Best Season Ever

This is my favourite season. Why? Pumpkins. I love pumpkins. My favourite ice cream is pumpkin, my favourite pie is pumpkin, see the trend?

And I've already started baking in the spirit of the fall season (or pumpkin season).















These start the festive food. My mummy bought me a doughnut maker off of Thinkgeek.com, and I've been having fun coming up with awesome doughnuts. These are my pumpkin doughnuts with marshmellow filling (in the hole) dipped in chocolate and topped off with walnuts. They were pretty good but the chocolate I used was weird so it made it odd. Next time I will but a dark chocolate that is semi-sweet.

















These are cupcakes I made for a choir retreat. They all loved them. They are apple cupcakes with a caramel frosting topped with a little sprinkling of salt. The only thing would change about them is maybe add some cinnamon to the batter.


Speaking of choir retreat, I was the chef on the trip. I was in charged of the food so I made a vegetarian jambalaya (we have three vegetarians, one person allergic to fish, two people [including me] allergic to soy, and then me also allergic to wheat). Jambalaya was very simple and I got to serve it lunch lady style. They handed me their plates and I dumped the food on with a big spoon, but it was good food. For breakfast I wasn't really in charge but I helped prepare it and I made the scrambled eggs, and sausage, and cut the cantaloupe. I got a good job on cutting the cantaloupe. For lunch we had a tomato, onion, and mozzarella salad and personalized paninis. It all was good and people liked it all.

I've been coming home a lot recently and every time I'm home I make dinner. I've made pumpkin gnocchi, nachos, curry and rice, and right now my mum and I are trying to decide what to make for dinner. We want something warm since it's raining, which reminds me, I need to get an umbrella. I have rain boots and everything, just no umbrella. Odd, I need to get one very soon.

More food underway. We might make cookies today too! My mum calls them magic cookies... yeah I laughed too. I don't know what makes the so magical, but I will find out.

-Charlotte

Brit. Beans

This is more of an entry for food allergies rather than cupcakes, but a cupcake update will be next!

So in my local (when I'm at my parent's house) supermarket they have a small section in the ethnic food aisle of British foods. Most of them are filled with wheat but there are a few things that I can eat and love to eat.

Heinz Beans are my favourite snack or even lunch. You just heat them up and you get protein and low calories at the same time. Sadly, I am in mourning for these beans because they no longer supply them at the super market. They were great little white beans in a tomato sauce and you could anything to it as well. Plus they are soy and wheat free.

There is a British food store about twenty minutes away from my parents house but I don't know exactly where it is but I now have to go there for my dose of Heinz Beans or what I call 'My Brit beans'.

And now I wish I still had my can of beans back that I ate my third week here at college. The last can I got from our store.

Good bye sweet Brit Beans, when we shall meet again, I know not.

-Charlotte

P.s. If you are vegetarian you should eat lot of beans. In Florence they are known as the poor man's meat because of how much protein is packed into them.

Rice

Yes I am updating twice because I have been absent for a while...from a lot of things, except school.

Anyway this entry is about rice. Why? Because I'm a quarter Japanese. Okay, no that is not the real reason. It is because rice is used in so many different cuisines and it can be used savory or sweet and is just so darn tasty.

There are many types of rice and I like them all. Brown rice, white rice, short grain, long grain; I'll eat it. If it wasn't for rice then I'd be stuck eating quinoa all the time. Don't get me wrong, I like quinoa, but one thing all the time would get old after a while so rice gives me variation.

A few nights ago when I, once again, had gone back home I made dinner for my parents. I wanted something Cajun, and so did they, so I made jambalaya.And it turned out to be really good.

I wanted to keep the rice theme going for that night so I even made a rice dish for dessert. I was something I had seen on the new Cooking Channel. David Rocco has made this chocolate risotto that I had to try because it was easy.

