Mindi Sue: 2011

Cupcakes for Kyna!

9:27 PM

I had to test my new handmixer and I could not let all the eggs and milk I had left over from baking cookies go to waste. Plus, I was visiting with one of my favorites today. So I made some cupcakes!

Green Tea Cupcakes with Blackberry Buttercream to be exact.

I used this recipe as a start, but used the contents of 3 all natural organic green tea bags instead of matcha and I nixed the pomegranate seeds. Although I totally want to try the recipe as is very soon!

I used the strawberry buttercream section in this recipe as a guide for my blackberry buttercream!

vintage plates + cupcakes = perfection

Here they are! Cute lil cupcakes with slightly melted frosting! Off to deliver some of them to my long lost friend Kyna who is home from NYC for a couple days!

Mental notes for next time: finally invest in some piping bags so the icing can be pretty and add more like 2 1/2 scoops (instead of 2) of batter from my cookie scoop for bigger cupcakes!

:)

cooking

Leftover Breakfast and Window Shoppin

1:25 PM

This morning I was faced with two tasks. Figuring out what to do with all our leftovers and spending gift cards online. I've been pinning some possible gift card options all morning in between thinking about the giant mass of ham in the fridge.

So what were we going to do with the 28 pounds of ham sent home with us from family dinners? Make breakfast cake! (using the leftover ham was definitely all my idea, not Ross' idea at all. hehe.)

I kind of eyeballed all the ingredients but this should do the trick:
6 eggs, 1 cup milk, 1/2 cup flour, dashes of salt and pepper, 2 big handfuls of chopped up ham, and whatever miscellaneous cheese you may have laying around!

Here's How:
Put eggs, milk, flour, salt, pepper, two big handfuls of leftover ham chopped up, and cheese shreds or hunks in a buttery 7x11 dish and bake at 450 for 20-25 minutes! Cool a lil, slice and serve!

Some of the cute things I've been peeping:


love the collar! <3

found on www.romwe.com

I like the mustard, rust, or mint!

found on www.fashion4us.com

I've been thinking about floral shoes for a while!

found on www.makemechic.com

baking

Baking from Scratch

5:26 PM

I started baking at about 10 am and finished up at about 4:30pm. I baked mostly from a vintage cookie cookbook I picked up a couple weeks ago, and I ended up with some adorable treats! I had trouble finding baking powder and baking soda (probably because tomorrow is Christmas eve), so I made recipes that avoided them... and for the candy cane cookies I worriedly used 1/4 tsp of bisquick instead of baking powder. Lucky for me they (and everything else) turned out perfect!

First up are the brown sugar butter melts! They called for a pecan on top, but I thought the little red candy made them look like cherry pies.. and I'm not gonna lie, I didn't feel like buying pecans!

Next on my list are these ginger-nut party rounds. There is an almond meringue on top, and let me tell you: beating an egg white until it has peaks by hand with a fork is exhausting! But the smell of fresh ground ginger sure made up for my tired arm.

Now these are just some cheat cookies. The only ones I didn't make from scratch are the only ones that had any type of mishap. Go figure. Haha. I ended up putting the dough balls too close together on the pan so the cookies came out kinda square.

Now for my all time favorite cookies ever! Peppermint almond candy cane cookies! We made these when I was little, and when I saw them in my vintage cookbook I nearly fainted.

Now for the treat I am most proud of, my very first pie from scratch! Well, mini pies! The recipe was super easy and fast. It did say I would make 12, but I am fine with 9 mini perfectly golden bubbling apple pies!

I can't wait to share all of these treats with family and friends for the holidays!

Happy Holidays Everyone!

baking

Macaroons, Macarons, Maccarons?

11:12 AM

However you spell it, this was an ambitious first attempt at baking these french confections.

First things first, Andrea and I spent a torturous morning at the Market District collecting ingredients, fighting crowds, and getting overheated. Everything was so easy when it came to deciding on flavors, grinding up the almonds, beating the egg whites, making the batter, filling the bags, squeezing out little circles, tapping out the air bubbles... or so we thought!

little batter circles, ready to bake

The first batch ended up filling the kitchen with smoke, because apparently the oven temperatures are just suggested temps and really you have to play around with different degrees until you don't burn anything. We only did this to one batch, resulting in a pile of cracked, uncooked, and burned little cookies in the trash. We found that my oven around 250 degrees (instead of 350 degrees) worked perfect at about 15 minutes.

Once we had the temperature under control, and the batches were coming out with perfectly baked "frilly foots", we realized that the cookies were completely stuck to the paper. Oops... The book suggested sprinkling water under the paper, but a baking friend said pan spray does the trick! Noted for next time. We were able to salvage about 3/4 of the cookies from each batch.

After all of this commotion, we decided that we were just going to use easy fillings instead of the fillings that were suggested. Who wants to juice lemons and core apples after such a distraught baking session?

Moral of the story: bake only one pan of macaroons at a time, use parchment paper not wax paper, and PAN SPRAY IS ALLOWED!