I haven't posted in a while, but to get back into the groove of things I thought I would show you guys what I've been working on. It seems every weekend I'm baking cupcakes, so here are some pics.
Do you guys have any good cupcake recipes to share?
So what do you and your sweetheart have planned for the evening? I'm sure a lot of you have plans to go out for dinner, but if you are like me and want to avoid the packed out restaurants here is a little suggestion for a nice romantic meal:
Shrimp Scampi Neely Style
In my Recipe page click on the link for a video of the Neely's making this delicious shrimp scampi. The recipe is super easy, it calls for a pound of shrimp, fresh parsley, butter, white wine, garlic, and lemon juice. I tried this recipe out for the first time last night and it came out great, I added a little old bay to the shrimp for extra flavor. Don't forget to serve with salad and garlic bread!
A nice glass of wine and some candle light!
Set the table and the mood, break out your nice glasses and don't forget the candles!
Oreo Brownie Sundae
Chocolate and Valentines day seem to go hand in hand. I found a great Oreo brownie recipe on the Betty Crocker website. Check out my Recipes page for the link. Top this brownie with some vanilla bean ice cream, hot fudge and caramel...yummy! Something sweet for your sweety!!
Chocolate Covered Strawberries
Who doesn't like chocolate covered strawberries? They are delicious and are perfect for Valentines day. These are so easy to make at home. You can buy chocolate dip from the grocery store, my favorite is Dolci Fruitta, it is a small container of chocolate chips and you melt them in the microwave then dip your fruit, very simple and quick. If you want to get fancy like some of the chocolate dipped strawberries you see in the stores, you can color some icing or piping gel and decorate with with a piping bag. I did this using a #1 piping tip, and then sprinkling with some red decorating sugar. They came out cute, I forgot to take a picture!!
Sherries Berries!!
If you don't want to be bothered with making your own, or if you want to order them as a gift for your valentine, I hear that Sherries Berries are the best. Click on the name it's linked to their site.
Well that's all for now, I hope you guys have a wonderful Valentines Day!
Hey Guys I haven't really had time to post, but I want to stay consistent....so I'm doing a quick post on things I've had over the past week. I did a lot of eating out this week, nothing to fancy, just the chain restaurants Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, and Red Lobster. Here are some pics of some of my favorite things to order, I also found recipes for them online, so check out my recipe page for the links!
Olive Garden - Sicilian Scampi
This is my favorite appetizer from Olive Garden, actually it is my favorite appetizer from any restaurant that I've been to thus far! It's shrimp served on top of toasted slices of Italian bread with a white wine sauce, and topped with fresh tomato, black olives, and green onion.
I don't know if I'm the only one that does this, but I tend to order the same things every time I go out to eat. At TGI Fridays, I almost always order the Cajun Shrimp & Chicken Pasta, or the Sizzlin Shrimp & Chicken.I As far as drinks go, the Blackberry Mojito is my favorite because it taste like juice, I'm not really a fan of strong drinks. I guess you can call me a light weight.
Red Lobster - Shrimp Scampi
My trip to Red Lobster was out of the ordinary this weekend. The didn't have the steamed clams appetizer, and the biscuits were hard!! I can't complain about my meal though. I had broiled scallops, shrimp scampi, and shrimp pasta, with a lobster stuffed baked potato on the side! Sounds like a lot right? I have the leftovers for my lunch sitting next me as I write this. I always order the shrimp scampi and shrimp pasta together because I like to poor the scampi over the pasta. I don't know when I started doing that or why, but I know it makes it ten times better you should try it!
I'm looking forward to posting alot in February, we have the Superbowl next weekend, and Valentines day, I'm throwing a baby shower, and of course it's Black History Month! So there should be lots of food involved with all of these things.
This weekend we celebrated my daughters first birthday.We didn't do anything big, just had some family and friends over for cake and ice cream. I made her the "big cupcake" that I mentioned in my last post, and it actually came out really cute. I let the kids make their own ice cream sundays with sprinkles, whipped cream, and all the toppings. We had a lot of fun. Everyone wanted to know how I made the cupcakes so I decided that would be a good topic for this post.
So first lets start with supplies......
I decided to make her a Funfetti cake, I thought that it went well with the Minnie Mouse theme and kids seem to love it. This time I used the Pillsbury brand but it doesn't really matter, I usually just grab what's on sale, they all taste good to me. Here's a little secret I picked up from my sister, add a pudding cup to the cake batter and it makes the cake come out really moist and delicious.
