Thanksgivukaah 2013: The random pictures

Well, its been less than an hour since I finished eating Thanksgivukaah dinner (though it was more just straight up Thanksgiving for my family since we're not Jewish). Of course, the necessary thing is to now relive the entire cooking, baking, and eating experience through pictures. I've cooked and baked enough to have several blog posts to tide this poor blog over till my next baking (and maybe cooking) opportunity, so ya'll will get to relive each bit and piece of Thanksgiving throughout the merriest time of year--finals bwahahaha.
But first, since words are lame, here are some general Thanksgiving pictures. Aka the random ones that don't fit nicely in a future post.

 One of the few "in action" cooking shots since, lets face it, messing with your phone while your hands are wet, sticky, floury, ect is hard. Some roasted garlic for what would become mashed potatoes. 1PM. Back when I thought it was tots feasible to get everything done by 5PM.

 Like seriously, our house has TWO ovens so we were able to cook the turkey while baking all the other necessary yams, crescents, cookies, sprouts ect. Even then, we didn't finish till like 5:45PM, almost an hour after our ETA (estimated time of arrival) to the dining table. How do you single oven households do it?

 Of course, if you leave me in charge of dessert, you'll basically get a second dinner spread of just desserts. Individual posts and recipes to come!

To finish, here's a messy picture of pumpkin pie and some very very special ice cream. My cousin accidentally crushed the pie a little while serving, but pumpkin pie is picture perfect no matter what in my opinion.

Vanilla and Vanilla: Cupcakes for a Belated Birthday

It's finally Thanksgiving break. It's finally home after 8 months. It's finally baking in a clean kitchen. It's finally time for belated birthday cakes.
While I'm personally not a fan of celebrating my own birthday (something off-putting about celebrating just turning an age older), I'm a fan of the excuse it brings to make cake. Thanksgiving break has over the past 3 years become my birthday-cake-baking-season to make up for all the birthdays I miss while away at school where kitchens don't lend themselves well to baking.

First off, vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream for a suddenly teenager little brother. Seriously, his voice was like an octave lower since the last time I saw him. He's always been a vanilla person. Like, to the point where he will eat an ice cream sandwich by eating the middle and throwing out the chocolate wafers (true story verified by the mother).



Vanilla beans are one of my favorite food obsessions. They just make everything vanilla or cake related 1000x times better. Plus, they're surprisingly satisfying to slice and scoop out. The empty pods can then be recycled and left to sit in sugar to make freaking amazing vanilla sugar. xx.

This past weekend was also the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary. While I found the episode to be quite disappointing (but not unexpectedly so), I kinda love the fact that Doctor Who has such long, deeply intertwined history across multiple generations. Since I couldn't make anything during the actual weekend, I wanted to add a little Doctor Who nod to the desserts I made this week. No one else in my family is a Doctor Who fan, but I'm willing to hijack their desserts to demonstrate my love. I originally wanted to do make mini-TARDIS to decorate the cupcakes, but that went a bit awry (think candy melts seizing thanks to the slightest amount of water getting mixed in). As an alternative, I tried decorating with white and blue swirls to represent time-vortex timey wimey things with some gold dust mixed in a well. It's a bit of a stretch, but A for effort? (lolz, jk, not in elementary school yo).



Vanilla cupcakes and buttercream recipes are from Cupcake Project, hands down my favorite food blog ever. I aspire to be as creative as she is in my life.

Dark and Stormy Cupcakes: 21st Birthdays

Ah 21. Its strange, but not unexpected, how many milestone birthdays you hit in your youth. 1st for obvious reasons. 5th because its probably around the age you start making big kid school friends. 10th because you get to says you're a decade old. 11th because its symmetric. 15th because heyyy permit time. 16th because heyyyyyyy drivers license. 18th because woot voting and democracy. 20th because congrats, you've survived teen pregnancy. And of course 21st, because heyyyy drinking.

The amusing thing is that all these age restrictions we have, 16 for driving, 18 for voting, 21 for drinking, don't really mean anything. Sure, the government says you can do something, but you as an individual are most likely somewhat different from the averaged out young adult that was used to set these age restrictions. Heck, there are probably 10 year olds who are more responsible voters than 35 year olds. Some 16 year olds may NEVER be responsible enough to drive a vehicle that kills around 30,000 people per year. Health and development wise, maybe at 21 you are still undergoing some of the important developmental changes that the averaged young adult may have gone through already. Plus, France and the UK seems to think you're done growing enough to have alcohol at 18 or 16 or whatever. So its not exactly like at the glorious age of 21 some switch flips in your body or some maturation cycle has ended that makes you bright and ready for alcohol. But we kinda celebrate it like it is. Not that most people actually abide by this rule either.

