What’m I making for this Friday, the last post-concert reception for the year? I’m so glad you asked! We have a very spring-y theme: “April Showers Bring May Flowers,” and I’m so excited about making adorable little cupcakes plus some savory cookies. The sweet items will be very small, made in my mini-cupcake tins (of which I have six). I’m not going to worry too much about the sugar content of anything, and I do plan to sample some. They are going to be so cute! And people love my Cheddar cookies. I will have a visual and textural contrast to those with some pepper-Parmesan biscotti, an item I’ve made before that went over well.
First, the cupcakes. I’ve just spent a fair amount of time looking at pistachio cupcake recipes, and while I love Sally’s Baking Addiction I don’t want to use her recipe even though it was her photo that made me fall in love with the idea of green-ish cupcakes with pink (strawberry) frosting. She wants you to use just egg whites, not whole eggs, which drives me crazy, and she’s very firm that you must use cake flour, which I refuse to do. So I’m using this AllRecipes version, which still calls for cake flour but only for half of the total, and so I’m just going to ignore that, and whole eggs. To substitute regular flour for cake flour you just use a little less. I won’t be using pistachio pudding mix, either. That’s why the recipe title is “Real Pistachio Cupcakes.” You grind up unsalted roasted nuts and go from there. For the other set of cupcakes I’m doing banana ones, and this time I am using Sally’s recipe.
And for the frosting—oh my goodness, folks! I’ve gone completely bonkers. I ordered freeze-dried fruit from Amazon (affiliate link) and am making Swiss buttercream frosting flavored with powdered freeze-dried fruit, an idea from Stella Parks over on Serious Eats. (Sally uses the freeze-dried stuff too, but her frosting is made with powdered sugar. Yuk! I have decided not to make American buttercream—the powdered-sugar stuff—any more, because it’s so sweet and so grainy. I’m going to try out an idea I have to make Swiss buttercream with powdered egg whites—yes, even though I refuse to use them for the cupcakes—and without heating up the sugar syrup very much. I’ll give a full report afterwards.) Just FYI—freeze-dried fruit is very expensive. My recipe calls for “up to” 2 ½ ounces of the stuff, and the on-sale price at the grocery story was $2.99 an ounce, so that’s $7.50 just for that. It’s not going to bankrupt me or anything, but I was kind of irritated about paying that much just for one ingredient. So I went looking online and the cheapest I could find was $2.74 an ounce, not a great savings, and I had to buy a three-pack of 10 ounces each in banana, strawberry, and raspberry. That added up to almost $75!! But I’ll never buy freeze-dried fruit again; it’ll last me till the end, as it keeps just about forever. (Well, 25 years, according to the seller.)
So I’m really looking forward to making these. I have a little frosting gun to do poufs which I hope will look okay. I’ll put some maple extract and cloves in the banana frosting, by the way. They’re going to be seriously delicious!
As for the savory cookies, I’ve been making the Cheddar ones for years and years, having originally gotten the recipe from the Washington Post Food section. People love them but, as I’ve said before, you do have to be sure to label them as “spicy.” They look like regular sweet cookies, but they sure don’t taste like them. The biscotti are also great, from the great Smitten Kitchen, and the leftovers keep forever in the freezer. They’re a great companion to soup, and I’m really hoping that they don’t get eaten up. I’ll make them fairly small.
So that’s the plan. I’ll get all the shopping done on Wednesday and do a lot of the prep on Thursday, but I don’t want to bake anything except for the biscotti until Friday, as I have this thing about freshly-baked items. I’ll get Jim to bring along his camera on Friday evening, and who knows? We might actually remember to take some pics.
Next week I’ll be providing/organizing a dinner for 75-80 people at our annual meeting, and those recipes will show up here at some point. We’ll be leaving the next morning for our trip out to the East Coast and will be gone for about a week and a half, so I’m not sure when I’ll get that post done. No 25th wedding anniversary this summer, and only one wedding so far for which I’ve been asked to make 200 lemon bars. But other things will probably crop up. Whatddaya think? There will be a big Memorial Day cookout to celebrate the holiday and also Gideon’s summer return and my father-in-law’s birthday. I love planning special meals! But I’ve also been pushing myself to make nice things for just us.
What about you? How’s your summer shaping up, food- and celebration-wise!