Cooking Show #5--Cupcakes!! With Salted Caramel, or Nutella Filling...& Mascarpone Frosting

We filmed cooking show #5 this week.  My featured guest, Emily, is a friend of my daughter's.  Emily is currently enjoying a gap year before enrolling in Harvard this fall.  She's doing all sorts of fun things--taking classes, working on service projects--but I'll bet it'll be hard for her to top the three months she spent in the south of France this fall.

Here's Emily behind the counter of a bakery that she worked at while she was in France.

Before she left on her adventure, I asked her if she would be a guest on my cooking show when she came back.  She enthusiastically said, "YES!"  I've been eagerly awaiting her return, wondering what types of exotic treats we'd prepare when she came back.

The best-selling treats at the bakery?  Cupcakes!  And the best-selling flavor?

Nutella!

Not quite the exotic recipe I was expecting, but I've never filled cupcakes with anything, so it was a bit of a challenge.

Emily also suggested making salted caramel cupcakes.  GET. OUT.  My favorite.  How did she know?

We used my vanilla cupcake recipe.  Emily told me that the recipe at the bakery was a very closely-guarded secret.  She was allowed to make the cupcakes, but the ingredients were already measured and she was never told the exact amounts.

We used Emily's frosting recipes, however.  Can I just state for the record that I, a staunchly loyal fan of buttercream frosting, have evolved into an even bigger fan of mascarpone frosting?

You'll need to put a bit more time and effort into these cupcakes than you would for basic frosted cupcakes. I think you'll agree, however, that the extra time that it takes--to make the salted caramel and to fill the cupcakes--is time well-spent!

Berries With Vanilla Glaze--A Pick-Me-Up for Winter Doldrums

Winter, be gone!

If only it were that easy.

Even though it has been pouring rain, the sixty-degree temps of the last couple of days brought a bit of spring fever with them.

Clyde has spring fever, too!

  I settled for a bowl of berries instead, doctored up with a vanilla glaze.  I know, I know...berries are not in season.  Which is exactly why I want them.  Because if they were in season, I wouldn't need them to cure my spring fever, because it would no longer be winter and I wouldn't have spring fever.  Are you following my logic?

This recipe is so simple, and so good!  At first bite, my girls declared, "This is a keeper!" "Make this again!" And I will, anytime I want to chase the winter doldrums away.

2013 Blog Review

I just checked my dashboard.  I can't believe that there were 247,000 page views last year!  A more than five-fold increase over 2012.  I am truly humbled and grateful!

Most Page Views

For the second year in a row, Crock Pot Boneless Country Style Ribs was the most popular post.  This recipe received 155,000 page views!

Coming in a very distant second, with almost 12,000 page views, Crock Pot Boneless Beef Short Ribs.

And finally, a dessert recipe!  The third most-popular post, with almost 7,000 page views,  Sea Salt Caramel Rice Krispy Treats.  This is definitely one of my favorite recipes from 2013.

The first time I made them, I scorched them.  They were still fabulous!

Audience

For the third year in a row, the country with the most page views was the U.S., of course.  This year, however, the country with the second-greatest number of page views was

Canada!

My Personal Favorite Post

It's only appropriate that my favorite post from 2013 is

Selfie.  How I wish I had started blogging when my kids were younger.

Thank you for visiting!

Happy 2014!

Cheesy Blueberry French Toast Bake

Happy New Year!!

I've been cooking up a storm throughout the holiday season.  Lots of tried-and-true favorites (which I've already blogged about), and lots of new recipes and experiments.  

This is what I made last night for our New Year's Eve dinner.  Heart-shaped lobster ravioli.

This recipe was filed under Good, But Not Good Enough To Blog About.  Not good enough partly because a. I was happy with the sauce, however the pasta dough could use some work but mostly because b. it took me two frustrating hours to make.

And so my streak of so-so recipes continued.

Until this morning, that is. 

I think my streak of cooking & baking failures has finally ended!

It took this package of not-quite-fresh bread to get me rolling.  Ba-dum-bum, pun intended.  Rolls, get it?

Okay, my comedic timing still needs work.  Something else to shoot for in 2014.

