This post, over at my other blog, details our weekly/biweekly basic grocery shopping. Here's a sample of the menus that came out of that (and a hunk of sausage I bought after the fact):
Breakfasts
-eggs with spinach and sausage
-iced mocha protein shakes
-mango bowls and granola
Lunches
-Tilapia cakes with lime and horseradish
-Fruit with white cheese, ham, homemade jams
Dinners
-Beef with prunes (adapted from a rabbit recipe) in the crockpot, served with noodles; banana coffee cake
-Chicken breasts and asparagus cream rice; almost-flourless chocolate cake
-Crock pot cassoulet (severely altered because we don't want to DIE!) and bitter salad with a homemade vinaigrette; citrus sorbet
I'm having fun with the new French cookbook while being conscious of the fact that we need to watch the richness factor. So I give a lot of cake away! The chocolate cake from yesterday was cut as soon as it cooled, and divided. A couple portions were packed for my lunch date with a fellow blogger, half was carefully sandwiched between layers of parchment paper for a Bible study birthday party, and a few slices went to the doorman. We have enough for 2-3 reasonable desserts if I can keep my greedy fingers off the rest of it...
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Yummy, rummy cupcakes!
Cupcake practice is underway, and so far, has met the stringent demands of my local taste testers!
I didn't think it would be quite so difficult to find a simple cupcake recipe on the internet, one that didn't require copious amounts of eggs and butter, one that could be easily adapted to new flavor combinations. I was SO wrong.
After sifting through a lot of different options, I settled on a 1-2-3-4 cake as the base recipe. There are a gazillion recipes out there so I'm not going to post a link. It is so simple, you can pretty much commit it to memory after the first try. The ratio of ingredients makes it easy to cut the recipe down to your needs or double if necessary. Beyond my caipirinha additions, I swapped out self-rising flour in the original recipe with regular flour and added some baking powder and salt to fill the gap. But if you have self-rising flour, you can skip the salt/leavening and just use that. Here is the finished product:
Caipirinha Cupcakes
1 cup (apx 180 grams, a little less than a full block) butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
3 cups flour
3 t baking powder
1 t salt
1 cup liquid (I used 3/4 cup milk, subbing in the rest in lime juice and cachaça)
zest from 1-2 limes
Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, beating well. Mix dry ingredients together in a separate container and add to egg mixture alternating with the liquid. Fold in flavorings and zest, if desired.
Fill cupcake liners about 2/3 full and bake until just done. In my oven, that was about 20 minutes...I would guess you want it at about 350. Let cool completely before frosting.
Boozy Buttercream Icing:
1/2 stick butter (Brazilian kind, otherwise, one American stick)
1 1/2 - 2 cups powdered sugar (acuçar de confeiteiro, impalpável)
1 - 3 t rum/cachaça (have fun here!)
lime oil if you want to kick up the taste
juice from 1/2 lime
lime zest
Cream butter and zest, then add sugar and liquid until frosting has the consistency you desire. Indulge.
Final verdict, one day later. The cake has a dense crumb; a lighter recipe may suit your tastes better. I think it would probably benefit from a little spritz of juice/alcohol over the tops or injected inside...but overall, they're tasty little things with a slight "oomph" of rum coming through. If I was really fancy, I would candy lime slices and top the icing with them...
I didn't think it would be quite so difficult to find a simple cupcake recipe on the internet, one that didn't require copious amounts of eggs and butter, one that could be easily adapted to new flavor combinations. I was SO wrong.
After sifting through a lot of different options, I settled on a 1-2-3-4 cake as the base recipe. There are a gazillion recipes out there so I'm not going to post a link. It is so simple, you can pretty much commit it to memory after the first try. The ratio of ingredients makes it easy to cut the recipe down to your needs or double if necessary. Beyond my caipirinha additions, I swapped out self-rising flour in the original recipe with regular flour and added some baking powder and salt to fill the gap. But if you have self-rising flour, you can skip the salt/leavening and just use that. Here is the finished product:
Caipirinha Cupcakes
1 cup (apx 180 grams, a little less than a full block) butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
3 cups flour
3 t baking powder
1 t salt
1 cup liquid (I used 3/4 cup milk, subbing in the rest in lime juice and cachaça)
zest from 1-2 limes
Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, beating well. Mix dry ingredients together in a separate container and add to egg mixture alternating with the liquid. Fold in flavorings and zest, if desired.
Fill cupcake liners about 2/3 full and bake until just done. In my oven, that was about 20 minutes...I would guess you want it at about 350. Let cool completely before frosting.
Boozy Buttercream Icing:
1/2 stick butter (Brazilian kind, otherwise, one American stick)
1 1/2 - 2 cups powdered sugar (acuçar de confeiteiro, impalpável)
1 - 3 t rum/cachaça (have fun here!)
lime oil if you want to kick up the taste
juice from 1/2 lime
lime zest
Cream butter and zest, then add sugar and liquid until frosting has the consistency you desire. Indulge.
