Lemon Cupcakes - first attempt

The long-awaited Lemon Cupcakes turned out quite tasty (lovely lemon flavor), but too dense/heavy to be worth sharing the recipe yet. Not sure what the problem is. Could be:

~ too many ground almonds weighing the batter down?

~ too much whole wheat pastry flour?

~ overmixing? I used the KitchenAid stand mixer, but was only making a small batch (six cupcakes), and the quantity of batter was too small for the machine/bowl. I had to run it longer to get things mixed in.

I'll try again, and post when/if I get it right.

The frosting is nice and lemony, but again, no recipe, as I started with a small bit of leftover cream-cheese honey icing I found in the freezer, added some butter, lemon juice, more conf. sugar and whipped it all up until fluffy. It was too cold to come through the piping star tip well, as you can see, but that didn't interfere with our dining enjoyment.

We'll be eating the last two of these tonight as we ring in the New Year in our usual low-key, at-home, early-to-bed way.

I've probably done the least holiday baking of any cook in blogland, BTW, one reason it's been so quiet here. I didn't make even a single batch of cookies this year. Things I have made have been mostly thrown together with no recipe at all, like the apple crisp I made for Thanksgiving, using some stale multi-grain pancake mix that needed to be used up, plus some rolled oats, a little butter, an egg, and a couple of big spoonfuls of yogurt. It was quite tasty, too, and achieved my goal of being equally good as either dessert or breakfast. But I forgot to take a picture of it before it was gone.

XMas dessert was also a dual-duty effort: pear coffee cake. I do have a snap of that, and it's on my list of blogging topics to catch up on (here and elsewhere) as we get into the new year. First, though, hubby and I are heading to Waikoloa for a long weekend, hoping to see some sun (22" of rain since Christmas!) and hit the beach.

(Don't know what's up with Blogger today, have tried to insert paragraph spaces three times with no success. Sorry it's all run together, but fixing it appears to be beyond my power.)

Chocolate Cupcakes

It's been a long time since I made cupcakes, but a new era may have begun. The post-birthday week celebrations weigh-in was a setback--not a monster one, but indulgences did show up--and I'm refocusing on my goal to be 10 pounds thinner on Jan. 1, 2009, than I was at the beginning of this year.

I figure cupcakes are the way to go if I want a small indulgence of the cake kind without derailing my late-year slim-down efforts. These little beauties are not much more than half the size of a modest piece of snack cake, and delicious. I frosted them with mocha buttercream leftover from my birthday cake (which I have not yet blogged about, but will get to eventually), yum:

Chocolate Cupcakes

Steps 1-3 can be done ahead of time, which makes final prep quick and easy. Makes one dozen, double the recipe if you want more.

Step 1)

Melt together and set aside to cool to room temp (slightly warm is okay):

6 T unsalted butter

4 oz. semisweet or bittersweet chocolate

Step 2)

Sift together and set aside:

3/4 cup flour (whole wheat pastry or all purpose, or a combination)

1/4 cup cocoa powder (unsweetened)

1 T cornstarch

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Step 3)

Combine and set aside (it will curdle, that's okay):

1 tsp instant coffee dissolved in 2 T hot water

2 T plain yogurt

1 tsp vanilla

Step 4)

Beat together at high speed until very light and fluffy:

3 large eggs

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup dark brown sugar (do not pack down)

When the eggs and sugar are nice and fluffy, reduce mixer speed to medium and slowly add the cooled butter/chocolate, then half the dry ingredients, then the coffee/yogurt mixture, then the rest of the dry stuff. The batter will be runny.

Divide batter evenly among twelve cupcake cups with paper liners, and bake in preheated 350 oven until done (about 18 minutes).

Cool on a rack, and frost as desired.

I'm thinking lemon cupcakes would be good for the next batch. But first I have to go buy a new cupcake tin. I threw the old one out, because after years of exposure to ocean-side air it was looking pretty funky (thank god for paper liners!). One reason the chocolate cupcakes are on the small side is I very carefully did not overfill them (I got 15 from the recipe): I wanted to be absolutely sure that no part of the batter had any kind of contact with anything other than the paper liner.

