Cupcakes and Kittehs and Goggies, oh my!

First, if you think "kittehs" and "goggies" is just babytalk and silly, then please go here and here and get lost in a few hours of cuteness and giggles.  It's ok, I'll wait....

....So, now that you realize the importance of the kittehs and the goggies to my everyday life - wait, you have, haven't you? coz I lurrrrves them! have you met Spice and Lucy? - we can move on to how they relate to cupcakes.  The New Zealand SPCA annually holds their "Cupcake Day" as a fundraiser, and really what could be more of-the-moment than cupcakes? 

Keep in mind that NZ is a little behind America on the "what's hot" radar, we haven't yet been cupcaked-out, and we're slowly starting to catch on to the macaron craze that's sweeping the States. 

*I totally just typed "sweeing" instead of sweeping, and I kind of like it.  It sounds like a combination of "weeeeee!" and swinging, which to me is just about on par with the peanutbutter/chocolate combination from heaven. 

Right, back to the cupcakes.  Of course I've made cupcakes before, but they've ALL been of the box variety because I am American and until I was about 20 I didn't even know that you could make cake from scratch.  True story.  So I know alllllll about the ins and outs of the different box cake flavors and which ones make good cupcakes, but making them from scratch is a whole new box of fish for me.  So I'm thinking a little practice is in order before the Big [Cupcake] Day, when I will be making people give me money for something that's supposed to taste good.  Not to mention the looking good part too, coz you know people aren't going to eat a cupcake that just looks like a pile of poo.  I'm pretty sure that would get me featured on Cake Wrecks! 

My first port of call for the lowdown on the cake o' the cups will be here: Glorious Treats' tutorial on basic cupcake baking.  You know, just to make sure I can actually bake a friggin' cupcake!

I've gone a little cupcake-crazy today and have just plundered the Kiwi Cake website for baking cups and icing colorant, and have my design scheme alllll planned about.  While these are cute...

...I'm not doing cats and dogs, or even birds or ferrets or fish, even though those aminals need lovin too. Nope, I have a whole different plan in mind, a completely different target demographic, and an utterly non-aminal gimic to go with it. Mwahaha, eeeexcellent!

Decorations - check!  Piping bags and tips - check! (Thanks Auntie Jay!)  Cupcakes - yeaahh about that, let's figure out which ones to make.  There are sooo many choices!!  These gems have been sitting in my Google Reader, just waiting to see their day in the sunshine:

• Cookies and Cream Cupcakes from Bakerella - love this lady, have you seen her Cake Pops book?  It's like, my bible.  I always know what I'm making for special occasions!  You had a baby?  Pink and blue cake pops!  You're getting married and owls are part of your theme?  Owl cake pops!  (Ok that was me.)  Your mother's sister-in-law's doctor's pet labradoodle is having puppies?  Newborn puppy cake pops!  You get me?
• Peanutbutter Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting from How Sweet It Is - but maybe the whole PB/Choc combination is more of an American thing?
• Heath Bar Cupcakes from My Baking Addiction - but that would require hunting down some Heath Bars, and I just don't know if I can be bothered to go that far...
• Chocolate + Coffee Cupcakes with Coconut Frosting from Steamy Kitchen - it WILL be a Monday morning, I bet coffee-flavoured lovelies would go down a treat!
• Vanilla Bean Cupcakes also from My Baking Addiction - maybe I'll just stick with these basic cups this year and branch out to the fancies later on...

Wow, how have I not made any of these before?!  I might have to turn in my Baker card if I don't get going on these soon!  [Ha, it's funny you see, because I've married a Baker, and I am a baker, but not yet a Baker because I haven't changed my name, and that's funny you know Baker/baker, capitalizing letters and stuff?!  Haha....hello? *crickets*]  I can take a hint, post done, off to bake the cupcakes, over and out!

Things that make the winter tolerable

1. My kittehs, Spice and Lucy, even when they are giving me "WTF" looks like this, which they do with surprisingly regularity.  Maybe because I like to get up in their faces and talk like a baby to them.  But they don't seem to mind sitting in our laps and warming us right up on these frosty nights!

2. Sunday brunches aka my quest to find the best Mocha in Wellington.  They warm my soul.  Having delicious slices to go with it doesn't hurt either.  There are from Seatoun Cafe, and their Ginger Slice is uh-maze-ing.  