I'm sure you've all seen the "Big Top Cupcake" commercial...that's the pan I used to bake the cake in. I had never baked in silicone bakeware, so I googled directions. The directions that I found said to lightly grease the pan, and I did...and the cake still ended up sticking!!! So it all fell apart, but I put it back together and this is the result.
Can you tell that it fell apart?
I used some of the icing to patch it back together.
To decorate the cake I used a decorating bag and a 1M size piping tip.
Using a decorating bag is easy, I learned by reading the box insert that came with a set that I got from Walmart. I added a page to the blog for tutorials, check out the cupcake decorating one I found.
I find that craft stores such as Michael's have a bigger selection of piping tips and bag sizes. Another good thing about the craft store is they have couplers, these are the white pieces that connect the tip to the bag. These come in handy if you want to use different decorating tips for the same icing.
For the small cupcakes I used purple and pink icing. I have a pack of McCormack primary colors food coloring. They come in little squeeze bottles and the back of the box tells you how many drops of each color to mix in order to get the icing color you are looking for. I also had a container of Wilton 6 mix sprinkles that I had used for another occasion. The container had sprinkles shaped as daisies, hearts, dots, leaves, wildflowers, and butterflies. I used the dots for the big cupcake, and the daisies for the small ones. I also used some plain course sugar sprinkles in pink and purple.
Here is the final result....
This is the face of the birthday girl....I think she liked it!!
The holidays are finally over, and so is 2010. Can you guys believe I forgot to make a sandwich with my leftover Christmas turkey!! That's my favorite thing to do with the leftovers, my grandma makes soup and pot pies with hers.
I had a few days off for the holidays and I spent them with my friends and family. Every year my friends and I have a Christmas cookie share, we all bake something and then come together and share it. My cousin is not a fan of baking so she usually makes the dinner. This year we had tortellini in meat sauce and it was really good. For dessert I made carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting drizzled with caramel. I also made my first cheesecake, which was an adventure but it turned out good. I couldn't find a recipe I liked for the cheesecake so I took a few things from a bunch of different recipes, I think I'm going to try it again this weekend, I need to tweak it a little. Once I get the end result I'm looking for I'll be sure to post on my recipe page. Some other desserts we had were cookie brownie bars, which is a brownie on the bottom and a cookie on the top, they were good but very thick and made it hard to eat anything else after. One of my friends cheats every year and buys her dessert, this year she bought pound cake and topped it with peaches and whipped cream, and I have to admit it was really good.
So, what did everyone do to bring in the new year? I had planned to have a few friends over, it turned out to be a little more than expected! But we all had a good time, we had a few drinks and played cards and watched the ball drop. My cousin made hot wings for our gathering, I made shrimp and rice, and we had a tossed salad for our veggie.
New Years Day at 300 Bowling Alley
On new years day a few friends and I decided to go bowling. We went to 300 in Melville. 300 is definitely different from the bowling alleys that I'm used to. We went around 10pm, so when we got there we were greeted by a bouncer giving out wristbands for people over 21. For a second I was a little confused, thought I was at a nightclub. The place is set up really nice with a big bar in the middle, nice tables all around to eat at. I thought it was clean and well kept. The balls are all kept in a back area and you have to go to a desk and tell the attendant what size you need. I thought that was nice, I usually spend to much time walking around the bowling alley trying to find a ball. The staff was really friendly and the DJ was ok. Now lets talk about the important stuff.....The FOOD! The menu offered items like burgers, chicken fingers, fries, hot wings, chicken quesadilla and more. Pretty good selection for a bowling alley. I tried the chicken quesadilla, hot wings, and sweet potato fries. They were all so good! The drinks were good as well. The price for bowling was reasonable $7 a game, drinks were in the $8-$10 range, and food was a bit high for a bowling alley - $11 for six chicken fingers, however the portion sizes were very good. 300 is right around the corner from my job, the food was so good I'm thinking I've found a new lunch spot.
Now that the holidays are over I've decided to post once a week, I see a few new restaurants that are popping up around town that I'd like to review, and I found some new recipes to try. Next week is my daughters first birthday, I'm going to be making her the big cupcake so we'll see how it turns out. Any suggestions on what kind of cake?
Hey guys! So how was everyone's Christmas? What good things did you eat?
I got new pots and pans for Christmas and a hand mixer so I decided to make Christmas dinner.
I made a turkey for the first time. I did not plan on making a turkey, because I would rather have had chicken, but my grandma gave it to me so I figured I would give it a shot.
