Coconut Cupcakes for Coconut & Lime's Blogiversary

I've had Coconut & Lime on my blog list for a while, ever since I was looking up Baltimore foodblogs one day in a state of (not exactly home)-sickness. I find the recipes intriguing and often not very difficult, plus I'm very impressed that every single one is original, but I hadn't gotten around to making one yet. Also, lately I've been craving coconut cake - moisty, chewy, delicious Southern-style coconut cake - and so when I saw that C&L's 4th anniversary was coming up, and that readers are being encouraged to try out recipes for a contest, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity! Sure enough, there was a recipe for coconut cake - well, coconut cupcakes, so I decided to try it out.

I followed the recipe more or less exactly. I did hit a snag with the butter, because I realised I didn't have enough on hand. I decided real butter would probably be more important for the baking part than the frosting, so I used 1-1/4 sticks butter plus a couple tablespoons margarine for the batter and all margarine for the frosting. The cupcakes were easy to make, though I suspect they should have cooked just a few minutes longer. They tested clean, but there are little dots in the centre of some that don't taste quite done. The texture is great - glossy and spongey, and a lovely yellow colour. It's not quite what I was imagining- much denser, less with the fluffy - but I still like it. The frosting, however, wasn't quite a success. I love cream cheese frosting, but this ended up very goopy and extremely sweet because I had to use twice as much powdered sugar to make it even remotely spreadable. This may have been the fault of the margarine, or the organic cream cheese... anyway, I ended up basically spooning it in the centre, pressing down a bit, and chilling to set. I think I probably should have let the frosting chill and then spread it to get away with less sugar. Fortunately, the cakes themselves aren't super sweet so it ended up all right. I still ate three yesterday!

Look, ma, a video blog!

So that was obviously a bit outtake-style, but I decided to post it anyway. I'll get better. Perhaps not have a disembodied head when I'm frying things. The tomatoes turned out tasty, but man are they a pain. Next time I have green tomatoes, I'm stir frying, or maybe trying Deborah Madison's lasagne, but this batter thing is very much not happening. It's just so messy, and the oil gets disgusting. I ended up just saving the zucchini to stir fry. I might still do the blooming onion in spite of myself, though, because I really really want one. So here's the finished product, the next day - it looked much better straight away but I was too busy eating to photograph. Pictured with tomato/cucumber/ranch "salad" to compensate for the expense of buying actual salad greens.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few days ago, I was really craving chocolate chip cookies. Not with oatmeal, not with toffee, not with coconut, just good, crispy, chewy, delicious chocolate chip. Imagine my surprise when I couldn't find a recipe in any of my cookbooks! They all want to go fancier, or they're from a place that doesn't do chocolate chips, or they don't have many desserts. Even the family cookbook is completely lacking in cookie recipes. I did a search of the foodblogs and again found almost no plain chocolate chip cookie recipes. I was going to give up and just use the Tollhouse one when I found this recipe from Canela y Comino. I knew I didn't want five-six dozen cookies, so I halved the recipe, and I was also a teeny bit short on flour so there was a quarter cup less. I've never baked cookies with real butter, and I learned that it really should be super soft or your mixer will hate you (I'm surprise mine hasn't died after the abuse I've put it through this week!) I also had to frequently push the dough out of the beaters to keep it going. The first batch, however, was amazing!! Apparently real butter's what you need to get that soft in the middle, crispy on the outside perfection. I used milk chocolate chips because I need the semisweet for something this weekend, but I thought they were delicious. Let them cool enough to firm up, but eat as many as you can warm, because that's the best way. I also chilled some of the dough and then tried another batch, but they didn't spread out as thin. I baked a little longer (twelve minutes) and didn't like the effect on the texture. I froze a log as well and I'll let that warm up completely before baking. Thanks, Gretchen!

Double Vegetarian Event Entry Time

All right, folks. You have a week to get those entries in to me, and I'm very excited that we have several participants this round so far who are neither me nor my mother. In the spirit of vegetarian blogging, I'm entering this post both in my own event as a second entry (because I had to do something with the other half of the puff pastry box) and in Eat the Right Stuff's Vegetables, Beautiful Vegetables event for the UK's national vegetarian week. So if anyone is coming from that event and wants to enter a vegetarian quiche, tart, or savoury pie (cross-posts are welcome!) just comment with the link to your post by Saturday, May 31st. We'd love to have you!

So, on with my experiment. I must admit, a lot went wrong with this recipe. It was still tasty, but not at all what I'd envisioned, and a little frustrating, especially considering how much I spent on all the ingredients. I found a recipe for caramelized vegetable tart at Meeta's blog. I know from others that Meeta has great recipes, and I read her blog regularly, so I'm sure the recipe would work just fine in more capable hands, but man, I just had all the mishaps. One major issue was the fennel. You see me here, charmingly displayed behind its fronds, but the fennel became much less fun after that. I've never tasted it before, and I found that the smaller pieces that got nice and soft tasted fine, but the majority of slices - perhaps because I couldn't figure out just how to slice it - were crunchy and had an odd, bitter taste.