Big Island Candies excess

My sisters have come and gone, and we had a fabulous time celebrating my 50th birthday for a week. Needless to say, all that site-seeing and chatting seriously interrupted any potential blogging time. Birthday cake recipe and tourist-activity photos will follow as time allows this week (have some serious catching up to do on the business and novel fronts). In the meantime, here's a quickie update on one successful stop appropriate to this blog:

We made not one but two visits to the Big Island Candies showroom (convenient location spells dietary disaster for those of us who live in Hilo, but they do a booming internet and mail order business, too, so go ahead and check out their site!).

I'd successfully resisted popping in to see what the fuss is about until hungry visitors with sweet teeth arrived. We sampled everything and consumed a horryfying quantity of cookies and other sweet treats. These are my favorites:

Mika Mints, oooh, so luscious and smooth and minty and chocolatey!

White chocolate dipped lemon shortbread cookies, for when you want something with crunch. OMG. You're truly better off never tasting these. Once sampled, you will want more. Daily.

Also good, the chocolate covered coffee beans (widely available, but these are better than most) and coffee-flavored shortbread cookies, both dark and white chocolate dipped.

I managed to avoid sampling their brownies, but am sure to do so eventually.

The good news is we did enough walking around at botanical gardens, waterfalls, the volcano, and beaches (to be blogged in days to come) to burn off a few cookie calories. The total damage on the scale, while not pretty, was much less severe than I'd feared. I only need to lose 5.5 pounds in 9.5 weeks to meet my year-end goal. Should be doable, if I stay focused on it, but business catch up and major novel goal (blogged here) have been major dietary derailers in the past. Not as bad as house guests, but progress impeding nonetheless. Wish me luck.

Yogurt-Apple Cake

It's not that I haven't been blogging lately, it's just been going on over here (sewing) and here (novelling). Not a whole lot of cooking or baking going on, just enough throw-it-together and big-pot (chili, mung bean stew) meals to keep hubbie fed. I'm easy, I can live on toast and the occasional bowl of fruit and yogurt for... days, at least.

I did make another quickie cake this weekend. Normally such things are enjoyed once or twice, then the rest goes in the freezer until the next Cake Night(s). But last week's impromptu delight stayed in the fridge. Which means I ate it for breakfast all week until it was gone. Ooops. Shouldn't do that too often! It never got frosted, though, so the ongoing indulgence could have been worse.

Saturday I whipped up a yogurt apple cake from odds and ends of this and that I collected from the fridge. I even made a frosting: a somewhat soft one, with honey and cream cheese. It reminds me of the very runny, not entirely satisfying "healthy" honey-cream cheese frostings my mom used to make when I was a kid, but lump-free and much tastier.

I measured and wrote down what I did this time, so as soon as I get a chance to write up a recipe I'll add it to this post. There's a picture, too, but it's still in my camera. Thought I'd use the few minutes I have right now to at least get a new post up here!

... details to come, just as soon as I pull ahead of the novel and quilt deadlines far enough to type up my notes.

Also in the pending-posts pile, some boasting about the excellent whole grain bread and pizza doughs I've been baking lately, and thoughts about what kind of cake we'll be having for the big birthday coming up...

I did it again

Once again I have managed to throw a bunch of stuff in the KitchenAid mixer, pour into a pan, pop into the oven and, 25 minutes later, pull out a really yummy cake -- all without following a recipe!

Yay me!

Downside: yet another kitchen triumph that may be emulated but never duplicated because not only did I not write down what I did as I went along, I didn't even measure anything. Slap-dash baking at its best!

Which wasn't what I set out to do. Late morning-ish I took 4 eggs from the fridge and a stick of unsalted butter from the freezer and set them out on the counter to warm up to room temp. I thought I was going to make a small genoise with a nice butter-creamcheese-tangerine frosting around, oh, mid-afternoon or so.

