Last Hurrah

The night before we started the South Beach Diet we cooked one last meal without any restrictions. "Barbecued Ribs with Asian Flavors. We had been waiting to make this dish for a while but we never had enough time. The ribs must marinate for at least 5 hours and then they cook for a hour and a half. The marinade was relativity simple: garlic cilantro Chinese Five spice powder, soy sauce, and brown sugar. The trick was finding a pan that was big enough to marinate the 3 lbs of ribs. I ended up cutting the rack in half and using my largest backing dish.

After the marinating process the ribs cook for a hour by themselves During this cook time we made the barbecue sauce which has twice as many ingredients as the marinade. Brian sautéed some onions and then made then into a puree and then returned them to the skittle and added the rest of the sauce ingredients.

Then we played take the rib shuffle. First take the ribs out after an hour and but the sauce on. Put back in without a cover for 15 minute. Take them out and cut them apart and toss them in the remaining barbecue sauce and then back in the oven, cover and cook for 10 minutes. Then they are done.

The ribs were delicious and we thoroughly enjoyed our last meal before our journey to the South Beach.

Our Return

After spending 18 days away from our home in Austin, we deiced to reinstate our blog by cooking something from Brian's new cook book, Mad Hungry. I bought it for him for Christmas as it give great hearty and healthy options for cooking for the men in your life. We selected, Steak Pizzaiola.

We started with a very large chuck of meat. With a simple preparation of salt and pepper we browned the steak on both sides in a skillet. We made a sauce with tomatoes,garlic and other spices.

Then like most of our recipes we cooked it for two and a half hours :) It was delectable even though we did end up eating at 8:30 pm. We served it with just a piece of bread.
We love making awesome recipes no matter how long it takes.

Perfect Choclate Cupcake

Brian and I were planning to go on the South Beach Diet in order to lose a little weight and to usher in a healthier life style. Knowing this drastic change to our diet was looming and that I would have to hang up my cupcake crown for a while, I wanted to make a very simple and delicious cupcake. Originally I was going to make these cupcake for our church small group but after a failed trip to the grocery store where I left my wallet at home and had to go back to the store, I decided to save them for the National championship game. Sadly we lost ... but the cupcakes were awesome.


I used bitter sweet chocolate to make a batter that resembled a brownie batter. I then mixed in the flour and coco powder. The cupcake were moist and not too chocolaty. :) Next challenge the butter cream. I had better success with this butter cream but it still turned out to thick and yellow and represented butter with vanilla flavor.

Next icing. I used my pastry bag and flower tip to make tiny rosettes as shown in my cook book. I found I am now a slightly better icer, but it is still tiring and time consuming. In a stroke of genius I invited our friends to ice their own cupcakes. Everyone had fun as they tried their hand at icing and wrestled the pastry bag. This game me a great idea for our next party; make up several pastry bags with different flavors of icing and let everyone have their fun creating their own cupcake creations.

The cupcakes were finished with shaving of milk chocolate and we all enjoyed something sweet in the midst of a bitter defeat.

Christmas Cupcakes

I had a very hard time deciding what cupcake to make for Christmas; peppermint, gingerbread, eggnog? In the end I went with peppermint because I don't like the other flavors. One of my personal quirks is that I hate most typical holiday flavors. These cupcakes were very simply, peppermint cupcakes with pieces of peppermint on top and then butter cream icing.

My sister and I made the cupcake on Christmas Eve. I love baking with my sister. We have been baking together at a very young age and mostly unsupervised :) Our way of cooking together is one of us will read the recipe out loud and the other one gets the ingredient or performs the cooking task. It is a great thing. Brain helped us by crushing the peppermint pieces. It turns out to be a tricky thing. You could not smash them to hard or peppermint shattered into dust. Brian had to hit them with just enough force for them to break a part but not disintegrate.

We made the butter cream frosting on Christmas after Christmas dinner while the rest of the family was hanging out. Butter cream is difficult to make. It involved a double boiler and lots of mixing. The ingredients are sugar, egg whites and two sticks of butter. We mixed it all together and it tasted very grainy like you could taste the individual butter molecules in the icing.
We then beat it to death and it turned very think and yellow. We filled it into a piping bag and I attempted to frost my first cupcake. The icing was so think that I had to work really hard to get it out. The cupcake looked beautiful and I displayed them on my cupcake holder. They were a big hit.