer named a pretty cliched name like "pumpkin bumpkin" or "pumpin bumpin" or something to that effect.

I would first like to just note that yards aren't actually a yard long. Unless yards are much shorter than meters, these glasses were really not a yard long. Although to be quite honest, I don't think I could have finished one that was actually a yard-long. The one "faux-yard" took some quality time and discussion about Rowling's new crime novel and some reflection on if Robin from The Cuckoo's Calling was more like Hermoine or Ginny (I still stand by my assertion that she's more like Ginny). The beer itself was pretty good, though not in that omg, pumpkin makes it 20x better than all other beers. I'm not really sure what aspect of pumpkin I was supposed to taste--the squash part? Then again, I'm not really a beer connoisseur either, though I feel like the Belgian might hardcore judge a pumpkin beer.

Bacon Chai Pancakes: A Victory Brunch

A retrospective story on long lost foods (like literally lost). During the commencement period last May, me and 2 of my close friends were staying on campus, post-term. In this period, we get housing in a random dorm, but no food since school is technically out. As college students, eating out is expensive, so cooking is preferred (and way more fun!). One of the things we planned to make were pancakes. Unfortunately, when we tried to make some for dinner one night in the student kitchen, we were chastised and yelled at by one of the student aids who told us all food in the kitchen had been thrown out, including our pancake mix. So regrettably, we ate something else. 

Fast forward 3 months later with the mourning period well done with (it was too hot for black attire anyways). During the kitchen orientation for the school year, guess what we found on the shelf in the kitchen. THE PANCAKE MIX. After being bitterly denied our pancakes 3 months ago, our first priority was honoring those pancakes and consuming them. It was a lovely ceremony, with the most fantastic of Saturday brunches one can attempt while in college. (Ok thats a lie, we could have tried harder, but you know, we go to school for books, not cooks).

Because it was fall, it was necessary to make a spiced variant of the typical pancakes. Last time I made something chai-flavored was in May when I made chai frosting. In that case, I used a highly concentrated form of flavor made from teabags in tiny amounts of water. This worked shockingly well so I figured I could use that again to see what would happen.

Oh, also, bacon pancakes. Because, hey, whats brunch without some sort of pork-related meat? The bacon pancakes were very much a la Pinterest. Thankfully, not a pinterest fail though. Next time, I might try to get more creative with the bacon and either crush it up to evenly distribute in a batter, or shape the bacon so they spell something within the pancake batter. Yea, I'm kinda a sucker for shaped pancakes, be it letters, micky mouse, or dinosaurs.

While the chai spices didn't shine out as distinctly as in the previous occasions, I could definitely note the taste of tea-like spices in the batter. Perhaps it was due to the lack of sugar and actual spices in the batter itself that made its taste less noticeable? Or maybe the bacon just overpowered everything in its pig-like manner.
I'm honestly not the world's biggest pancake fan (I think I like waffles better), but they are definitely great fun to make, especially the shaped varieties. Plus, things always taste better with revenge and justice.