30 for 30, Day 9: Cupcakes and Cardigans

Some of my favorite words that start with the letter "c" are cupcakes and cardigans, and today's post will include both of them.

Also among my favorite words that start with a "c" are candles, Chinese food, and credit cards, but outfits and blog posts about those items will have to wait. One might only have to wait until Friday. No promises.

Anyway....

Outfit In Theory.


The purple dress, the black cardigan and the boots are all part of my 30 for 30, while the tights are a bonus item (to deal with the cold, natch).

Outfit In Practice.


A very good outfit for taking my test tonight (bleh), and ....

Frosting some cupcakes!

(I'm sure you'd be just as excited as I am if they were in your house)

Here is my attempt at Valentine's Day-decorated cupcakes for a dear friend's religious education class.



Oh, and my test cupcake was delicious.

Happy "C"-wednesday!

...

No, that doesn't really work. Oh well.

.

The 12 Days of Cooking

Hello blog readers! Has your Christmas season been as busy as mine has? I thought to myself this morning, "Hey, I have time to blog! Yippee!" Then I looked at the blog and realized that I haven't been here in ages.*

But all is well, because we are here together now, laughing, drinking hot cocoa, and anticipating one of the holiest nights of the year. And how have I been prepping for this night?

By cooking every last lick of raw ingredients in my kitchen into every imaginable Christmas treat for four weeks straight.

It has been exhausting, but a lot of fun. It partly makes me wish that the season went on much longer than December 25 (oh wait...it does.) And, it makes me want to break into song.

Lucky you, I don't know how to add audio.

Nonetheless, you get my lyrics. Also in your favor: the tune is a dash familiar to you. Hum along to The Twelve Days of Christmas, won't you?

On the twelfth day of cooking, my kitchen gave to me:

Twelve loads of dishes,

Eleven dozen cookies,

Ten dozen truffles,

Nine dozen cupcakes,

Eight Tums needed,

Seven grocery store stops,

Six mini-meltdowns,

FIVE BATTLE SCARS!!

Four weeks of working,

Three dozen brownies,

Two failed attempts,

And a huge batch of TAH-MALL-EES!

That's right! After all those sweets, I went over to my in-laws' house and made tamales.

You know, because I am Mexican now.

Here's the proof:

He's finally going to share all his years of experience.


I see five plates, but six shot glasses. Hmmm, someone is getting the fuel without doing the work.


Yum.


My first masa-smeared corn husk.


Double yum.


I hope you have a very safe and holy Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I'll be sharing my memories with you soon, but don't forget to make your own!

Feliz Navidad!


*More than a couple weeks is pretty much ages in in the blogosphere. I'm surprised the blog didn't have wrinkles.

To Heal, Pour Salt In Wound

I'd like to share a little story about failure.

This story is a personal story, so I know all of the little details about the main character, like motives. Thankfully, I can tell you the moral of the story, too.

I decided to make caramels. I recently saw this recipe for salted caramels and they looked really good.

I wanted them. However, I did not want the $1.50 per price tag from a real candy shop that came with them.

What do the poor do? They make!

I took my sugar, water, light corn syrup and cream of tarter and heated them up real good.



I let it do its thing.



I added the heavy cream and soy sauce (I know, weird) right when the recipe said to.



I lobbied in the butter.



I mixed. I stirred. I did everything right.

How did they turn out?

Awful.

They were definitely burnt. Worse, the apartment smelled like burnt Chinese food with a hint of dairy.

What had I done wrong? I added all the right ingredients. I followed directions. I didn't question the soy sauce, even though my limited candy making experience told me it just wasn't right to add Asian condiments.

And now I had this.



After yelling at THAT STUPID STOVE for several minutes, I opted to just relax.

I assure you, this "just relax" nonsense is very uncharacteristic of me. If I did everything right, it had to turn out. It was science. It was the rule.

In another bout of totally uncharacteristic action, and said to myself, "I'll make them again tomorrow."

Because...I wanted the house to smell bad again? I cannot tell you what made me want to try making the caramels again.