This is what I wished my turkey looked like....lol
It didn't exactly come out that pretty. It was good though, I was so nervous that I was going to dry it out I opened the oven every ten minutes to baste it, so the side of the turkey facing the oven door wasn't as golden brown as the other side. For my first try it was pretty good though. Here are some tips I came up with during this process:
1- You have to do your research, foodnetwork.com has good tips I wish I had looked at it beforehand
2- Turkeys take a really long time to thaw out, it tells you to thaw in the fridge, but that didn't work for me the turkey was still frozen solid so the best method is to put it in the sink filled with cold water.
3-Make sure you pay attention to the weight of the turkey, because that's how you will know how long to cook it for, when that little red dot pops up it's not always done.
4-Lastly you might want to try to brine the turkey, which is soaking it in a salt water solution. My grandma did this and her turkey was very flavorful and juicy.
Here is what I had for Xmas dinner, doesn't that plate look messy? I should have arranged it neater for the blog pic, but I wasn't thinking about that at the time, just ready to eat!! So with my turkey I had baked mac & cheese, stuffing, candied yams, greens, mashed potatoes, and for dessert a pineapple upside down cake. The cake came out really good and pretty but I cut it before I remembered to take a pic!! I got the recipe from the Betty Crocker website check out my Recipe page for the link.
So guys I have some homework for you, I'm in search of a good mac & cheese recipe, I make it different every single time because I'm never really satisfied with how it comes out. So if any of you have a good recipe for me to try please share!
Hey guys! Two more days until Christmas is everyone ready?? The streets and the stores are packed so I'm assuming a lot of people are last minute shoppers. So what are you snacking on during this holiday season? I'm sure everyone has noticed entire aisles in stores filled with all types of goodies. So this post is dedicated to snacks.
Lets start with the so good bad stuff....
My son's class made Christmas trees in school out of waffle cones, vanilla icing, and of course candy! When I was in school we made gingerbread houses out of graham crackers and milk cartons, so I guess times have changed...anyway, my son was out sick so he had to miss this fun activity, lucky for me the teacher sent it home! Then we found another problem, the majority of candy she put in the bag to decorate was chocolate and my son doesn't like chocolate (strange right?) so we headed to Target to pick up some more candy for this activity and while we were there I picked up some things for myself. This time of year all of the candies have there holiday editions. I love the M&M packages they are so cute specially the peanut one tangled in the Christmas lights. Ferrero Rocher has their chocolates in a container shaped as a Christmas tree, Starburst and Skittles have little elves on the box, and than they have those candy cane shaped plastic containers filled with different candy, I picked up a Mike n Ike one for this project.
Here he is creating his master piece...
Making a mess right....here's the finished product....
So this has become the center piece for my kitchen table ...lol
What's Christmas without candy canes? When I was a kid I only saw two types of candy canes, the traditional peppermint red and white ones and the fruity rainbow ones. The latter were my favorite. These days they have so many different types. I found these cute Toy Story ones that come with ornaments at Walmart.
Santa's Cookies...
The cookie packages have also gotten "dressed" for the season. I love these Winter Oreo's with the peppermint creme. These are the cookies we'll be leaving out for Santa, everyone knows Santa loves Oreos. Pepperidge Farms also has a nice selection of holiday cookies out, their Holiday Homestyle box has an assortment that's good for entertaining. I like to use their Chessman cookies in a banana pudding recipe. Instead of the rooks and knights, they have candy canes and Christmas trees on them.Check out my Recipe page for the link to Paula Deen's "Not Yo' Mama's Banana Pudding".
The not so bad good stuff.....
Here are some snacks that are great and won't send you into a diabetic coma!
Recognize this tin can ?
It's popcorn
The popcorn tin was on the list of favorites for this time of the year. I'm pretty sure most of you have seen one of these at some point in your lives. It comes with three different types of popcorn, butter, white cheddar, and caramel. I always eat all of the caramel and the rest take a while to disappear or end up getting thrown out.
Mixed nuts are great to have this time of year. They are definitely a favorite and great to put out on the table for company.
Craisins are available year round, however I tend to see them more in the fall and around the holidays. They pop up in a lot of recipes. They are very good to snack on and you don't have to feel guilty because they are good for you.
Fruit is a great snack and also makes a great gift. Edible arrangements are always a hit.
Since we're talking about gifts, here is a look at some nice gift baskets...maybe a good idea for those of you who are still looking. Food is a great gift!!
The food find for this post....
Henry & David's Moose Munch
According to my cousin this is a great gift for teachers. It's caramel and popcorn and chocolate with nuts and it's delicious. Henry & David have great gift baskets and they also have the fruit of the month club. The fruit of the month club is a good gift because it gives year round. Hopefully you won't this reaction though ...