But regardless of whether its a milestone 21st, 30th, or 50th, or 75th or even 100th birthday, birthdays at any age equally deserve the same amount of cake, or in this case cupcakes. And in particular, boozy birthday cupcakes for the college-age student. I have a small obsession with making desserts with alcohol, though I'm not sure where it stems from. It's not like cakes baked with alcohol are actually alcoholic since it all burns off so no, I'm not trying to find more ways to incorporate alcohol into my 20s lifestyle. Since the birthday girl's favorite drink was a Dark and Stormy, my lovely suitemate and I baked these for her birthday party. Since she is also Canadian, and it was the night before Halloween, we attempted decorating skillz that ended up creating a spectrum of results from things that could pass off as a red and white canadian roses to things that probably resembled squished brains (mine were the squished brains obviously).

Overall I think they were fairly successful. I refrained from eating one myself to save more for the guests, but the bite I tried definitely had a rum-like bite to it thanks to the overnight rum soak I gave them cupcakes (which incidentally also made them moist). I had a small headache a little afterwards which I'm going to pretend was due to the cupcake so I can say that I had a cupcake hangover.

Recipe was from CAKE (RE)MIX with some adaptations inspired by Beantown Baker.

• Recipe based off of a box mix= necessary for short college hours.
• No one has time for fancy pineapple salsa fillings in college age kitchens.
• Buttercream was a surprising success. I'm thinking that maybe I've been making buttercream wrong all these years and need to start loving it.

Next time, I'd love to try to bake the cake from scratch using the recipe on Beantown Baker. I saw it on several other websites and it looks great!

Pumpkin Pasties: Anything from the Trolley Dear?

This semester, I'm taking a class called Christian Theology and Harry Potter. I know, it sounds like the epitome of "liberal arts education." And to be quite honest, it probably is. But, hey, I'm a senior, and 3.5 years ago, I made the gut feeling choice to go to Yale because I could have that option to take random non-STEM classes. In retrospect, I should have realized that STEM encompasses boundless fields of amazingness that I could probably never get bored even if I did go to a certain institute. But hey, on the other hand, I wouldn't get to tell people I took a class on Christian theology and Harry Potter. If you want a review of the class, you'll have to talk to me in person since this isn't a hey, lets talk about classes blog.

gotta love the pro iphone photo skillz

But, in terms of food, as part of the course, some students wanted to have a Harry Potter movie marathon one weekend. How anyone in college has the time to watch 16 straight hours of Harry Potter seems pretty impossible and was definitely impossible for our class. I believe in total, the most dedicated students got through movie 4. While I only stayed for the last half of Chamber of Secrets, I thought that this would be the perfect excuse to make Pumpkin Pasties--something that has been on my to-bake list for eons. Pumpkin pasties just sound so flipping delicious. I mean, it was the first thing Harry ate off of the trolley (which is apparently called a cart in the US edition). As I quote:

"Starving." said Harry, taking a large bite out of a pumpkin pasty. (Sorcerer's Stone)

Ok. so maybe this is my general pumpkin obsession getting away. After all, Harry's actual favorite treat is treacle tart.

woohoo face shot

Unfortunately, no one in my class (except for me) actually tried them because they forgot to get them from the kitchen where I told the viewing party to get them from. However, my suitemates and friends who got to eat them after I realized no one from my class actually ate them enjoyed them quite a bit. They were the perfect handsized, portable version of a pumpkin pie. It's like the pumpkin pie version of a hot pocket--to get all American here. And yet, 10000x better than a hot pocket could ever be.

check out those delicious innards

Recipe from Braised Anatomy with small modifications.

• 4 inch circles seemed a bit large for finger food purposes, so I used around 3 inch circles with the top of a mug. Actually, I might just be terrible at gauging inches.
• I seemed to need more than 12-15 minutes for my pie dough to fully bake, but I was working with a questionable oven and cheap pie dough, so many many many sources of error.
• I forgot salt. Which was actually perfectly fine, but I read somewhere that every dessert recipe asks for salt because it acts as a flavor enhancer by activating different taste receptors on your tongue. So maybe there is a dimensionality to these pasties I'm missing out on.