'Ello Kitteh!

Yesterday was my bff's birthday and of course I made her a cake... it was a lemon cake with raspberry filling. Definitely the best tasting cake I have made to date!


Crumb coat...


Cover in modeling chocolate..



She has a face!



I think she came out so cute!



Pink band around the outside to add color.


the black part of the bow is modeling chocolate and the pink inside is piping gel... I like how it sparkled.

"Healthy" Spaghetti

So today I was feeling really binge-y and wanted to have something for dinner that would really fill me up. Whole wheat spaghetti, turkey meatballs, lots of mushrooms and low fat mozarella = great success!



Point breakdown, and this all depends on how much you actually eat...
1 Cup whole wheat pasta = 4 pts
turkey meatballs w/ italian bread crumbs = 7 pts
1 cup prego heart smart traditional = 4 pts
skim mozarella - 7 pts (I like cheese :D)
= 22 points

I had 23 points left for dinner so this worked out perfect!

Turkey burgers with sweet potato circles and brussel sprouts

This meal is a super food meal! I made turkey burgers with dijon mustard - which worked as a binder for the meat and I saved points by not adding egg - roasted garlic, salt and pepper. They're on top of french bread I put in the oven until crispy. Then I baked the sweet potatoes with salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, touch of cinnamon and drizzled 2 tsp of olive oil. I was afraid that wouldn't be enough but they came out perfect! The brussel sprouts were fresh from the farmers market and I quartered them, drizzled 2 tsp of olive oil on them, added salt and pepper and a ton of balsamic vinegar. I love roasted brussel sprouts, the fresh ones taste NOTHING like the frozen ones.

Point breakdown
Turkey burger patties - 10 pts (but I could barely eat it all it was so much food!)
sweet potatos - 4 pts
dijon mustard - 0 pts
olive oil - 4 pts
brussel sprouts - 0 pts
balsamic vinegar - 0 points
french bread - 2 pts per slice (I only ate 1 I was so full)

= 20 point meal and I was STUFFED and it was so delicious. Definitely recommend using dijon in the turkey meat it is delish.

a little personal... and a delish recipe

Ok so I have started doing Weight Watchers and have been really trying to be creative with the points I am allowed to have... The best thing about their new plan is most fruits and veggies are 0 points! I can eat as much tomatoes, spinach and berries (some of my fav foods) as I want! So today for lunch I had 6 oz of chicken sauteed in olive oil - I am allotted 2 tsp of "good" oil a day - covered in salt, garlic salt and pepper. I sliced it and put it on top of about 1 cup of spinach. Then I chopped up 2 Roma tomatoes and 1 avocado, added 2 roasted garlic cloves and some cilantro. I made it in a seal-able Tupperware so I could use half today and half tomorrow as avocados are kind of a lot of points! I put that on top of the chicken and added a drizzle of balsamic vinegar... and voila!



Since half an avocado is 5 points the total points for the meal was 13 and I was FULL. I also had a sugar free jell-o type thing for dessert.

So hopefully this works for me... I really need to get my act together and this time I think I can do it. :)

In other news, Emily, whom I made the boomerang cake for, is getting married in February and looks like it will work out where I can make her wedding cake! I am so excited and absolutely honored she asked me! I am also SUPER nervous as this will be my first for realzy cake... all the other ones have been for fun and just to see what I could do... But now it will be in their pictures for the rest of their lives!! I will keep you posted on how the planning goes!

My friends are awesome!

So these are the treats two of my best friends made me for my birthday!!! The first was made by my bestie Rita... she knows my love of strawberry ice cream and cupcakes... so she made me strawberry ice cream filled cupcakes!!



The cupcakes were made of a pound cake and we both love rainbow chip frosting so that is what she used. Dear God were they amazing.. I had one for breakfast for like 3 days after my birthday.

My other bestie Marcy(whom I made the Toy Story cake for) made me a birthday cake! I love love love Nightmare Before Christmas, so this is what she made me...



Jack Skellington!!! It's so freaking cute I almost didn't want to eat it! She even got the little nose right!



Side details.. she made little spider web designs. I was very impressed this was the first fancy cake she had ever made and it was amazing. It was a chocolate cake with chocolate funfetti icing inside and fluffy white buttercream on the outside.

Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes that is right.... I put bacon in chocolate chip cookies. I am not the biggest fan of bacon but one of my good friends LOVES it so I made him these for his birthday.


Delicious cookie dough.... why are you so good?!







For some reason I didn't take a picture of the final product... lame. But they were seriously the best chocolate chip cookie I have ever made to date. And the bacon added a little salty aftertaste they were freaking delicious. I used milk chocolate chips so the flavors really complimented each other. Very excited to make these again!

Birthday Cake!