I also had a problem with the pastry, in that I used wax paper (maybe parchment is different, I've never known) and when I pulled it a way, and sizeable chunk of pastry came with it. Thankfully, there was still plenty, but I was a bit annoyed. Next, I toasted the pinenuts in the toaster oven and managed to burn them to a crisp. I have to stop toasting nuts in that thing. I'll never learn. Those were the last of my supply, so no pinenuts. Then the veggies just wouldn't cook fully. I don't know if they were too crowded in the pan, and therefore had trouble browning - next time, I'm using smaller veggies - or if the heat was just too low, but I had to crank it up to medium to make anything happen. After 25 minutes, they never really browned or caramelized, so I gave up. Everything but the fennel was cooked, at least, but I expected more browning in the broiler. After two minutes, the cheese was still blinding white and the pastry was dangerously dark. I gave up. Tasty, but not exactly a success. Better luck next time?

I had a similar opinion of my dessert offering this weekend, which was a coconut panna cotta from La Tartine Gourmande, one of my favourite bloggers. The process itself was blissfully easy, with only a few ingredients and little advanced technique involved. I picked it because I needed a use for the remainder of the buttermilk from the carton I purchased for a challenge you'll see next week. Apparently, though, my tastes just cannot handle cold buttermilk. Really, I knew this. I'm not the kind of Southerner who can drink buttermilk straight. I wince a bit, and it's an unpleasant experience. I like it in baked goods, but for some reason it didn't occur to me that the buttermilk flavour would be so strong here. I thought it would blend with the coconut somehow and not really be noticeable. I do think it would be tastier with the blackberry stew on that post, because some fruit to cut the buttermilk would be perfect, but as it is I'm probably throwing the rest away. Oh, well.

Random Photography Dump

Not really a post, just wanted to show you some things I've eaten lately that do not involve recipes or originality. First, one of my favourite snacks and a tea party standby: cucumber sandwiches! I made these for post-Quire concert refreshments because they really are just the easiest thing in the world to take to a party. Cucumber, cream cheese, white bread, done! It is a bit of a pain to remember not to lick the cream cheese off your fingers because dairy is so bad for the vocal chords, though. I found that the ratio of bread to cucumbers to cream cheese is about one loaf to 1.5 largish cucumbers to eight ounces cream cheese, if anyone needs to know.

Next, vegetables! There's just something about a big pan of tasty looking vegetables that makes me really happy. For a vegetarian, I don't eat that many vegetables. I get off on the carb + dairy track far too often, I'm sorry to say. For that reason, my body is always craving vitamins, and it sets me into euphoria when it sees the vegetables cooking. Weirdly, when I finished this use for them and had leftover zucchini and onion last night, my body went into another craving altogether, this time for grease. I had a stomach ache, and even so I was sitting there thinking "God, I *really* want some heavily breaded and fried zucchini and onion." Thankfully, I resisted the urge, but I still may try a blooming onion this week.

What I did use those lovely vegetables for was the Moroccan dinner kit Stephanie sent me in my Blogging by Mail package. I'd been looking forward to trying it out, and I finally remembered to buy veggies. The instructions called for two chicken breasts "or vegetables," so I tried to guess what two chicken breasts worth of veggies would actually be. I decided half a bag of frozen broccoli, an onion, and two zucchini. That worked. This is definitely a spicy treat, but I love the taste (and the sundried tomatoes in the couscous have a nice sweetness to cut the burn). My tastebuds have been growing up a lot over the past years (or perhaps my masochism is just developing) and I can handle spicy foods a lot better than I used to. I don't like hot sauce, but something like Indian or Moroccan food that involves spice, not just heat, I can enjoy. Thanks again, Stephanie!

Ginger-Ginger Cake

So this simple recipe thing is working very well for getting my confidence back. This week I decided to try Chez Lorette's Ginger-Ginger Cake, and I certainly enjoy the flavours. The ginger flavour is strong, and the sweetness is subtle. I wouldn't necessarily call it a cake - I think it's more like a sweet quickbread given how dense it is. That said, I wouldn't mind it being a tad bit more moist or more cake like. Tasty, but could use improvement. Next time I may try using less flour, more egg, more Muscat and oil, or just beating the whole thing with an electric mixer instead of only one step. I do love the crackly golden crust, though, and it's great drenched in Muscat for dessert. I'm including the recipe here in full, just in case you happen not to be fluent in French. (What on earth? Get cracking!)

