Happy Valentine's Day!

Here are my beautiful cupcakes!

I used Joy the Baker's Red Velvet Cupcakes recipe (really the Hummingbird Bakery's recipe) and my own Cream Cheese Frosting recipe (with beautiful Wilton's pink food gel!) Here is my frosting recipe:

1 8 ounce package of full fat cream cheese, room temperature
4 T. (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 t. vanilla
2-3 T. milk
1 c. confectioner's sugar

Beat the cream cheese and butter until fully incorporated. Add the vanilla and milk and beat again. Slowly add sugar while you are beating the mixture, mix for about 1-2 minutes or until thick and creamy.

These were beautiful AND delicious. Happy belated Valentine's Day everyone!

Honey Buttermilk Cornbread 5/5 Spoons

(Check out that chili. Gahhhh, so good.)

So, I've made an obscene amount of cornbread in the last few years. Today I made Whole Foods Vegetarian Chili (which is by far my favorite chili ever) and made my own cornbread to go with it. I feel confident enough to make cornbread and pizza dough without a recipe anymore. I've made cornbread before but this one is better, trust me. And this recipe is like really not that bad for you which is a bonus. Here is my recipe:

1 c. all-purpose flour (I might try bread flour next time, we shall see)
1. coarse cornmeal
2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. kosher salt
1 c. buttermilk
1/4 c. honey
1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil (or any oil of your choosing)
1 egg

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Grease a 9-inch pie/cake pan or line a 12 cup muffin pan.

Add all dry ingredients (through salt) into a large bowl and whisk until combined. In another bowl or measuring cup combine all wet ingredients and whisk. Add wet to dry and mix until combined but not beyond that. It will be thick like a cake batter. Add batter to the pan and place in top 1/3 of your oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean or when you press the top it is firm yet yielding. Let cool for a few minutes and then turn out onto a cooling rack. This is great warm or cold. Wrap your leftovers in some aluminum foil/plastic wrap. It will only last 1 or 2 days before getting pretty dry.

(Yeah, I should have taken a picture of my cornbread, but this one from Hungry-Texan is pretty close to mine)

So, you could add tons of things to this. Green onions, cheddar cheese, cracked black pepper, soyrizo, corn kernels, jalapenos, etc. The world is yours! I'm going to try making this vegan so I will get back to you all on that soon. This is a incredibly tender but not wet cake that is wonderfully sweet and corn-y.

Enjoy! And I hope you are all looking forward to my Valentine's Day dinner/dessert post this week. It will be sickeningly cute, trust me. ; )

Red Velvet Waffles w/ Cream Cheese Maple Sauce and Toasted Coconut 4/5 Spoons

OK, so it is not the weekend anymore, but here I am!

I have this insane idea to make pancakes/waffles out of all of my favorite desserts and luckily people around this beautiful world have the same idea as well. I've made Vegan Carrot Cake Pancakes and now Red Velvet Waffles (next will be Lemon Poppyseed Pancakes!) I served this with my standard tofu scramble (Thanks Kris Anne!) and some MorningStar Farms Veggie Bacon.

(My picture of my 2nd waffle.... I was too hungry to take a picture of the 1st one! That is the cream cheese maple sauce and toasted coconut on top.)

Here are my notes:

-- I was astounded that someone would use 1 1/4 cups of sugar in these waffles. These made 6 big waffles for me, so that's like a little less of 1/4 c. of sugar in EACH WAFFLE. Sick. I used 1/2 c. and I think it was plenty. I wanted the cocoa flavor to shine through and I was putting sweet syrup on top, so I recommend you don't go above 1/2 c. unless you love really sweet things.
-- Make sure to have your buttermilk at room temperature. Even though my butter was melted and cooled, my buttermilk was cold so it kind of turned the fat in the butter into a weird flaky mess. I could whisk most of it out but you don't want to over-whisk waffles so just a note for y'all.
-- For my cream cheese maple sauce, I didn't use their recipe. I left 4 ounces of cream cheese out at room temp most of the day. I warmed up the cheese in the microwave for about 40 seconds and added about 2 T. confectioner's sugar, 3-4 T. pure maple syrup and a dash of milk to combine. Just mix with a fork until it is smooth and you are able to drizzle it on your waffles.
-- As for the coconut, it was kind of an after thought. I put about 1/2 c. of coconut in a pan and toasted it on low-medium heat and stirred it frequently. It takes about 10 minutes, just keep an eye on it, because it can burn quickly.

