Gratuitous Catch-up Food Post

This post will cover all of the new and exciting recipes I have tackled since April. Wow. I am bad at updating. Let's start in the past and work our way to the present...

I got married (June 5th)! We made our own cake! It is a German beesting cake


Sourdough rye breads (James Beard recipe)


Buttery sourdough paprika rolls


Braised short ribs, our first meal to cook together as a married couple!


Roasted veggies


Spaghetti squash with homemade marinara and quinoa sticks


Pork chops and roasted poblano soup


Peach chicken with veggies and mashed cauliflower/sweet potato/red potato


Mushroom, garlic, salmon, cream cheese, asparagus quiche with standard crust


Mushroom, garlic, salmon, cream cheese, asparagus quiche with hashbrown crust

Lemon, Cranberry, Pecan Scone Recipe

I wish there was enough time to update my blog properly with all the sewing and crafting I have been accomplishing lately, but there just isn't. I have also been doing a decent amount of cooking and baking, so here we go with my new favorite recipe: Lemon, cranberry, and pecan scones! The lemons came from the lemon tree in my fiance's friend's yard. The pecans came from my mom's friend's yard.

Lemon, Cranberry, and Pecan Scones

Ingredients

• 2.5 cup flour (I prefer unbleached)
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• zest of 2 lemons (if you feel bad about wasting the juice, you can make lemonade or mix some lemon juice with powdered sugar to drizzle on the scones)
• 12 tablespoons COLD butter (1.5 sticks, cut into 1/2" cubes)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup fresh cranberries, cut in half if they are huge

Directions

1. Preheat an oven to 375. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or spray them. Set these aside. 
2. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and lemon zest. 
3. Add in the cold cubed butter. It needs to be cold so that when it bakes it expands and leaves air pockets of deliciousness. Mix the butter either with your hands or a mixer until it seems well incorporated and has the consistency of peas. 
4. Put this bowl in the fridge while you whisk the eggs to scramble them. Then add the heavy cream to this and whisk well. 
5. Get the dry/butter mixture out of the fridge and add the egg/cream mixture. You will need a mixer to combine these. Trust me, it will be thick. 
6. Then add in the pecans and mix well. 
7. Finally you need to add in the cranberries. Do not over-mix or you will break them and turn the dough pink. 
8. Separate the dough into 8-10 equal blobs and plop them onto your prepared baking sheets. 
9. Bake for 20-21 minutes or until the scones are golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean. 
10. Then enjoy!

Dulce de Leche Cupcakes

These cupcakes without the caramel stuffing are tasty; with caramel stuffing, they are ridiculously tasty! They are dense, which is especially important if you plan on stuffing them because they are easy to cut.

Picture-less recipe is at the bottom of this post. 

Before you start the cupcakes, you need to leave 8 hours to make the easy peasy dulce de leche. To do this, take a can of sweetened condensed milk and remove all labels. Throw it in a crock pot on low for 8 hours. After it cools, you have dulce de leche or easy peasy, gooey caramel!

Then we start on the cupcakes. It might seem tedious, but this recipe uses two bowls. In the first, add the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Mix this up.

In the second bowl, combine the sugar and eggs.

Mix these together.

Keep mixing until they are kind of frothy.

Add the vanilla.

Then add the butter and mix again.

Then add this wet mixture to your dry mixture and mix. Mix. Mix. Mix.

Then you add some sour cream. Can you guess what you do next? MIX!

Then you scoop your batter into wrapper lined cupcake pans.

Bake 10 minutes, then rotate the pans. This is what they look like after 10 minutes.

Then bake them for 10 more minutes and they should be done and will look like this.

Mmm! Beautiful cupcakes!

If you plan on stuffing them, cut about a 1" hole out of the middle.

Then fill the cavities with gooey caramel goodness.

While you are at it, add some caramel to your frosting!

Then frost. I use a single recipe of frosting for a double batch of cupcakes because I do not like a lot of frosting.

Then enjoy your cupcakes!

If you want the cupcakes to be salted caramel, simply add a dash of coarse salt right before serving. Om nom nom.

Directions

• Prepare caramel by putting a can of sweetened condensed milk (with labels removed) in a crock pot on low for 8 hours.
• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line pans with cupcake wrappers. Single makes about a baker's dozen, double makes about 29.
• In bowl one, mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
• In bowl two, beat together the sugar and eggs until slightly frothy. This can take up to 2 minutes.
• Add the vanilla and beat together.
• Add the butter and beat together.
• Combine mixtures from bowls one and two with beater.
• Mix in the sour cream.
• Fill the cupcake wrappers. 
• Bake for 10 minutes, then rotate pans. 
• Bake for another 10 minutes or until cupcakes are golden and a toothpick comes out clean.
• Once cupcakes are cooled, cut a small circle out of the top. 
• Divide the caramel between the cupcakes, reserving some for the icing.
• Prepare icing by beating together softened butter, powdered sugar, and caramel until smooth.
• Frost the cupcakes.
• If you want salted caramel cupcakes, sprinkle tops of cupcakes with coarse salt just before serving.
• Enjoy!

Brunch & Two Recipes

Last weekend my boyfriend's sister and her boyfriend were in town. We all wanted to get brunch together but couldn't decide on a place. Then it occurred to me that we should cook for them! We bought our new souffle dish while visiting them  and hadn't yet tried it out. Since souffle needs a reason, this seemed like a good one! Last time we made souffle, the dish we had wasn't big enough so we had to also use two smaller ramekins which was a hassle.

But this time we had the perfect vessel for souffle cooking! Look how perfectly it fluffed up and fit in the container! Yess!  We followed Julia Child's cheese souffle recipe.