I made this cake for my friend's 31st birthday.... yes it is a Toy Story cake and she loved it!




Look I'm Woody, howdy howdy howdy...






I literally made this cake in 3 hours that is why the buttercream isn't as smooth as I would like it. Woody's layer cow spots are made out of modeling chocolate. The cake is a white wedding cake recipe with funfetti frosting. It was delicious and I thought the cake was really whimsical and adorable!

A Farewell to Friends

So I am super proud of this cake. It's for a friend and manager at Outback whose last day was today. It was pretty sad her leaving and definitely a few tears were shed... but I got to play with modeling chocolate and it is totally magical! I don't know if I will ever go back to fondant because the chocolate did everything I wanted it to and was SO easy to manipulate.

So the brown parts were a mix of semi-sweet and milk chocolate and the colored parts are white chocolate colored with gel colors. Just a word of advice if you're going to color make sure you use powder color or gels because any water you add to the chocolate will cause it to seize up and crumble. Now on to pics! It's a boomerang because we work at Outback and it's all Australian themed and stuff......


Carved cake


COLORS!





I used the tips to add some dimension to the ribbon like thing that had the message on it. And piping gel colored green for the letters.


Finally put together and on a nice cake board and everything... I also got rid of the white dots that are on the message ribbon.... they really show up strong in this picture :/

Pretty happy with this one. And a few people expressed interest in making a cake for them in the upcoming months so we will see how that goes. I may have 4 or 5 people lined up for the next few months.... could be pretty exciting times in 2011.

Some paintings

Let's sum up a year in one post!

I am a blogger fail I know... but I have been busy the past year and have made quite a few cakes that I am pretty proud of... pics!



The cake that started it all... this was my very first theme cake and my first time playing with fondant. I made it last November for a friends birthday... its Green Lantern.. :D On the side I piped "in blackest night, in brightest day"



Second theme cake I made. It's all glossy because I had just finished painting the can silver. This was also a birthday cake for a friend who LOVES Diet Coke. It was also a german chocolate cake which was very hard to cover smoothly!



This is a LOST island cake I made for my husbands birthday in July. He is obsessed with LOST so he was pretty happy. The top says "Happy Birthday <3 Ben" because Ben is is favorite character on the show. The water is made out of sugar melted down and colored blue. That was really fun to do, I have never gotten to play with sugar before!



I made this cake for a cake contest for www.threadless.com. The goal was to make a cake based on a t-shirt design. Of course I didn't win, but this was a super fun cake to make!





The most recent cake I have made.. another birthday cake. We have a running joke that our friend Josh loves Italian food... so I made him a spaghetti cake! And he loves the Cowboys so of course the spaghetti should be in a Dallas Cowboys bowl!

I have another cake to make this week and I am really excited. I get to play with modeling chocolate on this one so we will see how that goes!

I am the worst!

I have not forgot about you blog!! I am sorry for the neglect we have been kind of low on groceries lately so I have been living off of ramen and Taco Bell. But tomorrow we are going grocery shopping so I will have many more updates to come!!

Turkey Chili with Corn and Black Bean Corncakes and a watercolor update

On Saturday night I made Turkey Chili with black bean corn cakes.
So for the chili -

1. Saute in olive oil 1 green pepper, 1 jalapeno and 1/2 red onion
2. add 2 lbs of ground turkey (or chicken, beef, pork)
3. Salt, pepper, cumin and garlic powder to taste
4. let the meat cook until there is no pink
5. add 1 28 oz can whole tomatoes, half the juices drained. I like to squish the tomatoes up a little so they're not so big
6. 1 can tomato paste
   
7. 2 - 3 tablespoons steak sauce of your choice (I use A1)
8. 2 Chipotle in adobo sauce
9. 2 Tbs. of adobo sauce from chipotle in adobo can
10. taste test to see if it needs any more salt or pepper.
11. Throw in anything else you might think is yummy!

This recipe is really versatile. I found a can of diced tomatoes with chipotle peppers and threw them in too. Green chiles are also a great addition.

For the corn cakes, I just bought 2 boxes of Jiffy corn muffin mix and made that as directed on the box. Then I added 1 can drained black beans, 1 can drained corn and a handful of colby jack cheese. Then I cooked them like pancakes on the griddle.

I like to put some chili on the bottom of the bowl then add cheese on top - Look at those tomatoes and green peppers! Then I throw a couple corn cakes on top. This is a big meal.. this amount was able to stuff 6 people. The corn cakes add the perfect amount of sweetness to a rather spicy chili. And the recipe can be altered to whatever you like in your own chili!

In other news, this is how my watercolor is coming along.

He is getting there. I had my first watercolor class on Saturday and the teacher was able to give me some guidance so I know what I am doing now! I am pretty happy with him, I just need to add some fine details. He will be a glorious octopus.

