February 28th, 2011

Orange Olive Oil Cake

Orange Olive Oil Cake

This recipe is actually from Smitten Kitten, and was originally made with blood oranges. I feel the blood oranges are far too precious to bake with, so I substituted naval oranges. In the end, I believe this was the correct choice. The bread itself is incredibly sweet, so a sweet citrus like blood orange would only make it nauseatingly sweet in my opinion. The naval orange had a delicious tart flavor that complimented the cake. And it was chalk-full of orange chunks.

Big hit at the coffee machine at work. Gone within an hour. If you notice, I only bake for my coworkers. It's too dangerous to keep this kind of stuff in my house.

February 27th, 2011

Naval oranges

These were a part of my Orange Olive Cake preparation. Three oranges go into this cake, which is more like a sweet bread. Perfect for breakfast, delicious with tea.

The process of actually cutting up these oranges, however, is elaborate. First you chop off the tops and bottoms like shown in this photo. then you use a knife to remove the rest of the peel and pith from the sides. Then comes the annoying part: You cut each section out individually so as to end up with only the juicy flesh and not the skin separating the sections.

I do have detailed step-by-step photos of this process, but I'm limited to one per day on here. I like to abide by my own arbitrarily made rules. The end product is tomorrow's photo.

February 25th, 2011

1.5 liters of Relaxation

I was just bragging that I found this in a 1.5L bottle. This is fabulous, easy to go down wine. I'm pretty sure they should sell it in boxes, just so I can have 4L in the fridge and handy at all times. It would be so much easier for parties.

February 22nd, 2011

Yellow poms, this week's flowers

This week's flowers are Poms! So simply, but sturdy and colorful during this drab time of year.

I would like to buy tulips since they're in-season, but tulip stems tend to outgrow their leaves and looks like weird long-necked adolescents after an awkward growth spurt. Then they flop over. It's a sad process. So I don't buy them.

February 20th, 2011

Graffiti on the bus stop bench
Everett, MA

Saturday mornings I like to do errand-based destination runs. One of my favorites, and perfect given my current short-distance minimalist running, is Target. It's approximately 4 miles away with limited traffic to dodge through.

This day had a vicious wind. It was only in the 20s, but the wind. Wow. I got an ice cream headache just walking through the parking lot. Internal pain-inducing wind is not cool, especially when you're underdressed and soaked in sweat. Half the time I do this, I buy sweatpants or something at Target. It's sad.

This shot was taken while I was waiting for the bus to take me home. Random drawing/graffiti on the bench.

February 18th, 2011

Lemon Meringue Tart
Beacon Hill Bistro
Boston, MA

Changing things up at lunch today, we made a reservation at Beacon Hill Bistro. A little fancier than our usual fare and also further down Charles Street.

Funny story. Everyone was gathering to depart at 12:10pm. My test wasn't complete. I had 3-4 minutes left of run time. I told one of the girls to not wait, since it was going to be a little while, everyone walks really slowly anyway and I'd catch up. She says okay and they head off.

I finish my test and head down the slowest elevators ever - the elevators that visitors take. So busy and confusing. I never thought they were coming, but when they did it was a surprisingly short trip down. I booked it out of the building and down Charles Street to the restaurant. I arrive, say I'm with the party of eight -- and they say I'm the first to arrive.

Really? The first? When I left like 8 minutes after they did for a 5 minute walk?

I take a seat in the waiting area and few a minutes later they arrive. They looked surprised. I inwardly roll my eyes, and say to the girl I told to go ahead with me: "I told you they way insanely slow." But given that we took the same exact route I'm still baffled as to how they managed to both end up behind me and not see me pass.

In any case, my meal was delicious. I had a butternut squash sandwich - which was sweet and savory all at once in a toasted bread. Perfect. I didn't eat the fries - why do restaurants still put fries with meals? Ew. This isn't McDonalds. Dessert, however, was this delicious lemon meringue tart. The lemon curd was ultra sweet, but the meringue and crust offset it with buttery, creamy goodness. The touch of caramel also went well with the sweet-tart lemon.

Yum. Totally lavish for a workday lunch.

