As you *might* have noticed, I haven’t blogged in ages. But, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been baking!
I’ll be spending this Saturday in the kitchen making dozens of homemade Cadbury-style creme eggs for those who have requested them (second batch coming the week before Easter for those of you who are interested) and making a pie for Sunday night. Though…that pie might turn into brownies…we’ll see.
And, this past week I made a giant loaf of bread that made for a delicious base for my egg salad sandwiches while last week I whipped up these corn and jalapeno muffins from the New York Times. I wasn’t entirely impressed with the recipe. Next time I’ll definitely be switching out the canola oil for butter (Julia knows best), and adding more jalapenos as they weren’t nearly as rich as I would have liked them to be.
But, there have been many more projects over the past two months. So, here’s a teaser of just some of what I’ve made. Apologies for the first two pics. They’re from my phone.
1. The Oscar Cupcakes
I made three types of Oscar-themed cupcakes. The first, The “Oscar” was a double vanilla cupcake with double vanilla icing and topped with a little gum paste star. Gah. The cupcake was yummy. The gumpaste was awful. Awful! It tasted like eating glue.
The second cupcake was 127 Hours. This red velvet cupcake was divine and topped with a simple cream cheese frosting and edible gold glitter. I ran out of time and would have loved to have added a candy pebble to the top of each of these to represent the boulder, but the were much beloved at the party.
The third cupcake was the Black Swan. I wasn’t a fan of the film, but these cupcakes, with their dark chocolate base and double vanilla frosting were fun to make, especially because there was a hand-piped dark chocolate swan on the top of each.
Credit: Ryan Jesena
2. The Entrement
As one of the Daring Bakers – though at this point they may revoke my membership I’ve been so bad about blogging! – I was tasked with making an entrement for the month of January. I will go into much more depth in a future post, but I learned a lot making this one that I filled with a homemade blackberry mousse.
3. The Chocolate Peanut Butter Crispy Rice Bars
On the bottom, crispy rice. In the middle, peanut butter. On the top, dark chocolate. Nom nom nom. In reality, they were so yummy that I eventually had to toss the remaining 5 because I could not stop eating them. Even though the rice was not crispy at all for some reason (perhaps it was my homemade corn syrup? We’ll see when I make a second batch), they were addictive. Extremely addictive.
Other changes coming soon include a new look for the site and more posts! If only my camera automatically uploaded the photos I took to the computer!