cookies 'n cream cupcake

So the other day i made vanilla bean cupcakes. I had a lot of leftover batter, so i stuck some oreos in the batter and made .... cookies 'n cream cupcakes.

they are delicious! vanilla-e flavor w/ big chunks of cookie pieces! the recipe for the vanilla cupcakes is here, and i just added about a cup of crushed mini oreos to the batter.

Apple Cranberry Coffee Cake

I have this classmate who always brings coffee cake to school for breakfast. Everyday I see her eating her super yummy lookin cake during our classes together. Wait. Once she was eating banana bread. But that was only once. I’ve never had coffee cake and I didn’t want to take hers, so I made my own! :) Did you know coffee cake doesn’t have coffee in it??? I didn't…I guess you’re just supposed to eat the cake W/ coffee. Ohhhh. Well here's my version of coffee cake…it was really moist and tasty!

Apple Cranberry Coffee Cake
Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour (sift before measuring)
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Cake:
1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour (sift before measuring)
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup melted butter
1/2 cup milk
½ cup applesauce
½ cup diced apple (about 1 small apple)
½ cup dried cranberry


Preparation:
Topping: In small mixing bowl, combine topping ingredients. Blend with fork until crumbly. Set aside.

Cake: Stir 1 1/2 cups sifted flour with baking powder and salt into a bowl. In a medium bowl, beat together beaten egg and 3/4 cup sugar and 1/3 cup melted butter. Add milk and applesauce. Stir in flour mixture and mix well. Add in cranberries and apple.
Pour batter into a greased and floured 8-inch square or 9-inch layer-cake pan. Sprinkle topping crumb mixture evenly over batter. Bake at 375° for 25 to 30 minutes, or until cake tests done.

Ice Cream Cupcakes

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but does anyone click on blogrolls to find other blogs? Well I eventually stumbled upon a blog that just happened to be having a contest. It was for ice cream cupcakes! I love ice cream and cupcakes, so this was the perfect contest for me! I didn’t want to make mine too fancy (I have finals this week and I really have to study!!), so I made a very simple, but super duper tasty ice cream cupcake. I call it Vanilla Bean & Cookies and Cream. It rhymes, see? I made a vanilla bean cupcake base, and then topped it with cookies and cream ice cream and a mini oreo!

I thought the vanilla cupcake and cookie ice cream flavor combination worked really well. It reminded me of an Oreo with vanilla bean cream in the middle. Yummy, yea?
I thought making the ice cream cupcakes would be really difficult because the ice cream might melt and all that stuff, but it actually wasn’t too hard. I just made the cupcakes, froze them, spooned ice cream into a bag, and piped it onto the cupcakes. Putting the ice cream on the cupcakes was actually the hardest part. Part of the ice cream would melt, so that when I tried to pipe it onto the cupcakes, it would sometimes spurt out just melted ice cream and sometimes it was thick like frosting. It was also kinda cold, but the main problem was getting it out of the bag. Maybe I should’ve softened it longer or something….



To enter we are supposed to link our post to here and here. So umm.. yea oh and here's the recipe!

For Vanilla Bean Cupcakes
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 tbsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
8 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cups sugar
2 egg yolks and 3 egg whites, at room temperature
3/4 cup milk
1/2 tbsp. vanilla extract

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Line two cupcake pans with paper liners.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Whisk together and set aside.
3. Beat butter in a bowl. Scrape just the vanilla bean seeds into the bowl with the butter. Beat on medium-high speed until light and creamy in color.
4. Slowly add the sugar to the butter mixture, beating after each addition. Mix in the eggs until incorporated.
5. In a liquid measuring glass, combine milk and vanilla extract.
6. Slowly mix in milk mixture and flour mixture into the butter mixture.
7. Once mixed, fill paper lines with batter.
8. Bake for 20 minutes
9. Freeze cupcakes if topping with ice cream

Assembly of Ice Cream Cupcakes:
Ingredients:
Frozen cupcakes
Cookies and Cream Ice Cream
Mini Oreos

1. Scoop cookies and cream ice cream into a freezer Ziploc bag.
2. Soften ice cream so that ice cream can be piped onto cupcakes (just wait a little bit)
3. Pipe ice cream onto cupcakes
4. Top with mini Oreos and freeze until ready to eat.






vanilla bean cupcake - see the black specs!!! it's the beans! :)

Kashi Cereal Squares

Has anyone had the original kashi go lean cereal? Well, im not sure if it’s just me, but I cannot stand that stuff. It’s disgusting!!! >.< I almost puked!! It says it’s so healthy but I mean like if you don’t eat any of it you’re eventually gonna lose weight.. I just couldn’t bear to eat it plain so like I had to coat it in sugar. But I still couldn’t eat it!! It was just sooo bad. But maybe if someone likes the cereal, this is a great sweeter version of the cereal…but uhh I totally cant eat this…but here’s the recipe:

Kashi Cereal Sqaures

1 cup marshmallows
1 teaspoon butter
1 ½ cup crushed kashi cereal

Preparation: Heat marshmallows and butter in a large saucepan on medium heat. Once marshmallows are melted, add in cereal. Stir until combined and then put in to a greased pan.

