Vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
It’s a mom-and-daughter baking project. I baked the cupcakes and mixed the frosting. Sam tinted the frosting and piped them on the cupcakes. She’s not a pastry chef. She’s turning 16 tomorrow and she’s never taken baking classes. If you want the full story on how we did the cupcakes, see “Once upon a time, she wanted to be a chef.”
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Carrot cupcakes
Based on a recipe found in Random Thoughts, I halved the ingredients to make cupcakes instead of two round cakes, got rid of the raisins (my kids don’t like raisins), retained the original amount of walnuts (love the stuff!) and substituted baking powder for the soda. The great thing about this recipe is how uncomplicated it is. Preparation took about 20 minutes and the baking time is 20 minutes as well. I started the preparations at 6.00 a.m. and the carrot cupcakes still made it to the kids’ lunchboxes in time for the arrival of the school bus at 6.45.
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Martha Stewart’s plum coffee muffins
The recipe is from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I’ve tried about half a dozen recipes from the cookbook and all have been great. Looks like I finally found a cookbook with real recipes rather than just Photoshopped food pics. I’ve done this muffin recipe before using preserved seedless plums and they were great. Just substitute fresh pitted plums and follow the same recipe to make muffins like the ones in the photo.
The obvious question is which is better — the version with the preserved plums or the one with fresh plums?
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Blueberry streusel cupcakes
When I asked my husband to buy frozen blueberries, I was half expecting that he’d come home with a pack of “Baguio-grown” blueberries. Wishful thinking, I guess, because there were only packs of imported blueberries in the supermarket. We grow blueberries at Trinidad Valley in Benguet but we never seem to be able to find them in local markets.
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