I ran into a few problems, though, while making it. I ran out of milk and creme so I didn't have enough to cook the rice all the way making it slightly undercooked, which was a shame because the rest of it was really good. But now I know my mistakes so next time I make it, it will be perfect.

Anyway, what I'm saying is rice is your friend, enjoy it and go cook with it.

-Charlotte

Sold Out

This past weekend I went back home to my parent's house and used the wonderful oven to make a dozen cupcakes. They were white cupcakes with Key Lime marmalade filling and butter cream frosting. Topped with a gum paste logo of the swim team.

I originally had no clue what was going to be the fate of these cupcakes but apparently my dad's swim coach sold them in a like a bake sale (I guess) so raise money for the team (again, a guess). Sunday morning my dad drops them off and all of them got sold. My dad said not everything got sold, so my cupcakes were a best seller, which is nice.

...Then I got a severe case of stomach flu (that's what we finally decided on) on Sunday which caused a train wreck of events that ends with me here, sitting on the couch where I will sleep tonight.

Here's a picture for you.

The team colour is green and their logo is these three waves and a penguin but I didn't have a patience or the time to paint penguins on every single thing.

-Charlotte

Cupcake Animation

I am a cinema major currently, emphasis on film directing, but I would like experience in everything I can. This summer I started working on an animation about a cupcake and I am working more on it. I am still in the storyboard area of the animation, but once I post it I will be sure to put it on here for you all to watch.

I am working on making a microwave cupcake, I plan to complete it tonight while my roommates are asleep. If I do it while they are awake then they keep coming into the kitchen so after I finish my classes, which are in the morning, I go to sleep and stay up late. If you wish to know how late, let's just say I have dinner at midnight... or is it breakfast...who knows?

I am also working on a script for a short film about pie. The working title is 'Pi Makes the World Go Round'. It is the story of a girl who struggles to celebrate her favourite geek holiday: Pi Day, but other factors keep interfering. I plan to pitch it next Tuesday at my writer's circle. Hopefully all goes well, I will write it anyway.

I will work more on my recipes for my Tim Burton cookbook and post more of my Geek Cookbook recipes sometime soon. My laptop is virus free now so hopefully all goes well.

-Charlotte

Epic Fail

A few weekends ago I went home and I really wanted cookies so I went ahead and made myself some cookies. At first I was going to make chocolate chip cookies, but as I was flipping through the cookbook I saw lemon tea cookies and decided to make those.

I don't really know what happened but they came out as flat as pancakes and could not get them off of the pan (well I did but it took a lot of scraping with a spatula). SO in the end I had a bunch of cookie crumbs left over.

The day before my mum and I could not resist buying form figs at the store that looked really good, so that gave me an ideas.

I took those crumbs and made them into a crust. I mixed the figs with some honey and I put that in the glorious oven. When it came out it smelled amazing but when I tried to cut and serve the pie it didn't turn out so great and looked more like a cobbler.

So I topped it off with some yogurt and am calling it my ancient cobbler, which started off as cookies and then became a pie.

The picture does not make it look good, but it was pretty tasty, if I do say so myself, my mum would agree with me.

Request

So while I was on my big cupcake cooking extravaganza this past summer, we had a lot of cupcakes around the house and my parents, in an effort to get rid of them, brought them to work and all those other places they go (I don't know everywhere they go).

My dad decided to bring one of my Mike Wazowski cupcakes to his swim coach and she loved it. On the 26th on this month they are having a swim meet and she asked me (through my father) if I would make a dozen cupcakes for their team.

I said 'yes', which took me a while to figure out because one of my friends is coming down that weekend and I really wanted to see her (or anybody for that matter), but I decided I will go home and make cupcakes. I might spend Saturday with her, her friends, my brother, and his girlfriend, then go down on Saturday evening and crank out cupcakes... we'll see what happens.

But I will make those cupcakes!

I also plan to start experimenting with microwave cupcakes. I have little silicon cupcake cups that I brought from home, I just need to go to Trader Joe's, yeah.

-Charlotte