Raspberry Filled cupcakes with coconut cream cheese frosting

Since passing, I've been a bit uninspired about posting. I went out to eat a bunch to celebrate (Estancia, 24 Diner, and Chinatown Mopac to name a few) and didn't cook much for a few days. Then yesterday, for whatever reason, I got inspired and made gnocchi with pasta sauce made with basil from my garden. And then I got invited to a cheese tasting party today and decided to make a dessert to bring and came up with raspberry filled cupcakes with coconut cream cheese frosting.

White cupcakes (from Baked)
2 1/2 c cake flour
3/4 c AP Flour
3/4 t kosher salt
1 T baking powder
1 t baking soda

1 stick butter, softened
1/2 c shortening
1 3/4 c sugar
1 T vanilla extract
1 egg + 1 yolk
1 1/2 c cold water

1/4 t cream of tartar
3 egg whites

preheat oven to 325 F. In a large bowl whisk together flours, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Set aside. Cream together the butter, shortening, and sugar. Add in the vanilla and egg+yolk and combine. Alternate in the flour mixture and the water. In a separate bowl (that is SUPER clean), whisk the egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Be sure to not get *any* yolk into this because it won't turn out at all. Fold in the egg whites to the rest of the batter. Bake for 20-30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. I can't really give a better time estimate because my oven is horrible and some of the cupcakes had to be taken out at 20 minutes and some of them had to be taken out at 30.


Raspberry filling
2 c fresh raspberries (although you could use frozen, but it's what I had on hand)
1 T orange juice
1/3 c sugar
1.5 T corn starch

bring all ingredients to a boil, stirring and smashing the raspberries until thickened. Allow to cool.

Cream cheese frosting
8 oz cream cheese
5 T butter, softened
2 t vanilla extract
1 1/2 c powdered sugar

beat the cream cheese, butter, and vanilla together until well combined. Add in the powdered sugar in thirds.

To assemble:

cut a cone out of the top of each cupcake and shave off the bottom part so that you have a flat disk and a cupcake with a hole in it. Spoon in some of the raspberry filling, top with the cupcake disk and then cover in the cream cheese frosting. It's easier if the frosting is at room temp so it spreads well. Top with grated, sweetened coconut and enjoy. :)

Candidate.

You know what tastes better than pesto made from organic basil that you grew from seeds in your garden? Passing the second year defense.

and now I'm going to start cooking and blogging and being a human being again. It's going to be great.

salvage the vegetables before they rot (aka potato) soup

Actually, the title is sort of misleading... the potatoes weren't close to rotting but the celery, onion and carrots were.

Sometimes I buy vegetables because they're "good to have" and serve as a good base for a myriad of dishes. These usually include celery, carrots, onion, and garlic. I bought a whole bunch of stuff over the past several months and promptly forgot about them when I stopped cooking. Looking through my pantry this evening, I found a whole bunch of stuff that was about to go bad, so I threw it together to make a soup and it's pretty good.

Potato Cheese Soup

1 medium onion, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 medium-large carrots, peeled and diced
2 T olive oil
2-4 cloves garlic, grated
32 oz vegetable stock
32 oz chicken stock
7-8 medium yukon gold potatoes, peeled and roughly cubed
fresh parsley
celery leaves
grated cheddar cheese

Heat olive oil. Sweat onions, carrots, and celery and add a big pinch of salt. Stir occasionally. Add in chicken and veggie stock and bring to a boil. Add in garlic and then the potatoes. Bring it back to a boil and allow the potatoes to cook until tender. Stick blender it and then taste for seasoning. Add salt, if needed (probably so). Stir in parsley and celery leaves. In each bowl, garnish with a large helping a cheddar cheese and homemade croutons.

Colby, on Justin Bieber:

"Why is he so popular? Isn't he like... Canadian?"


and now i'm quite literally ROFLing.

I should probably go to sleep, but I'd like to not fail out of grad school

hollek@conestoga:~/masters$ lol
No command 'lol' found, did you mean:
Command 'col' from package 'bsdmainutils' (main)
Command 'sol' from package 'aisleriot' (main)
lol: command not found


that shouldn't be that funny, but it's 5:40 A-fucking-M and I'm still up and not finished with this "draft" of my thesis. It's due at some point today and I have a feeling that people are going to be getting a copy of this at 11:59 PM.

Also, my teeth hurt from these Ricola Lemon Mint lozenges. I don't think they can actually be called "throat drops" but rather "candy masquerading as medicine".

Apology

Dear my body,

I sincerely apologize for the chemical warfare that I've been waging against you for the past few weeks. I promise to make this up to you by entering a medically induced (Nyquil) coma upon submission of my thesis to my committee. In addition, if we're still nearly on the verge of death, I promise to take us to a doctor's office.

Love,

Julie

sometimes caffeine can totally replace sleep... and sometimes it can't.

So I was taking a look at analytics wondering what the hell I had done to alienate my entire readership (of 3 people) when I realized that, oops, I had taken out the analytics in the CSS code when I changed the blog back to a default blogger face thing. (Yes, I just called it a face thing because I'm tired and frustrated and I've reminded myself clearly why I hate programming.)


also, I may have just written this program to get results for my masters thesis:

program shitfuck

implicit none
integer::i
real:: crap, n, want
open(1000,file='fuck.it')
do i = 1, 27
read(1000,*) n, crap
want = sqrt(sqrt(n)*crap/n)
print*, want
end do


end


bonus points if you can figure out what language this is programmed in (aside from, ahem, french).