3. The kiwi breakfast of eggs on toast with Canadian bacon, mushrooms and tomato.  It's a bit of a mission getting all those flavors on one fork, but I have mastered the skill due to many mornings (actually it's usually more in the afternoons since we can't get out of bed on a weekend morning to save our lives) of practice and application.  What I want to know is why I hadn't encountered this heavenly combination until a Kiwi made it for us one morning, post-party.  Ah well, the mystery may never be solved, but I will never stop loving this cholesterol-fest!

4. Sunsets like these.

Pumpkin Bread

Humility alert: My work colleagues love me.  Not because I work hard or because I'm the smartest cookie on the plate (both of which I do/am, of course!), but because I bake.  I bake lots.  I bake at least once a week.  If I don't bake, they start to wonder what's wrong with me.  And their blood sugar levels start to collectively drop and they get the shakes, so I run home and whip up something to restore them. 

This week there was a big hunk of pumpkin sitting in my fridge, leftover from making Pumpkin Soup, and crying out to be used before it turned into a science experiment, which things are known to do in Fortress Moxham's fridge.  I'm pretty sure it's the fridge's fault, it aims its cosmic rays at some poou, unsuspecting piece of produce and makes it grow a nice woolly coat of white fuzzies.  Totally the fridge.  So I made some pumpkin bread out of said earlier-mentioned pumpkin for the work mates, just to make them love me a little more.  What can I say, I am a glutton for baking love.

Anyway, this is my pumpkin, of the crown pumpkin variety.  *Photography disclaimer: I'm using Instagram and Hipstamatic on my iPhone because (a) it's winter here in Wellington, and being so far south we lose any daylight before I get home from work, and (b) I haven't learned how to optimize my dinky point-and-shoot camera yet, and so I still take pretty average photos.  Back to my pumpkin - I only used that piece you see in front, that was plenty of pumpkin meat (pumpkin meat, really?! is that the term?) for this concoction.  I weighed it up, just for good measure, and it came out to 600 grams.  True story: before I moved to New Zealand, I had never measured by weight!  Must be my innate fear of scales.

So then I had to use all of the strenth that I possess, my sharpest knife, and whatever wits I had at the end of the workday in order to carve the skin off the pumpkin and not my own fingers.  And then again with the cutting the pumpkin into chunks - this thing did not want to cut up.  It acted like I was carving up its soul.  Poor little pumpkin soul.  I hope it rests in peace. 

So once you have de-souled the pumpkin, throw it in a pot of hot water and boil it up into a mash, much like you would for mashed potatoes.  When it's nice and soft, strain it, and mash up in a big bowl.  Add sugar, oil, water, eggs and shake what yo momma gave ya.  Or just mix it, if you're not feeling very enthusiastic.  Then mix up some dry ingredients - flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves.  You can sift them together, or just aerate them with a wisk in the bowl.  Either way, it's all about aeration.  On a completely different note, please don't judge me for my 80's bench tops and shoddy-looking drawers, we're renting! 

Ok now that that's out of the way and I don't have to worry about being harshly judged for my cracked-out kitchen, I can finish this bread.  Introduce the dry ingredients to the wet ones, preferably in an actual mixer if you don't fancy having to clean up stray flour, and beat until smooth.  Divide between two loaf pans and bake at 180 C for 55-60 minutes, or until a toothpick come out clean. 

This pumpkin bread does two things for me as an American.  First, it gives me a reason to cut up a pumpkin.  I may or may not have carved some eyes into this one before I mutilated it for the pumpkin soup.  And I may or may not have given him a crooked smile too.  Look, New Zealanders don't really do Halloween, and they definitely don't do jack-o-lanterns at Halloween, so I had to take the chance when I got it, k?  You can take the girl out of American, but you can't take all of the America out of the girl. 

The second thing this bread does is mostly fulfill my fix for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.  Although I am determined to do Thanksgiving this year!  But this will suffice for now, especially if I serve it warm with some real whipped cream.  *Homer drool*  Yes, this is a multi-tasking bread, and really when it's as cold outside as it has been, you need food that does many things for you at once!