(Photo courtesy of The Spellbound Cafe)

These were really delicious. I wouldn't say they were perfect because I think they could use some tweaks. Not sure what but I'll mull it over and let you all know. They had a great cake like texture but didn't necessarily crisp up the way I wanted them to in the waffle iron. It might have something to do with my really old iron and not with the recipe though. Even though they were a bit floppy they had a really nice cocoa flavor and worked SO WELL with the cream cheese maple topping and toasted coconut. I will make this again with some minor adjustments. If you have fantastic waffle and pancake recipes you think I should try, please let me know!

Next up.... Spinach and Artichoke Spaghetti Bake! (My own recipe.... ooh la la.)

Classic Buttermilk Cornbread 5/5 Spoons

Sometimes I love sides more than I love full "real" meals.

I love to go to a restaurant and order 3 sides and gobble them up with gusto. The thing is, they have to individually be so good and different from each other that it constitutes a meal (in my mind and in my belly). I need some sort of bread product (corn bread in this instance), some sort of protein (I made organic cumin-laced black refried beans to go along with this) and a veggie (homemade guacamole! I have my own recipe, if you want it, let me know!)

(Photo courtesy of Fine Cooking)

The problem with cornbread (which I admittedly don't have a lot of experience at making) is that it can be SO DRY. I mean you can put as much butter on a dry hunk of bread as you want but you still know it's not very good. I think using buttermilk (did you know it is actually low in fat?) really moistened the bread and it is even quite tender today. I wanted to make sure to find a recipe that a. was tender (check) b. not chock full of sugar (check) and c. doesn't contain an entire stick of butter (check). I think this recipe is my new winner! Here are my notes (there are barely any!):

-- Instead of table salt, I used kosher salt and bumped it up to 1 t. because kosher salt weighs less than table salt. Interesting, huh?
-- I used low-fat sour cream without any problem.
-- Because I had it, I added about 1 c. of frozen corn kernels. I feel like this part is totally necessary.

(I'm definitely not from Alabama, but I love cornbread!)

I of course couldn't wait. So I flipped this bread out of the pan and cut it into weird chunks and gobbled it up with some butter substitute. It was the perfect amount of sweetness and had a wonderful intense corn taste that a lot of cornbreads do not have. This is a great recipe because it uses so much cornmeal and very little all-purpose flour for a super authentic taste. This *technically* is not that bad for you. There is some butter yeah, but this bread will serve a lot of people. And I'm not always so worried about butter as I appear on here, I love me some sweet cream unsalted butter. This would go great with this Vegetarian Chili or Cincinnati Chili Mac.

Coming up soon......

Red Velvet Waffles with Cream Cheese Coconut Butter

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting


and other things I'm totally making up like BBQ Beefless Tips with Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Asparagus and a White Pizza. See you soon!

Cara's Buttermilk Bread 5/5 Spoons

Did you know that toast is my favorite food? Yeah, that's right. I am an immense lover of food and to me nothing is better than two perfectly crispy, crunchy, toasty and buttery pieces of soft, dense bread. It can go wrong obviously like any meal. You could over toast your bread (although I like it pretty dark), use bad butter/butter substitute (I use Earth Balance, it is my favorite) or you could just flat out use the wrong bread. Obviously everyone's toast tastes are a very personal thing. My ideal toast is thick, chewy sourdough bread toasted until dark brown and slathered with Earth Balance.

I stayed up until 2 am last night baking/proofing/caressing Cara's Buttermilk Bread and it was worth every minute of sleep I lost. This is decidedly easy and a great way to use up extra buttermilk if you have it in the fridge. This was not hard, but you do need some time management skills. You need to make sure you have 3 hours (give or take) to make, check, form and bake your bread. It is worth it, trust me. I woke up this morning to an amazing loaf of healthy, homemade bread and TOAST. My god, the toast was splendid. I love knowing exactly what went into that loaf of bread. There are no hidden ingredients or weirdo chemicals I can't pronounce. I think I'm gonna start making a loaf of bread for myself every week instead of buying my regular challah at the grocery store.