Then I got caught up in sewing projects, and laundry, and baking more whole grain bread (a higher priority, to my husband, than cake, though not to me), and the day got away from me and suddenly it was 6 pm and I was wiped and I still hadn't made a cake (Sunday is CAKE NIGHT! in our house, so disappointing when I drop the ball and don't come through with the goodies, even if they're just for the two of us).

By that point the eggs were warmer than room temp (they'd been hit with an hour of late afternoon sun on a warm, sticky day here in Hilo, oops) and the butter was droopy and leaking. And I just didn't have the zip left to do the genoise thing, which isn't all that hard but is a bit of a production.

So instead I dumped the butter in the KitchenAid mixer bowl, poured in some raw sugar and set it whipping up. 4 eggs to one stick butter is a little off as a general cake ratio, though, so I added about 2 TBSP of cream cheese. And the 1/2 cup of grated tangerine rind and sugar I'd had in the freezer, and had thawed with the genoise in mind. In that went. All four eggs, one at a time. A generous glug of vanilla extract. Threw some toasted almond pieces in the mini-chop and ground them up, in they went, too. Then a couple of generous scoops of (fluffed with a fork) whole wheat pastry flour, a bit of salt, a couple teaspoons of baking powder, and a few large spoonfuls of yogurt.

Looked like batter, tasted like batter, so into my 7x11 pyrex baking dish it went, and into the oven at 350 until browned and yummy smelling and done. Total prep time, oh, maybe 3 minutes?

So, some kind of an almond-tangerine butter cake. A little frosting would be good, or a drizzle/soak with orange syrup, but I haven't bothered with any of that. I did, however, have a nice piece for breakfast this morning with my coffee, and the flavor is even better than yesterday.

Now, the dilemma: do I wrap up a few pieces and put them in the freezer for future Cake Nights, or just keep the pan in the fridge till it's gone?

Delicious Brown Rice

Ooops, somehow I've let almost a month go by since my last post. Partly 'cause I've been busy answering feng shui questions on my "Fast Feng Shui" blog, and partly 'cause I've been spending most of my free time sewing lately (and reading, but I'm always reading), but mostly because I haven't cooked much of anything very interesting recently.

What I do cook a lot of, no matter what else we might be eating, is brown rice. My husband sometimes eats it twice a day. And because he's a certifiable health food nut, that means we go through many 2 lb. bags of this wonderful stuff:





The last time my parents visited, my dad (who's a potato man, and not super enthusiastic about rice) commented, with some surprise, that the brown rice I'd served was "really good." That's because I've learned a thing or two about cooking yummy brown rice over the years. Here are my secrets:

Brown Rice Secret #1:
Use organic brown basmati rice, not "long grain"! Plain old long grain brown rice looks the same as basmati and costs a noticeable amount less, but if you've been having a little trouble learning to love brown rice, dig into that pocket and splurge for the good stuff. Get basmati. Lundberg Family Farms Organic Brown Basmati is my all-time favorite and our daily grain. It requires much less washing than the stuff from the bulk bin at any healthfood store I've ever shopped at, and cooks up beautifully. The basic recipe on their website works fine, but I can do better.

Brown Rice Secret #2:
When the instructions say to "rinse," they mean "rinse really well." That means put your measured amount of rice into the pot (or your rice cooker insert) and run cool water in to cover by at least an inch. Swish it around with your fingers, then look at the water. It will be either somewhat or very cloudy. Pour out the water (into a mesh strainer is a good idea, to catch the grains that will make a dash for the drain). Now rinse again, at least once. One rinse is never enough. Depending on what rice you are using, you may have to rinse three or more times before the water is acceptably clear. Skimping on this step leads to gummy rice.

Brown Rice Secret #3:
Most cooking instructions will mention a TBSP of butter, and call it "optional." I use olive oil, rather than butter, and consider it essential. Even with good rinsing, the starch in the water is likely to create lots of bubbles that will seep out under the pot lid, run down the side of the pan, and make a mess on the stove. A little oil prevents a nasty cleanup job later. Plus it's tasty.