Plucky stick-to-it-tive-ness. Stubbornness. Tomato, to-mah-to.

The next day, I followed the directions again, but this time made the caramel on a different burner of the stove, thinking it would keep from getting as hot as the bigger one I'd tried the day before. However, this burner didn't reach all parts of the pot, and I feared it would create a hot spot in the middle, burning half of my caramel, making it...I dunno, half as worse as yesterday?

In my fear, I abandoned ship. I pulled them early, afraid that they would burn and that we'd have a repeat burnt-Chinese-food-day in the kitchen.

How did the second batch turn out?

Underdone. Because I hadn't cooked them long enough at the end, they never solidified like the slice-able and chewy caramels the recipe (which now felt like it was taunting me in a mean-kids-on-the-playground kind-of-way) promised.



So, proving that I was still the head of my kitchen, and that no soy-infused caramels were going to bring me down, I dumped them out into a bowl, and they became sauce.





This was the best caramel sauce ever. It has topped both ice cream and popcorn. It finds its way onto my spoon in the middle of the night. And, it does not taste at all like Chinese food, burnt or otherwise. The soy sauce adds a smoky flavor that adult tongues really appreciate (completely different than the saccharine-only sweets for kiddos).

Here are the parts I'm sure you've been waiting for: the reflection, and the moral of the story.

I think on blogs, and in real life, we have a tendency to share only our successes, or the things we think others will like to see, or the things that turn out perfectly. I also think that's a big disservice to the writer and the readers.

I am not perfect. I am way, way imperfect. I have been reminded of that by outside forces lately, but I think that learning it from my own failed endeavors helped me realize that it's OK. Since much of my life feels a little upside down right now, it was really good to have this absolute failure in a very unimportant area to remind myself to deal with it, get over it, move on. This advice works for those little things.

In a sense, I think the advice evolves when the failures get bigger, more important. Our path in life, our relationships, and the big-ticket decisions don't always turn out perfectly, or even the type of imperfect we expected and were ready to deal with. Sometimes the caramel burns. Sometimes you pull early and things still don't turn out. Sometimes the smell of burnt Chinese food will seep into your pores.

But sometimes, you turn the failure into something. Sometimes it unexpectedly works in ways you didn't anticipate, and winds up in bowls of ice cream at first you didn't think you needed, but end up being essential and really comforting. Sometimes just going with the soy sauce, as weird as it sounds, works out.

And so I am here to repeat something you already know, but that I needed reminding of this week. While many things can't be changed outside your skin, you're in control of what you do. If you blow it once, give it another go. You might fail again, but that might just be OK.

The End (of the story).

Gno One Hates It

"Knowledge" might be "power," according to those in the educational world, but it does not make us good adults.

I'm talking about decision making.

Yes, I'll explain.

I know, through years of grooming, that I am supposed to eat balanced meals. Meals with protein. Meals with vitamins. Meals with more than one item. (I also know this through nights of eating just cookies for dinner. That is a no go.)

Alas, this knowledge is not changing my behavior because...

I made gnocchi.



Gnocchi, the delicious potato-y pasta that says, "Hey, you can have a square meal if you think those vitamins will keep you warm at night, but you'll be dreaming of me."



It says that, really. You might need to listen closer to yours next time.



Either way, when the gnocchi are in the house, all this "knowledge is power" mumbo-jumbo gets kicked to the curb. You just want carbilicious gnocchi.

Or, maybe you're like me, and you want gnocchi with butter. And butter is dairy, so there you go.

Here's how you make 'em.

I learned how to make gnocchi from my dad's mom a few years ago. I have since added some "tips and tricks" that I have learned since then that are part of the sacred gnocchi-making strategy.

First, set your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and let it get hot. In the meantime, turn off your air conditioner. If you have both running at the same time, it means you are a millionaire and can pay someone else to make gnocchi for you. I might be available for this job.

Prep some potatoes for cooking by scrubbing them down, drying them well and poking them with forks. You'll need about 5 cups of cooked potatoes for this recipe, and with my little potatoes that meant about 7 (the rest are for later in the week).

