Cupcakes: Shaken, Not Stirred

Thanks for my dearest sister for another great blog posting. Here it is....

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Anyone who has followed my guest posts knows that I don’t like putting a lot of time or effort into cooking. If the instructions are longer than Take it out of the box and put it in the oven, I’m probably not going to make it.

So I was really interested to try the new Shaker cupcakes from Dr. Oetker. (They also have Shaker muffins, but I’m not a big muffin fan. Cupcakes on the other hand…)

My first thought is that these things are environmentally irresponsible - the plastic container will be used once and then outlast our entire species. Let’s take a moment and hail the recycling programs that turn these things into sweaters and picnic tables! Yay recycling!

Moving on. Making these cupcakes was easy as pie. :) Pour in some milk (you don’t even measure it, just pour until you reach the fill line on the container), shake, and pour into a cupcake pan. I was impressed how perfectly the batter filled exactly 6 cups. But it brings up another drawback of this product – for $3 you get only 6 cupcakes. If you’re a cupcake connoisseur, you may go broke.

Pop them in the oven for 22 minutes, let them cool, frost them, and voila! Cupcakes: shaken but not stirred. :)

Of course, I didn’t make frosting because that requires work. And why make something when Betty Crocker is perfectly willing to make it for you? I also used drizzle icing left over from the mocha brownies experiment.

And the taste… Yum! Good chocolate flavour and light, fluffy texture. The frosting was especially good, lol.

I would recommend the Shaker cupcakes if you need a small batch of cupcakes quickly, don’t mind spending $3 for such a small batch, and are good about rinsing and recycling your plastic.

Easiest. Bread. Ever.

Here is another guest blog by Foodiestudent's sister. Take it away FSS...... :)

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Back in university I took a creative writing course where I wrote a series of short stories about a fictional medieval village. In our first class, we had to read our first story. Mine began with the heroine Thayleen (shortened from phenolphthalein, an acid-base indicator; I was also in a chemistry class that term) walking through the town market. A baker called out, “Come try my bread! Best bread on the island!” But I got tongue-tied and read it as “Breast bed on the island.”

Yeah. I was cool back then. Let’s fast-forward about 15 years because I’ve found what may in fact be the best bread ever.

Recently I came across an article on the Macleans website, reviewing a new book called My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method, by Jim Lahey. The author, a professional baker, came up with a way to make no-fail bread at home with almost no effort. Well let me tell you, I’m a big supporter of no-fail and no-effort! So I Googled to find a recipe from the book and I found one here (scroll to the bottom for the print-friendly link).

The big secret to this bread is to bake it in a large oven-proof pot like a dutch oven. Well, I didn’t have one so I went out and bought one, along with bread flour and yeast. That was the most effort I had to put into this recipe.

The ingredients are simple: flour, yeast, water, and salt. Mix them for 30 seconds, cover, and let it sit for 12-18 hours.

After the sitting time is over (I waited 15 hours), turn the sticky dough out onto a floured surface, shape it into a ball, put it onto a floured dishtowel, and fold the towel over it. (Tip: put a lot of flour on the dishtowel.)

Leave it for another 1-2 hours. Preheat the oven and the pot, then carefully drop the dough into the pot, cover it, and bake for 30 min. Remove the lid, and bake for another 15 mins or so. Take the pot out of the oven and turn the loaf out onto a cooling rack. It will come right out without sticking, and it will smell amazing!

Now wait for 1 hour for it to cool down. This step is painful, let me tell you. :) But Jim Lahey says it’s important and if Jim Lahey says it’s important, then you should do it. And this is your reward:

And here’s mine with butter, honey, and saskatoon jam:

And the taste is… Amazing! Yum! It’s quite different from store-bought bread but that’s a good thing. The outside is crispy and the inside is chewy and semi-dense with lots of air bubbles. It has a fairly mild flavour that should go well with most toppings.

I’m interested to try this technique again, maybe with whole-wheat flour or some herbs or other ingredients added. I figure my total time spent in the kitchen was maybe 15 minutes over the course of 2 days, and I got a gorgeous loaf of bread out of it. My Bread is definitely on my Christmas wish list!

