Food as Art

The only way Steve will eat a vegetable is if it is raw and in a salad...so we eat lots of salads. Salads are one my favorite things to make because all of the colors are so beautiful, and the finished piece is not only appetizing to the eye, but delicious and healthy. Common ingredients in our salads are spinach, cherry tomatoes, bell pepper (any color), cucumber, kidney beans, and although not pictured here, avocado, pine nuts or walnuts, chicken, and occasionally fresh pear, apple, or strawberry slices, and sometimes boiled eggs. My favorite salad dressing is Kraft Roasted Red Pepper with Parmesan Italian dressing, but we usually go for any variety of balsamic vinagrette or italian. YUM!!!!

Tiny Caker Baker

For Christmas, Helya gave me a Cupcake cookbook with recipes so lovely, I had a hard time refraining from ripping out the pages and framing them in my living room. Choosing which cupcake to bake first was even more difficult. I narrowed it down to two based on the ingredients I already had on hand and went to work. 

I spent an entire Sunday afternoon mixing, sifting, stirring, and frosting. I usually don't enjoy baking because accuracy is key to successful results. I am the worst when it comes to precise measurements and ingredients. But I wanted to take a stab at these delightful treats because I knew it would be worth it in the end. However, my biggest initial mistake was deciding to half the recipes. I didn't really know what to do with 48 cupcakes, so I thought 24 would be more manageable and I could just half every ingredient and it would still be accurate. You tell me what's worse: too many cupcakes or dividing 1 and 5/8ths by 2? In hindsight I would have been much better off with cupcakes coming out of my wazoo. Fractions belong in hell. Well, with Steve's help, I managed to convert all of my ingredients into weird amounts like 13/15ths of a tablespoon or somewhere between 3/4 and 7/8ths of a cup. I think that may have had something to do with the outcome because in my opinion, they weren't sweet enough and were a bit dry. On the other hand, Steve ate about 20 of them all on his own so they must have been alright. 

The best part about all of this is that I tried something new and I didn't fail. I've never baked 100% from scratch, so it was an accomplishment and something I will definitely try again. Tiny cakes on deck:  Dark chocolate molten lava :)

Mocha Chocolate with chocolate whip frosting and cocoa powder

Banana Pecan with butter cream frosting