Lavender lemon cupcake blooms with a lemon cream cheese icing

July 24, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 17 Comments

I know that no one needs to be reminded that I love cupcakes.

But just in case you do…

I LOVE THEM I LOVE THEM I LOVE THEM. I love them so much that my obsession justifies my lack on punctuation.

I also love making them. And buying stuff to make them pretty.

Hence the purchase of these lavender cupcake liners.

Remember a million years ago when I explored St. Lawrence Market in Toronto? In that post, I raved about this wonderful kitchen supply shop they had set up in the middle of the second floor. It was here, that I found these beauties.

I have wanted to make lavender cupcakes ever since.

Since I’m really rather logical, I chose Thursday, the hottest day on record since 1956 to bake things. No, I did not bake them outside. You’re funny, though. Luckily for me, my awesomely super student home came equipped with AC. This blast of cold air made mixing, scooping, piping and living tolerable.

It turns out that because these cupcake liners were so gigantic, I was unable to correctly estimate the amount of batter that was to go in each. And so, the Godzilla-sized cupcakes were born. My doubled (thank god I did this) recipe made a dozen of them, and frankly, each cupcake is the size of a small coffee mug. They were good though, so I didn’t mind. I also still managed to eat two (mom: this does not warrant another hyper-concerned type two diabetes email, but thanks for having my back).

Also, holy cow these were awesome. Seriously, really, really yummy. And I consider myself fairly well versed when it comes to cupcake tasting. The lemon and lavender flavours were balanced in the perfectly moist cake, and the cream cheese icing had a nice citrusy shot. Okay, maybe the icing was a little too sweet for some, BUT I LIKED IT.

Anyways, I took plenty of pictures of my cupcakes in bloom. Since she demanded that I do this, I must say that Ariel was the photo director for this cupcake shoot. She stood outside in a completely inappropriate heatwave day outfit and held cupcakes in the blistering sun while I snapped at my cupcakes from all angles. She also had the idea for the sunflower leaf photos. Very Thumbelina, n’est ce pas?

I have more than half a dozen cupcakes leftover, as of Friday evening. Perhaps I will give them away, or perhaps I will eat them all in one sitting and let a stomach ache blossom in my stomach. Yeah, I just went there.

Update: I brought the cupcakes to a fiesta-themed party I went to Friday night. It was Mexican-themed and they were boys. Could I get the theme anymore wrong?

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Tie-dye cookies

July 9, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

Please forgive me for what I’m about to do:

These cookies were absolutely tie-dye for.

See? I told you it was going to be bad. Now, if you can move on from this disastrous display of attempted wit, please continue to read about these colourful cookies.

I figured such colourful cookies warranted the use of my homemade placemats as an appropriate backdrop.

The rekindling of my creative cooking self was partly inspired by my passionate love of colour.

These cookies saw me, once again, utilizing the ever-strong powers of my gel food colouring (well technically, it’s Brittany’s food colouring, but she was kind enough to let me use it for the summer). The recipe for these cookies was inspired by two different blog postings, one by The Cooking Photographer, and the other by my new favourite baking blog, Diamonds for Dessert. I’ve only made “icebox cookies” once before. To make icebox cookies, all you do is refrigerate the dough and slice it to make the cookies. For me, this refrigeration time lasted for two days, since I had absolutely no time to make them earlier in the week. I finally got around to baking them while I waited for my portobello pesto pizza to rise.

Due to poor planning on my part, I decided to knead the gel food colouring into the cookie dough, rather than mix it in pre-flour when it would have actually been easy. As a result, the dough wasn’t completely dyed, creating this sort of cool tie-dye effect. It also meant that my hands were dyed with pink, green, yellow and purple dye for three straight days.

Gel food colouring – it’s powerful stuff. (PS: in my recipe below I’ve changed around the instructions so you can get solid cookie colours…unless you want to make them look tie-dye, that is, in which case add in the food colouring last).

My favourite part of photographing these cookies, was that a little girl strolling along the street with her mom stopped and stared for a bit. Something about rainbow-coloured cookies make kids coming running. I gave her a her mom a cookie and snapped their picture just because the kid was so damn cute. I also happened to be a fan of her pink colour scheme.