Lay the spuds out onto a cookie sheet covered in salt. The salt helps draw moisture out of the potatoes, which is something you want when making gnocchi but no one ever tells you.



Cook the potatoes for about 45 minutes to an hour until there is very little give when you stab them with a fork. They should be wrinkly and sad-looking. This is a sign of success.

Take the potatoes out and let them cool a little before touching. No food is worth second-degree burns.

While the potatoes are still warm (but not hot!), peel off their skin.



Cut the potatoes in half.



Half a potato at a time, work the spuds through your ricer.

This is a ricer.





These are the potatoes going through the ricer.



Don't be scared of the ricer.

The ricer is important because it keeps some of the natural texture of the potatoes. A potato masher would destroy all of your hard work, giving you very dry mashed potatoes that could only be remedied with heavy cream and a nice, juicy steak.

The ricer is your friend. However, if you don't have a ricer, you could push the cooked potatoes through a colander like I used to when I was first learning how to make gnocchi. You'll look ghetto, but remember: you are not running your air conditioner and oven at the same time. No one thinks you're Daddy Warbucks.

When you've collected your 5 cups of ricerized potatoes...



...turn them out onto the counter into 3 cups of flour.



Your instincts will make you feel that this is wrong, that a bowl should be involved. Actually, this is the best way to do it.



Add one egg and a pinch of salt...



and mix these with your hands until a dough forms.

Not quite.



There you go.



This is the reason for bowl-less-ness. Mixing the dough this way will help ensure you don't add more flour than is needed. The dough will take what it needs, so don't force too much flour onto it. Show it some respect.

At this point in the recipe, you could add things like finely-minced garlic, Parmesan cheese, or fresh or dried herbs to the dough for a little zing.

But I don't have time for that. I need gnocchi now.

With a 7 out of 10 on the "reckless abandon" scale, pull off small patches of dough...



...and roll them into thin ropes on a floured cutting board. Cut 1-inch pieces from the rope and roll them up onto a fork.



This makes that little gnocchi sauce "well" everybody is always talking about. The well is important.

Seriously, just flick them up the fork.

My wells are satisfactory, which is good enough for me.



At this point, you have a couple options. The first is boiling up some water in your favorite pot and going to town. When the gnocchi float to the top, they're ready to eat.



It is very likely, though, that you cannot eat all of this pasta in one sitting (as hard as you might try). The other option is to lay the gnocchi out on a clean cookie sheet and freeze them. After completely frozen, you could store them in freezer bags. You can also cook the gnocchi straight from the freezer, too; again, when they float to the top of the pot after being thrown into boiling water, they're ready to eat.

Me? Well....



P.S. Here's somebody making gnocchi with Gorgonzola--yum!

Fresno Fair

Just a brief reminder that this is the last weekend of the Big (x5) Fresno Fair. We got a chance to go last weekend, so our obligatory moment of eating everything in sight was completed wholeheartedly.

Make sure you don't miss yours!

Goodbye, Summer...

...and a big, football-watching, hot cocoa-sipping, sweater-covered-arms hug to autumn.

Welcome back. You look great. You are just as cool as I remember.

I missed you.

...

And to you and yours, I wish you a happy St. Matthew's feast day, too.

How Many Miles To The Sugar Shack?

I stepped into cupcake nirvana this weekend.

I spent part of the Labor Day weekend with my sister Stephanie. During the week we had talked about doing something over the weekend, but when it finally came we got into a bit of a funk. To avoid from getting lazy-crazy at home all day Saturday, I forced Stephanie out to lunch and to run some errands with me.

On our drive out, something caught our eye.

Correction. As we drove past it at 30 miles per hour, a tiny glimmer of pink no bigger than a beach ball and no closer than 100 feet caught Stephanie’s eye.

A new gourmet cupcake and frozen yogurt shop, called the Sugar Shack, had opened up at Sommerville and Perrin, and we had spotted its fabulous sign.

Yes. You read that right. GOURMET CUPCAKE AND FROZEN YOGURT SHOP.

