50th post - Potato Mash

Happy 50th post! That's a lot of food.

Today, I present to you one of my favorite foods in the world: mashed potatoes.

This particular variant features caramelized onions, sour cream and lots of love. My secret? The Black and Decker drill hand mixer.

Now, off to start a new semester.

Mint Julep cupcakes (with white chocolate frosting and no less than two kinds of alcohol)

A few months back, a graduate school cohort of mine had to move away. (She was going to work for the Library of Congress - boo hoo on having to move, right?)

Thankfully, most librarians seem to also be foodies. Or at least, they really love to cook.

I got a lot of alcohol that I wouldn't normally drink (along with some ingredients like pomegranate molasses that I still haven't figured out what to make of.)

Another good friend of mine moved away to California a short while ago and, since she seriously shares my passion for cooking, I ended up with a fridge full of condiments which have gone to good use.



But then, I started thinking. I have all this alcohol from the last person. What am I going to do when someone else moves? I'm like a veritable shelter for unwanted condiments whose owners were moving away. Sniff! But at this rate, I will be up to my eyeballs in awesome stuff before I can make anything out of it.

The large bottle of creme de menthe patiently sat in the back of my (1 foot square) liquor cabinet. It stared. "Drink me. You'll love it." But I had a strong feeling that creme de menthe has to be taken in doses.

Mint julep cupcakes to the rescue!



I added a lot of alcohol to these twelve cupcakes. And then, since the alcohol was taken out by baking, I doused them in some Jack Daniels I've been steeping with vanilla beans.

And I added some green food coloring, because the creme de menthe left them a wussy pastel green.

Well, they sure were potent.

As you all may have noticed, I take my pictures outside. My balcony afforded a particularly pleasant and green day, so I thought the cupcakes could use a more natural green than the food coloring inundated in their beings.




Cupcake recipe here, from Cooking and Booking. Frosting recipe here. Also add about 1/2 to 1 tb Jack Daniels after cooled and before frosting.

Apartment Therapy Contest!

Hello all -

I have entered into the kitchn's Best Lick 2008 Ice Cream Contest! Please go vote for my entry here.

I'll bake you something good if you vote, promise.

Coconut Lavender Mambo!

I love potlucks.

I also love bringing food to potlucks.

These are my favorite potluck food because they're different, but as long as people love coconut they end up loving them. Actually, my absolute favorite might be funeral potatoes but I can't bring myself to blog about those.

Something's really wrong with me, and I think these cupcakes smell like bacon until you frost them. They get this really nice crunchy top on the cupcake and it makes me happy like some people are made happy by crushing leaves under their feet.



Most of all, I love potlucks because I get to use one of my favorite things in the world - my Cupcake Courier - Lemongrass that was received as a wonderful birthday gift by a fellow cupcake enthusiast and good friend.



Recipe for coconut lavender cupcakes from Never Bashful with Butter, to whom I am totally and utterly indebted because this recipe is in the lifetime recipe book.

Road Trip: Fredericksburg Bakery, Fredericksburg, TX (otherwise entitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Lose my Packing)

Sorry I've been absent this summer, folks. First I got a job, and then I experienced a lot of discomfort and eventually got my wisdom teeth out last week. Unless you really want lunettes' smashing recipe for Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie or possibly Packaged Pudding, you've been out of luck.

One of the neat things about my job this summer is I have the opportunity to road trip across Texas. This means that I get to eat at a lot of neat places, and I happened to bring my camera along on the last one (but not the macro lens, damnit!)

An early-morning pit stop led us to the Fredericksburg Bakery on Main Street in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Now, this is where the wisdom teeth come in. After eating nothing but smoothies for a few days, I still managed to have some complications where I needed packing placed in my teeth. I lost the packing while devouring the first solid food I'd really had in about five days.



It was so worth it.







The Fredericksburg Bakery contains a huge display case full of all sorts of German-themed and otherwise sugary baked goods. I got the cream cheese cinnamon roll, which had raisins and pecans (again, stupid choice) packed in. It was incredible, maybe even life-altering--but that may be the Vicodin talking.

Also available is an assortment of fudge and Blue-Bell Ice Cream.

Cash or check only, but even my face-sized cinnamon roll was only $3.



Fredericksburg is really a foodie masochist's paradise. You could easily gain ten pounds over one weekend, and it's on my 'to do' list of Texas stops along with a trip here.

Flavor Two: Cherry Vanilla Cupcakes - The Box Mix Experiment

You see how the frosting's kind of flipping you off?

That's how this cupcake tastes.

Blech.

Boxcakes, part 1

My sister lovingly spends her time trying to get me to post her pictures on my blog. She's a dear.

She sent a boxed cupcake mix she got from World Market from Cobblestone Kitchen. The three-pack of cupcakes promises 12 cupcakes each of lemon poppyseed, strawberry and chocolate caramel, each with frosting! It's almost too good to be true.

In interest of my ever-growing love of poppyseeds and my desire to find them somewhere locally, I decided to make the lemon poppyseed for work today. My coworkers loved them, but I had some problems.

1) 3/4 cup of what basically amounts to powdered sugar is not enough to frost twelve cupcakes.
2) There was not enough lemon. On a business trip a few days ago, I had the MOST LEMONY muffins ever and they ruined me for the week.
3) When the frosting did come together after I added an additional cup of sugar to the 4 tbsp shortening, the resulting picture did not look like this:



It instead looked slightly like spackle.



They were still pretty tasty, though. Just not homemade. Coworkers described the frosting as 'crunchy' and very sweet. I've yet to figure out why these need frosting in the first place, but the strawberry and chocolate should do better in that arena.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you! Mr. O and I were at the grocer the other day and he found these darling wrappers! How could I resist?




I need to get out more, huh?