Anyway, back to our story....

Stale bread or rolls are perfect for making French toast.  I've never, ever had success making any type of French toast casserole, however.  Oh, I've certainly tasted casseroles that I liked.  One time I was at a friend's house and she had made a spectacular cinnamon French toast casserole.  

She sent me the link to the online recipe and I only looked at it long enough to see that it called for three sticks of butter.  I. Just. Can't. Not even for special occasions.  Unless it would provide at least 24 servings, but then only because if I were to host a breakfast for 24 I'd be frantic enough that I wouldn't care how much butter I used.  Yet again, I digress.

I'll cut to the chase:  I've attempted to make many French toast casseroles that weren't loaded with butter.  And I've never liked any of them.  Until today!

I googled like crazy and adapted a Kraft recipe to suit my needs.  Ironically, there was no butter in the original recipe. I decided that butter wasn't the enemy after all and used a teaspoon or so to grease the pan.

Clyde's 15 Minutes of Fame

A friend of mine sent me an email with a link to

Cute Emergency .  She wrote, "That looks like Clyde in your yard! Is it?"

I clicked on the link.  It brought me to the twitter page for Cute Emergency, and I found this picture of Clyde:

Golden loving that snow was the caption.

How Clyde ended up on Cute Emergency, I have no idea!

I had taken that picture of him last year on Christmas day, when he was 3 months old.  

Here he was yesterday.  This is his serious pose.

And here's the goofy pose!

Clyde and Gus had lots of fun romping around.

Have a nice weekend!

Cooking Show #4!

I've been trying to put the finishing touches on my holiday decorating...

I'm really slow this year.

I swear I used to be able to get everything done in one day.

It's been three weeks since I started decorating and I haven't even wrapped one gift yet!

We filmed an episode of the cooking show last week.  What did we prepare?

(Click on any of the recipe titles to go to the post of the recipe.)

Raspberry Brownies

Yum.

Chocolate-Raspberry Truffles

It takes a few tries to get the hang of dipping these, but I promise you that they taste fabulous no matter how they look.

Champagne Sundaes with Raspberries

Chocolate-Raspberry Truffles

I call them chocolate-raspberry truffles.  My friends and relatives call them "the candy things", "raspberry fudge", "the chocolates", "those things that you make".

They have asked me about them when talking about an upcoming party at my house--"Will you have those things that you make?"

When I'm invited to a friend's house and I ask if I can bring something--"Bring the chocolates."

When I'm hosting a party, about to serve dinner--"Where are the candy things?  I want one before they're all gone."

Or, commenting on a friend's facebook post this week, (which had nothing to do with my cooking) her response to my comment--"I love your raspberry fudge!"

Cooking Experiments, and Pear Coffeecake with Maple Frosting

I'm so lucky that my family puts up with my cooking experiments.

Recently, there have been a few failures.  Nothing that was so terrible that they wouldn't eat it, but stuff that was definitely not going into the "mmm, must make this again" recipe file.

Like these caramel-filled snickerdoodles.  If you're looking at this picture and thinking, "Hey! Those look pretty good!" you would be half-right.

Half-right because they were good while they were warm, but when they cooled down the caramel hardened and was impossible to bite through.  As in take-a-bite-and-now-I've-pulled-the-entire-caramel-center-out-but-I-can't-chew-it-because-my-teeth-are-glued-together-by-caramel sort of impossible.

PRETTY CARAMEL COOKIE, YOU FAIL.

And there was my Caprese Egg Roll experiment.  I LOVE Caprese salad in all of it's incarnations, whether it's a basic Caprese salad or Caprese skewers or Caprese salad with avocado and olives.

It looked promising as I rolled it into egg rolls.

They looked good as I arranged them around the tomato sauce that we would be dipping them into.

They look okay, right?

But the truth is, I'd rather just eat a plain old Caprese salad. Or if I'm going the exotic egg roll route, I'll make a batch of Italian egg rolls.

Okay, enough about my failures.  

I finally put an end to my losing streak when I was trying to find a way to use up two very ripe pears.  I immediately thought of adding them into a coffeecake, but I have never added pears into a coffeecake so I decided to check foodnetwork.com for a recipe.

