Tomorrow is Ryan’s birthday and we had a pre-celebration with a cheeseburger cake last night. When we saw this in the dessert case at Whole Foods, we couldn’t pass it up – it’s a cake…that looks like a cheeseburger! And we just so happened to be grilling hot dogs & bratwurst for dinner, so it had to go home with us. Wimpy would have been proud; Wimpy loves his hamburgers. Mmmmm, delicious cheeseburger cake…

Ryan bought me a Zoku Quick Pop™ Maker for Christmas & I love it! It’s easy to use & I love that you can create your own recipes that are both healthy & dairy-free – it’s also nice to know exactly what’s going into your frozen treats…with the right ingredients,  you can be sure there are no artificial sweeteners, color, etc. Last night we decided to give it a whirl & made some delicious eggnog popsicles by combining soy eggnog, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, & sprinkling in some crushed cereal bits for crunch – yum!

The Zoku blog has recipes & there is a recipe book available for purchase as well. We decided to wing it for our first try & it turned out good; after all, Ryan is a master at winging it & having things turn out great.

Here’s a bit of cupcake porn for those who read this blog. Just some simple easy to make minty, chocolatey chip-y, vegan, gluten-free cupcakes for you to enjoy.

The recipe follows Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World‘s basic chocolate cupcake recipe. Instead of regular flour substitute gluten-free all-purpose baking flour and a little extra tapioca flour (no more than a tablespoon). Go with the chocolate extract option for the additional extract and I also added a bit of mint extract (1/2 teaspoon) as well. For the icing I followed the directions for mint icing from the book but left out the green food coloring; I wanted to go for the classic peppermint look. Paint thin stripes of red gel food coloring inside a piping bag, 2-3 are all that is needed, then add the icing in to frost. Nothing fancy here other than a few simple substitutions.

2012: Week 32
Peach party

Months ago, our friend Michael shared a dream with us…to make & eat a dessert version of a Turducken which he named a Coopieke. A Coopieke is a cookie inside of a pie inside of a cake. Michael celebrated his birthday with us last weekend and thus the dream was realized – we made him a Coopieke & it really was delicious!

We started with a large chocolate chip cookie, then we baked the pie crust separately and put together a no-bake chocolate pie which we layered the cookie inside of, then we baked a chocolate cake, cut the cake into layers, topped each layer with chocolate frosting, cut out the center to place the pie (or coo-pie, I guess I should say) inside, inserted the pie into the cake, & then frosted the whole thing with vanilla frosting. If you can’t decide if you’d rather have a cookie, pie, or cake, then just have all three!

2012: Week 7
Sweetheart

365 - Day 357

cake & crepes:

Last weekend, we made this fluffy vanilla cake with classic vanilla buttercream frosting & Ryan took his first crack at making crepes (which turned out to be much easier to make that he thought, much to my delight). I had my crepes with almond butter, powdered sugar, & a squeeze of fresh lemon on top & Ryan had his with peanut butter filling & chocolate sauce on top.

While the crepes turned out well last week, I thought they tasted a bit too eggy or maybe just not quite sweet enough for my sweet crepes. So we tried out a different recipe today from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian cookbook & they were delicious! Chocolate crepes with fresh strawberry filling (strawberries cooked in brown sugar & butter & fresh strawberries on top) for me & chocolate crepes with peanut butter & banana for Ryan. And, because I love potatoes so much, Ryan added a side of his yummy breakfast potatoes to my plate as well. As Julia Child would say, “Bon Appétit!”

365 - Day 326

365 - Day 314