Experimental Baking - w. Twin - Irish Carbomb Cupcakes

I guess it's not P.C. to say Irish Carbomb cupcakes - but I was making them with and Irish person, and my name sounds Irish so maybe it's okay this time?

These cupcakes weren't for any particular reason except for my friend sending me some handy tools to make baking easier so we decided to try them out using Smitten Kitchen's Recipe. with some changes of our own. It's basically a chocolate Guinness cupcake, with whiskey ganache filling and Bailey's buttercream frosting. Unfortunately my pictures are a little blurry - oh well.

Okay so here's the batter - something to note is that it seemed to be runnier than other cupcake batters. We thought something might have been measured wrong due to it's low viscosity, but it all worked out in the end


Bakes cupcakes! The do rise some so best not to over fill the cupcake papers


The corer! It looked like it was going to take WAY too much out of the middle, but it was the perfect amount


24 Cupcakes - just like the recipe said


Filling with whiskey ganache with another handy tool.

Note on the ganache we did the following changes: less butter more whiskey, diff chocolate
Ganache Filling
8 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (we used chocolate chips - you don't have to chop it up that way)
2/3 cup heavy cream
1/2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
4 teaspoons Irish whiskey

Frosted cupcakes - we weren't that good at using the icing tool - but we had fun decorating. Some got the ganache mixed into the frosting because we didn't replace any part of the core (because we had already eaten them...)

For the frosting we didn't measure out the powder sugar - we just added it to the stick of butter & Bailey's until we liked the flavor, texture and consistency. I believe we did 3 Bailey's and 1 heavy cream.

~emy

Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass at the MFA

This adventure is from a while back, but over the 4th of July weekend we took advantage of the MFA's Free Fun Friday and went to see the Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass exhibit. In the past I've seen some other Chihuly pieces at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, the Albert and Victoria Museum in London, and the Mohegan Sun Casino in CT but this exhibit was great because you could get so close to the glass. There was also a special movie showing Chihuly through the years in action with his team creating new installations around the world. Here are some of the shots I got.

From a distance I thought this one was a real plant. It was custom made for the MFA's atrium and they are trying to raise the money to buy the piece for the permanent collection


Chandeliers!


Close Up - looks like orange grubs


Zoomed out - still kinda looks like orange grubs


This is a shot of underneath ones of the chandeliers.


I took this photo and then like 5 other people turned around to take the same one.


Kind of a funny narration about the next photo


Close ups



Glass mystical forest


Glass in a boat - the mirror reflecting was cool too.


One last light


~emy

Experimental Cooking - Grilled Pizza

Much like the Jersey Shore my friends and I have started to have a weekly family dinner on Sunday night. Granted this has only happened twice and the next few weeks are iffy and then football will start. So maybe it will be very short lived but it has been a lot of fun.

Getting to the food point. It's summer which mean pulling out the grill, but hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled chicken was getting old, so we decided to try out grilled pizza. It didn't seem that hard roll out dough, brush with olive oil, grill add toppings, grill some more. All the article about grilling pizza said the key was being organized, which we were - but that didn't help out our first pizza from being half a disaster. I say half because only half of it burned into an blackened mess.

Key point missing from all of those "How to grill pizza" articles: Cook smaller pizzas!!! Don't use all the dough at once!!! Being lazy, we bought pre-made dough and mistakenly rolled the whole thing out and try to put it all on the grill at once. It folded on itself and wasn't really spread out because it was super hard to get on the grill. The 2nd rolled out pizza we cut into 3 smaller pieces and it worked out soooo much better.

Check out the results - the messed up pizza isn't there, though we did eat it still:

Closest pizza = arugula, prosciutto and cheese
Middle = cheese
Farthest = grilled peppers & onions and cheese (it was also kinda shaped like the USA, but it's hard to tell from this angle)

~emy

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Mother's day was brunch and father's day was carrot cake cupcakes. I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen and you can get it here. I can't actually tell you if they were any good, because I'm not the biggest fan of carrot cake, but my parents ate them all up and said they were really good. Though my parents would probably tell me anything I make tastes good.

Here are all the ingredients before the mixing. I actually only made half a batch and was grating my carrots super fine, but then got tired of it and used the next grater size up after that.


The batter! I didn't use the kitchen aid to mix it because of all the "chunks" aka the carrots, walnuts and raisins


Cupcake with frosting. I didn't use Smitten Kitchen's frosting recipe totally. It is a maple cream cheese frosting, but I didn't use butter and not as much sugar. I also used the fake kind of maple syrup and it tasted fine.


~emy

Brunch Cookin'

My poor neglected blog. It's been such a busy few months with a new job, school and life in general.

This is from awhile back, when I put together a nice spread for a Mother's Day Brunch:


Bagels from a local shop with cream cheese, lox, tomatoes, red onion and cucumbers for the fixings. Cinnamon rolls from a recipe that I don't remember where I got from, but I didn't pack the brown sugar that much because the time they were made before they were way too sweet.

And then there were the avocado and bacon deviled eggs (on the square plate in the above picture)

Pretty simple recipe I don't actually measure either:

• Hard boil 6 eggs
• Cut in half and scoop out the yolks.
• Add in half an avocado (diced), about 2 tablespoons of mayo, paprika and garlic powder to taste.
• Mix/Mash - then scoop filling back into the white of the eggs.
• In this case I added in cooked bacon on top as a garnish, but the next time I made them I actually crumbled in about 5 strips of bacon into the filling. It ended up being easier to eat it that way

hmm now I really want to make some of those eggs...

~emy

Twin's Hello Kitty Birthday Cake

Another birthday means another cake! This one with the theme of Hello Kitty because she's just so cute and Twin loves her.

I always forget to take enough pictures when I'm doing this, but here are the ones I remembered to do:

Top layer of funfetti cake carved in the shape of Hello Kitty's head


Frosted with butter cream with marshmallow fluff fondant rolled out next to it


The covered and trimmed layer - it actually got stuck to the plate, (I was holding it vertical and it wouldn't budge) so thanks to the boyfriend for getting it off with a spatula


Finished cake - the base cake is actually 2 layers of funfetti - one was dyed purple because I was thinking about attempting a checkerboard cake but didn't end up doing it. I also didn't get any picture of the cake after it was cut to see the layers :(


It didn't look as good from this angle - I think I should have tried to use the cake edge instead of cutting the cake from the center because it made it more lumpy and hard to cover on the sides


With a flash! I think it looks better because you can't tell that the left ear collapsed as much


~emy

People Say - by Portugal. The Man

Good song - weird music video:



~emy

Google Autocompleter Job

So Google has a posting for Autocompleter Jobs - it pops up in the section of the autocomplete:


It's kinda hard to see, in this shot - but it's on the bottom right hand corner.
The main skill you need to be an autocompleter is to be able to type really fast - around 34,000wpm. Check out the whole posting here, complete with interview from a current autocompleter, which follows for your viewing convenience.


~emy