Baking – Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes

Before I became mildly obsessed with The Food Network, I was convinced that I knew how to bake. Now, I wasn’t lying. I did know how to bake. From a box. The 2 eggs, oil, water, and the powdery mix in kind of box. True, they weren’t bad at all. In fact, sometimes they were absolutely delicious. If you couldn’t tell, we weren’t really a homemade baking kind of family. Homemade cooking? Absolutely. But baking – not so much.

I began to experience more homemade baked goods as I discovered boutique bakeries and talented friends and extended family. On a rare day off last week, I decided it was time that I try too.

I was extremely apprehensive about this initiative. I had never baked outside the comfort zone of the boxed mix before, and precision is key when it comes to baking – or at least that’s what I’ve heard. Still, I decided it was time that I faced my baking fears and try something, seasonal perhaps. After perusing FoodGawker, I made the executive decision: Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes.

The pumpkin pie cupcake recipe from The Baker Chick sounded like exactly what I wanted. It is the gooey, custardy center of a pumpkin pie, in the form of a cupcake. No crust. Many have called me crazy for this, but to be honest, the crust is just not my favorite part of a pie. I will eat it, of course, and I will enjoy it. But the center is the best part to me. I call it my texture/consistency OCD.

For this recipe, I preheated the oven to 350 F  and lined my cupcake tin with foil liners. While I waited for the oven to heat up, I mixed these ingredients up in a large bowl.

• 1 – 15oz can of Pumpkin puree
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 1/4 cup of brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup of half-and-half

Then, I mixed the dry ingredients in a medium-sized bowl.

• 2/3 cup of flour
• 1/4 tsp of baking soda
• 1/4 tsp of baking powder
• 1/4 tsp of salt
• 2 tsp of pumpkin pie spice

I whisked the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients in the large bowl until it was well incorporated. This took about 2 – 3 minutes.

As a side note, this was the first time I’d ever used a whisk. Crazy, I know. I had always just used a mixer or a wooden spoon, or even a spatula if I had to. But I gave in, finally, and bought a whisk. It made it much easier for me, and I’m not sure why. I’m just glad I have it now!

I spooned out the mixture into a cupcake tin, making 12 cupcakes. I filled up about 3/4 of the way up, as instructed in the blog post I was referring to. It wasn’t as exact as I had hoped – I discovered that I’m terrible at eyeballing measurements. In the end, I just prayed that all would be okay in the end.

I set the timer for 20 minutes and popped the cupcakes in. Then, I cleaned as I waited. I tried to keep my mind off of them by doing busy work around the apartment, reading blogs, talking to people on GChat, but it was to no avail. I was truly anxious about the way they would turn out. The batter seemed a little runnier than batters are supposed to be, though I’m not sure how I would know the exact consistency of a “batter” since I’d never really done this before.

Finally, the timer went off.

I hurried over to the stove and grabbed an oven mitt before carefully opening the door of the oven. The spicy, pumpkin smell of fall wafted out through the kitchen and a part of me breathed a sigh of relief. I pulled the muffins out of the oven and set them on the stove to cool down. Now, came the waiting. I didn’t want to take one too soon because if it was still too hot, the (hopefully) custardy, gooey cupcake would just stick straight onto the paper. I didn’t have any cooking spray on hand, and had forgotten the ingredient at the store, so I just took my chances.

After another 20 minutes of waiting, I finally took one from the tray. I was nervous. They smelled good, they looked decent, so I really only had one way to find out if they tasted good. I unwrapped the cupcake and, true to my predictions, parts of the cupcake stuck to it. Still, it wasn’t nearly as much as I had anticipated. I took a bite and…well, it wasn’t half bad.

True, it wasn’t the best cupcake I’d ever eaten. But it wasn’t bad for a first attempt. If I were to do it again, I would want to find out what I did to make the batter so runny. The end result wasn’t bad, but there was a part of me that feared it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

Despite the doubts I have, I am still proud that I made this fall dessert dish. I had one just last night with a glass of apple cider. It did remind me why autumn is my favorite season.

What’s your favorite fall dessert? Have you ever tried to make it yourself?

American Chop Suey – a 9-Year Old’s Dream

When I opened up the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook lying around at my boyfriend’s apartment, I had one thing in mind: ground beef. I had just seen a commercial for Manwich (A sandwich is a sandwich, a Manwich is a meal) on TV and found myself craving ground beef, something I had not consumed in awhile. Before I went to the beef section of the cook book, though, I perused the pasta section just for kicks. Pasta is, after all, one of my favorite foods.

I stopped at a recipe that sounded easy to make, incorporated ground beef, and looked delicious: Spaghetti with mushroom sauce and ground beef. I was later told that this was, basically, American Chop Suey. I didn’t have spaghetti to use, so I resorted to what I did have in the cupboard: elbow macaroni. Yes. A 9-year old’s dream.

The recipe itself was simple enough, and I think it did turn out okay, but I did struggle immensely with chopping vegetables. I am both clumsy and extremely slow when it comes to the combination of a vegetable, a knife, and a cutting board. What should have taken me about 5 – 10 minutes according to the book actually took me closer to 15 – 20 minutes. It could be due to the fact that I refused help when my boyfriend offered, or my lack of ability to conceptualize what “dicing” meant when it came to mushrooms. In the end, the important thing was, I got it done. It wasn’t done as prettily or as quickly as I had hoped, but I figured, “You win some, you lose some.”

