Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes

For Christmas my mom sent me a little cupcake making contraption that make the core of cupcakes a different color from the outside of the cupcakes, essentially creating vertical layers in a cupcake. A few weeks ago two of my good friends came over and I wanted to make us a treat. I figured I would try out the little contraption.

K and I got to work preparing the batter. I wanted to use my standard chocolate and vanilla cake recipes, so it took a bit of preparation.

Once all of the ingredients were ready, we got to mixing.

Then using the little cupcake core contraption, we put the batters into the tins. For whatever reason, it seemed easier to put the vanilla in the middle and the chocolate outside, so that is what we did. While they were baking, we made my standard Oreo cream cheese frosting.

Once the cupcakes were cooled, we frosted them and were ready to take a bite and see the perfect vertical layers of batter.

Unfortunately, the vertical layers didn't work and for the most part, we ended up with horizontal layers. They were still delicious, but not as aesthetically pleasing as I was hoping for. I'm not sure if the cupcake contraption didn't work because the batter wasn't the same (vanilla with half of it dyed) or if it simply doesn't work as well as intended. Once we move, I will have to give it another go!

Baby Tunic and Leggings

One of my neighborhood friends had a baby girl about three months after T was born. The baby girl was still in her mama's tummy at our Halloween party, but at the party, we talked about T's costume and the fact that he will never wear those black leggings again.

I asked her if maybe she would like them for her baby girl when the time comes. She was all for it. The time came, but it seemed weird to give her just an old pair of black leggings, so I decided that I would just make a little outfit of it.

Using the same peasant dress pattern that I have used before, I made this little one. I changed it slightly to add long sleeves since it would be Spring when the little girl would likely fit into the leggings. I intended to still keep the sleeves a tad poofy and close them around the wrist with elastic, but I had a little mishap and had to rethink the situation. I pared down the sleeve and now it is just a regular old sleeve. I also made the length a little shorter since I wanted it more of a tunic than a dress. I didn't know how long to make the tunic, since I don't have one just sitting about, so I used one of T's onesies to kind of guess the length. Hopefully it's not too short!

The dress is so simple to do up. Cut out the pieces, sew on the sleeves to the front.

Then sew them to the back piece. Do up the hems and add elastic to the neck. Done! (Note that this photo is pre-neck elastic.)

Next up were the leggings. I figured I could just leave them black, but why not add something cute!? I was considering ruffling the bum with the same fabric, but decided against it. I settled, instead, on little bows. They were super simple to make.

Then using T's old leggings, I just sewed them to the lower, outside seams. Another friend and I went over to meet the little one a few weeks back and she is just adorable. Hopefully this little outfit fits her soon - Spring is on the way! Hopefully!!

Turtle Fail

Last week I got a crazy cold that had me in bed each night with the boys - at 7pm. This week I am feeling much better, but I am still quite exhausted and also trying to catch up on everything I didn't do last week. I'm not sure if I have mentioned it on the blog, but we are going to be moving to the US for a few years. Y put in for a transfer and got it! We will probably head out in May, which gives us a bit of time to go through our entire place, throw stuff out, and organize for the move. As a result, I probably won't be doing too much for the blog in the coming weeks. The good news is that I have a lot of projects that I have done and just not yet blogged about. So, hopefully I can stay up on posting twice a week, but I might slide every once in a while.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, K's school took a field trip to the aquarium. K was very excited about this! They got to take an onigiri for lunch and some snack. I asked K if he wanted to go to the grocery store to pick something out, but he requested that I make bread that looks like a fish. Hmmmm...I had no idea if this was something he had seen before or had just come up with, but my breadmaker book has a recipe for sweet turtle breads (カメロンパン - kame melon pan）. I decided this would be the easiest route. I started with the dough in the breadmaker. Once the dough was ready, I divided it into quarters and then chopped the tops off of each triangle.

I divided the top half into five little balls and put them on a lined cookie sheet.

I streched the balls so that they slightly resembled a head, a tail, arms and legs. Then I rolled the top and put the turtle's back on the body parts.

The next step was to make the top cookie part of the bread. I mixed butter and sugar with some egg.

Then added flour and mixed until it looked like batter. Kind of.

I divided that into quarters, rolled each quarter out, and put a shell on the turtle.

Then I scored the cookie so it would look more like a shell. This was not in the instructions in the book - I just thought it would look cute. This could be the start of where everything went awry.

I let them rest so they could rise and when I checked back on them I was so sad. They turned into little blobs. Not the cute little turtles I was hoping for.

