Banana Cupcakes with Nutella Buttercream

As previously stated Nutella is one of my top 5 favorite ingredients, and for like 2 years now I have been claiming I want to create some form of a banana Nutella cupcake. Well, tomorrow is my last day of work with my little babies (I'm moving on up to the 2 year olds haha) so I thought I would bake my lovely ladies something special.
I found the following recipe for a banana cupcake as a starting point, but as usual things did not go quite as planned...
I doubled the recipe so mine looked like this:
Cake:
3 1/2 c flour
1 tbsp + 1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 c butter
1 c white sugar
4 eggs
1 pouch banana applesauce (ok, things get weird I will explain...)
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 c milk
4 large bananas

Buttercream:
1 1/3 c butter
1 tsp vanilla
4 1/2 c confectioner's sugar
2 tbsp hazelnut flavored coffee creamer (um, yeah..)
6 oz Nutella

Preheat oven to 350 and place liners in your pans. I have one normal size cupcake tin and one 6 count giant muffin tin, so I came out with 12 + 6 cupcakes.

Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in small bowl. Cream together butter and sugar until fluuffy. Add eggs one at a time. (This is about when I realized I only had 4 eggs. I know you can use applesauce and bananas both as egg substitutes, and because it was already a banana flavored cupcake I decided I could use one of the banana applesauce fruit crushers I take in my lunch. (yes, I realize that applesauce in a pouch is for 5 year olds so they don't need a spoon and still get fruit...but I need fruit, too!))  Add the vanilla with the last egg and beat well. Add flour mixture and milk alternately mixing until just incorporated. Fold in chopped bananas. Pour into pans and bake for about 20 minutes. (The bigger cupcakes needed about 5 extra minutes)

To make the buttercream, beat 1 1/3 c butter until smooth and glossy. Add vanilla and confectioner's sugar until there are no lumps. Then I added the Nutella. I am guessing on the amount because I just kept adding spoon fulls until I felt it tasted right. The original recipe has no Nutella and calls for 1/4 c heavy cream to be added once you've beaten it smooth. The Nutella made things quite thick and as I had no heavy cream....I decided hazelnut flavored coffee creamer would be juuuust fine. I added enough to thin out the icing. I won't lie, this stuff is amazingly delicious.

The cupcakes aren't very sweet which is great because the buttercream is decadent. Next time I think I would add one more banana, just for some extra flavor. All in all though, I call this a HUGE success!!

Dill-icious Chicken Salad

First of all, sorry for the slack! Not sure what we have been doing for the entire month of August, but apparently it was not cooking tasty things and telling you all about it...

Now, for my weekend trip to the zoo! Living outside of DC means there are a million and one awesome things to do, and most of them are free! A few friends and I decided to hit up the National Zoo on Sunday and take a picnic with us. I was in charge of menu planning of course, so I settled on chicken salad croissants, bacon ranch pasta salad, chips, sodas, and a bizarre crockpot (mis?)adventure cake. (Maybe that deserves it's own post...)  I cheated on the pasta salad and used a box to save me some time, but the chicken salad was a little different from my normal recipe and it really turned out great!
(Note: I always try to cook to my friends' tastes. One of my buddies coming to the zoo haaaates celery, so I left it out of this recipe. I added in the pecans for our crunch factor)

3 poached chicken breasts (I just used water and some salt to poach in)
Silly amount of fresh dill, finely chopped (what constitutes a silly amount? I bought one of the little plastic boxes of fresh dill from the grocery store and used it all. Probably 2 heaping tbsp once chopped?)
6 green onions, thinly sliced
1 c. mayo
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
Juice from 1/2 a lemon
1/2 c. pecan halves
kosher salt and black pepper to taste

Roughly chop the chicken (I leave pretty big chunks because that's how I like my chicken salad, but obviously you can make it how you prefer) and toss in a bowl with dill and green onions. In small bowl whisk mayo, lemon juice, and mustard together. Slowly fold it into the chicken so everything gets coated nicely. Salt and pepper to taste. Add in the pecans and boom! You're done.

If you don't like dill and pecans you will 100% hate this salad. I personally love dill so I found this super tasty. We served it on butter croissants from Trader Joes with some lettuce and tomato and a small spread of Dijon. Everybody loved it--certainly made for a great day at the zoo!