In addition to the cheese souffle, brunch consisted of fresh fruit, lemon poppy seed French toast (made with the challah bread I baked last week), and Brussels sprout hash! It was incredible.


Today I'm going to share two of my favorite brunchy recipes, lemon poppy seed French toast and Brussels sprout hash. First up:

Lemon Poppy Seed French Toast.

Ingredients for about 4 servings:

• 3-4 eggs (depending on size)
• 1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp milk
• Anywhere from 2 tsp-1 Tbsp poppy seeds (depending on what you prefer)
• 1 tsp almond extract
• 2 Tbsp lemon curd (this is totally optional but I love the taste it adds. If you commit to a jar of it though, you are going to have to make this recipe at least 4 times before it expires. How sad! If you don't want to buy lemon curd, add extra juice and maybe some lemon zest and/or marmalade)
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice (or juice from one lemon)
• 6-8 slices thick cut bread (I use challah but anything would work)
• about 2 Tbsp butter

Mix eggs, milk, poppy seeds, almond extract, and lemon curd in a bowl. Slice up your bread. Mix in lemon juice (I save this for last because once I added it after only the milk was in the bowl and the milk started to curdle). Pour the liquid mixture into some kind of pan or flat baking sheet. Put the bread in the mixture and flip is so that each side is covered. Melt about 1/2 Tbsp in pan over medium heat. Cook french toast until golden brown and flip. Once the second side is golden brown, you're done! If your pan is small, add another 1/2 Tbsp of butter for each batch. 

Brussels Sprout Hash

• 1/2 package of grated frozen hash brown potatoes
• 1 package Brussels sprouts, washed, trimmed, and cut in half
• 1 yellow onion, minced
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 Tbsp. canola oil or vegetable oil
• 1 tsp. lemon pepper
• 2 tsp. dried parsley
• salt and pepper, to taste (you might not need more pepper if the lemon pepper is enough)

Heat oil in a pan and add onions, garlic, and potatoes. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until the potatoes start to turn golden brown, this might take up to about 10 minutes. I use a non-stick ceramic pan so that I can easily scrape up the delicious crunchy bits. Once the potatoes are looking extra delicious, add in the seasonings and Brussels sprouts. Cook for about 5 more minutes so that the Brussels sprouts can get tender, then enjoy! I always serve this with eggs of some sort.

Cooking and Sewing

This is Luna, Devourer of Worlds. She is our recently[ish] adopted house bunny. Here she is enjoying some outdoor playtime. She helps me sew.


She helped me narrow down the layout of my Moda Friendship Sampler Blocks. For info on the blocks themselves, including color codes, look here and here.


I have also been working on my fox for the Secret Fox Swap. I came up with this mug rug/mini quilt thing. Obviously it needs facial features.


Luna, however, was not impressed with the fox. Here she is illustrating how not-scary the fox is by pretending to sleep. So I made the fox a teensy bit bigger. Gosh, she is so helpful. In all seriousness, isn't she adorable when she sleeps???


Anyways, this semester I am teaching one less lecture and two less labs than normal so I find myself with more time to sew. I pulled this fabric to get started on a quilt for my old college roommate and her boyfriend who just bought a house!


And this is the layout I'm working on. The quilt will be comprised of 8" blocks and the blocks that are colored in are what I'm using to make the quilt. So it will be 8 x 9 blocks. If you can see on the bottom of the page, I sketched each possible block then assigned everything numerical values so I could really randomize the quilt by rolling dice to pick block order. I might write a post to explain what exactly I did because it was a really fun and stress free way to decide on a random layout. I also thought it would look awesome to have the colorful blocks surrounded by a border of monochromatic blocks, but KT wants lots of color, so that would not work this time.


In other news, all three of my hens are laying eggs! From left to right: Bullroarer, Eglantine, and Polydontasaurus.


I used some of their eggs to bake some challah bread that we used to make lemon poppyseed French Toast. Yum!


Speaking of cooking, last week the boyfriend and I decided to do some themed cooking. The theme we decided on was South American. The first themed dish is keshi yena, an amazing treat from the Dutch Antilles. We first had it in Bonaire and loved it!


The second dish for theme week was feijoada, a Brazilian black bean stew. Omnomnom.

Sewing Before Writing

I am so excited to have my sewing machine back and am absolutely dreading teaching this fall semester that I have been getting a lot of sewing done (and not much blogging)! First off we have a quilt my mom commissioned me to make for her cousin who is getting married. I tried to be good and use some stuff from my stash, hence the background changes. Oh well. I have until September to finish this one.


I have also started making food to freeze so I have tasty things to eat when I am too busy teaching to cook. First off, homemade pita bread using 1/3 whole wheat flour. Yum!


Then some steak fingers with roasted veggies, mashed potatoes, and red cabbage coleslaw.


Oh yeah, back to sewing. Here is a sashiko panel I stitched up. I'm working on adding some super secret applique.


I also started working on some Moda Friendship Sampler blocks. I am going to try my best to provide links to patterns and color codes for the fabric I use. Eventually there will be 20 blocks made (of the available 31 patterns), but they are not going to be made in numerical order. I am making them as my LQS has the Bella solids I want to use.

Block 2: Daffodil (Bella 9900 250) and Clementine (Bella 9900 209)


Block 6: Cobalt (Bella 9900 227) and Kiwi (Bella 9900 189).


Block 8: Peacock (Bella 9900 216) and Amelia Pink (Bella 9900 166)


Block 12: Daffodil (Bella 9900 250) and Grey (Bella 9900 83)


Block 24: Kiwi (Bella 9900 189) and Aqua (Bella 9900 34).


Block 25: Bright Turquoise (Bella 9900 226) and Grey (Bella 9900 83).


Block 29: Fuchsia (Bella 9900 190) and Grey (Bella 9900 83).