For fun...some of the things I've made lately that weren't a part of my menu.

My third cupcake from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes...not really a cupcake...more of a muffin...which the book calls a tea cake. Hey, in my mind, a cupcake's a cupcake! These are pistachio and raspberry and they were incredibly dense and sweet and we ate them like they were going out of style. The recipe only made 15, so I didn't give any away.


Adding raspberries...


And the finished product!


I have talked before about my love of weird, non-breakfasty foods for breakfast. My latest is turkey sliders. Yup..this weekend I made up a bunch of sliders with shallots, mushrooms and teriyaki sauce and topped them with good old American cheese. BK ate them for lunch this weekend and the rest are for my breakfast. I think they're delicious and so simple to make!


Topped with cheese!


Adorable little turkey sliders!

I bought Texas peaches and Georgia peaches on Friday and used the Texas peaches for a salsa for catfish. I decided to make one of BK's favorites with the Georgia peaches, peach crisp. I have these little ramekins that I've never used, so I made individual crisps this time. They were cute, but not that practical...you have to let the ramekins cool down quite a bit before you can eat the crisp. This stuff is so good, especially topped with cream.


Lovely Georgia peaches


Even lovelier peach crisp!

Busy week, man!!! :D

Clover had a great time at her college orientation. She's going to St. Edward's University, which is a small school in Austin. They call UT, where my son attends, the "big cattle ranch up the road." I must say, this orientation was very different than the one we attended when Cam started UT four years ago. Very small, very, very, almost to the point of ridiculous, thorough. I know more things about St. Edward's than my own alma mater! It's nice to be back home though and cooking again. We had some nice meals out and I even ventured out on my own at lunch one day and totally enjoyed the solitary dining experience. Austin is a fun, fun town to visit and I always enjoy a trip that way...

When I got home Saturday, my first order of business was grocery shopping, then I made my second recipe from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes, Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Frosting for my dad, my father-in-law and for my kids' dad, BK! BK told everyone all weekend that they were really rich, so much so that he could "only eat two at a time." *shakes head* He's a nut. This recipe was much more time-consuming than the first ones I made...the cupcakes themselves weren't too difficult, but the frosting took a ton of work. I had to chop a POUND of semi-sweet chocolate, melt it *AND* make a cocoa powder mixture to add to the butter/sugar frosting. It was a PITA, to be honest, probably because I don't really like chocolate that much. I was totally sick of it by the time I finished the frosting! I decorated them very simply and added a few sprinkles. There were plenty from this recipe to take a bunch to both dads and we still have a bunch left here...including some cute little minis.


Mixing cupcakes

Filling cups

Chocolate frosting I

Chopping chocolate

Chocolate frosting II


Father's Day dinner for BK was Mango Salsa Chicken...he really loves it, so I made it again not long after we just had it. Roasted some asparagus and made a big green salad and it was yummy! On Saturday, I made Grilled Spiced Rubbed Chicken with Alabama Barbeque Sauce. It didn't have a picture, so now it does! This was really, really good and I made Pioneer Woman's Crash Potatoes to go with it, along with the obiquitous green salad...we do love our salads, especially in the summertime!


Yummy grilled chicken


My agenda for cooking this week isn't very experimental...sort of the same old favs. We're definitely taking it easy for a few days. I worked this morning in my classroom and am going to make Jay's Signature Crust in a bit and then get into the pool to catch some rays this afternoon. We'll just have a cheese and basil pizza for supper. No stress at all.

I made this dip today for lunch. Not that healthy, but man, it's yummy. I'll just workout a bit longer to keep all the fat from the cheese from settling in to stay!

For the rest of the week, I've got Chicken in Caper Cream Sauce planned one night and turkey burgers with mushrooms another night. That pretty much gets us through Wednesday and I'll worry about the rest after that...I really am being lazy!

Here are a few more pictures of my adventures in cupcaking:


Cupcakes I

Cupcakes II

Mini!

This is how I packaged up the cupcakes I gave away last week:



Next up in cupcaking: Blueberries-and-Cream Cupcakes with raspberries added for the 4th of July! Should be awesome!!