One Meal to Rule Them All

I made a pretty epic meal last night... It was a collaboration of ideas from my husband Chuck, our friend Rita and myself. It all started a few months ago when an episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives featured Kuma's Corner and their "Lair of the Minotaur" burger that has Bourbon soaked pears and melted brie cheese. We have pretty much been drooling and dreaming about that place ever since! So Chuck wanted to try and poach some pears to put over chicken. I immediately thought of adding brie cheese. Rita and I were both thinking sauteed green beans, she suggested adding almonds to them and I thought of a shallot to toss in. And lastly, Rita requested baked rosemary potatoes to round it out.
This is what we ended up with! I started out by pan frying the chicken in a little butter. I didn't go heavy on seasoning, just a little bit of salt, pepper and garlic. I got the potatoes baking in the oven so they would get some crispy skin going on them.

I decided to use white wine as opposed to bourbon for our pears.
The recipe for the poached pears is -
2 cup sweet white wine.. I used Riesling
2 cup granulated sugar
2 1/2 cup water
The juices from 1/2 a lemon
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon

This little mixture was really good, but next time I make it I won't add the water and maybe add a little more cinnamon. It almost tasted a little held back so next time we won't have the water there to subdue any of the flavors. I also only had canned peach halves (I know a crime) so I will use fresh ones next time as well.

For the green beans I just sauteed the diced shallot in olive oil, added some chopped roasted almonds and then the green beans. They were amazing. I thought they tasted like something you would actually get at a restaurant! Hooray!!A little more food porn... I layered the pears on top of the chicken then added some sliced brie to let it melt. I drizzled some of the poach sauce on top and then sprinkled some cinnamon on it... absolutely divine dinner. I don't know if I can do better than this!

My take on baked Ziti... that isn't really baked or ziti :D

First of all, let me declare it here - I will never cook meatballs in a pan again!!!! No seriously... it's all about baking them.

OK So I took some leftover spaghetti sauce I had and added a ton of mushrooms, Italian seasoning, red wine, garlic and a little rooster sauce. Then I boiled up some whole wheat Penne.

For the meatballs, I combined one pound of ground turkey, garlic, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, diced mushrooms, an egg, rooster sauce and cilantro. I rolled them out on a greased cookie sheet and sprinkled bread crumbs on them. I put them in the oven at 400 degrees for about 20-25 minutes. They were seriously the most delicious meatballs I have ever made. Here is the cooked pasta with the baked meatballs (excuse the starch line around the pan :>).Added the sauce on top of the pasta and meatballs.
And sprinkled mozzarella cheese on top!
I wish I could have swam in it. And not too terrible on calories either. I used whole wheat pasta, low fat mozzarella and organic spaghetti sauce. Next time I make it I will have to calculate exact calories. But I could literally eat a ton of this stuff! Seriously, next time you make meatballs bake them! You won't be sorry!

Mushroom Mozzarella Chicken with Feta and Tomato Orzo... oh and homemade Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Ah I haven't updated in a week! I will not let this happen again! I haven't really been doing anything too productive this last week. I have been trying to preserve what little Summer break I have left. School starts on Wednesday and I am actually pretty excited. At the very least I will have something to do. Anyways on to the tastys!
So for dinner I made some chicken breasts with a mozzarella/mushroom/green pepper topping. A few hours before dinner, I made a dry rub of garlic salt(I am obsessed), pepper and parsley and let the chicken marinade for a bit. I was a little naughty and sauteed the veggies in butter >.< al dente directions that came on the box and then added a little butter, a can of diced tomatoes, feta cheese, parsley, garlic salt and pepper. And of course some garlic bread.
And a view from the top - such a pretty and colorful dish!

Yesterday I made Carrot Cake Cupcakes. I have been wanting to make them for a while and found myself possessing almost all of the ingredients so I whipped them up. Oh and for the record, grating carrots is the worst thing ever... if you have the opportunity to buy them pre-grated or shredded then do it! I swear I almost grated my whole damn hand off.
Here they are in all their glory! Well as you can see they didn't rise that well... next time I will cut the oil and maybe add some more flour. I might jazz them up a bit by adding some crushed pineapple too. And yes that is homemade cream cheese frosting... I could have just ate that and been good to go!

Steak with Pesto Sauce

I got the new issue of Better Homes and Garden (yes I am an old lady :P) and it had this delightful recipe in it. It is a flank steak with a cilantro-y pesto sauce. On the side were some cumin spiced corn and some roasted potatoes. It was ridiculously tasty. I didn't have flank steak on hand so I used breakfast steaks instead they were just as tasty.
Um yeah... the pesto is really GREEN! I actually still have a lot of the pesto left over... I am going to have to think of something good to do with it...