Vegan cupcakes

A while back I purchased a great cupcake cookbook "Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World".

It has tons of great recipes in it, but I hadn't gotten around to making any of them until this weekend. So I tried out the golden vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting. The batter mixed up very easily, although it is very easy to overmix it (which I did and they came out a tiny bit tough). They rose a ton in the oven, which happens often because of our altitude. I expected them to fall, but they stayed a perfect shape for frosting! All in all I thought they were delicious, and you couldn't tell a difference in taste between these and their non-vegan counterparts!

Happy New Year

To ring in the new year, we had a progressive dinner with a group of friends. We started with appetizers at Christina's new house, went to La Fuente restaurant for dinner, came to our house for dessert, and finished the celebration at Mary's house with cocktails and dancing! For dessert, my friend Candace made flan, and I made chocolate mousse in chocolate cups. To create the cups, I first melted 12 oz. of semisweet chocolate chips in a double boiler. Then, I used a pastry brush to paint the inside of cupcake liners. I tried both regular liners as well as nut & party cups. After the first layer of chocolate, I froze the cups for 30 min. Then I remelted the chocolate and painted a second coat and froze the cups again. Once the chocolate had hardened (about 1 hour), I peeled off the paper cup. I found that the nut & party cups were MUCH easier to peel off than the regular cupcake liner.

While the chocolate was hardening, I made the mousse. I found the recipe for "Heavenly Chocolate Mousse" on the All Recipe website. The only deviation I made was that I cooked the egg yolks over a double boiler rather than directly over the heat. Once the mousse was done, I piped it into the chocolate cups using a large star tip and topped it with some whipped cream. It made a nice single serving dessert. I think next time I might try it in mini cupcake liners for a bite-size dessert! Happy New Years!

Gingerbread

I have to admit that I had never made a gingerbread house. It seems like the holidays always fly by and we never get around to it. So... I was stoked when my sister-in-law threw a gingerbread house making party. I found the gingerbread recipe on About.com, but instead of using the icing recipe I used the royal icing powder mix from Wilton. The recipe made a good dough for the house and for cookies. However, the first batch of cookies I baked WAY to long and they turned into little gingerbread rocks. The dough turned out really dark because the molasses I had on hand were blackstrap molasses. It still tasted really yummy though. The first house below I decorated and the next one my husband, Dan, decorated (notice the fully landscaped yard)!