Coconut Nest Cupcakes

This weekend was spent eating way too much food (as most holidays are spent); of course I had to round everything off with some Easter themed treats! I’d planned to make these for a family dinner and everyone loved them. They were the right amount of squishy, gooey cupcake goodness.

I couldn’t resist picking up this cute bunny plate to serve the cupcakes. I saw it and said to my boyfriend “I’m buying these.. I don’t care what you say, I’M BUYING! IT!“. I guess I was very serious! Kinda Cheesy? yes. Adorable? very.

The cupcake batter

Dry: 2½ cups unbleached flour, 2 cups sugar, 2 teaspoons baking soda, ½ teaspoon salt
Wet: ⅔ cup canola oil, 2 cups water, 2 teaspoons vinegar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

This recipe will make around 20 medium size cupcakes. In a bowl, combine all wet ingredients, in another bowl combine all the dry ingredients. Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet until just combined, it will be a wet batter with no visible lumps.

I used pretty blue and green cupcake liners but if you can also just grease the muffin pan with cooking spray. Fill cupcake pan 2/3 full. Bake at 350 F for 20-22 minutes, until a tooth pick inserted comes out clean. Then you’ll have these cuties:

Ready for Frosting

These would be perfectly delicious on their own! But since it was Easter I decided to decorate. Wait until they’re completely cool before you frost them. In the meantime you can make the cream cheese frosting and toast some coconut for the nest part of the cupcake.

Cream Cheese Icing

250g package of cream cheese
half a stick of butter
1 cup icing sugar
½ tsp vanilla

Cream together the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add the vanilla and mix well with an electric mixer (or just a fork and some muscle in my case), add the icing sugar in batches. You can let the icing sit covered in the fridge for up to 1 day. Put aside until your cupcakes are cool. Toast some coconut in the oven until slightly golden brown. Have fun decorating! Top with some chocolate mini eggs.

Verdict: DELICIOUS

Cauliflower Soup to warm you up!

It seems like winter won’t be letting go anytime soon so it was time for some comfort food! I had 2 heads of cauliflower I wanted to use up so I searched far and wide for what would be the perfect cauliflower soup recipe. Luckily I stumbled upon a delicious recipe, please visit The Pioneer Woman’s website for the full recipe with measurements! I was really excited to make this recipe because I had the cutest carrot to use up too! (Yes, carrots can be cute! See the little purple one!)

Here is everything you need – go forth and gather!

Cauliflower, Carrot, Onion, Celery, Chicken Broth, Whole Milk, Half & Half, Butter, Flour, Salt, Pepper, Parsley and Sour Cream for garnish

Start by chopping up your onion, carrot and celery roughly, I like some nice bite size chunks. This soup is not blended so don’t make them TOO big..

A pretty mirepoix is a happy mirepoix!

Once that has cooked down nicely in oil (or butter), add your roughly chopped cauliflower bits along with some parsley. The store was out of fresh parsley for me, but I found a magical tube of “fresh” parsley, which was just a sludge of pre-chopped parsley. Keeps in the fridge for a month apparently. Convenient and tasted great too! I cooked down my cauliflower for quite some time (at least 30m) but my pot was way too small for the job. Note to self: get a decent size pot. I then added chicken stock and the yummy cream sauce I had been concocting on the side. Flour. Whole Milk. Half and Half. What’s not to like about that? I love the richness it adds to the soup. I mean, just look at it!

Hearty Goodness

And because it was a cold winter day (and I needed the +10 extra laziness points) I ate my warming soup in front of the computer. It’s somewhat healthy because of the vegetables… right? Well, just in case I garnished with sour cream on top. :)

Sticky Almond Brittle with lemon and honey

First, a quick announcement if you haven’t noticed – Pile of Sticks has a new look! I feel very happy with the new layout and I look forward to posting more often. I’ve decided to focus my efforts mostly on food; it seems that 80% of my posts are about food anyway!

Today I’m posting a really quick recipe for Almond Brittle which I made over the holidays. It was a really simple but personalized gift I gave out to family and friends this year. I made a double batch but I’ll post the single batch version for you. This is probably the simplest dessert treat you can make. It looks pretty and is a traditional Italian treat.

I love it because the ingredients are so simple and can always be on hand. Ready for the ingredient list? It’s short! Here it is:

Whole Almonds, Lemon, Sugar

Yep, that’s it! So don’t feel intimidated to try this at home. Optionally, you can add honey for a little extra sweetness. I did use honey this time around because I received a jar of local honey from a friend. This delicious honey came directly from the apiaries of the University of Guelph. (It’s tasty in tea, too!)

Start by blanching 150g (around 5oz) of whole almonds in boiling water for a few minutes. This is to help you remove the skins which are bitter. After boiling the almonds, the skins will just pop right off with a little squeeze. Skin-less almonds are prettier anyway, so don’t skip this step! If you can get whole almonds without the skins then you just saved yourself a step. Try not to get slivered almonds as they just aren’t substantial enough for this recipe.

Here is my almond peeling station, it helps to have a second pair of hands to help with this task! (refreshing drink included)

Once the almonds are peeled, lay them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet lined with tinfoil. Bake the almonds at 350c degrees for about 5 minutes so they are lightly toasted. They shouldn’t be brown at all, just crisped up a bit. Once they have cooled a bit, chop them roughly.

