Category: Recipes

Miscellaneous, Mary, Baking

baby shower!

I’ve been having some very busy days lately and last weekend was no exception! So short post today mostly recapping Alyssa’s baby shower!

Alyssa used to write for this blog, back when she had time to do so. I miss having her posts on here! Now that she’ll be a mom in a few short months, I think it’s safe to say she’s not coming back (though I’ve known that for a long, long time). We celebrated the future birth of her baby boy with a little baby shower, hosted by her old friend Christina. All I did was set up and do desserts, so most of this is Christina’s lovely handiwork.

The spread, from the view of my desserts! I finally bought myself a Dessert Tower. I’ve been wanting one forever but didn’t really feel that I needed it. But I’m over that now. I need it. I want it. It makes cupcakes look so pretty.

A bit of a close up – red velvet cupcakes on the first three levels and lemon ricotta cookies on the bottom. The overflow of cookies is on the cake stand to the left, with some vanilla meringues from Trader Joe’s. The little sugar animals are from Do it With Icing in Clairemont (I love that place).

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Mary, Recipes

berry crumb pie aka i think i love pie

I have been on some kind of pie making kick lately. In the last few months I’ve made a blueberry pie, 2 strawberry pies, this berry crumb pie and last weekend I made an apple strawberry pie.

Compare this to last year, where I made approximately zero pies.

I think I might love pie after all.

I really want to make mini pies now. I must experiment!

This pie makes use of the bounty of the season with fresh strawberries and blueberries. It’s summer! You should bask in the glory of summer berries!

These are some of the ingredients you need. Flour and sugar were too shy for the line up. Also: that Speculoos filled chocolate bar doesn’t go into the pie. It’s just for eating while you make the pie.

It’s there for support.

I like making the crumb topping first. Flour, sugar, cinnamon, soft butter. If you’re feeling giddy, add in some oatmeal.

You can stir this if you want, but I chose to just squish it that day. Squissssssssh.

It ends up looking a little coarse and crumbly, like this. You can also just melt the butter and stir, but what’s the fun in that?
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Recipes, Products, Mary

homemade mashed potato pizza with cholula

Over the weekend I told Jake I was finally getting around to writing my post on URBN with their crazy mashed potato pizza. He casually suggested that I should try and remake that mashed potato pizza. He also hinted that he thought I could do a little better.

He is definitely a keeper.

One of the things I remember from our outing at URBN is that our waitress wisely suggested the addition of the Cholula sauce as a topping on the pizza. She was so right – it had given the pizza the extra “oomph” it needed and I ended up devouring a few slices. Not long after I was contacted by a rep asking if I’d like to sample their line of Cholula sauces. It all came together over the weekend when I received the samples and tried my hand at creating my own version of the mashed potato pizza.

[There’s more than one kind! From left to right: Original, Chili Garlic, Chiptole and Chili Lime]

A) Before being contacted, I had no idea there was more than one flavor and B) I had never had Cholula before we went to URBN.

I always thought Cholula would be “too hot” or “too spicy” for me, but actually it’s not that bad. It doesn’t have the kind of heat that lingers and then beats you up – it’s a gentler heat, more of a spice and kick of flavor than anything else.

Jake and I both tried each sauce with a spoonful of mashed potatoes to see what flavor we liked best. I balked a few times at the amount of sauce he poured on. He’d give me a look that said, “You’re kind of a wimp.” But he’d eat half of it so there was less sauce and then I was amiable to eating it again. Of the four, I like Original and Chili Garlic the best. The Chili Garlic has a good punch of garlic flavor mingling in with the original spice, making it one of my favorites. The Chipotle was a little too spicy and bold for me while the Chili Lime was just okay. Not being a huge fan of lime to begin with, I might have been a little biased against it.

[unbaked mashed potato pizza, ready for the oven]

Onto the pizza making! I bought my pizza dough from Trader Joe’s. I am determined to do my own dough soon, but it was not this day.

It’s best to let the dough rest for 20-30 minutes before handling (I do it while the oven is coming up to temperature). Spread a bunch of flour over a cutting board and just let it rest out of the package. It’ll be easier to work with once it gets rid of a bit of the chill.

I slowly flatten the dough once it’s been rested and then use my hands to gently spin it in the air. I don’t toss it around or anything, I just use my knuckles and keep moving it in a circle until it stretches out nicely. I find that doing it in the air is the easiest way, letting gravity do most of the work.

[mmm, pizza]
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Miscellaneous, Mary, Recipes, Cooking with Jake

peanut butter and chocolate potato chips

I’m sorry, what does this post title say?

Peanut Butter and Chocolate covered what?

Potato Chips.

Yep.

Totally Jake’s idea. I just executed it. (Jake helped, too).

He got the idea after a recent trip to Trader Joe’s. I had bought a bag of milk chocolate covered potato chips, which I really liked. Jake put together the idea of my love of peanut butter + chocolate with the potato chips and viola!

A delicious idea was born.

You don’t need a whole lot for this recipe. It’s mostly just melting and waiting. Also, I used about twice as much chocolate as shown (of each kind).

First things first: melt your peanut butter. Just scoop out a few spoonfuls and nuke it for a about a minute.

And then do this:

Dip it! I liked a few that weren’t dipped all of the way, but Jake liked to cover them up.

It’ll look really weird at first. Just trust me.
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Mary, Recipes

peanut butter + chocolate rice krispies treats

I kind of want to go and make these again. Right now.

These are super tasty and super easy treats that you can make. I brought them to the San Diego Food Blogger’s Bake Sale last month and am finally getting around to posting about them! I first spied this on Brown Eyed Baker’s website and knew I had to try it.

Peanut butter and chocolate is, after all, one of my all time favorite combinations.

Make the rice krispies!

Get yourself a bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups. You can tell this was right after Easter, since I used peanut butter eggs instead. They were on clearance! And yes, you need a whole bag.

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Miscellaneous, Mary, Recipes

homemade bacon is totally worth it

Not too long ago I spotted this post on Indirect Heat about how to make your own bacon at home.

“Oh my god. We could make our own BACON!” I thought to myself. It didn’t look to be that hard. And I knew that I could get my dad on board to do this. I emailed him the link and said, “We – or rather you – should make this.”

He replied not too long later. “Get the ingredients. We’ll do it.” YES!

My dad did all of the work and we got the reap the benefits last weekend when he smoked the first slab of homemade bacon using apple wood from the tree he cut down in the backyard last year.

[Smoked Pork Belly]

Is there no finer usage for pork belly?

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