The rest of the cooking went fairly smoothly.  The book’s recipe makes 6 servings, which is what I ended up doing. I could do the math, but I didn’t want to screw up just because I wanted to size the recipe down. The recipe calls for:

• 1 lb. ground beef
• 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
• 1 can condensed cream of tomato soup
• 4 oz. diced mushrooms, drained - I used about 4 – 6 fresh mushrooms, cut up
• 10 oz. spaghetti – I used elbow macaroni 
• 1 medium sized onion, diced
• Italian spices – I didn’t have a mix in a bottle of spices so I used a pinch of thyme, some arugula, garlic, and salt
• Hot sauce – I used a little bit of Sriracha 

I threw the onions and the ground beef into a saucepan and cooked it until the meat was brown and the onions were “tender.” To be honest, I couldn’t tell about the onions but I did figure if the meat was brown, the onions were done too since onions cook quickly. It took about 5 – 7 minutes for the meat to brown enough so that I was able to move on. I didn’t realize how much beef 1 pound actually was.

Once the meat was mostly brown, I added in the 2 cans of soup, and the mushrooms. I covered the pot and brought it to a boil. Once it was boiling, I turned down the heat so that it would only “simmer” for 20 minutes. I had to Wikipedia that.

I added in the Italian spices and the Sriracha sauce. Then I stirred it around before putting the cover back on. I filled up another pot with water and put it on the stove to bring it to a boil for the pasta.

The multi-tasking part of this dish made me a little bit uneasy. I was afraid I would get too concentrated on one thing and forget another. But, I quickly realized, this particular strain of multi-tasking required very little attention. As I brought the water for the pasta to a boil, I would consistently stir the saucepan in fear of the ground beef getting stuck to the bottom – in retrospect, I’m not sure if I did anything wrong with that or if it’s just the way it is. But I was still paranoid about it and was constantly stirring.

I dropped the pasta in and glanced at the timer. The dish was almost done. It was then that I realized that we didn’t technically have any vegetables for dinner. I debated with myself just not having a vegetable for dinner – after all, mushrooms were technically veggies, right? In the end, the better side of me won out and I looked in the fridge and freezer to figure out what we had. One quick trip to Alex’s room to make sure that the “vegetable medley” by Green Giant that I found in the freezer was ours, I popped the frozen vegetables in to cook.

It wasn’t ideal, but I figured that as a beginner cook, I would have to cut myself some slack. At least we’d thought to buy frozen vegetables at all last time we went to Shaw’s.

Once the pasta was drained, I threw it into the saucepan with the ground beef, mushroom sauce and let it cook for just another minute before shutting the stove off. I separated out 2 plates, dished out the veggies and, well, there you have it.

My first meal. All by myself.

I have to admit that it wasn’t that bad, and it was pretty easy to make, despite the whole Melody vs. Chopping Vegetables ordeal. I would like to call it a success, but it wasn’t completely. Chopping issues aside, I had put the leftovers, which were plentiful, from the meal into a container for lunch the following day. When I heated it up on Monday, it was just a tasty as it had been the night before, but my lactose intolerance kicked in. The creaminess of the warm, but not quite hot, sauce did not jive well with my stomach for the rest of the day.

That, however, is not a cooking blunder, and although I may not throw this into my hopefully developing “Greatest Hits” page, I am still going to chalk this particular meal up to be most successful.

The next challenge? Maybe I’ll try baking…

Not Just Culinarily Challenged

For the first 18 years of my life, I was blessed with home cooked delicacies of Chinese/Vietnamese descent from my parents. My father, with his passion for all things delicious, had perfected traditional dishes and I was spoiled with them as a result. Yes, I was a spoiled little brat. For 18 years, I could not wait to leave home so that I didn’t have to eat Chinese/Vietnamese food every night anymore.

Then, I went to college.

What a wake up call that was. Eating at the Warren Towers dining hall every night wasn’t so bad – for September. But I very quickly realized how great I had it at home – eating non-MSG filled Chinese food, having my meals prepared with love by my father, feeling good after I ate rather than fat. Next year, I vowed, next year I will cook more.

Unfortunately, “next year” turned into “4 years later.” And here we are.

The pasta I made that was more than just a little "al dente." Whoops.

My second year, my boyfriend lived off-campus and liked to dabble in his new-found freedom from a dining plan. Turns out, he’s a pretty good cook. Between him and the West Campus Burger in the dining hall, I was all set. When Alex went out of town, I would eat out or go home for the weekend. My plan was so efficiently realized that my kitchen continued to stay filled with frozen dinners, leftovers from take out, and beer. I was, and probably still am, the epitome of college men everywhere.

Except, I’m a woman. I should know how to do things like cook an egg. I should know how to make pasta. I should know how to make rice – I’m a woman and I’m Asian! Unfortunately, that part of the woman/Asian gene seems to be recessive in me. Nothing ever comes out the way I want it to, I usually majorly screw something up, most of the time I forget an important ingredient. To put it simply, I am Culiniarily Challenged.

But now that both my boyfriend and I have graduated college, now that we each have kitchens we don’t have to fight with 14 people to use,  now that we have agreed that our eating out portion of the expense pie is far too large, I have decided that it might be time to grow up. It also helped when Alex went out of town for a week, I couldn’t go home, and I was determined not to eat out every night. Let’s just say, I’m lucky I neither starved nor injured myself trying to cook.

And who knows? Cooking might be fun.