From the side they don't look too bad, but this was prior to baking, mind you.

When they were baked, they didn't look like turtles at all. Luckily I made them on a Tuesday night and the field trip wasn't until Thursday. We still had time to go buy something else for K to take. In the morning I showed him the blobs and told him that it was no problem if he wanted to go to the grocery store to get something else to take. He looked me in the eye and with the sweetest little voice said, "But mama, I love them." My heart exploded. I didn't know if he was just saying that to be nice to me, but Y told me that K told him how excited he was about his kame melon pan that mama made. I love him.

The final obstacle was to find something to put the turtle in so that K could throw it in his backpack without crumbling it. I found this bento box at the 100 yen store and it was the biggest one I could find. I had to squish the turtle in there, but he fit and K took him on the field trip. He only had a few bites of the turtle, but that was just fine by me.

 

 

Healthy (?) Brownies

I wrote last week about how we had 17 people at our house two weekends ago, 9 of whom were kids. In addition to the two cheesecakes I made, I thought a batch of brownies might go over well with the kids. Around the same time I was planning my desserts, a friend of mine of Facebook asked a general question if anyone had ever made brownies with spinach in them. What? I looked online and found that Jessica Seinfeld had a recipe from her "Deceptively Delicious" book for brownies with spinach and carrots in them. The recipe was online, so I figured I would give it a try.

I made my spinach puree. At this point, I thought about just stopping the madness and finding a new recipe. T is close to starting solids, I could just freeze the puree for when he needs it in a few weeks.

The carrots were already steaming, however, so I figured I might as well keep going. But yikes, this did not seem like a good idea to me. I followed the recipe closely, only substituting butter in for the margarine.

As I mixed it all up, it did start to resemble brownie batter, but I just couldn't get the bright green and orange out of my head.

I baked them up regardless, and let them cool down completely before trying one (as per the recipe). In the end, I just wasn't all that impressed as they didn't seem brownie-like to me. I had Y try one, he said it was fine. K seemed to like them just fine as well, but I am left unconvinced. At the party, only one or two were taken - the cheesecake was obviously better.

 

It's not that they tasted bad. For the most part you couldn't taste the spinach, although I did feel something tasted strange in there. The consistency was also a tad off for me. But most importantly, given that there is 1 cup of purees and then the pan is cut into 12 (I did mine into 16) pieces, I wouldn't really consider these a way to get in the veggies. With 16 squares cut, that equals out to a whopping 1 tablespoon of vegetable puree per brownie. That's not really worth the lack of deliciousness to me.

 

That being said, I am lucky in that K is a little veggie monster. His favorite food is asparagus, closely followed by brocolli. He doesn't care much for pork or beef, but he loves every other protein imaginable. I guess if my kid wouldn't touch a veggie, I might make these again, but for the meantime, I think I will stick to my full fat, full sugar, nothing-healthy-at-all brownies ;)

Banana Muffins

I'm not going to lie - at this point, I have made banana bread a few too many times on this blog. I just can't stop! It's so perfect when you have a whole bunch of bananas that are getting over-ripe since someone decided that this week he doesn't like bananas. I have used the same basic recipe every time, just switching it up with what I add in. So far, I have yet to find a combination that doesn't work.

This time I used all butter, and a half a cup of granulated sugar with half a cup of brown sugar (as that is what I had in the house). I didn't do any other changes when mixing it up.

Once the basic recipe was ready, it was time to get creative. I originally wanted to make two little loafs - one to eat here and one to take to Y's parents' house, but I didn't have any more of the mini loaf pans. Instead I made muffins. The only muffin liners I had, however, were really big - like Costco sized. I wasn't sure how many muffins it would make, but I did still want two different flavors.

After dividing the batter in half, I decided that one would have chocolate chips in it. I emptied out the last of the chocolate chip bag and this was all that was left. Uhhhh, lame. I scrambled around the kitchen, but couldn't find any other chocolate to put in aside from M&Ms. M&Ms and banana bread sounded weird to me for some reason. Then I remembered that I had some Mexican hot chocolate tablets in the cupboard. I had never baked with Abuelita before, but I figured it would be okay.

I chopped up half of a tablet and threw it in.

The other half of the batter got broken up pecans and dried cranberries.

Once they were all mixed up, I put them into the muffin liners. I only got three muffins for each batter. A tad bit disappointing, if I do say so myself. I'm not sure why, but it seems I forgot to take photos of the finished product. You'll just have to believe me - they looked beautiful and holy moly were they delicious. The Abuelita and chocolate chip one was surprisingly good. It had a slight cinnamon taste to it and a few grains of crunchy sugar here and there, which totally reminded me of being little and sneaking a little piece while my mom made our hot chocolate.Yum!! These breads further my theory that it is impossible to make a bad banana bread using this recipe as the base. Try it!!

