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!

Strawberry cupcakes with chocolate hearts

My husband had a church meeting/potluck that I was invited to. So... looking for any excuse to bake cupcakes, I made these yummy strawberry cupcakes. I found the recipe on Martha Stewart's website, although the recipe is from Sprinkles bakery. I love the fact that both the cake and icing recipe use pureed fresh strawberries. The berries have looked so wonderful at our grocery stores and farmers markets!!! 

The cake baked up very nicely and had a wonderful light texture with a great flavor. I whipped the frosting more than the recipe suggested since I wanted an airy frosting that I could put the chocolate decoration into. I found the heart pattern in the word clipart directory. I experimented using the Wilton candy squeeze bottles instead of pastry bags for the hearts. I would not recommend it since I kept getting splotches of air in the chocolate (a problem that I have not had with disposable plastic bags). However, the melting of the chocolate was quite simple in the bottles. I just boiled water in a saucepan, let it cool some, and added the squeeze bottles to the water. I kneaded the bottles and that was enough to produce nicely melted chocolate. I am sure they work much better for filling molds than they did for piping freehand

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