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P.S. iPhone users, I found a new foodie app to recommend. It’s called Harvest and costs $2.99. It contains info about how to select and store 64 types of produce, what’s in season when, pesticide levels used to grow them, etc. It’s super easy to use and a great little gadget to have handy at the grocery store.


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Thanks FSS. Another great blog post. As a carb lover I am all over this recipe :)

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

This blog post is the creation of my BFF, Skottie. Skottie and I go way back but we've never spent any significant time in the kitchen together. So it was news to me that deep down, in the shadows of Skottie's heart, lies a master baker. Let's learn from Skottie the baker together, shall we? Take it away, Skottie.......

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The awesome Foodiestudent has asked me to be a guest on her blog a couple times but I haven't done it yet. I recently promised my co-workers I'd bake them something for our next team meeting so I thought this was a perfect opportunity to show my culinary fortitude on the blog.

I love baking cookies. They're quite easy to make and they taste very good. The cookie monster in me decided that it was time to make Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies. I've made this recipe once before but this time I decided to experiment a bit.

One of my favorite spices for sweet dishes is cinnamon. I ran this idea by Foodie and she thought that it might not go over very well with chocolate. She suggested that I swap the chocolate for raisins. For those of you that know me well, you'll know that raisins are just WRONG. They do not belong in any cooked dish. I stayed true to my desire to add cinnamon with the chocolate chips.

Here's a link to the base recipe I started with: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Oatmeal-Chip-Cookies/Detail.aspx

I rarely do this, but for all you followers out there, I carefully measured out all of the ingredients and put them in colourful bowls. I think this is the first time I've used some of these bowls. If you look very carefully you can see a bit of cinnamon on the plate. I didn't want to overpower the recipe so I started with a small amount. There are 2 ingredients missing. One ended up in the cookies, the other did not. Can you guess what's missing?

The first step of the recipe is to cream together all of the "wet ingredients". Yes foodie students, sugar can be considered a wet ingredient! This results in a brown gooey mixture that tastes like heaven.

After that, you're supposed to fold in the dry ingredients. Usually I don't use oats in my cookies. After mixing it all together, I noticed that this recipe is quite dry due to the oats.

Here's a shot of my well-used cookie sheet with an awesome invention on top of it: Silpat. Silpat is a silicone baking sheet that prevents things like cookies from sticking. It's works wonders and makes for easy cleanup too.

Some of my co-workers say that my cookies look very professional. They're all the same size and shape (usually but you'll see later on that's not so true this time). I do this by carefully by measuring the amount of cookie dough using a measuring spoon as shown in the photo.

Here you can see a picture of the baked cookies. Is your mouth watering yet?? Being a semi-professional pastry chef (I've taken one class), I know I must taste my creation. I tasted one of each batch. I prefer a cookie that's crispy on the outside but gooey in the middle. The first batch was just like that. Yummmmm. The subsequent batches were less gooey -- more on the dry side. And one batch was over cooked because I wasn't paying attention. That will teach me a lesson. I had a timer on and didn't hear it go off because I was busy browsing the interwebs.

I took the cookies to work in a fancy package: a ziploc bag. I challenged my co-workers to guess which ingredient was missing (vanilla) and which was added (cinnamon). One person said nothing was missing and that they were perfect as-is. No one could guess the missing ingredient without some hints. I also learned that I didn't add enough cinnamon. No one was able to guess that it was there. Other quotes: "Excellent!" "These would win at a bake off". Overall a success. Next time I'll add more cinnamon and ensure that they aren't too dry.

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Thanks for an awesome post Skottie. And yeah, my mouth is totally watering. I'm going to have to make some of these cookies. My stomach demands it. :)

After an accidental hiatus... I'm back :)

I apologize to my loyal Foodiestudent blog readers for not updating this blog in a while. I changed the password and then forgot what I changed it to for a while. Embarrassing but true.

But then I remembered it and am now able to get in and update the blog again. I have 3 guest posts coming at ya over the next few days before I delight and amaze you with one of my own making.

Delight. Amaze. Yup, those sound like the words :)

Stay tuned......

With all my heart,
Foodiestudent :)