Meanwhile, add 2 cups of sugar, 1 tsp of lemon juice, 2 tsp of honey and 2 tsp of water in a small pan. Let everything melt together on low heat and stir occasionally. Once the sugar is totally dissolved, let the mixture turn golden. (about 7-10 minutes) Be careful because the melted sugar will reach very high temperatures. Once you have your golden sugar syrup, combine with the almond pieces in the pot and mix everything together.

While the mixture is still hot, pour it out onto a sheet lined with parchment paper. It will be VERY sticky! For additional flavour, use a lemon wedge to spread the mixture around rather than using a spoon. If you prefer not to use lemon, make sure you use a wooden spoon that has been oiled or at least run under water; this will help prevent your brittle from sticking all over your spoon.

I made the mistake of putting it on a sheet lined with tinfoil which stuck! Don't copy me, haha!

Let the mixture cool down then cut into bars before it’s completely solid. Try not to eat the whole tray in one sitting. (very tempting)
I also made the mistake of refrigerating it right away which made it too sticky. Let it cool down completely so you don’t have too many sticky bars to deal with. I plan to make this every Christmas from now on!

These are easily a 5/5 for me – DELICIOUS!

Cooking School for a day

This past month I visited ‘The Cookery” in Picton, Ontario and along with my sister made some delicious food for the day! There were 4 other people joining us and our humble chef and teacher had an amazing menu planned: Barley Days Dark Ale Soup, Apple and Butternut Squash Soup, Tailgate Chili, Beef Bourguignon, Spiced Cheddar Biscuits and Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes. MMMM comfort food! After touring the restaurant style kitchen (our workstations) and perusing the herb garden outside, we were ready to get our hands dirty. (mostly making biscuit dough!) We paired off and got to work.

Here I am standing next to the chef in the herb garden - which produced a lot of herbs for November!

I chose to make the Apple and Butternut squash soup; it was very easy to make and had simple ingredients. Squash, apples, onion, garlic, celery, apple juice and vegetable stock… oh, and a whole cup of butter! The hardest part was waiting over an hour for the squash to roast in the oven. We had a gigantic 6 pound squash to work with – regrettably I only have a picture of the resulting soup which was my favourite dish of the entire day. I had a lot of fun using the restaurant’s industrial sized hand blender. (or “whizzy toy” as Titli Nihan would call it.)

The cheddar biscuits were spiced with Cayenne, not only did they had a spicy aftertaste but they left beautiful flecks of red in the otherwise plain biscuits. These baked up rather quickly in the double wide convection oven.

By the end of the afternoon we were all tired and excited to try out all the food we managed to make! There were tons of leftovers for everyone to bring home. I’m definitely making that soup again!

My style of Curry

I‘m a huge fan of Japanese curry roux, such as Kokumaro or Golden Curry. I would usually make this meal in the fall or winter because it’s very filling and warm; although I found myself making it a lot this summer after I discovered some new ‘secret ingredients’ that made the curry that much better! The 2 extra ingredients I added were Honey and Coconut Milk. They made the curry very rich and delicious. (It was by no means healthy, haha!) Here are the ingredients I bought for this particular curry which is now my favourite:

1 lb. Ground pork, (ground veal is also pictured but wasn’t used), 2 Medium potatoes, 1/3 large Daikon radish, 1/2 zuchinni, 1/2 onion, garlic, ginger, green chili, honey, coconut milk, nishiki rice.

1. Chop Everything up!

2. Add the onion to a pot, then garlic & green chili. Add the meat. when browned add the rest of the vegetables to soften them up. At this point I added about 4 blocks of curry roux along with the honey, 1/2 cup of coconut milk and some water to cover everything. Let it simmer until thickened nicely. This will yield a large amount of curry which is great for leftovers.

Serve generously with hot rice. yum yum!

Wordless Wednesday

Okay, maybe a few words… Hello Bloggie. Time really does fly. Summer is gone and fall is here!

Halloween is approaching, you know what that means!

Remembering Bento

I‘m quite an avid reader of many food blogs, especially Japanese food blogs. While catching up on a few, I ran into a post by Hiroyuki – Staying with my Parents/両親の家に泊まる where he posted photos of his parents garden as well as 3 different kinds of bento his family ate that day. It’s funny how a certain item can bring back memories. I was instantly remembering my favourite bento I had while in Japan in 2008.

I shared this (very large) bento with a friend while we were on the train to Ama no Hashidate. I bought it for 850 yen in the Kyoto train station just before catching the train so it was very convenient! The price was very reasonable considering the size of the bento, there was so much food that we didn’t finish it between the two of us. If we could buy this quality of food in Canada at train stations that would be amazing. I would make this at home but some of the ingredients are so hard to find, especially shishito peppers.

My favourite drink at the time was this Royal Milk tea and of course my friend got a beer!

I’m glad we ate this lunch on the train as the ride was quite long, I remember switching to a local train at one point. We were smart and took an express train on the way back. All of these memories of my visit come flooding back as soon as I remember a food that I ate or a place that I visited. I think it’s time to plan another trip soon! Of course, the view of Ama no Hashidate was definitely worth the long train ride from Kyoto.