B is for Boston...Cream Pie!

For the past few weeks my mind has been plagued with making graduate school decisions. Where I want to go, where I don't, and sending out many letters with these decisions. It hasn't been very easy, as all these decisions entail leaving my loved ones and everything that is familiar to me. At the same time, I feel a sense of excitement when I think about all the goods things that await me, no matter where I'll be. And in the past few days, the school that I applied to in Boston has definitely been the frontrunner. It's a great school in a great place, and when my dad and I went to visit I loved everything about it: the history, Irish pubs on every corner, and the beautiful harbor. So, in honor of my (maybe) new home in the fall, I made Boston Cream Pie!

I found this recipe on a Paula Deen forum, adapted from a Paula Deen recipe for BCP cupcakes

Ingredients

-1 box of yellow cake mix, 1 1/2 cups of heavy whipping cream, 1 small box of instant vanilla pudding mix, 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 1/4 cup sour cream

Chocatate Ganache:

-6 1 oz. squares of bittersweet chocate, 3/4 cup heavy whipping cream, 2 cups confectioners sugar

Directions:

1. Mix and bake 2 round cakes according to directions on the box. Cool completely.2. In a large bowl mix together pudding, whipping cream, sugar, milk and sour cream. Beat at medium speed until you get stiff peaks. Consitency shoud be that of thick pudding.

3. Cut top off one of cakes to get flat surface. Cover top of cut cake with filling and put second cake on top.

4. Make the chocolate ganache: use double boiler and melt chocate and cream together. Stir regularly so chocolate won't burn. Once smooth whisk in sugar and continue until smooth. Put ganache in fridge until it is spreadable consistency (about 30 mins)

5. Spread ganache on cake and store in fridge.

This was surprisingly easy to make! My only issue was that the second cake, the one on the top, craked in the middle when I placed it on there, but that's something I think I could have fixed with a different kind of cake mix (maybe less moist) or more careful handling. The amount of chocolate ganache the recipe made was also a bit more than I expected, but when we ate the dessert it wasn't overpowered by chocolate. In all, a very successful venture. Now if only understanding Boston accents was as easy...

Offically On Board with the Mango Tango

I took ballroom dancing lessons in high school and learned how to tango. But up until today I'd never tried a mango. I'd had a strawberry mango smoothie but I'd never just eaten a mango. And boy was it delish.

Okay, so what if they're sitting on the washer. There was no other free space!!

So after my first taste of mango, I went on to make mango cupcakes using....*GASP* a boxed mix as my basis. I initally did not want to use the box mix. I wanted to make a yellow cake batter and add in the mango.  But the recipe promised, that with a few modifications I wouldn't be able to taste the "storebought fake sweet taste". So I thought I'd try it. Now, if I'd been smart I would have made 1 batch of cupcakes with the box and one compeltely from scratch and then asked people which they prefered. But I'd didn't plan ahead so I'll have to try that experiment later. Perhaps, with chocolate mini cupcakes.

So, for the cupcakes you mix together one yellow cake box mix with 4 eggs, 1/3 cup canola oil and 3/4 cup of buttermilk and 1 cup of mashed mango, instead of the ingredients/amounts that the box called for. Bake at 350  for 15 minutes and let cool while you make the frosting.

The frosting called for 4 oz cream cheese, 1/4 cup of butter 4-6 cups of powdered sugar and 2 tablespoons of half and half. I left out the half and half and ran out of powdered sugar after adding in 2 cups, so I stuck a cup or so of granualted sugar in the blender and it let it run until the sugar was powdered...TADA (okay, I tried smashing it to bits before dragging out the blender but it was slow going). I also added in about 4-5 tablespoons of manjo juice. I don't have an accurate measurement because I just squeezed the mango into the frosting bowl until it looked like there was enough.

And I ended up with maybe a cup of leftover frosting that I'm looking for a recipe to use them on. I'm thinking it'd be good on bity chocolate cupcakes, but since I don't have anything but chocolate chips I think I might try making an amish cake and topping it withe frosting instead of the brown sugar and nuts it called for...or maybe cinnamon rolls? What do you think?

I'm glad I added in the juice because it really added a nice mango punch to the cupcakes, which on their on had a very subtle sweet fruity flavor. The juice made a wonderful difference, and gave the frosting a pale yellow color.