I recommend doing some prep work ahead of time, and then it's just easy, step-by-step mixing all the way through. Preheat the oven to 400. Grate a small piece of ginger (the goal is a tablespoon, but I never measure something like this). It's always better to buy small pieces of ginger. For some reason they taste better. I try to do no bigger than my thumb. Pour 100 mL vegetable oil and 100 mL Muscat into a liquid measuring cup so that they're ready to go. That's the lovely colour you see here. If you don't know Muscat, you really should. This was a lovely bottle that I found at the kind of expensive grocery store, $15 being the cheapest one they had. It's very strong though, almost like sherry. The variety I used to drink all the time in the Languedoc is honey-coloured and very sweet, and I've also had a ruby red one that was quite good with cheesecake.

I digress. Measure 150 g of sugar and dump in a mixing bowl with three eggs, then measure out 300 g of flour so that it's ready to go as well. Now take your electric mixer and beat the eggs and sugar until light. Here's another place I might have gotten a fluffier cake. My eggs were pale, but could theoretically have been paler. I was afraid of overmixing, which I've done with a couple of cakes. Next, mix in the oil and muscat, then the fresh ginger and 1 t powdered ginger. Mix in the flour with a little over 2 t baking powder (a sachet if you're in France). Once that's all nice and incorporated, chop up 50 g crystallised ginger. You can find it in the Asian foods section, and you'll need a sharp knife. Fold that in.

Pour into a buttered or parchment-lined baking pan - the recipe doesn't specify size, but I used a 9" round and it rose up quite nicely. Since it's so bread-like, I might also try a loaf pan. Bake ten minutes, then lower the heat to 320 (or 325 if you don't have a digital display for your oven). Bake another forty minutes or until it tests clean in the centre. I checked at thirty and the centre tested clean, but it looked gooey in the cracks on the sides, so I let it go to thirty, which was perfect for me. As you can see, I've been enjoying slices for breakfast with yoghurt and fresh kiwi. I removed the kiwi from the skin to take the photo, but if you're not familiar with the French way of eating kiwi and still slice yours without peeling, I highly recommend slicing and half and eating with a spoon. Why didn't we think of that?

Don't forget - You still have a little over a week to get in those AVF #3 entries! I need your savoury tarts, pies, quiches, etc. by Saturday, May 31st.

Edible Thoughts: Comfort Food

I've been meaning to do this post for days, I admit, but I finally am getting around to it. Comfort food! No, I'm not talking about biscuits and gravy. Comfort Food is the title of a new book by Kate Jacobs, author of Friday Night Knitting Club, and I was invited to join the new Edible Thoughts Foodie Book Club, hosted by Stephanie and Cath, where we're blogging about it. First, my thoughts on the book itself.

I admit that when I read the first chapter, I was seriously doubting my ability to get through the whole novel. I have a pet peeve about clichés and overdone description of people, and the first few pages were a little bit of that and then some. (Please, please, no more butterscotch-coloured hair!) Fortunately, it got better quickly, and I found myself enjoying the little drama that is the lives of CookingChannel host Gus Simpson and her family and friends. I'm not much of a "beach reader," but this is a good light read, and as you get deeper into the novel the characters start getting much more interesting.

I tend to get tired of romance in books, just because it's always heterosexual and it's always predictable, but here it wasn't too overblown, and I was actually surprised by some of the plot twists and turns. I especially enjoyed the minor characters like Hannah, Troy, and Oliver, and even beauty queen Carmen, who became much more likeable by the end of the book. As for the foodie element, I wasn't too into the use of real Food Network names, but the food itself was fun to read about.

For my recipe, I chose a Spanish tortilla, which I've seen on various blogs but never tried because I'm not into eggs. When I read about Carmen's version, though, using potato chips of all things, I was intrigued. I clicked around the web and found a few tortillas using potato chips, and came up with my own variation on that theme. It's very simple: beat five eggs, add a full Ziplock bag (quart-size, fill it up, crush the chips, and fill again until you have a full bag crushed) of high quality lightly salted potato chips, and let sit about five minutes. It basically looks like wet potato chips, but don't worry. Dump it into an 8" or 10" non-stick pan with a bit of olive oil, and cook maybe five minutes over medium heat. You can lift up the edges to peek and see if it's cooked. To flip, first slide it onto a plate, then flip the plate over into the pan. This worked very well for me, but you have to be a quick and fearless flipper. Cook the other side and slide out onto a plate. Slice and serve.

I still am not a big egg fan, so I wasn't in love with the recipe, but I did find it tasty. The potato chip taste is very prominent, which improved it for me, and it has an interesting texture - not quite soft, not quite crispy. My tortilla was fairly thin, but you could use a smaller pan or more eggs. You also might add some chopped fresh herbs. I saw one recipe that called for fried onions, the kinds that come in a can, but I couldn't find them in the store. Maybe next time!