Here's the recipe, straight up:

Pumpkin Bread

- 600 grams of pumpkin, about 1/3 of a Crown Pumpkin

- 1 1/2 cups sugar

- 1 cup water

- 1 cup canola oil

- 4 eggs

- 3 1/2 plain flour

- 2 tsp baking soda

- 1 tsp salt

- 1 tsp baking power

- 2 tsp ground cinnamon

- 1 tsp ground nutmeg

- 3/4 tsp group cloves

1. Preheat your oven to 180C.  Grease or oil and flour two loaf pans.

2. Peel the pumpkin and chop into large chunks.  Boil in water for 15-18 minutes, until it's soft enough to be pierced by a fork.  Strain the water out as much as possible, squeezing the pulp. 

3. In a large mixing bowl, mash the pumpkin.  Add the sugar, water, canola oil and eggs, and beat until mixed.

4. In another bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves.  Sift or whisk together to aerate and combine.  Slowly add them to the pumpkin mash in the mixing bowl and continue beathing until the mixture is smooth. 

5. Divide the mix evenly between your two loaf pans.  Bake for 55-60 (ish) minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. 

6. Feed to your family/work mates/bestest friends, because you now have a lot of bread to get rid of!

Last Week In Wellington

• Peter Jackson is off location-scouting new places around New Zealand to film The Hobbit movies.  That means all the actors are on sabbatical - if they're smart they've left the country - and I won't be coming across dwarves sitting at a waterfront cafe' or Gandalf collecting donations for charity.

Ian McKellen, raking in the dough at the cricket.

• These top-ten quotes from LOTR makes me excited for Peter to get filming again.

• It's nation-wide school holidays.  This means packs of bored teenagers are roving around the city looking for ways to be as obnoxious and true to the stereotypes as possible, making it impossible to walk anywhere around the CBD, especially during lunchtime.  Thus I've been bringing my lunch to work for the past week.  Bugger trying to wade my way through schoolkids just to get food.

• Maybe that's why Peter Jackson is exploring the remote places of the country now, to get away from those crazy kids? 

• The Antarctic has relocated to New Zealand, leaving snow over most of the country and blowing wind so frigid through all the cracks in our non-insulated houses that we've all collectively gotten hypothermia and lost feeling in our legs.  That must be why all the boys are running around in shorts and jandals now.  Frickin weirdos,

• It only spit a few flurries into Wellington, which is more than they've seen in years.  Why do I live in the only place in the whole damn country where it doesn't snow?!  I love snow!  I love rolling in snow.  I love eating (clean) snow.  I love it when the trees are all covered with snow.  I love it when the cats first see snow and freak out, then come running back inside because they don't understand why this white stuff is so cold and wet.  I love snowboarding.  I don't love falling on my butt repeatedly when snowboarding.  I love it when the world is white and sparkly.  I love it when everyone has to wear a bagillion layers just to go out to get the paper, because then we're fat and happy.  Therefore, I'm not happy that I live in a no-snow zone.  I cry.

Happy Feet was happy to meet me. 

• Happy Feet has gone for a swim now that it's cold enough.  I'm pretty sure that he is just about the smartest penguin EVAR, because he knew that the Antarctic was going to move here, and he left home early enough to find himself a flash home and an endless supply of high-quality salmon.   

• I have learned the art of only heating one room of your house at a time with an oil heater.  You spend most of your evening in the lounge where the TV is, right?  So as soon as you get home,  you shut the curtains, close the doors to the lounge and crank up the heater.  Then make something for dinner that requires as little time in the kitchen as possible, or pile on 3 layers of clothing, hat, scarf, and fingerless gloves and brave the cooking.  Once you have procured hot food, hoof it back to the lounge, top up with a few blankets and maybe a cat or two, and stay there til the shows are over and you're ready to head to bed.  Make a mad dash into your pajamas, wave the toothbrush in front of your face while simultaneously washing your face, heat up a hot water bottle or wheat pack, then (and this is the key) drag the oil heater into the bedroom and seal the door shut.  Shiver under the sheets until your finally warm up, or if you're lucky like me, you can snuggle up to your own personal heater (read: husband who runs a few degrees higher than normal humans).  Then finally, hope like hell that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to pee, because really at that point you are risking all kinds of unpleasant things like frostbite, hypothermia, and even death. 

That was last week.  Maybe this week I'll get around to actually posting something that I did for the purpose of blogginess?  

Kahlua Mocha Brownies

...or as I like to call them - "mmmmfff, oh yeah!" brownies.  Because that's all you will be able to say while eating them.  Meg Ryan's orgasm in the cafe scene in When Harry Met Sally comes to mind when I think of these brownies.  Anyone who is a fan of the coffee/chocolate combination needs to eat these brownies, "Stat! Clear!", as my husband likes to say.  He doesn't watch medical dramas religiously like me, so he doesn't exactly have the terminology down pat. 