This weekend I made my first batch of cupcakes from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes: Chocolate Malted Cupcakes with Fluffy Vanilla Frosting. BK ate FIVE before the day was over, so I'd call them a success!


FIVE CUPCAKES! And the man is still skinny as a rail...I don't know how he does it!

My goal with these was two-fold. First, make a cupcake from scratch that tastes really, really good. Successful on that end, even though I thought they didn't taste very malty, BK and Clover did. Second, I wanted to use a recipe with frosting so I could practice my totally amateurish decorating skills. I didn't feel like messing with the Marshmallow Fondant yet, so this was a good starting point.


It was easy enough to get started and can I just say, all my years of baking with a hand-held electric mixer were wasted moments. A Kitchen Aid mixer makes this stuff so much more fun and much more simple.


I'm not a huge chocolate fan, but even I found this stuff pretty tempting!


I decided to make the frosting blue...thought it looked pretty with the dark brown cupcake. I gave Clover a taste and she said, "mmmm...fluffy!" She didn't know it, but the frosting *is* called fluffy vanilla frosting!


I made a cupcake wrapper with some scrapbook paper...I don't scrapbook, but I love looking at the papers in craft stores, so I'm glad to find a reason to buy some!


Experiments with icing and tips. I need work, but all in all, I had a really good time with this project! I can't wait to make more...next up: Raspberry Pistachio Cupcakes.

I don't really know how it happened, but I am crazy about cupcakes. Yup...cupcakes. It's odd, I'm not really at all a sweets kind of person and these days I can't even eat many of them or my blood sugar goes out the roof. But...Clover wanted cupcakes instead of cake for her birthday in April. That's not unusual, she's asked for cupcakes before...so I decided that I'd do something with fondant since I had some unused white in the pantry that I couldn't remember why I'd purchased. I started surfing and found some cupcakes topped with birds and owls that were just *precious.* Clover was good with them, but wanted different colors, so I let her pick those out and got going.
The colors she decided on...dark blue, forest green, copper (looks peach to me) and brown. So her...so totally, totally her. I decided to use the blue for the backgrounds and the other colors for the animals. I drew my own patterns and cut out a tagboard template and then started rolling out fondant and cutting them with my xacto knife. I used a straw to make the little dots and just cut the twigs freehand. BK says the owls look like cats, but Clover approved!!
Cat heads (owls) and birds ready to top the cakes.
Clover shows off the finished product. She really enjoyed them. I also made the cupcakes themselves from scratch...my first time not to use a box mix for cake. I wasn't that impressed and went back to a mix for my next cupcakes.
So, flush with the success of those cupcakes, I began looking around for ideas for her graduation party...figured I might as well do cupcakes for that too! In the end, I just made lemon pudding cupcakes and lemon cream cheese icing and topped them with purple and yellow (gold) sprinkles for her school colors. I found some adorable cupcake wrappers online and bought those to finish them off.
These tasted a ZILLION times better than the scratch cupcakes and they looked really cute.
So, now the obsession was setting in...I have done basic cake decorating in the past for family and friends, but now I really was feeling the urge to do cupcakes. I found a website called cakecentral.com that has hundreds of cupcake photos and spent about three hours one night looking at them. I bookmarked several and then started trying to think of *REASONS* to make cupcakes. I have a recipe for homemade fondant that decorators swear by and bought a Martha Stewart book called, appropriately enough, Cupcakes the other day and after I go to the store this weekend, I'm making some for the hell of it. I just have to decide which ones and what for. Maybe Ginger and Molasses cupcakes topped with whipped cream? Or Brownie Cupcakes with Lavendar icing? Or maybe lemon with buttercream and big dot sprinkles?
I'd like to pull a Julie/Julia and make every single kind of cupcake in this book...they all look that amazing!
And now, to switch gears, a few photos of the recent grad, her brother and her new bike.
With her bff Brianna right after the ceremony.
With Cam before we left for the ceremony. I have a picture just like this when it was Cam's graduation day four years ago.
The ceremony, boring, boring, boring! You can't tell from this, but there are 390-something kids in her graduating class.
Her only means of transportation for college...lmao.