February 16th, 2011

Coconut Cream Cupcakes

Coconut cupcakes Part 2 starts here. I frosted the tops of the cupcakes with the same coconut frosting, then rolled them in toasted sweetened coconut flakes.

As you can tell, this was like semi-homemade since I used the box cake and bought sweetened coconut flakes. My previous coconut cake from two weeks ago was far more advanced with every last thing from scratch - coconut cracking fresh.

But these were a lot more moist than all of my from-scratch cakes, so I fell back on the box after several disappointing cake textures. Everyone loved these and they disappeared almost immediately. Sweet decadence. I can still smell the sugar coconut in the air.

This was a request by the way, from a coconut loving birthday coworker.

February 15th, 2011

Filling the coconut cupcakes

These are my half-complete coconut cupcakes. It's a basic yellow vanilla cake mix. Instead of water, I used coconut water. I added pudding mix for moisture. I added coconut extract for amazing flavor.

I then made a coconut frosting from scratch - which was a little runnier than I wanted, but still fluffy, sweet and most important coconutty. It was infused with coconut extract also, along with coconut milk.

I filled up a pastry bag with the frosting, buried the end into each cupcake and squeezed until the tops bulged and threatened to split.

That was Part 1.

February 14th, 2011

Breakfast and lunch: Protein shake, roasted veggies and a blood orange

I was scraping the bottom of the barrel with this photo, I'll admit. I just was documenting what I was taking to eat that day and was never meant to be an impressive photo. I love blood oranges. I'm obsessed with protein shakes, specifically Biochem 100% Whey Vanilla. Roasted veggies are better than steamed.

I have little else to say about this.

February 12th, 2011

Downtown Boston from the pier in East Boston, MA

It's taken my 9 months to take this very simple photos. It's the view from East Boston across the harbor to downtown. It's stunning. The most beautiful view in all of Boston.

I run past this daily (or would be daily if the weather were better) as I jog around the harbor.

This is why East Boston rocks.

February 9th, 2011

Nail Rescue

At the beginning of January I became really obsessed with fake nails. I was buying and applying those Broadway Nails Petites in peach. They're much shorter than your classic fake nails, almost coming across as natural. I had always imagined that I'd immediately break them off - rather like the cheap fake nails you get with Halloween costumes at CVS. These are much nicer. I was blown away by the strength of the nails. Sturdier than my own naturally grown nails. And they stayed in place - which they should since you're using superglue to apply them.

The major drawback that I learned after the fact was that no matter how gentle you are when removing the nails, they will have destroyed your natural nail below. Over a month later, my nails are still, peeling, weak and torn up. There is no going back from this! So I turned to Sally Hansen nail rescue to try to rub some gel-based strength back into them. I don't have high hopes, but I'm willing to try anything at this point.

February 7th, 2011

Mango Mousse and Chocolate-Espresso Cake

The second birthday of the week inspired a new level of cake-making. My very first mousse cake. Mango mousse at that. I've been in love with the mango mousse from the Whole Foods bakery for several years now. It's technically made off-site at a local bakery, but I forget the precise name.

In any case, I went looking for a simple mango cake recipe. Then I realized that I didn't have the beautiful acetate wraps to hole it in place. I did some shopping over the weekend, but couldn't find anything locally. I considered using a clear cellophane used to wrap books or gift baskets, but decided against it in the end. Instead, I went in search of a recipe that was a little sturdier - and fell upon this Mango Mousse and Chocolate-Espresso Cake at the blog Desserts For Breakfasts. The sturdy bottom layer made from a rich mocha topped by a fluffy mango mousse and finished with a sweet espresso jelly, all wrapped and held together in a thin bark of bittersweet chocolate.

The original recipe is designed for 6 small cakes, but I made a 9 inch single cake instead. I was able to bake the cake part in a single pan as a result rather than deal with a baking tray. This made the thin chocolate wrap harder to handle in the end (an extra set of hands would be a lot easier), but I got it on and it turned out brilliantly.

The only bad part of the cake, was the cake-part itself - the chocolate cake was really dense. Again, a density issue with these from-scratch cakes. I was told that it was texturally appealing when eaten in combination with the mango mousse and espresso jelly, however. In the future, I will cut out the cake part altogether though and just make a solid mousse-and-jelly cake. Or do a layered mousse cake with maybe passion fruit, mango and vanilla cream. Yum.

