My first endeavor was jam. We have a glass stove top in the apartment in which I currently reside. I melted it. "But aren't they built to withstand insanely high temperatures?" One would think. Anyway, I had been wanting to try my hand at preserving for a while and, after reading numerous blog posts and articles each detailing the ease and simplicity that is jamming, I thought that it'd be a breeze. Yeah, well, this breeze melted my stove. Apparently when you sandwich hot jam in between a hot stove and a hot stock pot, the glass revolts. What is with me and glass?
At any rate, I was somehow able to create five jars of strawberry jalapeno jam.
If you decide to try your hand at preserving, I highly suggest this article here. And, if you're curious to try strawberry jalapeno jam, you can find the recipe here. I added a couple habaneros to the recipe to give it an added kick. (and kick it does!)
I sorta cheater "baked" like the lazy person that I often am to make the pastries below. They are just rolled out Pillsbury crescent roll dough, filled with jam and cream cheese. Tasty and fattening, but too easy for me to feel good about myself.
Another endeavor: homemade Snickers. As with the rest of the female race, I have become addicted to Pinterest. And it is through Pinterest that I discovered the beauty that is homemade Snickers. Go Pinterest. These little devils threw me off the South Beach diet wagon hard and fast. And they are worth it. Make them. Now. They are easy and no stoves were harmed in the process (diets maybe, but no stoves). You can find the recipe (and better pictures) here.
This is the giant block of yum before being cut into smaller squares of mini yum
All those things were fine. And scrumptious. But it's this kind of thing that I'm missing.
I made these a couple months ago for a Kung Fu Panda night at a friend's house. They're chocolate peanut butter cup cupcakes. What I really wanted to do was play with the melding of chocolate and wasabi, but who, besides me, would eat that not as a part of some television reality show? So, I went with the other obvious Asian ingredient...peanuts. I just stuck a couple mini peanut butter cups in each liner before filling them with chocolate cake batter. Nothing too impressive. But the frosting. Oh that frosting. For the frosting, I just mixed peanut butter, cream cheese, nutella, and unsweetened coco powder. Nothing else. No powdered sugar even. I wish I had written down the measurements, but I didn't :( I was just throwing things together in a mad fury, trying to get them done in time. To finish things off, I just rolled out fondant circles, formed them into fortune cookies, and dusted them with cake glitter.
But that was a couple months ago and I am growing lonely for my piping bag. However, somewhere in that growing loneliness there is an idea growing with it. Puppy chow cupcakes. Haven't figured out all the ins and outs of them, but I'm going to make them on Saturday. It's been decided. And that is going to get me through the rest of this work week. So stay tuned. Hopefully it won't take me another two months to tell you how it goes...