Lemon Meringues

Anyone interested in anything super light, super airy, and super delicious?? Well, I am! And what better way to create something that good than making meringues? Oh, and the hint of lemon just adds that extra punch of flavor along with the puffy airyness!

Lemon Meringue

3 egg whites
¾ cup powdered sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
1 teaspoon lemon extract or 2 teaspoons lemon juice
food coloring

beat egg whites until fluffy. Beat in powdered sugar and cream of tartar. Beat in lemon extract and food coloring. Pipe onto a pan lined with parchment paper using a Ziploc bag with the tip cut. Bake at 225˚F for 45 minutes or until firm.

Coconut Tapioca Pudding - Updated

I just did a post on coconut tapioca pudding, but it didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. (I had used the wrong sized tapioca pearls-they were too big). I bought the smaller sized tapioca pears, and re-made the tapioca pudding using the same recipe. It actually turned out quite well. The pearls quickly turned translucent, and so I was able to make the tapioca in about half the time. The coconut flavor wasn't super strong, so I added about 1/4 cup extra, and it was super yummy!

Recipe:
Bring 2 cups water to a boil in a saucepan. Add 1/3 cup (small!!!)tapioca pearls, partially cover and simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the pearls are translucent, about 20 minutes. Stir in 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk, 2 tablespoons sugar and a pinch of salt until dissolved.

Godiva's Best Truffle!

godiva...yum, just the name reminds of all the different, rich, and delicious chocolates they sell. plus, they also have this deal where if you sign up for a membership, you recieve a free piece of chocolate every month! and, when you buy something for 10$ or more, the next month you'll receive a free 2-piece chocolate box. (but it's the same every single time, and so it gets kinda boring after gettin like 10 of those boxes..)


well onto my favorite truffle. So after trying like pretty much all of them, i have to say my favorite is the dark chocolate truffle. the praline truffle is a close second. the dark chocolate truffle is a rich and dense, dark chocolate filled chocolate shell. the chocolate isn't too dark, that it tastes bitter, but enough that it isn't too milky and creamy. plus, all those scientific people say dark chocolate is good for your heart! just another added benefit, and one that tastes good too!

Edamame Fried Rice

Fried rice: A great way to use up left over rice. Need I say more?

Edamame Fried Rice w/ Salami Pieces
1 cup left over rice
1/4 cup edamame
1/8 cup left over meat (I used salami)
1 teaspoon shoyu
1 teaspoon oil
salt and pepper to taste

1. place old rice, oil, and shoyu in a frying pan
2. heat rice, and then add edamame and meat
3. place on plate, and then garnish with salt or pepper to taste

Edamame Mozzarella Egg While Omelet

im not usually an egg person, but i mean like really, who can pass up an omelet? they're so delicious, and really easy to make. I don't like the flavor of the egg yolk, so all of my omelets are only egg whites. We had left over edamame (soy beans) from the night before, and so I added that and cheese to my omelet. For some reason I don't like it when my cheese if fully melted, so i sprinkle the cheese on the finished omelet so the residual heat will semi melt the cheese.

Edamame Mozzarella Egg White Omelet
3 egg whites mixed w/ a tablespoon of water
1/4 cup edamame
1/4 cup mozzarella cheese

1. grease pan and then heat.
2. pour egg whites into pan
3. As eggs set, take a spatula and push the edges of the egg mixture in, allowing the uncooked eggs on top to flow underneath and make direct contact with the skillet. Repeat the procedure at various spots around the edge of the setting egg mixture.
4. place edamame on egg, and fold egg whites over the edamame
5. place on plate and sprinkle with cheese

