Sunday, April 17, 2011

Star Wars Themed birthday food!

For peter's birthday gathering I decided to make star wars themed food.
We ended up making 4 star wars themed foods.

1. Light Sabers! We melted white chocolate and dyed it green, blue, and red (no purple b/c peter would have gotten angry if i acknowledged samuel l jackson's purple saber)
2. Princess Leia cupcakes. M&M buns and frosted faces. Not that well done since i'm not that artistic, but you get the idea

3 and 4. Using the william sonoma cookie cuters I made yoda and storm trooper cookies.




Ideas I didnt follow through with:
* Han Solo action figure in Jello (carbonite clearly). Someone suggested I turn this into Jello shots, but I was afraid people would accidentally eat the han solo figurines.
* Death Star Truffles, pretty easy to make a chocolate truffle look vaguely like the death star
* Luke's severed Hand. At halloween Diana took a latex glove and filled it with water and froze it to have ice hands floating in the punch, I figured this might be able to be adapted for the star wars purpose as well.
* Home made marshmallows for cloud city

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Cooks Illustrated

I've recently been introduced into the world of Cooks Illustrated, and even signed up for 1 year. I found some great recipes and all turned out delicious. One however could have turned out better. It turns out Cooks Illustrated has a handy iphone app, which of course I downloaded. You can look up a recipe, add the ingredients list to an easy shopping list, and then follow the recipe by phone as you cook. This would have been all fine and dandy if there hadnt been a major typo in the iphone version. I made the Poached Pear and Almond Tart. There are 3 different portions to this recipe, the poached pears, the crust, and the Frangipane filling. TWO of the 3 portions (the pears and the filling) had the same typo. On the iphone version it called for 5/6 tsp of salt. First off who has measuring spoons that can even do that? I thought it sounded like a lot, and didnt have the right spoons, so i put in 3/4 instead (so slightly less for those of you who dont feel like doing the math). I decided to taste the frangipane b/c I love almond flavored anything and it was super salty!!! I ran to my computer and sure enough it was supposed to call for 1/8 tsp instead! I dumped in a ton of sugar to both parts to try and compensate for my super salty tart. The tart ended up ok (esp since I love salty things), but I think next time will be better.

Scalion Pancakes!

Earlier this week I came across a recipe for scallion pancakes, which is just about the only part to Chinese food I'll eat. For some reason no restaurant around here offers them. I started discussing it with Emily who recommended a slightly different recipe. Who knew scallion pancakes are so easy to make!!! The other nice part about making them at home is that you can use less oil, and put them directly on paper towels to soak out more oil when you are done. mmmm so delicious.



Emily was also inspired by our conversation and made them as well this week!

Friday, April 8, 2011

LDCM Cookies


Today we had a govt shutdown party. I made cookies stamped with the image of the satellite our instrument is mounted on. They came out alright