Mike and I both have cupcakes to take to work tomorrow!

I liked the cupcakes and will probabbly make them again, but maybe add in some more mango and possibly some rum/ rum extract. And oh, this made 24 cupcakes!

If you want to see the original recipe you can find it here.

Mango Tango!

I don't know how to tango...but nothing else rhymes with mango! I've had a pretty rough week, with a very full schedule and a pesky little cold that snuck up on me. But a bright spot in all of it...get this: buying a mango! I absolutely adore mangos; the color, the sweetness and how much easier it makes healthy eating. I'm not sure how Rach feels about them, but I found this fabulous little recipe for Mango Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting (of course there's cream cheese in it)...and I think I might just make this her next challenge! I got the recipe from http://joelens.blogspot.com/2010/05/mango-cupcakes-with-cream-cheese.html. Of course, in case mangos can't be found/aren't desired, I'm willing to accept any cupcake recipe involving a fruit ;)

Best of luck, Rach!

A is for Apple Muffins!

I found the recipe for these muffins on Finding Joy in My Kitchen. I followed the recipe (except for swirling in some honey when I stirred in the apples)but I'll share it here for convienience sake.

Topping
2 tablespoons brown sugar1/2 tsp cinnamon
Dry1 C whole wheat flour 1 C all purpose flour1 tsp baking soda1/2 tsp salt
Wet

3/4 C brown sugar
1 cup apple sauce
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup buttermilk, I used 1 cup of milk mixed with 1 tsp vinegar
1 choppped apple, I used gala

Mix wet and dry ingredients in seperate bowls and then combine. Stir in apples.Fill muffin wells and then sprinkle with topping.  Bake at 375F for 23 minutes. I got 18 muffins from this recipe.

The muffins turned out to be smaller than I expected but, I actaully like this size because I can easily eat them for dessert or a small snack.
Lu's Challenge: Your challenge is to make something that starts with the letter B! That could be banana something or other, bread pudding, butterscotch whatchamacallit, butter cookies, breadsticks, blondies, black bean brownies,  brittle, baked alaska, banoffe pie, butter rum thisorthat, baklava, blackberry cobbler, biscotti, black forest triffles, buttermilk vanilla bean cake,  bourbon doused goodness, blueberry thingies or whatever else you think of- just make it start with B! Good luck, and I await my next challenge :)

Valentine's Baking

I've been wanting to make a lemony baked good since Christmas when my mother in law gave me a lemon cake scented candle.

The culprit....uh inspiration

But, with no one to bake for I've had to wait awhile so I could send Mike off to work with cookies in celebration of Valentine's Day. To celebrate I decided on Lemon White Chocolate Chip Butter Cookies and Peanut Butter Thumbprint Cookies. The lemon cookies satisfy my lemon craving (although I am still trying to talk my husband into letting me get a dwarf lemon tree) and the peanut butter cookies are easy to make and even easier to "valentine up", by making the jam thumbrint into a heart shape.

White Chocolate Butter Cookies- recipe adapted from Piece of Cake

1 cup unsalted butter, cut into tablespoons, at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon light corn syrup
2 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 large egg yolks
2 cups spooned and leveled all-purpose flour
1 cup white chocolate chips

1. Cream together the butter, sugar, salt, cornsyrup and lemon juice until creamy.
2. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating between them.
3. Beat in the flour
4. Stir in white chocolate chips.
5. Shape dough into a disc and divide into 4 pieces.
6. Roll each piece into a log, about 2 inches around. Wrap each log and refrigerate overnight, or at least two hours. I let two rolls sit in the fridge overnight and froze the other  two rolls.
7. When you're ready to bake preheat oven to 375. Slice each log into 12 cookies and place on baking sheet 1 inch apart. Keep the remaining dough cold while the first sheet bakes for about 15 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet halfway throught. Let cool two minutes before transferring to wire rack.

Makes 4 dozen.

Ready for the oven

White chocolate is the my least favorite type of chocolate, and I don't often opt for lemon flavored desserts, but this combination sounded intriguing enough to try. But, I burnt them so I wasn't able to get the full effect of thier goodness. It turned out to be more of a "grilled lemon white chocolate butter cookie". I'd recommend shortening the time to 10-12 minutes or reducing the temp- and make sure to put the cookies on parchment paper!

