Friday, June 3, 2011

Whoopie Pie Weekend!

This past Memorial Day weekend, my good friend and college roommate came to town. Caroline now lives it up in DC. She was only going to be in Cola Saturday night and wanted to do dinner. I just had to bake something since I hadn't seen her since December!

Since her trip was spur of the moment, I wanted to make something easy with what I had. On Saturday I decided to make use of the Devil's Food Cake Mix I bought a while ago. I wanted to make this lower in calories and healthier. Instead of the vegetable oil required, I used the same amount of unsweetened applesauce. Instead of 3 eggs, I used 4 egg whites. I also had a recipe from my Betty Crocker Cupcakes Book for Vanilla Butter Cream icing I've used previously and decided it would be perfect.

As I was mixing this, I saw the recipe on the box for Mini Whoopie Pies. All you had to do was drop it on the parchment paper and bake it for 7-9 mins. I thought that would interesting to try. I just used two cookie sheets covered in Parchment Paper. I used 2 TBSP for each I dropped. It reminded me of making cookies. While that baked, I started on the frosting.

I took two sides and put frosting in the middle. I was afraid I would run out of frosting (I only made frosting for 12 servings) that I just put a little in the middle. Of course I ate some. They were so good! I had two... oops


Of course, I still had extra batter from my experiment, so I baked 12 cupcakes! I greased the muffin pan and when they were done, I put them in cupcake liners. They were stickier then usual, but they tasted so much better than if I had used yucky vegetable oil!!!
I played around with the frosting (BTW, any butter cream icing is amazing). The frosting was for 12 servings, but I was able to spread it out. I playfully decorated half the cupcakes (the circles are interesting... accidentally spilled the sprinkles). For the other 6 cupcakes, I sliced them in half and made mini mini whoopie pies by putting icing in the middle.
Did I mention that with the cupcakes, I put a few chocolate chips in the middle? (I poured batter, sprinkled a few chips, then put more batter.
I went back in to fill the whoopie pies since I had the leftover butter cream. It kinda tore the pies because they were sticky, but didn't hurt the taste. I used blue sprinkles because of memorial day weekend, but it made them look a bit funny, like if I used blueberries. :). Unfortunately, threw away the recipe, but it can be found on the back if you go to a grocery store.

I'm happy to say my friends loved the whoopie pies I made! I brought them to dinner and we ate them after our yummy sushi dinner at Sushi Yoshi. We had such a great time that night. We even split this huge XL Margarita Tower. And randomly, the table beside us were on their third L Margarita Tower and got too drunk and gave us theirs. We had to big Margarita Towers and Mucho Margaritas. It was crazy. Great night!


Friday, May 20, 2011

Red Velvet Cupcakes are amazing. The end.

For some reason I felt like food blogging. I has been about 8 months since my last confession blog. I started it to be consistent, lol. Friday is my sister's birthday (and Sunday is my dad's). I decided, since I haven't been to my sister's house in FOREVER, to visit her on Saturday and make her and her kids cupcakes. Upon my boyfriend's request, I decided to make Red Velvet Cupcakes. I can't believe how long it has been since I've made them or baked! I've been trying to eat healthy (and have lost 10 lbs!), and cupcakes is something I have NO control over.

I decided to make them from scratch (Also, this was a last minute thing and the grocery stores and Wal-Mart on this side of town do not carry the red velvet box mix!). I remembered how much I wanted to try out recipes from Joy the Baker. She has this cupcake recipe called 'My Favorite Red Velvet Cupcakes'. How could I resist?!

This definitely look me a long time. I hate making a mess, so I constantly cleaned up as I went. I almost wondered if all the energy and work I put in was worth it. I mean, the finale of The Office was on! I started at 7:30ish, but took a break to wait for the icing and cupcakes to chill and iced the cupcakes during the later half of Parks and Recreation.

Was it worth it? Yes!



I basically followed the recipe she adapted and listed on her web site. I used fat free cream cheese instead of regular and skipped the cinnamon in the cream cheese icing. I wish I could get the icing all thick and high, but this was still tasty. The recipe for each called for one dozen. I doubled the red velvet recipe because I wanted to sprinkle powdered sugar and make half of them different. I thought I could control myself by eating one. I used myfooddiary.com to calculated them to be 136 (Plus 46 with icing) for each cupcake. Pretty good, huh?

I would have, if I ate only one. But, of course, I ate two, plus a lot of icing licking!!! I got gel icing to write happy birthday, but it looked weird when I tested it on a couple non icing cupcakes. And the icing cupcakes are too pretty to write on. On well, I hope my family enjoys how pretty and tasty they are! :)


I am so glad I discovered Joy the Baker and hope to make more recipes from her site!!!

It is now way past my bed time...

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

At Least It Isn't Monday...

Oh Friday, I finally found canned pumpkin!!! I was so excited. I swung by Earth Fare on the way home because I figured SURELY they must have this because they are a natural and mostly organic food store. They did have it so I bought two cans. I also grabbed a box of No Pudge Brownie Mix (which is amazing!) and Blueberry Vitatops. I had to get things only found at that store.