Final verdict, one day later. The cake has a dense crumb; a lighter recipe may suit your tastes better. I think it would probably benefit from a little spritz of juice/alcohol over the tops or injected inside...but overall, they're tasty little things with a slight "oomph" of rum coming through. If I was really fancy, I would candy lime slices and top the icing with them...
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Spice cookie deliciousness
My neighbor, in a gesture of madness and true generosity of spirit, let me sit down with the last scoop of her Haagen Dazs Speculoos and Caramel ice cream the other night. It is her favorite flavor, which just shows what a wonderful woman she is...sharing her vices with me! Of course, it was love at first sight. And it reminded me of those visits to the Netherlands...of windmill cookies with tea and coffee, of ridiculous indulgences that were called a healthy breakfast. Visions of spices dancing in my head...
I remember purchasing a container of speculaas spice on one of those trips, but it didn't make it through all these international moves. Sad. So when my neighbor mentioned that not only was that her favorite ice cream but also her favorite cookie, I became inspired. After all, I must replace what I devoured. Google, here I come! After comparing a bunch of recipes, I decided to go with Chocolate and Zucchini’s. With, of course, a few modifications.
The first was to make my own spice mix. I ground whole cloves and some cardamom seeds in our coffee grinder. Don’t try this with your only, wedding-gifted, hard-to-find-in-South-America coffee grinder, like I did. The clove oil ate the finish off the plastic lid, even though as soon as I’d scraped the clove/cardamom paste off, I dropped it into soapy water. Oops. My mix is probably a little heavy on cloves, but I followed this general ratio for the ground spices:
2 cinnamon, 2 nutmeg, 1 ginger, 1 cloves, ½ cardamom, ½ white pepper.
Because I don’t have a special pan or cool cookie cutters, I washed a never-used stamp and pressed it into the dough for a little texture, then cut them out with heart cutters, because it’s almost Valentine’s Day. (Oh, and free-range eggs. People, egg yolks are NOT supposed to be yellow!)
The final result: crunchy bottom, soft center. I wish my brown sugar was a little higher quality; there are a few unpleasant sugar crunches in the middle of a bite, but overall, they're tasty. Give them a day's rest (as many commentators on the sites I'd looked at mentioned) and I think they'll be splendid.
Here’s the recipe:
(adapted from Chocolate and Zucchini: )
3 ½ cups flour
175 grams (or about 1 ½ sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 small egg
1 1/2 cups of dark, dark brown sugar (add a little molasses if you only have light brown sugar)
2 teaspoons mixed ground cake spices (traditionally cinnamon and cloves)
Mix together butter, egg, sugar and spices, then add the flour by hand and knead dough until it is well combined and holds together. Like this:
Separate into two balls. Roll out the first on a sheet of waxed paper (no flour) to about ½ inch thickness, then cut as desired. Remove cookies to a parchment lined cookie sheet and bake at 375F for apx. 12 minutes. Don’t overbake...they should be slightly soft in the center. Pull the parchment off the sheet and onto a rack to allow cookies to cool.
I remember purchasing a container of speculaas spice on one of those trips, but it didn't make it through all these international moves. Sad. So when my neighbor mentioned that not only was that her favorite ice cream but also her favorite cookie, I became inspired. After all, I must replace what I devoured. Google, here I come! After comparing a bunch of recipes, I decided to go with Chocolate and Zucchini’s. With, of course, a few modifications.
The first was to make my own spice mix. I ground whole cloves and some cardamom seeds in our coffee grinder. Don’t try this with your only, wedding-gifted, hard-to-find-in-South-America coffee grinder, like I did. The clove oil ate the finish off the plastic lid, even though as soon as I’d scraped the clove/cardamom paste off, I dropped it into soapy water. Oops. My mix is probably a little heavy on cloves, but I followed this general ratio for the ground spices:
2 cinnamon, 2 nutmeg, 1 ginger, 1 cloves, ½ cardamom, ½ white pepper.
Because I don’t have a special pan or cool cookie cutters, I washed a never-used stamp and pressed it into the dough for a little texture, then cut them out with heart cutters, because it’s almost Valentine’s Day. (Oh, and free-range eggs. People, egg yolks are NOT supposed to be yellow!)
The final result: crunchy bottom, soft center. I wish my brown sugar was a little higher quality; there are a few unpleasant sugar crunches in the middle of a bite, but overall, they're tasty. Give them a day's rest (as many commentators on the sites I'd looked at mentioned) and I think they'll be splendid.
Here’s the recipe:
(adapted from Chocolate and Zucchini: )
3 ½ cups flour
175 grams (or about 1 ½ sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 small egg
1 1/2 cups of dark, dark brown sugar (add a little molasses if you only have light brown sugar)
2 teaspoons mixed ground cake spices (traditionally cinnamon and cloves)
Mix together butter, egg, sugar and spices, then add the flour by hand and knead dough until it is well combined and holds together. Like this:
Separate into two balls. Roll out the first on a sheet of waxed paper (no flour) to about ½ inch thickness, then cut as desired. Remove cookies to a parchment lined cookie sheet and bake at 375F for apx. 12 minutes. Don’t overbake...they should be slightly soft in the center. Pull the parchment off the sheet and onto a rack to allow cookies to cool.
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