Of course I couldn't find what I was hoping to find.

But I did find a recipe for Apple Coffeecake!  And along the way I found a recipe for Raspberry coffeecake with Vermont Maple Frosting.  So the alchemist in me decided that switching out the apples for pears and combining it with the maple frosting would be a great combination--and it was!

Cooking Show #3

We filmed another episode of the cooking show over the weekend.

Still climbing my way up that steep learning curve, but having fun along the way!  I didn't forget any ingredients this time around, but I did forget to take pictures when we were through.  

We were already eating French onion soup and enjoying rum punch when I remembered about the pictures.

So I made the rounds, checking out all of the half-eaten bowls to see if there was perhaps ONE bowl that I could get a decent picture of.  Mr. Terrific's bowl was the most photogenic, a fact which I found really puzzling, because he loves French onion soup more than anyone I know and I would have expected him to have been a bit further along than the rest of us.

And it was then that I realized that he was on his second bowl.  I made six bowls, there were only five of us there taping, and he hated to see that last bowl of soup go to waste.

Click on the titles under the pictures to be taken to the recipes!

French Onion Soup

Chicken Piccata and Roasted Tomato Salad with Pine Nuts and Blue Cheese

Fortunately, I was able to take a picture of the chicken and the salad before we dug in.  If you're wondering what the large round thing on the right is, it's a caperberry, which is what capers turn into when they are full grown.  Capers being the immature buds of the caper bush.

Little bit of an agricultural lesson there for you!

And last but not least....

Rum Punch

Mmmmm.  The rum punch was also half-gone by the time I took pictures, but that's because we started drinking it as soon as it was made.

A great big thanks to my friend, Gayle, for graciously assisting me, and whose love of capers and rum punch inspired our menu for this show.  

Puppy-Sitting, and Pumpkin Dip

A lot has happened since my last blogpost.

The Red Sox won the world series!!!

 Here's a picture I took of Clyde and Gus, during the final inning.  They knew I was getting excited.

Clyde was getting excited, too.  He's such a party animal.  Gus was just very concerned.

Here's a picture I took after the final out was made.

Mr. Terrific raised his arm in triumph, quite a display of emotion for him.  Clyde is off partying somewhere.

Gus is still very, very concerned.  It was way past his bedtime and he just wanted to call it a night.

Meet Georgia.  She's an 11-week-old Silky Terrier.  

She belongs to my friend, Maureen.  Maureen needed a puppy-sitter for a short period of time last week, and I volunteered.

Clyde volunteered, too.  Gus happened to be at the groomers that day, so it was up to me and Clyde to entertain Georgia.

I wasn't sure how to go about letting Clyde and Georgia play, so I decided to separate them at first.  I leaned a gate against a doorway, with an opening at one end that was only big enough for Georgia to fit through.  I figured it would be her call whether she wanted to play with the big old behemoth staring at her from the other side of the gate.

Ladies and Gentleman!  On the far side of the gate, at a robust weight of 68 pounds--CLYYYYDE!!!

 And on this side, tipping the scales at THREE WHOLE POUNDS, Georgia!!

And that is how they stayed for a few minutes, Clyde on his side of the gate, watching Georgia as she ran back and forth on her side of the gate, barking up a storm.

Due to laziness, or perhaps because of a desire to make himself smaller and thus less of an imposing figure, Clyde decided to drop his bones to the floor.

I vote that he was just being lazy.

At that point, Georgia quite boldly walked through the gate.

And proceeded to explore the fluffy giant, Clyde.

This is my favorite picture.  Not long after I took this picture, Georgia got a little too friendly and Clyde got spooked and ran away.  I was laughing so hard at my 'fraidy-dog I forgot to take pictures.

But he quickly came back and settled himself down so that their game could continue, with Georgia pouncing and exploring and Clyde barely moving a muscle.  Except for his furiously wagging tail, that is.

Georgia finished off the play date by attacking her squeaky hedgehog toy.

Enough, already!  Here she is, begging me to stop taking pictures.