Breakfast

Breakfast is seriously the best meal of the day, hands down. I could eat breakfast for every meal, really. Eggs, bacon, fruit, pancakes, french toast, waffles, etc, etc.

Since I love it, I've been trying to put more effort into it - at least more than the banana-on-the-go when I'm running late to my pointless 9AM class. Eggs are definitely my favorite, so I've been focusing on preparing them in the mornings.


Egg & Veggie Wrap - A veggie wrap leftover from the catered international student lunch during my Study Abroad Orientation. I fried two eggs and stuck one in each half of the wrap, as well as some dijon mustard. The perfect thing to eat after a late night. It was flavorful & filling.


Egg & Veggie Scramble - 3 eggs scrambled with Trader Joe's "Harvest Hodgepodge" frozen vegetable blend. All the right veggies for an omelette/scramble. Once again, flavorful & filling.

Sunday Night Supper Club 5/19

We waited a very long time to have another supper club - scheduling, breaks, and being generally busy. We finally got around to having sushi night! We stuck with veggie maki (we had some imitation crab meat at the end) and had a great time making it. We made regular maki and then attempted to make ice-cream-cone-like hand rolls using these short sheets I picked up, but they ended up more like burritos - really messy burritos. "Fusion Cuisine", right? We also played Apples to Apples and I was laughing until I was crying. Overall, it was an amazing night.


fillings




We had extra avocados from the filling so we whipped up a quick guacamole that was honestly the best I've ever had. Avocados, salsa, garlic powder, lime juice, voila! It was gone in less time than it took to make!

I made jam thumbprint cookies for dessert, mainly because I didn't have many ingredients on hand & I wanted to get rid of most of my jam before I move back home in less than a month(!). I sweetened them up with a simple vanilla glaze & we couldn't get enough of them!

Easter Peeps Cupcakes

Hey, I know this is late, but I'm a busy student! Last week I went home for Easter and made these adorable cupcakes with the help of my mom and little brother. They're carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, topped with a Peep bunny and jelly beans. Adorable + delicious! I did have a lot of trouble with getting the frosting stiff enough. I wasn't really paying attention and used a recipe for cream cheese frosting that was pretty goopy & not good at all for piping grass-like frosting. I ended up adding tons of powdered sugar to help it stay up (no time to run to the store and get meringue powder) but the frosting thankfully never got too sweet.


An army of peeps!


Chocolate mousse peeps are the bomb.

I obviously ended up with a lot of extra cupcakes (24 for 6 people???) and came up with a cute little way to bag them up and hand them out. I cut off the tops of brown paper bags, which fit 2 cupcakes snugly inside, stapled them & added a little sticker. It could be a cool way to sell them in small quantities over the summer. Maybe I'll come up with a little stamp I can use to mark the bags as a product of mine!




Peeps snugly in their carriers.

We had a huge Easter feast for just 6 people: turkey, stuffing, twice-baked potatoes, asparagus, green beans, French bread, jello, THREE PIES (pecan, key lime, & vanilla creme), and my cupcakes. Oy.


My mom's delicious pecan pie - heavy on the pecans!


My desserts of choice: cupcake + key lime pie


Of course we can't forget my Easter basket & egg dyeing activities! My family is really boring when it comes to dyeing eggs. We all usually just make pretty combinations of colors without any fancy decorating. It's fine with me because they look great all the same.


I got to hand-pick the contents of my basket: gummy bears, Whoppers eggs, Cadbury caramel egg, green Peeps bunnies, and a dark chocolate Toblerone (my mom surprised me with that one). I didn't like the dark Toberlone so I switched my mom for the milk chocolate. My dad got a white chocolate one & I highly recommend trying it!

Personal Blog

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Banana Honey Muffins w/Walnuts & Chocolate Chips

I had some bananas going bad and just enough honey for what my cupcake calendar recipe called for, so I had no choice but to make these muffins/cupcakes. I'm calling them muffins because I've been eating them for breakfast with a little bit of peanut butter swiped on top. I decided to add walnuts & chocolate chips because I wanted the muffins to taste un-plain without having to add frosting; I had no frosting ingredients!

The muffins are moist & flavorful. The chocolate chips add the right amount of sweetness & the walnuts add the right amount of crunch. The peanut butter I put on top really kicks these up a notch, too.


The dino wrappers are the best part of these :)

Turkey Tacos

When I was home for the weekend, I was put in charge of making dinner for my brother and I while my parents went out to a dinner party. I don't eat beef and he doesn't eat vegetarian things, so we were in a bit of a bind. Luckily, my mom had thawed out some ground turkey and purchased taco-making ingredients at the store just the day before. I had no choice but to make turkey tacos! My little brother even helped out with the prep and we had a great time assembling the meal together. Food really brings people together.



They tasted EXACTLY like regular beef tacos, if not just a little lighter. Completely delicious. They weren't as good as, say, shredded chicken tacos, but I was happy to be able to eat the same thing as the rest of my family for once. Kenny liked them, too! He's always the hardest one to please.

Easter Cookies

Last weekend I went home and made these delicious sour cream sugar cookies with my mom. It's a secret family recipe & has always been my favorite thing to make since I was little and helping my mom cut out the dough shapes. We used a simple glaze recipe from some Betty Crocker cookbook to ice them.



We used Easter sprinkles & tried to make the frosting spring colors, but the purple turned out grey-ish and my mom added WAY too much yellow food coloring so that one didn't turn out so pastel-y. My little brother Kenny helped out with decorating and did a really great job.



We took them to a family birthday celebration & everyone gobbled them right up. Not hard to do when you've got 6 out of 8 brothers and their wives and children in attendance.

Space Party!

I had a space-themed party last weekend. Now, I am not really a going-out type, staying in much more than the average college student. However, when I combine all the people I love in costumes in my own home, I can't get enough! I made Oreo "moon" cupcakes with chocolate cake and oreo buttercream frosting. I had time to kill, so I made a bunch of different cupcake toppers.



We also made a space punch (or a sad excuse for one) with UV Blue vodka, Sprite, and raspberry sherbet. It was good enough to have a few too many drinks. We were going to order from Galactic Pizza in Uptown to keep with the theme, but I was too poor and just went with Papa Murphy's to have pizza that was still out of this world! Heh...heh. Overall it was all a hit! Another party is in the works for when I move out of my apartment next month, but I doubt we'll have a theme.