Peanut Butter Heartprint Cookies

1 cup peanut butter
1 egg
1 1/3 cups sugar or splenda
1 tsp vanilla extract
Jam

Combine with a spoon. Press into small round disks. Use fingers to make heart shaped indentions in the center. Bake 12 minutes at 350F.  Let cool some before moving to wire rack.

I love peanut butter cookies, but I'd never tried the thumbprint kind. The February edition of  Martha Stewart Living suggested that you can make almost any cookie into a thumprint style cookie, and recommended making heartprints for Valentine's day. Some recipes I looked at for thumbrint cookies suggested baking the jam into the cookies and others suggested adding the jam after. But I didn't get to find out which method worked best because in the first batch the thumbprints came out of the dough, so I opted to make them all the same. Oh well, they still tasted fabulous

Did you make any goodies for Valentine's Day?

I don't want kids...but I sure do love these Peanut Butter Cheesecake Brownie Babies!

I decided to make these Peanut Butter Cheesecake Brownie Babies at the most ironic time, as the Boyfriend and I recently started a healthy lifestyle kick. Really, trying anything of that sort while still in college in irony enough...Anyhoo, peanut butter is sadly not included on the healthy food list, but these brownie babies were so delicious they lured us back to our days of unhealthy but happy eating (the diet lasted like 2 days so whatever).

My roommate, who also very much enjoys baking, gave me a great tip about measuring peanut butter: spraying the measuring cup with baking spray so that it would be easier to scoop out. Amazing! I don't know why I never thought of it before, and it may seem like common sense but it was still pretty useful. This girl is full of some pretty nifty tips.

My favorite part of the process was mixing the peanut butter and cream cheese. My friends are always commenting that I use cream cheese in a lot of things, but it just makes everything better! I will say that I got a bit lazy at the end, so while the majority of the brownie babies were a spoonful of the peanut butter cream cheese mix into the middle of the brownie batter, the last few were all of it mixed in together. Definitely not as tasty as biting into the filling.

Yummy mixture!

One thing I would leave out in the future is the cool whip topping. It wasn't really necessary and was a little too much sugar for my taste. The cherries were fun to have though. They brownie babies were a hit, and they gave me a reason to use my cute new cupcake liners! I'll definitely try to make them again.

My roomie modeling with the cupcake liners!

Ingredients:

-1 pkg. (19 to 21 oz.) brownie mix (13x9-inch pan size)

-1 pkg. (8 oz.) PHILADELPHIA Cream Cheese, softened-1/3 cup sugar

-1 egg

-1/4 cup peanut butter

-1/2 tsp. vanilla

-1-1/2 cups thawed COOL WHIP Whipped Topping

-20 maraschino cherries

Directions:

HEAT oven to 350ºF.PREPARE brownie batter as directed on package. Spoon into 20 paper-lined muffin cups.BEAT cream cheese, sugar, egg, peanut butter and vanilla with mixer until blended. Spoon 1 rounded Tbsp. into center of batter in each cup, pressing down slightly into batter. Bake 30 min. or until centers are set. Cool. SERVE topped with COOL WHIP and cherries.

Ooey Goey Butter Cookies

This wasn't a challenge but I made them for two ladies at Mike's work so I thought I'd share. It's a Paula Deen recipe (of course it is! it's got butter in the name!) I doubled the recipe and made around 70 cookies, but I'm giving you the recipe for a single batch

okay, they don't look so attractive in big ziploc bags but I promise they taste good

Ingredients:

1 tsp vanilla
powdered sugar
1- 18 oz box of moise chocolate cake mix (I used Butter Fudge Cake mix by Duncan Hines the first time and Super Moist Triple Chocolate by Betty Crocker this time)
1- 8 oz brick of room temperature cream cheese
1 egg
1 stick room temperature butter

Steps:

1. Beat cream chz and butter until smooth.
2.Beat in the egg.
3. Beat in vanilla.
4. Beat in cake mix.
5.Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours.
6. Preheat oven to 350F. Roll into tablespoon sized balls.
7. Roll balls in powdered sugar. Place 1.5 inches apart on a greased/sprayed pan.
8. Cook for 13 minutes. Sprinkle with more powdered sugar if desired.

9. Clean up the late night kitchen mess:

The results?

They were just as fabulous as I remembered! I portioned away ten or so for us to have at home and they're almost all gone.