Anyway, back to the brownies.  My friend Jay the Red Panda agrees that you need to make these as well, because he would like some.  But more on him later, he deserves his time in the spotlight. 

I made these brownies amid the fury of baking I did for my birthday a few weeks ago.  That's one of the things I wanted to do for my birthday - bake.  What kind of freak am I that I want to potter around the kitchen all day, baking for other people?  (Ok, admittedly Jonno and I did polish off the Peanutbutter Chocolate Chippies that he made, so they never made it to the "other people" stage!)  But seriously, I actually wanted to spend the day with the oven.  The oven that we have a love/hate relationship with.  The oven that we're pretty sure harbored a mouse corpse for a while, stinking up the flat every time we turned it on with that burnt-hair/dead mouse smell.  The oven that doesn't know if it wants to burn something on the top or on the bottom because it just likes being fickle and surprising us every time.  The oven that has no true middle rack.  That oven.  Love/hate.  Or really, more like need/hate.  I need it to make my brownies.  I need it to bake my comfort cookies.  I neeeeed that damn oven.  But I don't have to like it.

I only barely got a photo of the beautiful brownies because my work mates went after them like starved kids at fat camp.  For these lovelies, I combined RecipeGirl's Fudgy Kahlua Brownies with The Pioneer Woman's Mocha Brownie frosting mainly because I had a big ol' bucket of frosting left over from when I had made the rest of PW's real Mocha Brownies (from her cookbook The Pioneer Woman Cooks).  It was yum, delish, drool-worthy even.  Now go make them!

Kahlua Mocha Brownies

Kahlua Brownies:

• 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour Mae's Mocha Icing:
• ½ tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 ½ cups light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• ½ cup 

Mae's Mocha Frosting

• 1/2 lb. (450g) butter, softened
• 2 cups icing sugar
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup brewed coffee, cooled to room temperature

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C. Line a 9x9-inch baking dish with baking paper.
2. Makin ze brownies: Sift together the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder and salt); set aside.
3. Get a double-boiler simmering away on the stove, and be sure that the bowl is not touching the water.  Melt the chocolate and butter together until smooth and glorious.  Remove to a cold burner for a bit.
4. In your trusty mixer's bowl, combine sugar, eggs and 1/2 cup Kahlua. Pour in buttery chocolate mixture and beat until mixed well. Mix in dry ingredients and beat just until combined.
5. Scrape your lovely brownie glory into the baking pan.  Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until top cracks slightly and toothpick inserted in center comes out mostly clean (it might be slightly gooey on the bottom of the toothpick).
6. Let the brownies cool completely. If you're like me, that means putting them out in your sunroom where the gusty Wellington winds cool that puppy down PDQ.  More effective than a refridgerator and energy efficient!
7. Next, the icing: Combine butter, icing sugar, cocoa powder, salt, and vanilla in a bowl until they get to know each other a bit.
8. Pour in the coffee while whipping the icing to a frenzy.  If it seems too thick to you, add more coffee until it's light and fluffy.
9. Once the brownies are cool, spread the icing thickly over the top.  Put the whole shebang in the fridge (or back out in the sunroom if you're like me) to cool and gel together.  When you're ready to serve them, dip your knife in warm water every few slices to get a clean cut.

*These will be fudgy gooey brownies, not cakey.  If you're not prepared to get a little messy with the eatin', then you may have failed the "how to play in the mud" lesson in preschool.  Go back and relearn that one before attempting these brownies.

New year, new......

....Ok, I haven't figured that part out yet.  I turned 28 yesterday, officially the "late 20's", and ten years after I graduated from high school.  Like, really?!  How did ten years escape so damn fast?  And I'm married and live with a boy?!

And I live in New Zealand?!  I've just realized - my kitties are Kiwi!  If kitties had passports, then 3 out of our little family of 4 would have New Zealand passports.  I always thought I would grow up to have little American kitties, fat and happy, but no, Spice and Lucy are "kiwi as, bro".  Maybe that's why they seem to like Jonno better than me.

the missing SpiceGirl - Emo Spice

This is Spice, and she loves Jonno's lap.  As soon as we get home, she trots right up to him and starts her little "Hurry up and sit down on that couch so I can has a nap on your lap" routine - chirping and circling him like a shark until he finally plops down, and she promptly leaps gracefully onto his lap, does one wee doggy circle and settles exactly like this.  And then gives me this Look, lofty and scathing at the same time, firmly reminding me that she is Top Kitteh in our house. 