Stroller/Car Seat Blanket

Happy New Year!! Sorry for the lack of posts recently. We were at Y's parents' house all last week and it was glorious. I decided that rather than blog, I would catch up on my sleep. So I did. I slept a lot. It was perfect. Because of the holidays, I have a few posts about things that I have made that are really quite old at this point. But, while they are old to me, they are still new to you! So here we go!!

The weather turned a bit chilly here a few months ago. At that point, T was still tiny (look at him!!) and we didn't have a coat for him. I would just put him in my wrap and then wrap blankets or my jacket around us. This worked fine, but took a bit of time to deal with. Also, as soon as I wrapped him up like that, he would pass out - he was probably two or three months old at the time. The passing out bit wasn't too much of an issue, except on K's school days. I really wanted to keep him awake until the bus picked up K so that we could go home and nap together. I realized that if I put him in his stroller, he would stay awake, but he also tended to just kick the blankets off. So, I made him a little stroller blanket.

I started with a big square of fabric - about a meter on all sides. I used two fleeces (one for the outside and one for the inside) as well as a thick batting.

I layered them all together and then folded the whole thing into fourths.

Using a Sharpie, I drew a line so that the corner with all raw edges was rounded and then sides going out to either end were a bit curved. You can kind of see the line in the photo below if you look closely.

Then I cut along the line and it looked like this.

The batting was a tad small, so it didn't meet up perfectly at the corners, but I just chose to not worry about that bit. I did, however, baste it as well as I could to the inside fleece. I wanted the blanket to be hooded, so I folded one of the rounded edges together so that the blanket was folded diagonally and drew a line across horizontally, then sewed it up. I did the same for the outside piece of fabric as well.

 

Then I sewed it up, right sides together, making sure to line up the seams from the hooded part and leaving a bit of a gap for turning. I turned it right side out and then top stiched all the way around. Since it was to be a blanket for a stroller, I needed to cut slits into it so the straps would fit through. I kind of guessed on this bit, but luckily it worked out well (at the beginning at least).

I cut the slits and then pinned the cut edges together.

Thinking I was all smart since fleece won't unravel, I just zig zagged around the slits. It made a huge mess. :(

The slits ended up super wavy and not nice looking at all. After all the work, I totally ruined it!! Good thing this was in the back, so no one would see it until I took T out. Still, I hated what I had just done and figured there had to be a solution.

I kept thinking for a few days, all the while using it.

T loved it, but eventually he wanted his arms free. Luckily, a good friend of ours sent us a beautiful fleece jacket for T, so he would wear that and then I would wrap up his little body and legs in the blanket.

As soon as we got in to a shop or on the train, I would unwrap him and his little body would feel so toasty. As we both were loving the blanket, I decided that I would make two more - one for our new niece and one for a good friend's daughter, both born at the end of November.

 

I decided that the best way to fix the wavy slits were to use a bias tape of sorts. I didn't want to use real bias tape since the blanket was quite thick and I figured I would mess it up. Instead I settled on strips of the lining fleece. I also worked out a much better way to deal with it. I assembled the blankets the same way I did T's, but before cutting the slits, I drew them on and then sewed around them.

 

 

 

Then I cut them open. Since they were sewn together, I didn't have to deal with pinning that many layers of fabric together.

 

 

Next I cut super long strips of the lining fleece, each about 8 cm wide and sewed them around the slits, about 4 centimeters on either side of the blanket. This was not an easy task - the machine was working it's way through one layer of batting and four layers of fleece. As a result, it didn't turn out perfect, but looked way better than the wavy mess I had made of T's.

 

 

 

 

Not perfect, but better than the prototype. I ended up fixing T's as well and I like it much better now. I made these before each of the new babies were born and gave them away just before and just after their births. We saw our little niece (who was given the pink one) over the New Year and she was using her blanket for her car seat. She looked so sweet all snuggled up in it. Her parents said that it works really well - wahoo!!

 

 

Unfortunately T is over his at this point. We got a lot of use out of it, but he doesn't like being all wrapped up in it any more. Homie's on the move! Also, given that we wait for the K's bus for a good ten minutes and it is freezing, we use a different stroller bag that is down and super duper toasty. He still doesn't much care for it, but it is zipped like a sleeping bag, so he can't bust his way out of it. Too bad, little man!!