Adventures in Food

19 Jun

I have been feeling very adventurous in the kitchen lately. I generally play it safe with cooking and stick to easy and simple. Maybe it’s Nathan’s request for fancy birthday cake, or my desire to “spice up” my cooking skills, but I’ve been trying out some more complicated things lately and documenting my experiments with the camera. Here are a few of my recent creations.

Nutella Cheesecake. Nathan found the recipe here.

Pretty straightforward as far as cheesecake goes, with a couple of exceptions: add Nutella in the batter before baking and top with a dark chocolate glaze.

So delicious!

Raspberry-filled cupcakes. I took these to Nathan and his co-workers on his birthday. I found the filling recipe and tutorial here.

Making the raspberry sauce.

Finished filling, with raspberries stirred back in.

I cheated and used a cake mix. If I had been really fancy, I would have made them from scratch.

I used my Pampered Chef grapefruit knife to cut out the holes. It worked great!

Making the holes for the filling.

Cutting off the bottom of the "cones" to make room for the filling.

Pouring in the filling.

Putting the tops back on.

Then frost, and voi-la!

Delicious, raspberry-filled cupcakes!

This last one was WAY too easy to be considered adventurous, but I just had to include it to show how easy it was and how amazing our new blender is. It makes soup! This took me about 10 min total to make. If I hadn’t added the grilled chicken, it would have taken less than 5 min. And it was so delicious!