Carrot Cupcakes with Ginger-Cream Cheese Frosting

around lunchtime i was hit with a craving for some cupcakes, and apparently the only cupcake place around me has gotten some mediocre ratings on yelp. well, then! i decided to just go ahead and make my own. besides, it’s been a while since this house was filled with the aroma of freshly-baked goods anyways.

flipped through some recipes on marthastewart.com but decided they were wayyyy too complicated for a quick indulgence, so went back to my old standby, epicurious, and found this one.

extra bonus because the recipe doesn’t require cake flour, so i had most of the ingredients i needed (hooray for getting rolling on this whole cooking thing—the kitchen cupboard is getting well-stocked!).

how keeyute are these cupcake liners i found at the supermarket?

i’ve always cut off the tips and top parts of carrots—is that what people do? i’m not sure why i started doing that.

and y’all, what do you do with the pieces that don’t make it through the food processor? i’m too lazy to cut/chop/shred these leftovers by hand, so i just toss ‘em :\

because my cheap, non-baking ass doesn’t have a sifter, i just dumped the dry ingredients into a bowl and whisked them using the whisk attachment on the kitchenaid. i stopped and manually whisked around a bit to make sure there was nothing stuck at the bottom.

(EDIT: forgot to mention i increased the cinnamon from 1/2 tsp to 3/4 tsp, and in hindsight, i think maybe some nutmeg would also have been nice.)

note to self: paddle attachment likes to fling flour everywhere. turn mixer to a lower speed, pour slowly, or turn off all the way.

after the addition of the carrots and crushed pineapple (which, btw, are a pain to drain):

luckily the dried ingredients that were stuck on the side of the bowl got incorporated once the batter got bulked up with the veggies. (and yes, i’m counting these as vegetable servings.)

into the cups! (and yes, i wiped off all the excess dough on the pan before popping it in the oven.)

while the cupcakes were baking, i tried to make some poor man’s ginger-cream cheese frosting by combining some grated ginger with canned (tubbed?) cream cheese frosting. i grated some ginger but it came out really really wet (and it didn’t give me as much as i thought it’d give me, especially after squeezing it dry/drier), so i supplemented with some ground ginger powder (don’t ask why i have it; i forgot which recipe that went with lol).

i tried to sample it while i was mixing, but i couldn’t really taste any ginger, but i didn’t want to overdo it, just in case. i probably ended up adding 3/4 to 1 tsp of ginger powder?

the cupcakes, fresh from the oven:

i’ve been writing this post since they came out, but i don’t think they’re cool enough to frost yet. :\ ugh, i hate waiting!

btw, i’m writing this post using Windows Live Writer. pretty nifty! it can do fancy things to pictures!

---

UPDATE:

the cupcakes have cooled and are frosted. i’m pleasantly surprised. the cake isn’t too sweet (it could maybe have benefitted from another 1/4 cup of sugar, but maybe it’s because i have a total sweet tooth), and the frosting is quite good, with just a hint of ginger. nom nom!

good enough, at least, that i felt comfortable giving 3 away to my neighbors :P

Lobster Macaroni and Cheese

i was browsing around foodnetwork.com looking for things to make when this recipe for lobster macaroni and cheese caught my eye. i love mac and cheese, and i love lobster, so how could this go wrong? (eep!) besides, the bf really likes the neelys, so that was another point in its favor.

i went to target to get another pot (since we only have one big pot and, by watching the video, you can see it goes a lot better if you have two big pots) and saw these mini bottles of white wine! perfect for someone like me who only uses wine for cooking and would otherwise just waste an entire bottle! i don't think i would have noticed except some other people were looking at box wine (is it finally cool to drink box wine?) and these four-packs were on the same shelf.



the first step was to grease a pan with butter. umm, are there any better ways to do it than (literally) by hand? so messy :\ (tho this would pale in comparison to the mess that would come later...)



another thing i bought at target! a chopper! (since we all know by now how terrible i am at chopping!) unfortunately one of the shallots i got at the store had started going bad (i think? it had like black stuff inside) so i only had one instead of two :(



i really wanted to use my favorite shape of pasta, campanelle, but my local slightly-ghetto supermarket didn't have it so i used penne like the recipe called for.



i was all about approximation cooking this. thanks to google, i discovered that 5 tbsp is about .3 cups, so i used a little less than 1/3 of a cup (since who wants to count out 5 tbsp? not i!). i'd also never used tomato paste from a tube before (i usually get canned), but since the neelys used tube sauce, i did, too.



now it gets sketch. in the video the roux looked nice and compact, like dough, but i couldn't get it to look like that, so i added an extra tablespoon or so of flour.




well, then the recipe said to add in the white wine and let it reduce. uhh, i added the wine and there was nothing to reduce! the clump (it was now a clump) stayed a clump! i even added maybe 50% more wine, but it still stayed clumpy. oh well. i gave up. :P




once i added the cream (and paprika and cayenne -- both very approximate measurements -- and bay leaf), though, it looked OK. btw, a big F U to whoever invented milk cartons!