February 6th, 2011

Espresso syrup

I spent the day making more cake. Another multilayered, multi-step baked good that took hours to complete.

This particular shot is the espresso syrup that I used to between the chocolate cake layer and the mango mousse. It was probably the easier part to make out of the entire cake.

February 4th, 2011

Coconut Cream Layer Cake

I have been on a baking binge this winter and the birthdays of coworkers has finally given me a safe outlet. I was chatting with one of the technicians about the project manager who only wears Hawaiian shirts (he's from Hawaii), and mentioned that he was wearing a new shirt today. Last year we came up with this awesome plan to have everyone wear Hawaiian shirts for the day in honor of his birthday. So when the PM walked into the lab, the technician naturally remembered to ask when his birthday was. "Tomorrow."

Woah. We had no time! So we immediately send out an e-mail to everyone to get them in on the last-minute Hawaiian shirt-wearing theme. Then began to plan our Hawaiian-themed party. Really this just involved someone maybe picking up some leis and me agreeing to make a cake. So I went with coconut, since I love coconut.

I chose Alton Brown's Coconut Cake by way of this really delicious baking blog. It would be one of my first traditional cakes from scratch. What I mean by traditional is that I really love cake mix with added pudding. I will jazz up the mix, go to down on shapes and frosting - but the base cake is never my own creation when it comes to fluffy, cakey cake. This is kind of a daunting recipe. Four layers, filling, 7-minute frosting, and 5 different types of coconut products.

I managed to get the four layers baked, filling, frosted and topped, following instructions to the t, but mine really wasn't quite as lovely looking as the recipe blog photos. I used pre-separated egg whites for the batter, which immediately fell after I reached stiff peaks. So they weren't as fluffy as they were supposed to be. this resulted in a more dense, drier cake. However, the coconut water-soak saved the day to make it ultra moist. The 7-minute frosting was also less fluffy than it was supposed to be, which I'm sure was a temperature thing that I didn't notice. You can tell that its sort of glassy.

Overall everyone loved the cake - its richly sweet with every kind of coconut you can think of - coconut cream, coconut water, coconut milk, coconut extract, coconut shavings. I ended up cracking a coconut on my front stoop in like 20 degree weather with a hammer because I having issues cracking indoors. A man was walking by with his Pomeranian who really, really wanted some coconut. It was an odd scene between us.

This image was captured last minute on the travel tray right before we cut into it. Poor lighting. I would like a prettier cake holder with a 9-inch base rather than 8 inch, but this old Tupperware one that my mom gave me has the most secure handle/locking mechanism on the market. The new ones are all really sketch.

February 3rd, 2011

Relax Cool Red Wine

My favorite wine comes in a sweet red in addition to the original riesling.

February 2nd, 2011

Maverick Square Mural
East Boston, MA

I was waiting for my bus in Maverick Square, when I looked up to notice this mural overlooking the streets. As I tried to find a decent angle, an older gentleman started chatting with me. He introduced himself by way of explaining that he has a copy of that mural, which was actually painted from a turn-of-the-century postcard.

It turns out that he was an East Boston native, up visiting his daughter from Florida with his wife. He explained that there is an entire set of East Boston postcards from that era, which can often be found at local fleamarkets. He gave me some tips on where to find fleamarkets, and chatted a bit more about how the face of the square had changed over the years. He and his wife took off on the 116 bus a few minutes later and I was left wondering how hard it would be to locate one of these postcards when fleamarket attendees hardly have business pages documenting the goods they have for sale.

February 1st, 2011

Never ending snow
East Boston, MA

It's very difficult for me to snap photos on week days. The fact is, I'm usually in such a rush to get to work in the morning, that any am photography will have to take place between my kitchen and the train station. I am a creature of habit who takes nearly the same route each day, so I am not offered a variety of brilliant photographic moments.

Then I labor indoors at work all day. When I emerge, it is dark! I am again confined to photographing things at the gym, the supermarket or on my dark commute. Also a bit limited.

So this leaves me with photographs like this one, where I just demonstrate on how tedious all this snow is getting to be with a general, poorly lit image of the freshly cleared sidewalk. This will not be the last, I'm sure.