(Pictures courtesy of One Hot Stove)

Here are my few tweaks and just general impatient bread maker notes:

-- I used half unbleached all-purpose flour and half whole wheat flour. That's pretty much what I do now for all my dough recipes.
-- I skipped a step and just kneaded it, formed it into a loaf like shape, oiled the pan and let that rise for about 2 1/2 hours. This is instead of step 5 and 6. It worked well and there was less kneading and fooling around with the dough then.
-- When I baked it, I only left it in for about 30 minutes. It says 45 and I think that would be good too, but I wanted my bread to be a bit doughy. And it was, deliciously so.
-- And this was my bad, but I didn't take the bread out of the loaf pan overnight. I set it in the microwave to cool but keep moist but when I took it out this morning, the bottom was a tad soggy. So before you let it cool, take it out of its loaf pan to let it dry out.



I give this recipe:

5/5 Spoons!

If I could give it more I would. I realize I skipped my Vegetarian Taco Tater Tot Casserole, I'll get around to it but this was far more important to me to write about. Hope this finds everyone well!

Buttermilk Lemon Bars 5/5 Spoons

I LOVE LEMONS.

LOVE LOVE LOVE. I can never get enough. It hasn't gone far enough where I would just eat a straight up lemon (unless it had sugar on it and came with a shot of vodka) but I won't rule it out in my lifetime.

Making these Buttermilk Lemon Bars seemed like an obvious choice and since I had 2 leftover lemons and some buttermilk in the kitchen, the fates were calling me.



Before I get into the recipe, I want to say how much I love the Baking Bites website. I would say I'm much more of a baker than a cook (although I love to do both) and this website is just chock full of recipes I've kept in my bookmarks to try. Like Salted Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies, Chocolate Mint Cookie Squares and Samoas Bars. She has a cookbook too that I am interested in buying in the future. But enough of that now....

I didn't change a thing with this recipe. I followed it exactly because it didn't seem like it needed any tweaking at all. The only thing I would say is that they took longer than 20 minutes to fully cook through. Once they were done I put them in the fridge to cool overnight. I pulled them out this morning, dusted them with powdered sugar and cut it into 16 squares. They are tremendous. They are tart and sweet and the base is crumbly, buttery but cohesive.

So yeah, go make these. But only make them if you plan on sharing because I've had 3 already today and I plan on having 3 more and I even have two roommates!

I give this recipe:

5/5 spoons!

I don't have anything planned coming up, but trust me, I'll think of something and be back in the next few days. Love ya all!

Kentucky Biscuits Recipe 5/5 Spoons

So once again, I decided to make these at like midnight last night. I always have a hankering to bake in the middle of the night. I will say that when I wake up in the morning with fresh biscuits it really starts your day off right.



(photo courtesy of TheLitterbox101 at allrecipes.com)

I honestly don't have much to say about these biscuits besides praising them highly. The only thing I changed is putting 1/2 t. of kosher salt instead of a dash. At first I thought they weren't salty enough (I used unsalted butter) but this morning when they were at room temp, I thought they had the best flavor. So if you can stand letting them come to room temp, you won't be sorry. The biscuit is super easy to make (about 30 minutes total mixing and baking) and it is so tender on the inside and crispy on the outside.

You could easily make these vegan by using about 1/2 - 1 t. of vinegar or lemon juice and filling it up to 3/4 c. with soymilk and Earth Balance for a butter substitute. I haven't tried it because it is hard to find Earth Balance sticks here unless it is at Whole Foods. If any one of my vegan friends/readers make these, please let me know. I would be curious to know how they turn out.

I give this recipe:

5/5 Spoons!

You will hear from me soon with the Buttermilk Lemon Bars I mentioned in the previous post. Obviously at this point I'm trying to use up the rest of the buttermilk in my fridge, haha. I hope they are worth the wait!