Suddenly, the weekend funk vanished. Stephanie’s attitude changed. The newly-discovered prospect of enjoying a cupcake upon completion of errands had her quite chippered-up.

It was seriously a treat for us both. We walked in late Saturday afternoon to a sassy grayish-blue parlor with sweets on all sides. Yogurt dispensers on the left promised New York cheesecake and Irish mint. Doses of pink accented the ribbon-wrapped cake stands on the right. Mondo-sized and single-serving cupcakes lovingly taunt you behind glass. And they have “Frosting Shots” at twenty-five cents a pop.

I think my heart stopped.

Had we been missing this place all along? No, owner Janelle said they had been open only a day.

And, like dorks, we cheered when we heard that. Cheered.

I think we were happy both for this new business opening up and for the fact that we were one of the first people to discover it. Oh, and we probably subconsciously cheered for the sugar rush we were about to experience.

We can testify that both the yogurt and the cupcakes were spectacular. In particular, we devoured a white cupcake with blackberry syrup across delicious frosting, and got through most of a red velvet with cream cheese frosting before lapsing into a sugar coma.

Red velvet


What's left of the white cake with blackberry


I'm not big on just frosting, but this might convert me.




It seriously bums me out that I can’t link you to their website (they don’t have one—yet). However, go visit them. Eat their food. Chat with the staff. You will definitely enjoy talking with the authentically-nice Janelle. She even shared with us some things that they may and up doing soon, like flavors of the day (so you can know when specific treats, like margarita-flavored cupcakes, will appear). And who knows, their efforts may grow into something like a Twitter account sharing what they’re making for the day with their predicted legions of followers.

Either way, it’s nirvana.

What a Tart!

Over the weekend, I decided to make good use of all the figs I had accumulated and make a Fig and Almond Tart, which in theory should look just like the picture next to the recipe.

I began the process of creating the tarty goodness by washing a whole bunch of black Mission figs.



To ensure they were good, I had about seven before I started cooking. And darn! I didn't get a picture of that. Oh well...

I put the figs into a glass bowl and dug up my grandma's old food processor to begin forming the tart dough.



I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that's old. You're thinking that color (that beige-y sad color) was discontinued in the 1970's because it looks awful. You're thinking it will never work.

Well, I had hope. I was going to give the old girl a shot. I thought, "I'll prove that things don't need to be new to make delicious treats!"

In this coin toss, you won. Fried motor.

With the food processor out of commission, I resolved to make my tart the old fashioned way: with frozen butter. First I put all the dry ingredients together, including a lot of lemon zest.*



Then I folded in the butter, making sure it stayed chunky for tart tenderness, and mushed it with the dry stuff to look like this.



I assure you that in real life, it was not blurry. I then flattened the dough into a disc and put it in the fridge to keep it cool and full of potential.

While that hung out in the fridge, I mixed all of the wet stuff, including some local honey, with my awesome red spatula.



I think the red spatula is the secret. Or following the directions. Either or.

Then I cleaned my workspace so my mom and sister would not have a conniption after reading this blog post.



See, Mom and Steph, look how clean it is!

After basking in this tidiness for about 45 seconds, I busted the dough out of the fridge, rolled it out flat, spread the wet stuff onto it, put some almonds onto that, sliced the figs and laid them on top of everything.



Aww, pretty.

After spreading some fig jam on top of it all for glossiness, I folded the edges over and stuck it in the oven....



...where I stood right outside the door, waiting, wondering, "Is everything OK in there? It isn't doing anything." I think I was waiting for it to bubble like lasagna or something.

The timer finally went off, and all was well. It was cooked and delicious (and, again, not blurry in real life).



I took it to a few places this weekend so people could give it a try, and it was well received (except by my husband, who made sure to give me a kiss on my forehead before he said that I did a really good job, but that he could now confirm that he does not like figs).

I'm really glad people generally enjoyed the tart. It's encouraging when you make edible and likable food. I was sharing my success with my parents this week, which reminded them that that had a gift for me: 3 bags of dried figs.

Oh boy.


*By the way, I do not have a zester either. Food processor, zester...are there other things you think I need?