All the Kiwis in my house are banding together, grrr.  Well, I'll be a Kiwi too...in a few years!  If Immigration get off their bums and finally process my Residency application...  Maybe if I send them some of my baking it will speed up the process?  A little sugar could go a long way!  Here's what I made this past weekend for my birthday:

Oreo-stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies

Or I should say, Jonno made the Peanutbutter Chocolate Chippies (From Bakerella, although I can't find the recipe on her site, so I'll attach it here) and I made the Oreo-stuffed Chockies (from Amanda @ Amandeleine).  And MMMMMMMM they were damn good.  We had a smorgasbord of sugar set out on our coffee table - cookies, lollies, cocktails, and sugary sappy girlie movies! 

There was even more baking that occurred, but I will share that later because it deserves its own post.  Full disclosure: both recipes were blatantly used straight from their sources, as I have not yet gotten into the whole writing-the-recipes-in-your-own-words thing yet.  I take no credit for the recipes, but I did bake the deliciousness and take the photos posted here.

Follow the yellow brick road? How about the chocolate pie road!

I can’t follow directions.


I can’t follow directions, I can’t follow a recipe, I can’t even follow the yellow brick road – I take detours, wander off for a while, and then come back having taken a few more steps than were originally prescribed.

Therefore, I am celebrating my inability to walk in a straight line by rebooting my past blogging efforts and doing it for real. For real real. Like, actually posting more than once a year. So, let’s get this thing started with something to lead you off the track of your diet, if you were on one. I’m sorry, it’s my moral imperative in life to lead you astray, especially with this recipe. Go make it now, or at the very least this weekend, because it will improve your life, quantifiably. I’m hoping that you can follow directions better than I can!

French Coconut & Chocolate Pie


Ingredients:


• 3 whole Eggs, Beaten
• 1 ½ cup Sugar
• 1 cup Flaked Coconut
• 250g (ish) Butter, Melted
• 1 Tablespoon White Vinegar
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
• ¾ cup chocolate, any kind
• 1 pinch Salt
• 1 whole 9" Uncooked Pie Shell


Directions:


1. Preheat the oven to 325°F/160°C.
2. Press pie shell into 9” pie plate.
3. Mix: eggs, sugar, coconut, vinegar, salt and vanilla.
4. Melt the chocolate in the microwave for 30 seconds, and then for 15 second intervals after that, stirring each time so that the chocolate doesn’t burn. After it’s completely melted, add it to your filling mixture.
**Note: you can use any chocolate you like – milk, dark, white, whatever. I used milk chocolate and it was dee-lish-us.
5. Melt the butter in a separate bowl, then incorporate enough (not necessarily all) to make your filling nice and liquid-y, but not runny.
6. Pour into the pie shell and bake at 350°F/180°C for 50 minutes to 1 hour.
7. Let cool slightly before serving, otherwise you will have lots of oozing. Unless you like that kind of thing, like this guy.


Mine didn't look anything like the photo I've posted, (a) because this one doesn't include chocolate, its just plain ol' French Coconut Pie, which I guess you could do, if you were boring, and (b) because I have zero baking technique to speak of, I just make the stuff taste good, who cares what it looks like, so I won't subject you to having to look at the mostly-brown pie that came out of my oven. 

Wow that was a long and probably not-grammatically correct sentence, which is normally one of my greatest pet peeves, especially in the press.  Luckily, I never wanted to actually write for a living, and so am not subject to those silly laws of grammar.  But, I mean seriously, if you are a reporter or a copy editor for some kind of publication, I would hope.  I'm always finding spelling mistakes, grammatical problems, and just plain poor writing on news sites - for pete's sake, someone proof-read that sh!t!!!  And now I'll gingerly step down from my soapbox and go hide in the corner now....

Here is something else to make you happy, now that you've had your pie - Fluffy Ducks!!  If it doesn't make you happy, then I'm not sure I want to be your friend.  And if you feel like being a little bit more learned, here's an interesting photojournalist's collection of photos from behind Russian lines. 

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There's been another earthquake in Christchurch, I can't think of anything else to write today.