Of course, I had to swing by Piggly Wiggly to get devil's food cake mix so I could finally make the Yum Yum Brownie Muffins with the recipe from Hungry Girl website (devil's food cake mix and canned pumpkin only).

I didn't have time to make them Friday night because I had to get ready and go to dinner for my friend's 80s themed birthday party down town at 8pm. There ended up being 12 of us and they didn't make a reservation in time for TacoSushi. Ugh. So the restaurant told us it was an hour wait. We ended up trying to go somewhere else. We didn't end up eating until after 10pm at IHOP!!! We should have just stayed and waited for an hour. But it is hard to control an 80s dressed crowd of 12. The night got better after we had food in our belly (and thankfully sobered up the others!). We danced, got free champagne, and left downtown at 2am when the bars closed. It kind of made up for how stressed I was for the first couple hours of the night! Hm...

Saturday I got up, worked out, and made the Yum Yum Brownie Muffins as the Carolina game on ESPN started at noon. It was a great game! We beat Georgia 17-6. It was amazing. Richie was working the 9-11 Kid Rock concert at FT Jackson that day so I took Timmy to my place and put the gamecock themed handkerchief on him for good luck (it worked!)


He was so excited after the game... It wore him out :)

Oh, and my friend finally booked out hotel for October in NYC! It is actually happening. Now I have to finally buy by plane ticket! I am super excited for October! I am not flying alone thankfully. There will be four of us going so it will be a nice chill group...




Friday, September 10, 2010

Excited for: The Office DVD, TacoSushi, and the Gamecocks!

I am super excited I finally have The Office Season 6 DVD in my clutches :). I bought it during my lunch break at Target as they have an extra special bonus disc only available at Target (and it came with $10 off coupon for The Office Bobblehead... love it). Not sure which one I will get as I want them all! I feel like Dwight would be a classic, though.






























Tonight will be great. It is a friend's birthday and we are eating at the new restaurant, TacoSushi. Should be a fun night.




Tomorrow, South Carolina plays a home game vs. Georgia. I deeply dislike Georgia. As a college student, I hated noon games this early in the season as it is SUPER hot in September anytime during the day in Columbia. I can't wait to watch my Gamecocks win :) lol.

Current Gamecock Football Stats:
9.2.2010: W 41-13 vs Ole Miss


Go Cocks!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Mojitos and Chocolate Cake

I am usually entitled to an hour lunch break even if we have long staff meetings so I will blog on my 'break', though I am not actually going to leave the office...


I love staff meetings. We usually get together once a month for a mostly productive meeting to discuss what is going on with the company and throw in ideas. The best part? Free food and cake (because someone always has birthday each month). For lunch we had food from Mojito's Tropical Cafe, new downtown restaurant. Their chicken wrap I had was amazing. 


We also had a choice of two cakes from Publix, a chocolate ganache supreme cake and a rasperry ganache cake. The chocolate won out. I (along with many other coworkers) got a second helping of chocolate cake and killed it. Below is an picture from the Publix website of the cake I had. Yum.

Amazing lunch :)


Unfortunately, this definitely will not help me lose 20 pounds. Now I am going to have to work out extra hard at the gym after work... boo. I've incorporated a jump rope into my work out plan which is a nice old school throw back and kind of mixes it up.



Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Years Later...

I haven't blogged in years. Back when I was really familiar with HTML and Photoshop and all that stuff. But I felt inspired and maybe it will help me keep up with things...
I believe starting last weds to this weds, it has been the slowest week at my 8am-5pm job. Yesterday had some pretty exciting events. My future nephew-in-law was born early in the morning AND The Office Season 6 came out. I don't know which is more exciting :). I am waiting to buy The Office because I want to get bonus stuff. On target I saw they had a bonus disc, but the DVD isn't out yet. I want it so bad. I absolutely <3 The Office.


Also,
I found this recipe on Hungrygirl.com for Yum Yum Brownie Muffins:


http://www.hungry-girl.com/week/weeklydetails.php?isid=614&idate=09-29-2005

I desperately wanted to make them because it only uses canned pumpkin and devil's food cake or a healthy and low fat muffin (only 180 calories!) but I can not for the life of me find canned pumpkin! Anywhere! I tried 3 Walmarts, BiLo, and Piggly Wiggly. I know it is seasonal, but there is a lot of stuff they sell now that isn't useful. It is really depressing because I had my heart set on these muffins now. I am hoping canned pumpkin comes back on the market soon, locally that is.


Right now, I can't stop eating the dang cookie cake I bought for my roomie's birthday. She had only eaten one slice but I asked her yesterday to eat it because I am a fat kid and I keep chucking pieces of it. It is not figure friendly. And it is a big cake because they apparently don't make smaller cookie cakes. Ugh. It is sooo good, too. 
I will continue to think of sweets at work all day.