Cinnamon Sugar Glazed Nuts :)

plain vs. glazed

There’s this new giant safeway store near my house, and guess what!? they have a nut bar :) but the nuts are kinda expensive…. Who want to pay 20 bucks for just one pound of nuts, not my parents! (even though they have some pretty cool combinations like furikake, spicy, sesame glazed, ranch, and a ton more) So instead of buying the super expensive but oh so delicious flavored nuts, I decided to make my own. Oh and btw the nut bar guy’s name is rory…but onto the nuts, so it turns out Costco sells nuts for about 8 bucks for a huge bag of nuts! (I, meaning my parents, bought a huge 2 lb bag of pecans for just 8$..i think) So I was looking through a lot of recipes on making your own sugar glazed nuts, (I felt like eating sweet nuts), and I came across a lot of recipes that use butter. I then decided I didn’t want to use any butter, cause then I’d have to put in the oven for a really long time. I decided to use a recipe where you just melt the sugar in a saucepan, add the nuts, stir around, and pour on a pan. Simple, yea? So I made the sugar mixture and dumped in a pile of nuts. It was a little too sweet, so the next batch I made had more nuts to the same ratio of sugar, and after they’d cooled, they were delicious! We tried adding a vanilla extract for a hint of vanilla flavor, but it just made the nuts sticky, and not hard like the other batched. My favorite spice combination was just the plain ol cinnamon. yum.



single hazelnut


Sugar Glazed Nuts
¼ cup sugar
1 ¼ cup nuts of choice (I used pecans)
1 tsp. spice of choice (I used cinnamon, but I’ve also tried ginger and cloves…pretty weird combination)

Melt sugar and spice in saucepan, (it took awhile for all the sugar to melt, and the little clumps to melt too, so just be patient), once melted, add nuts and stir, will cool quickly, so after you mix the nuts put on a silicone mat and separate the big clumps.



cinn sugar glazed pecans


shelled and toasted hazelnuts


in the process of melting

Coconut Tapioca Pudding

when i was little....*cough cough* like a couple years ago, i always thought tapioca was for old people, so i never ate it. It was all cartoon networks fault. They had this show, Codename Kid's Next Door, and one of the episodes was about destroying the seniors citizen's supply of tapioca. Kinda a weird plot, yea? i think they said it was gross or something. But anyways, back to my tapioca story. So I never thought I liked tapioca, until I tried coconut tapioca from Bale Bakery. It was Amazing! Clear little pearls bathed in creamy coconuty goodness. Delish! It's so tasty, but of course, they sell it in tiny little 1/2 cup containers. :( But now.... I found out how to make my own! but of course...something just happened to go wrong. The recipe said large tapioca pears, and so I bought large tapioca pearls. Turns out I bought the extra jumbo large ones! It's only supposed to take 40 minutes to turn clear in the water, but umm...since they were so big...well it was like an hour and a half, and it still didn't completely turn clear! It was actually pretty good, and next time i go to times I'm gonna buy the smaller sized pearls...




Recipe:
Bring 2 cups water to a boil in a saucepan. Add 1/3 cup tapioca pearls, partially cover and simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the pearls are translucent, about 40 minutes. Stir in 3/4 cup unsweetened coconut milk, 2 tablespoons sugar and a pinch of salt until dissolved.

Baked Puffed Corn Cereal

You know how puffing your own popcorn is considered sooo easy…well, I kinda burn mine. I know, that’s pretty bad, but I found an alternative. I take puffed corn and I toast it for a little while. It makes it taste like popcorn, but it doesn’t burn super easily..at least I haven’t yet… I put it with a little salt, and although it doesn’t stick, some of it does somehow and it tastes perfectly like popcorn! It's also a great snack when doing geometry homework.

Ingredients:
2 cups Puffed Corn Cereal
1 tsp. Salt
Pepper (optional)
Spread the cereal on a pan. Toast for 5 minutes @300˚F or until crispy. Sprinkle salt and pepper on the cereal. Enjoy!

Kasha

the other day we had kasha for dinner. usually I don't take pictures of my dinners cause, well, i'm not sure, I guess im just so hungry that I eat it right away. But back to what I was originally gonna say, i had kasha for dinner. And it was delicious. I can't find it at any of the stores in Oahu :(... Somehow we had a box of it in our pantry (we probably bought it on the mainland), so we made some!!! Kasha is actually eaten as a cereal in most places, but we ate it for dinner...but then...i ate it for breakfast! yum.

random pictures

Thailand

Great Harvest Bread Co. ...again...

after school i was craving HUGE FREE slices of bread. and so guess what i did? i went to great harvest bread co!!! wooohooo. the sample slices are so huge and it's amazing how delicious the breads are. they now have mini dinner roll sized versions, and so for dinner we bought the pop-eye bread. It had like spinach, cheese, bell peppers, you know those healthy things...


it wasn't my favorite bread cause I thought it tasted a little spicy and i totally had better breads from there. we actually didn't even finish the bread, and it only had 6 dinner roll sized round pieces of bread!

