Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie: Project 2 for Cleanin out the Kitchen
Recipe: A bittersweet chocolate pecan pie with bourbon in a homemade butter pie crust.
Tonight I’m going to a Friendsgiving (yay for multiple opportunities to eat turkey!) and I wanted my contribution to use various items in my kitchen, given my now current week-long move (WOO). I also wanted an opportunity to try out a new crust recipe from my friend, Mitch. So, with that in mind, I decided to make a chocolate bourbon pecan pie. My family was never a pecan pie family, which, it turns out, is a HUGE mistake, and I had never even heard of one with chocolate and bourbon, but since I had both of those ingredients on hand, this seemed like a must-do option.
Banana Bread: Project 1 for using random kitchen ingredients pre move!
Recipe: Typical banana bread ingredients. That’s it.
I’m moving into a new place in less than two weeks (YAY–I got a super cute one bedroom cottage alllllll to myself. No more sharing walls. Got a yard and a deck. Close to Greenlake. It’s all very magical. See below for picture.) and decided today that I should try to bake through some of the more random ingredients I currently have in my kitchen so that I don’t have to move them. One of the more random things is a LOT of frozen bananas…. A banana is almost always somehow involved in my breakfast but sometimes I can’t get through them fast enough and when that happens, I throw them in the freezer. So, as of this morning, I had 10 frozen bananas and really don’t want to move them. Since banana bread is such a glorious glorious thing, the decision to make it my first pre move baking project was easy.
Chocolate Chip Cake with Custard and Strawberry Buttercream
Recipe: Three stacked 6″ chocolate chip cakes layered with homemade pastry cream and fresh strawberries and frosted with a strawberry buttercream.
This past week I was in Hawaii and it really was paradise. I’ve never seen any place that was more beautiful. Truly. So when I got back to Seattle on Saturday night to discover that our weather forecast was 10 straight days of rain–summer is apparently over here–I was a little bummed. Not only was I no longer on a tropical island, it was probably going to be a while before I even saw the sun again. So now, to cope with the lack of blissful sunshine, I bake.
Berger Cookies, Take 1
Recipe: A shortbread-type cookie covered in chocolate.
If you’ve never had a Berger cookie from Baltimore you’re seriously missing out. I’m not even much of a cookie person but these cookies… ❤ nothing I could say could do them justice. I love them so much that before leaving DC, I went to four different locations in town where these cookies were supposedly sold, only to find that they weren’t in stock. Unbeknownst to me, my friends similarly went on searches for me and also couldn’t find them, so I ended up ordering two boxes online to be shipped to Indiana for the holidays. The cookie gods were not looking kindly upon me though and I got a notice that they weren’t even going to be shipped until January 1 and I was leaving for Seattle the next day…but my parents love me so they forwarded on one of the boxes and yes, I ate them in a time period that I will not be revealing online. Point? I love them. A lot.
Marionberry Cupcakes: My cupcake tribute to Seattle (and DC, randomly…)
Recipe: A yellow cupcake with a marionberry buttercream.
I’ve been in Seattle for about three weeks now and, with being out of my apartment in DC since the beginning of December, I realized it had been two months since I had baked. And I was getting twitchy. I needed my baking fix. So I figured that if I was going to bake for seemingly no reason, I should at least do something that was a tribute to Seattle. Enter the marionberry. According to Wikipedia (because I’m not writing a report for work and thus can quote Wikipedia as fact), the marionberry “is an indigenous blackberry developed by the USDA ARS breeding program in cooperation with Oregon State University.” Ok, so we’ll say this cupcake is more a tribute to the pacific northwest… But also, coincidentally, this cupcake is a tribute to my former home and a certain former mayor. You know what? Yeah let’s just call this an acknowledgement of the former mayor and not a tribute. I can’t look at my cupcakes as a tribute in that sense without feeling…icky.
5th Birthday Cupcakes
Recipe: A yellow cake cupcake with a chocolate frosting and a white cake cupcake with vanilla buttercream.
I have a cupcake job due tomorrow morning for a 5th birthday party. The party is being held at a bowling alley and while I considered for a while trying to do a bowling themed cupcake, I decided I really didn’t have the energy for that and the woman ordering the cupcakes didn’t seemed concerned either that the cupcakes be all out awesome. So we settled on a “5” on top of the two types of cupcakes.
Pumpkin Cookies with a Brown Sugar Glaze…What Up, Fall.
Recipe: A simple pumpkin and cinnamon cookie with a brown sugar glaze.
Tonight the low in DC is 53. And I’m officially calling it fall. As such, it’s time for jeans, sweaters, jackets, and any and all varieties of squash. Delicious, delicious squash. Today, in fact, has been a two squash day for me. Dinner was spaghetti squash – my first time having it – and it was awwwwesome. Then I decided I needed to continue my evening of squash and move right on to pumpkins. And what better way to celebrate the pumpkin than to make it into a cookie? And then slather it in a brown sugar icing. (Oh and then using the remaining pumpkin puree for pumpkin soup tomorrow for dinner. Yeah fallllll.)
Vanilla Cupcakes with Lemon Buttercream
Recipe: A white cupcake with a lemon buttercream, topped with a piped flower.
I got a request earlier this week for an order of two dozen cupcakes for a surprise birthday party tomorrow. They wanted simple vanilla cupcakes with a lemon buttercream – no problem. They also wanted a cute flower on top of each cupcake, in various pastel colors – problem. Yeah, I can’t freestyle design cupcakes, as is clear by the above picture. I feel like these were cupcakes I would’ve made when I was in middle school…and the woman whose birthday it is it not so much in middle school as she is a high-up lawyer in the federal government…so we’ll see how this goes over. At any rate, they taste good, so I have that going for me.
Chocolate fudge swirl chocolate peanut butter ice cream-what up.
[Actual picture to come soon – for now, enjoy my visual interpretation of chocolate/peanut butter love.]
Recipe: A chocolate peanut butter ice cream with a chocolate fudge swirl (sort of).
My ice cream container has been sitting in my freezer since last summer, just waiting to be used again. And, now that it’s cooled off from temperatures that were frankly too beastly hot to consider doing basically anything, even in the A/C, I decided it was time to make some ice cream magic happen! A friend recently proclaimed their love of all things chocolate peanut butter so I decided if I was going to make ice cream, I might as well do something fancy (pb is fancy, deliciousness in my book!) and satisfy their craving.
Molly-is-coming-soon Strawberry Cupcakes!
Recipe: A homemade strawberry cupcake and strawberry buttercream, both with fresh strawberries.
My friends Rachel and Sam are expecting a new addition to their family soon-a little girl named Molly. These are for her! : )
Strawberries were on sale at the grocery store over the weekend and they inspired me to retry the strawberry cupcake recipe I made a few years ago (and failed at). Well, to be fair, the cupcakes were great (and are this time around too!) but the buttercream recipe in my cookbook was incomplete compared to the instructions I later found for the same recipe online. This time, I decided not to take the risk and just used my standard vanilla buttercream, minus some vanilla, and plus a whole heap o’ fresh strawberries! YAY SUMMER.
Exercises in Glucose Replenishment: My weekly experiments in baking 