i totally overbought cheese, too (which is pricey!!!). i got two packages each of the gruyere and the cheddar, but it turns out i only need one. now i know -- 8 oz of cheese shreds to be about 2 cups. hrmph. oh well. now i just need to find another cheesy recipe (can't be hard) to use it up with.





the recipe said to wait until the sauce could coat a spoon, but umm, it was able to coat a spoon since the beginning, so i just waited a couple minutes for it to reduce (you know, just for show), then added the cheese.




now, i should have just been smart and bought frozen lobster tails, but no. i had to be adventurous and opt for live. O_O wtf was i thinking? i was hoping at the (chinese) grocery store they could just give me tail, but no, he just quartered them.



i knew i was in for trouble, but it didn't hit me until i took them out of the bag. W.T.F. was i supposed to do with raw quartered lobster?!



i pulled on a pair of latex gloves and went to town, just trying to pull as much meat as i could out of every corner of the lobster, but i soon gave up and was satisfied with just extracting larger chunks of meat. um, did you know the meat really really sticks to the shell? ugh. this was all i was able to (err, was willing to) extract from two lobsters. what a waste of money! ($33!!!)



oh well. good enough! of course, by this time, the pasta had become nicely accustomed to the shape of the colander :\ and yes, the lobster is already in the sauce, but of course you can barely see it given the tiny amount that actually went in!



it all came out nicely in the pan, though. topped with panko and chopped parsley.



and after coming out of the oven, still all bubbly:



ready to eat!



verdict? hmm. not bad. definitely could use some lobster. i've taken 3 bites already but haven't yet encountered any lobster meat lol. i also had to add a bit of s&p; it could probably have used more of both during the preparation process. i can really taste the wine, too -- it's obvious i used too much. not really a bad thing, though.

it's really oily, and i don't know if that's because i used way too much butter in buttering the pan? but still, it's good. i probably won't make it again, but if i do, i'll be sure to use frozen lobster :\

p.s. love love LOVE the panko!!! it gives it such great texture!

UPDATE: p.p.s. i think it might be the cheese that's making it oily. i remember while the sauce was simmering after i added the cheese (while i was trying in vain to get lobster meat...) streaks of oil would rise up to the top. hmm.

and yes, it needs moar lobster!

Buffaloco Moco

as i was getting ready for bed last night (after a great Oribtal concert, btw, but that's another story for another blog) i was overcome with a hankering for some loco moco. which is odd because i've only ever had a bite of a friend's at a zippy's in honolulu, so i'm not really quite sure exactly how it's supposed to taste.

one recipe seems to be quite popular, from big island grinds. truth be told, it's not really that complicated, but i figure something to go off of was better than nothing!

at the same time, i was craving buffalo meat, but again, i've only ever had once before about a decade ago when i was trying random meat (like ostrich, etc.) -- haven't had it since. so, what a perfect chance to combine those two cravings for an adventure -- loco moco made with buffalo meat! so i used the big island grinds recipe but took a couple of additional liberties, which i'll mention during the course of the post.

of course, i needed something to snack on while cooking, since i didn't really eat a decent dinner last night.



i used a sweet onion -- quite a bit of it, actually, maybe a good 1/3 to 1/2 cup or so. i really need to get a slapchop (warning, page is really annoying) or something. you can see as i was chopping (i'm left-handed, so it goes left to right) the pieces kept getting bigger and bigger. i only ended up using the left half, though.




one pound of buffalo meat, with onions and salt and pepper.




after made the patties, though, i thought to myself, "self, you should probably add some garlic, too!" cue a spoonful of minced garlic (from a jar, thankyouverymuch).



the recipe called for not-lean beef, and i remember reading somewhere that buffalo is extra lean, and since i'm with paula deen, i used a lot of butter in the pan when cooking the patties up.



while the meat was cooking, i looked ahead in the recipe and saw i needed to mix some flour and water to make a thickener for the sauce. uhh, what? O_o i just dumped 1/4 cup of flour in a bowl and started adding water. clearly this wasn't enough:



i added more and got something slightly runnier than glue, and decided to stick with this.



by this time, the meat had finished cooking. note to self -- extra onion means extra-fragile patties. (the patties were so thick i had to turn down the heat and just let them cook a bit longer than stated in the recipe.)



is beef stock the same thing as beef broth? i got this because the recipe called for "good" beef broth and the container looked fancy. yes, that's how i judge, by the cover. p.s. we have to import our beef stock from canada? really?



i added the flour thickener and thought i could just whisk away the lumps, but no! eep!



i googled and it said you could put the gravy in a blender to try and remove the lumps, but we don't have a blender(!) so i tried the kitchenaid with the whisk attachment. umm, even on high, it wasn't de-lumping the gravy :\



then i remembered we have a stick blender! yay! which worked great!



i fried up some eggs:



and assembled:



how does it taste? not too bad. i'm quite proud of myself for trying this, but next time i'll use real beef or maybe add some barbecue sauce to the buffalo since it came out quite bland due to its leanness. maybe add a bit of pepper on top. or furikake?