Along with the bread they also have super tasty baked goods, last time I came here I wrote a review on the lemon bar and some of the other stuff. This time I got a mud bar and a cranberry oatmeal cookie. The mud bar was pretty interesting for me cause i've never seen one of those. It was a bar with a brownie base with a chocolate chip cookie top. I thought the chocolate base was a little dry and the top didn't really seem to blend well with the bottom. However, it was quickly snatched up by my brother who wolfed it down in a matter of seconds! he thought it was delcious!!



The cranberry cookie I had was a little too soft for my liking, but I quickly consumed it with a nice tall glass of milk! :) The cookies are quite large, (almost the size of my head) but I ate the entire thing in one sitting!!!! uh oh...it's gonna leave its mark.. dun dun dunnnnn. I haven't baked or eaten cranberries in a while now, so i was totally inspired by those cranberries to buy some. I'll probably be making a couple different types of things with dried cranberries. yum.

Soymilk Chichi Dango (Mochi)

Soymilk Chichi Dango

Usually mochi is made with just water and mochi flourish stuff. I was at Shirokiya (a japanese department store @ ala moana)and they were having this fair sorta of thing. They were selling soymilk mochi, and I totally needed to try it! (I <3 mochi)

So the mochi wasn't super strechy and squishy-like like normal. Once I bit into it, I just bit into it, and I was able to pull off a piece w/o tearing it. It was a little weird and I didn't really like it, but everyone else did :) so it didn't go to waste!

Apple Sauce Spice Bars

APPLES!!! i love apples! <3 :) but i've never really had fresh picked apples because it's too hot to grow apples in hawaii :( and i can never go pick my own because i have school and thanksgiving break isn't long enough...but when it's apple season they're still pretty good, even though they've traveled thousands of miles just to go into my mouth! so these are dorie greenspan's applesauce spice bars...they were pretty good, very moist, and delicious! i kinda ate all of the apples..oops..so i just used more applesauce. they were still really good and maybe that's why they were so moist and sorta dense....hmm....

Coffee Cookiecake

Today I felt like baking with coffee, and so I tried to make cookies using coffee. I don’t really like coffee, but I sorta like it better when it’s in a cookie or cake. Did you know coffee cake doesn't have any coffee in it??? I didn’t know that…But anyways, I made a cookie base, and then added some coffee…and the coffee grounds used to make it. Uhh is that okay? Cause in the final product…well lets just say the coffee grounds look like poppy seeds. So I started out with a coffee cookie in mind, but ended up with a cake instead. They were shaped like cookies, but tasted like a cake or very airy cakelike bread. Hmm I wonder why? Maybe there was too much liquid? I’m not sure, but these were actually okay, and probably taste pretty good with a nice cup of coffee. Or when your waiting for your ride to the mall to get new shoes.

Coffee Cookie Cake –by me!
Ingredients:
½ cup white sugar
1 egg
½ cup butter
2 tsp coffee grounds
3 tbs hot water
1 cup whole wheat flour
¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp baking soda

Preheat oven to 350˚F. Soak coffee and water in a small bowl (I used a coffee filter thing, but ended up just mixing the two). In a bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add in egg and coffee mixture. In a bowl, combine flour, baking powder and soda. Combine flour mixture and butter mixture. Drop onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper and bake for 12 minutes or until browned.

BLT Steakhouse Review

The other day was my brother's birthday, and since he LOVES steak, we went to a steakhouse. His favorite steak place is Hy's, and closely following is Ruth's Chris. But since we have already gone there quite a few times, he wanted to go to a different steak place, so BLT Steakhouse it was (also cause it's new on Oahu). They said the filet mignon was really weird, 'cause it had a TON of grisel! I don't really eat meat, but I totally thought filet mignon wasn't supposed to have grisel. They said the onion rings were huge and actually really really tasty! But they said the best thing was the popovers! They had cheese in it, and were super puffy and delish! They rated the restaurant as an okay steak place cause of the grisel on the filet mignon, but the delicious popovers and onion rings...




Caesar salad


yummy cheesy POPOVERS!


some pate dish thing




ONION RINGS!!!!


so this is one of the meat things, im not sure which one..



umm..some sort of meat thing, either the filet or some other type..