4 months in to my New Year Plan to make one recipe out of each of my cookbooks, and I’m not doing as good as I thought I would be. Time to step it up.
Hello, Cupcake! by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson
You may remember this book from that time I tried make fake spaghetti and meatball cupcakes (incidentally, to find that link I went through every blogpost tagged “cupcake”. It was a delicious odyssey through my past.) This book is awesome, but often sets the bar way too high. I’m terrible at art things in general, and feel very accomplished if I can frost something better than a five-year-old. The technique explanations in the front are helpful, but I think I would need a lot more practice to do most of the suggestions in here. Others look really cool, but might not taste very good, like the fake corn on the cob cupcakes made out of yellow and white jellybeans. Anyway, it took me awhile to choose a recipe that I thought looked easy enough for me to accomplish and also good enough for me to eat:
You’ve seen these guys before
The hardest part was separating out the Oreos so that all the frosting was on one side. Recipe at the end.
Also, the slightly less dramatic:
The Everything Pressure Cooker Cookbook by Pamela Rice Hahn
This one may be less flashy than cupcakes, but there’s no denying it’s super useful. We got it as a wedding present from the Wiess masters (well, I guess the ex-Wiess masters by then) along with a magical pressure cooker/slow cooker/rice cooker device. It is easily the best kitchen thing I own. Seriously, you should get one if you like cooking at all. We use it at least two or three times a week, whether to cook rice or chicken fast or to slow cook a whole meal. I decided to try something I’ve always wanted to make:
Pear butter!
The recipe was really easy (as you can see after the cut), but it didn’t turn out like I was expecting. In the end, it was more like an applesauce consistency than a butter. Still delicious on a toasted English muffin though!
Recipes: Read the rest of this entry »
