Art Show: Pretzels

My best friend is having her final studio art show tomorrow and she asked me to "cater" for her. I would do it for her no matter what but I'm also just excited to do an actual "event." (I use quotes because I don't feel legit yet) Well the first thing I made was the easiest and simplest, chocolate covered pretzels. Just melt different chocolates and drizzle over pretzel rods. I let them dry part way up right and then laid them on a tray to finish. I accidentally left them all tempting my roommate. She didn't see the note that she could eat some... oops

 I'll upload the rest of the food later!

More Baked Goods

Apparently I've been on a baking streak recently, so what did I do with ripe bananas? Make banana nut muffins of course. I only had half the amount of bananas so I halved the recipe and added a little bit extra sugar and extract because the batter just tasted like it needed a some extra. Turned out delicious and was perfect with a large cup of coffee for breakfast.

Lemon Poppy Seed Cake

A simple easy lemon poppy seed cake. Quick to make and always impresses. I rarely make the same recipe more than once but this is delicious and a favorite of my mom's so it had to be good.

Killer Carrot Cake

While at Andrea's, we decided we wanted desert. Well I love to raid people's kitchens and see what concoction to make. I decided on carrot cake with brown sugar frosting. Well it was three of us who had some slices of cake and we all started out as happy young ladies, excited for our little treat. Well as we kept going the sugar began to hit. I made the entire recipe of frosting and used it all on the cake, bad idea. It was way too much sugar and we soon began to crash. It was a delicious cake, but there was too much sugar, don't make the same mistake.


As for the recipes, since it was "pantry leftover" kind of baking I made some changes.
For the cake:
1. We didn't have whole wheat flour so we used the same amount of all purpose flour.
2. I read the recipe wrong and thought the cream cheese was for the cake and since we didn't have any, I added the same amount of vanilla yogurt into the batter. It was actually a great mistake since the cake ended up nice and moist.
3. We didn't add nuts
For the frosting:
1. we didn't have powdered sugar so we used normal sugar, but I would recomend using powdered if possible
2. I added like 1 tsp of vanilla extract
3. We made the entire batch but really only make half of the frosting recipe, unless you like sugar comas, in that case go ahead.

Wine Tasting

Earlier in the year a bunch of my friends and I went wine tasting at Chateau Morrisette one foggy Saturday morning. I was pleasantly surprised in several ways.
1. Virginia wines can be good. Who knew?
2. I preferred the white wines. I know I have always been more of a red wine lady but these white wines were the perfect balance between, crisp, sweet, and refreshing.
3. Apparently you can make wine out of berries other than grapes. The last tasting was of a blackberry wine and although I'm usually not a fan of desert wine, the tartness of the blackberries made the sweetness more delicious than cloyingly sweet.



Well this little blast from the past was brought on because tonight my friend and I enjoyed a little wine from Chateau Morrisette while doing homework. This was the Sweet Mountain Laurel and I admit I liked the Vidal Blanc better but this was already chilled at Kroger so well it had to do.

Veggie "Burger"

Veggie burgers have a bad reputation and unfortunately most people won't even try them, but when done right they are absolutely delicious. This was delicious but kind of lacked the whole burger thing...


I chose this recipe because it looked simple but I should've known the patty wasn't going to hold when there was no egg or other binder in the recipe. I also probably didn't mash the ingredients together enough. So instead of a veggie burger, I had a quinoa and black bean mix (I added extra cumin because the recipe's amount wasn't enough). The plan was to put the patty on a whole wheat muffin with a feta and roasted tomato mix but since the burger disintegrated it became more like two toasts with toppings. It was actually really tasty just not exactly the end result I was hoping for.

The side was asparagus cooked quickly in a pan (no oil or anything) until bright green then drizzled with olive oil and some grated Parmesan cheese. It really doesn't need anything else.