I already have a few tricks up my sleeves for the next time I make cookies like this. I’m thinking of making two layers mint green and adding in peppermint extract instead of vanilla. The other two layers will then somehow have oreo crumbs mixed in, making them either (a) like a girl guide cookie or (b) like the best Dairy Queen blizzard in existence. Stay tuned.

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Sunday dinner with Ariel and Alex: Chilled guacamole soup and double chocolate chipotle muffins

June 23, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

…And Ariel made the fajitas (and Alex hung out with us but ate some vegetarian-friendly meal)!

There is little I love more in life than an impromptu, Mexican-themed meal. Throw a couple of good friends into the mix, and you have the ingredients for a terrific night.

The dynamics of my friendship with Ariel
(I’m in the mood for headings)
This past Sunday, Ariel invited me over to her house (my old house) for a taco dinner. Obviously, I accepted. It was Ariel’s turn to make me something anyways. You see, the two of us have a payback system that never involves the exchange of money. I make Ariel supper? She makes me supper in return. Ariel buys me an oat fudge bar from Starbucks and a fun popsicle after I forget my wallet at home? I buy her a movie ticket at the Mayfair. It’s a good system. Yesterday we even had a muffin exchange at lunch. This is why we are friends.

The appetizer
When brainstorming things to make on Sunday, I came across two recipes on Tastespotting.

The first was for a chilled guacamole soup. I was intrigued. I had never made guacamole before, but am passionately in love with avocados. I figured I’d try this one out, and cart it over to Ariel and Alex’s as an appetizer. It was super easy to make (it took 20 minutes + chill time) and gave me an excuse to buy and munch on my favourite fruit.

Please note the metal chunk that was once attached to Ariel's bike, Hans — Please note the metal chunk that was once attached to Ariel's bicycle, Hans

But don’t get me wrong – this soup was not made without sacrifice. Oh whatever do I mean? Well, you know how a few blog posts back I mentioned that you need to wear gloves when you cut jalapeno peppers? I decided to disobey my own advice, promising that I would be careful and not burn my fingers.

Good news: I didn’t burn my fingers.

JUST EVERY SINGLE PART OF MY FACE, INCLUDING EYELIDS, NOSE AND FOREHEAD.

Pain and agony. Whine, whine, whine.

The dessert
Okay, I’m over the pepper burns.

I spotted these “muffins” shortly after the soup discovery. Why the air quotes? It’s because these were more or less cupcakes. I’m sorry, anything with the term “double chocolate” in its name has no choice but to be excluded all together from the muffin category. The addition of the chipotle spice was simply an excuse for me to use more of that $8 bottle of chipotle chili pepper that I bought when I made my Cinco de Mayo brownies (yes, I realize that these are the muffin equivalent of that dessert, shh).

I decided that if I was going to classify these as dessert, I might as well go all out. I scooped out the top and plopped in a spoonful of ice cream. Great summer dessert. In true west coast fashion, Ariel had blackberries with hers.

Final note: the vanilla I used for the cuppins wasn’t just any old vanilla. When I babysat for this family the other week (the girls and I made 50 cupcakes from scratch for their school classes, but that’s another story…), the mom gave me a bottle of homemade vanilla extract. It was made with boiled down Grey Goose vodka and real vanilla beans (which were still sitting in the bottle). So awesome.

PS: Oh old front porch, it was good to be back. I missed standing on a chair to take photos (not).

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Nutella and sea salt caramel chocolate fudge (and a failure turned positive)

June 14, 2011January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

(Please note that I am writing this post on Sunday, June 5. I am writing this message to the future. All feelings of anguish expressed within this post will be long gone [hopefully] at point of reading. Caution)

I FEEL SO ILL.

I would not recommend my Sunday afternoon eating habits to anyone. Just in case you’re wondering, marshmallow fluff and nutella are a terrible, terrible combination.

And by terrible, I mean utterly and irrevocably delicious…until you eat several hundred spoonfuls straight from the jar.

My afternoon: Take heaping spoonful of marshmallow fluff. Insert in mouth. Take heaping spoonful of nutella (note: ensure you use a different spoon and eat the marshmallow first, as to not dirty the marshmallow spoon with melted nutella). Insert in mouth. Enjoy. Repeat for the next three hours.