Viva la flan!

So ever since the epic fail, flan has been on the brain. I watched Jo's mom make hers at the beach a couple weeks ago (the recipe I originally botched) and picked up a few tips to avoid failure. I was feeling more confident for round two.
Then at work last week we had a pot luck. I work with ladies from all over the world, and one of my Peruvian mommas brought her flan. I quizzed her on her recipe and technique and found there were a lot of differences. Shirley bakes her flan in a bundt pan and uses 2 cans of evaporated milk in addition to the sweetened condensed milk (instead of regular milk.) She also makes her caramel straight in the bundt pan...  
I decided to stick to Yolanda's caramel method, use Shirley's recipe, and bake it in an angel food cake pan because that seemed a safer bet than a scalloped bundt pan...

I put my cup of sugar in a sauce pan with 1/3 cup water and cranked up the heat. I got it bubbling and let it go, swirling it around the pan every now and then.

 I'm going to overload you with pictures of this because let's be honest, it was my biggest struggle....





Here we go with the bubbles...



Are we getting a little darker?!

Drum roll please....we got caramel!!!

So once I poured the caramel into my pan I remembered to let it cool, and then I added my very frothy custard mix. (4 eggs, well beaten. Add 1 can sweetened condensed milk, beat well. Add 1 Tbsp sugar and slowly add 2 cans evaporated milk, mixing constantly. Lastly add in 2 tsp vanilla) The roasting pan had been in the 350 degree preheating oven filled with enough water to cover half of the cake pan so when I was ready I put in the dish and there you go! I only made one mistake this time...I didn't wait long enough for it to cool, so I lost half an edge when I flipped. It did, however, taste AMAZING. So rich and creamy...mmmMMmm





Not too shabby, hmm?









Shrimps and more Shrimps!

Back from vacation and shrimp feasting on the lovely coast of South Carolina!  Ashley joined me and the fam for a delightful week of relaxing and beaching.  With her she brought Grandma's recipe for shrimp and grits!  I have never actually had shrimp and grits and I'm just now learning to enjoy shrimp at all so it was a new experience for me.  Frankly, it was way easier to make than I was expecting and super delicious.

We start with 3 pounds of fresh shrimp for 6 adults - it was questionable if that was enough, I certainly was full but some people wished there had been more.  With me, Ash, and my mom we peeled and de-veined all of the shrimp.  I can't say this is an enjoyable job, but it wasn't nearly as terrible as I was expecting.  And I got to use the shrimp de-veining tool we found in the kitchen of the condo!  (You can save the shells and tails and make a shrimp stock which was used later in the week for a sauce to top a crab/fish dish.  Very flavorful.)

The shrimp get mixed up with salt, pepper, about 6 cloves of garlic, and some thyme (the original recipe calls for parsley but we had to work with what was in the kitchen) and then placed in a glass baking dish.  After about 20 min in a 400 degree oven they were cooked perfectly.

As for the grits, the local Food Lion had quite limited options so we ended up using 5-minute grits.  Ashley was not excited about this and apparently my suggestion to use the yellow grits was ridiculous, so 5-minute grits it was. Ash dressed them up with almost a stick of butter and lots of salt.  I don't know what non-instant grits taste like but these were certianly good.  We mounded up the grits in a bowl and served the shrimp right on top.  I'd say it was a very successful dinner and I thoroughly enjoyed my first shrimp and grits!

I think I'm a shrimp convert - It is way easy to cook and make flavorful, and I probably ate more of it on this vacation than I ever have before.  The shrimp and grits dinner was pulled together between crazy golf cart rides and perhaps a couple too many beers and it still managed to be good.  And don't think the shrimp stopped there, we had a big shrimp boil a couple nights later!

It's tough coming back to reality after an extremely enjoyable vacation at the beach with some of my favorite people.  It made for good memories and a chance to cook for my family with one of my best friends, which doesn't happen often enough.

P.S. I apologize for the lack of pictures, for whatever reason the only one I have is of Ashley whisking grits and none of the final product.  So I will leave you all with this gem:

As AMAZING as this photo is...Little has a pic of the shrimps right as they went into the oven...