2014/2015 - Book 39b

"Hallowed" - Second book in "Unearthly" series

Yep, you guessed it, I got sucked into the "Unearthly series". Since I've already gone past my year-long reading challenge (and failed, unfortunately), I figured diverging into another series won't hurt anything, and then I'll still have the story line clear in my head.
I thought this was a pretty good second book. I don't want to give out too much of the plot, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone who wants to read the first one yet. But there are some good twists and turns and it is a good set up for the third book (which I just happened to get from the library during my lunch hour today). I'm really looking forward to learning how it ends.

I have a couple of short recipes and then one long RECIPE EXPLOSION about some of the most adorable and professional-looking cupcakes I've ever made :)

To start off with, I made some strawberry-covered chocolates as a kind of Valentine's treat (yes, I know I am very behind with my recipe sharing). I found the idea in my Food Network magazine and thought it was clever. Chocolate-covered strawberries are so popular, so I decided to switch it up and make strawberry-covered chocolate, essentially chocolate truffles covered in freeze-dried strawberries. Finding freeze-dried strawberries was a trick (thank you Hy-Vee), but all-in-all they were pretty tasty. Not very much strawberry flavor, so I think I'll stick with regular chocolate truffles from now on, but it was something cute to try.

And for the main course, a french onion pork chop skillet. Unfortunately, I was not a fan of this. I needed a way bigger skillet, or maybe two skillets, to give my meat enough room to cook. Also, it was leaning pretty heavily to the salty side of things . . . not a good place to be. I served it with a side salad though, so it wasn't too bad. Definitely not a "make it again" recipe.

Lemon cupcakes with lemon curd

For the main attraction, feast your eyes on these cupcakes that I made for my friend Lisa's baby shower. Lisa knows I love to bake, so I was really honored when she asked me to make the cupcakes for her shower. It turned out that there were going to be a ton more people there than I was expecting at first, so I made a lot of cupcakes. I wish I had written this post earlier, so I could remember exactly how many I had made, but I want to say I made at least 24 regular sized cupcakes plus probably 60 mini cupcakes. I decided to make two flavors of cupcakes, because some people are crazy and don't like chocolate, and then of course, I had to fill them, because filled cupcakes are fancier. I finally settled on chocolate cupcakes with a chocolate raspberry ganache filling, and lemon cupcakes with a lemon curd filling. I used German buttercream for both and just split the batch and colored half pink and half blue (because she didn't know if she was having a boy or a girl). She had also had rubber ducks at her wedding reception, so I thought using duckies would be really neat . . . this was my cupcake inspiration (duckie cupcakes). Found really cute duckie toppers at my local bakery store . . . I got half that were actual rubber ducks that squirt water out their beaks and the other half were just plastic toppers.
For the actual cake, I used my go-to chocolate cake recipe and filled them with this yummy chocolate raspberry ganache. I didn't think the ganache had quite a strong enough raspberry flavor, so I put some of the extra seedless raspberry preserves in the cupcakes as well. These were topped with a swirl of pink frosting and a fresh raspberry. In case you were wondering the proper way to wash raspberries . . . I found this video interesting (washing raspberries).

The lemon cupcakes were a bit harder to plan since I didn't have a go-to lemon cake recipe, but I looked at a few and decided on this one (lemon cupcakes). I saved two lemon curd recipes (Martha Stewart lemon curd &  Sugarcrafter lemon curd . . . which is just a slightly scaled down adaptation of Martha Stewart's recipe) and I honestly can't remember which one I used, but I'm thinking that I used the larger one so the number of egg whites and egg yolks was even . . . who knows. I do like the pictures on the Sugarcrafter site though. I'd never made lemon curd before, so I found them helpful.

I knew presentation was important too, so I put them on my nice cupcake stand and a three-tiered tray. Driving to that baby shower was sure nerve-wracking, but they all made it in one piece. Next time, I think more of these plastic trays would be a great idea. So, I think they are the most professional-looking cupcakes I've made to date, they were super tasty, and they were a huge hit with everyone. I hope you're enjoying them as much as I did :)

So cute :)

Now, I need to apologize for the length of this post. I definitely need to trim down my recipes so I don't overwhelm my readers too much. Anyways, I'll have a few more longs posts, probably, and then I'll try to pare them down a little bit :) Have a great week.