Candy!

I used my candy thermometer for the first time and added a new sweet to my repertoire. As usual, I was inspired to make this particular thing because I happened to have peanuts lying around. And what's a better treat made with peanuts than peanut brittle?




For a first attempt it was damn near perfect. I think the only thing I might do differently is use raw peanuts or add the peanuts later in the cooking. The taste was great and the texture was crunchy that melted into sticky-smooth. It also didn't linger on your teeth like candy likes to do, which was an unexpected bonus.

I found so many recipes that equated peanut brittle with Christmas. It's not part of my holiday memories, but it might be this year.

Almond Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting

Double leftovers. I made some cupcakes to use up the egg yolks that I had from making a meringue-based frosting for different cupcakes and to use up the leftover frosting itself.

I substituted almond extract for vanilla for something different. I cut down the recipe since I had 5 egg yolks, but it still made 12 cupcakes and 2 heart-shaped ramekins.

Hello

Hi, I'm Deitri.

Up a Tree

This squirrel cracked me up the other day since he was running all around with an apple in his mouth. He ran up the tree in my front yard and then part of the way down. He was posed long enough for me to find my camera, turn it on and snap a few shots. Eventually, he ran down and onto the street and sidewalks. Lucky for me, he didn't try to get into my house.

Whipping Cream Pound Cake

whole cake

slice

I had half a pint of heavy whipping cream set to expire in my fridge so I needed to find a recipe. Not far into my searching, I found this one, which sounded pretty good. The pound cake was really delicious and actually tasted better a few days later.

I just had a great cup of coffee

I love coffee. Really, check my profile.

As much as I hate to admit it, coffee affects me. I don't get jittery or sleepless, but it causes my heart to race so I try not to drink too much. It's tough because, well, I love coffee!

And most decaf is disgusting. It tastes and smells like chemicals or plastic. Or Old Spice.

But, I do like Swiss wash decaffeinated coffee like they serve at Tommy's. And the other day at Zagara's I found a coffee that looked too good not to try.

Newman's Special Decaf from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. It's organic, fair-trade and water process decaffeinated. There's so much good on the label that I thought it was going to taste gross. But, it was bright, crisp and yummy.

It was weird to have a great cup of coffee without the bad feeling. I won't give up the real stuff, but I'm glad I found an alternative to my usual Kona.

Groundhog Day

Early spring
Phil
Chuck
Chuck
Huckleberry
General Beau Lee

More winter
Jimmy
Dave
Willie
Quentin

I choose to believe Buckeye Chuck because he's Ohio's official groundhog.

A Very Good Idea

Moon landing 2 - shoot your own video to help NASA

Birthday Cupcakes

This week, one of my co-workers had a birthday. Someone bought a card. Someone bought balloons. And I made cupcakes (no surprise there). Below are yellow cupcakes with white chocolate-butter cream frosting.

Almost Classic Cake

Special Birthday Cake with Semi-Sweet Chocolate Buttercream frosting.
3/4 of the whole cake

I was asked to make a cake as the dessert for a fried chicken dinner. Since most of the attendees watch their sugar intake, I thought I'd try using the bag of Splenda for Baking that's been in my pantry for a while. (I called the 800 number to make sure it was still good. Turns out it never goes bad!) The cake wasn't as moist as I would have liked, but for a first attempt it was pretty good.

The frosting was outstanding. The recipe was a mix of Mrs. Millman's and semi-sweet chocolate buttercream. I used 12 ounces of chocolate chips (melted and cooled), a stick of butter (cold), 1 cup of powdered sugar, a little vanilla and some milk to thin it out.

I left a little bit of the cake unfrosted at the request of the host, but cut it out of the picture because it looked weird.

Giant Banana Muffins

The muffin is almost as big as the teapot! Okay so the muffin is pictured next to a kid's tea set, but I made it in a jumbo muffin tin, which makes muffins that are about twice as big as regular muffins.

Here's a close-up:


The recipe came from the same muffin book as the zucchini nut muffins and the pecan muffins, and since that book is inconsistent, I wasn't sure how these would taste. They were yummy, but next time I'll try adding some nuts or coconut to liven them up. I love the jumbo tin though. I may never make a cupcake-sized muffin again!

Chocolate Cake with Strawberry Glaze

These pictures are kind of ugly, but the cake was delicious.

Chocolate cake, faux ganache filling, strawberry glaze. This cake had to replace the one I wanted to make when I couldn't find a recipe that I liked. I wanted a chocolate cake with a fudge filling, topped with a strawberry glaze. Ideally, this would have been a Bundt cake. Unfortunately, the only from scratch recipes I could find involved nuts and the birthday boy doesn't like nuts so it wouldn't work. The strawberry glaze was a little thin and spread a bit more than I wanted, but that was because I added a few extra strawberries to make it pinker.

Listen To This

I downloaded a new app for my iPod Touch called Top 100's by Year by Bing. The app streams the "top 100" songs from each year from 1947 to 2010, one year at a time. The app information describes the tunes as, "songs that have stood the test of time" so they aren't necessarily the most popular songs of the years. Although the songs play on a shuffle mode, you can skip ones that you don't want to hear.

I'm not sure I would have paid for it since I don't generally buy apps for my iPod, but it's worth a free download. It's completely entertaining to listen to songs from a particular year. But I wonder who ranked the songs on the lists? Is Free Bird really the top song of 1973?

Pre-Christmas Baking

I usually make sugar cookies for Christmas, but I had a function to attend that required cookies so I made some a few days earlier. I took two dozen of them (colored red and green) to the event and made these with the leftover dough. They're blue because it was the first day of Hanukkah.

CUTE!

Looky Here!