Brown Rice Secret #4:
I use a little more water than the 2:1 ratio Lundberg recommends. Back in the days when I cooked on the stovetop, I used 2.5 cups water for every cup of rice. Now that I use a rice cooker I use about 4-1/4 cups of water to my standard 2 cups of uncooked rice.

Brown Rice Secret #5:
Use filtered water. If you don't yet have a Britta filter or equivalent, what are you waiting for?
If you want to get really fancy, substitute chicken or vegetable broth for half the water.

Brown Rice Secret #6:
Seasonings!
Salt to taste, of course, but I also add to the pot:
~ freshly ground black pepper and maybe a dash of cayenne or chipotle powder
~ 1-2 TBSP of fresh lemon, lime, tangerine, or orange juice (basically, whatever citrus I can get my hands on); a splash of dry sherry is a good substitute if there's no citrus in the house
~ about 1 tsp of some kind of dried herb (my standard is thyme)

And I usually also toss in:
~ about 1/2 tsp dried coriander
~ 3 whole green cardamom pods, crushed with a knife blade so the seed flavor can get out
~ 2-3 fat slices of fresh ginger root

This sounds like a lot to put in everyday rice, but my rice cooker is next to the spice drawer, and when you cook rice as frequently as I do it becomes habit and doesn't take long at all to toss the extras in. Especially when you don't bother to measure anything but the rice and the water and just eyeball everything else.

If you want to get really fancy make an easy pilaf:
Add 1/2 cup of french green lentils and an additional cup of water
and 1 cup of finely chopped carrots and celery
yum!

Brown Rice Secret #7
Get a rice cooker. I resisted this for years. I thought a rice cooker was a needless extravagance. Why did people bother? They're pricey, and take up a lot of counter space. Then I got a very nice one for under $40 at Costco, and can't imagine going back. It's just so easy: put all your stuff in the pot (you'll have rinsed your rice really well first, of course!), close the lid, and push the "brown rice" setting. It takes a lot longer than on the stove, but once you get in the habit of remembering to start the rice sooner than usual, you don't have to think about it until the machine beeps at you that it's done. I do not miss popping into the kitchen every 10 minutes or so to check on the rice and see if the flame needs to be turned up or down, or if it's done yet.

If you don't have a rice cooker, bring the covered pot to a boil, then turn town to a simmer and cook until the water has all been absorbed. This will take about 45-50 minutes, but keep an eye on it. If your pot lid is not tight-fitting you could loose a lot of water to steam and the rice will be charred on the bottom, before you expect it to be done. When all the water has been absorbed, remove from heat (still covered) and let sit 5-10 minutes. Fluff with a fork before serving.

Happy healthy eating!

Still looking...

...for a truly great, quick and easy, "everyday" chocolate cake recipe. You know, a go-to version, that I can rely on to be yummy and can whip up in not too long from stuff I usually have in the fridge. We're not talking about a multi-layered extravaganza that's so much work you only make it for very special occasions once a decade kind of thing. Been there, done that, and I don't think the decade has passed yet, so I'm aiming for simple and tasty.

Made another "okay but not to rave about" choc cake last weekend. Maybe my cocoa powder is to blame? All I've got on hand is plain old Hersheys, and the cannister has been open for quite a while. Maybe it's stale. Does cocoa powder go stale? Would I be happier with my choc cake results if I sprung for some really good stuff? Which I'd have to order online, 'cause gourmet shopping opportunities are pretty much non-existent in Hilo. We make up for that with a great farmer's market, but it doesn't solve the gourmet cocoa powder dilemma.

Theoretically, I could purchase some local cacao pods at said local farmer's market, and make my own cocoa powder.















But -- I know this is hard to believe -- there are some DIY lines I will never cross, and making my own chocolate from the pod stage is destined to stay on the far side of one of them.

Perhaps also I should try, just once, to follow a recipe EXACTLY as it is in the book, before messing around with it and making substitutions.

We've got two more "cake nights" worth of the most recent so-so results in the freezer. Will keep trying when we've eaten those up. Or when I feel like baking again, whichever comes first.