…

If it was possible to die from a sugar overload, I would not have made it through the day. You can’t really blame me though – I have never in my life purchased a jar of marshmallow fluff or nutella, so I had 21 years of spreadable sugar deprivation to make up for.

So why did I break the ever-established rules of my dietician mother and get these two nutritionally void products?

To make nutella and sea salt caramel chocolate fudge, of course.

As the title suggests, this was quite the decadent dessert. So many layers. So much sugar. Enough to make any one diabetic, really.

As I often do with complex, multi-layered foods, here is the anatomy of this sinfully rich dessert:

Layer 1: Melted chocolate and nutella fudge
Layer 2: Homemade sea salt caramel
Layer 3: Chopped hazelnuts
Layer 4: Some sort of strange marshmallow fudge layer, which utilized an ENTIRE JAR of marshmallow fluff (this post is warranting so much capitalization, apologies)
Layer 5: More melted chocolate and nutella fudge.

The layer-by-layer breakdown photo (minus the top fudge layer) was inspired by my dear friend and fellow blogger Brittany. Visit her blog, it is awesome.

Now, I was originally supposed to make this fudge for an office meeting we were having on Monday.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

The only age group who enjoys layer upon layer of sugar is the under 20 bracket. Not grown ups. Perhaps what happened next was for the best.

Yep, you guessed it. The fudge got stuck in the bowl.

It was completely my fault. The blogger whose recipe I was using said this should be made in a big 9×9 pan. Instead, I insisted on using a deep Pyrex dish (to be frank, I was too lazy to run over to my old house to get my baking pan…lame). Clearly the part of my brain that determines when rational decisions should be made was on an extended vacation.

The emotional breakdowns that resulted from this sticky situation were not pleasant, and I am embarrassed to say that I ate away my feelings. Yes, that’s right. I ate even more.

The pictures you see in this post are of the two almost-full pieces of fudge that I managed to salvage and make look presentable.

So what will I do now? Eat the destroyed fudge with ice cream, of course!

In the meantime, though, I think I need a glass of milk.

A word to the wise: if you are to recreate this recipe, please, please, PLEASE follow the actual instructions. None of this Pyrex nonsense.

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Happy Birthday Lindsay! (ft. Martha Stewart’s tiramisu cupcakes)

June 8, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Fact: every dessert is better in cupcake form.

Heck, lets just broaden that statement to say that anything is better in cupcake form.

Including tiramisu.

This past Friday was my roommate Lindsay’s birthday.

Since we haven’t been living together for very long, and because we are both lovers of good dessert, I wanted to make her something special for her birthday. She requested either ice cream cake or tiramisu. I settled on the latter, having already conquered the frozen fates when I made my homemade ice cream cake back in February.

Obviously I couldn’t just make any old tiramisu. Silly you for thinking so.

Martha Stewart’s website has a bounty of creative cupcake ideas, albeit ones that are fairly complicated (to the point that the recipes come accompanied by a tutorial video – yikes!). It was here that I discovered the recipe for these.

I have never used so many kitchen do-dads to make one batch of cupcakes. I was boiling, brewing, sifting, melting and brushing… It all worked out though. What can I say? #justcallmemartha

Having just moved into a new house with many left behind/forgotten baking utensils, I had to get creative with my methods. For example, I used a cheese grater from IKEA as a sieve and a salad-bowl-in-a-pot as a double boiler. I try to be resourceful, I really do.

The outcome of much kitchen labour was a batch of 15 pretty awesome cupcakes. The cake was spongey and light (although a tad burnt on the bottom, woops). The chocolate-marsala sauce that was brushed over the top tasted delicious (although, as Matt pointed out, it tasted a little like some sort of sushi sauce, but he is just crazy). Finally, the pièce de résistance was the mascarpone cheese icing that was so light but so rich.

ONE more thing: I splurged and bought vanilla beans for these cupcakes! A real life vanilla bean (actually, two). It cost me an arm and a leg (AKA $7), but it was totally worth it.

PS (I lied with the one more thing): can you tell that I’ve been making a conscious effort to create the “setting” for my food photos? I’ve noticed that most food blogs feature a bunch of random background items (emphasized by their sweet cameras and actual ability to achieve some sort of bokeh), so I thought I’d try doing the same thing. These shots featured Lindsay’s container of cocoa and a silk scarf I bought at a garage sale.