Mocha Cupcakes - the deadly way

I haven't had any schoolwork for almost two months now and life has turned into a drag. I can't figure out what to do on a daily basis and most of the time I don't even have a clue of what day it is. So I started painting the house. I've been painting the fireplace, chairs, doors and even a radiator. Apart from that, I've been cooking for the family and baking some as well whenever I felt like it. These horribly delicious cupcakes were something I conjured up last week to kill the diets of everyone in the house.

Ingredients:
225 grams flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
25 grams cocoa
150 grams butter
300 grams caster sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon mocha essence or paste
250 ml milk

1. Sift the flour together with the baking soda and cocoa.
2. Cream the butter with the sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Beat the eggs through the butter one at a time and mix until smooth in between.
4. Add the mocha paste and mix again.
5. Beat the milk and flour through the batter alternately, in about 3 additions each.
6. Bake in a preheated oven of 180 degrees Celsius or 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 12-15 minutes.
7. To decorate, use frosting in an icing bag to make a big swirl and top it with caramel sauce and chocolate shavings. For my cupcakes I used a store-bought vanilla cream frosting.

I apologize to everyone who lives in my house and is on a diet (which is basically everyone). Please look forward to even more sweet treats in the future, while I continue to fail at finding a job. Look on the bright side: I've been looking up how to make us more healthy treats! I'm sure I'll get to making those soon after I make some fruitcakes, Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte and something that involves the jar of caramel sauce I have left.

Thank you for having me and my deadly cupcakes!

Imitating the Japanese

After my rant about chinese and indian dishes, without posting recipes, I want to share two Japanese recipes. Both of them are inspired by the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants my family keeps visiting. Also, they're both very easy to make, so we should totally make these every day!

Best things first: Edamame! After the first time we tried them, me and both my sisters have become obsessed with them. They're very salty and you have to 'suck' the beans out of the pod. We actually fight over them.

Ingredients: 
Frozen edamame (soy beans)
Few tablespoons salt 

1. Take the edamame out of the freezer. In the meanwhile, start cooking water with salt. (I add about 1 tablespoon.)
2. When the water is boiling, add the edamame and cook them for no longer than 5 minutes.
3. Drain the water and serve the edamame with some extra salt, or loads of salt depending on your taste.

This recipe I made up myself. I really liked the sauce I made for dango, so I used it again to make Sweet baby corn. I really liked how it turned out, so I'm sharing the idea!

Ingredients: 
Baby corn (1 can)
Sesame seeds (1-2 tablespoons)
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tablesoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon mirin
5 tablespoons water

1. Start making the sauce: put the sugar, soy sauce, mirin and water in a pan and heat until the sugar is dissolved.
2. Add the baby corn and cook until ready, which should take about 10 minutes. Add the sesame seeds last moment and keep cooking on a low heat for another minute, then serve.

We should eat Japanese more often. I really like how they tend to have a lot of small side dishes. This would normally mean too much cooking for me, but sometimes I can't help but get excited by the idea and spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I hope you like the recipes as much as I do!

Conquering India and Asia

If you've followed Moonpies4U for a while, you'll notice I'm a big fan of baking up cakes and cupcakes. More than anything I love to bake sweets. So I'm surprised, perhaps most of all, to find myself totally enthusiastic about cooking dinners. I want to conquer the Indian and Asian dishes. I've been obsessed with red bean paste (anko) and japanese/chinese dishes, while at the same time I'm dying to try a curry.

I've never made a curry before. Can you believe that? Well, until yesterday. I made a special curry à la me. Which actually means there is no way anyone in the world could ever replicate what I did, but it roughly involved chicken, a can of coconut milk, carrots, beans and a whole lot of spices. A Whole Lot of Spices. There are so many recipes out there for a curry that all use different spices, so I just used I had in my cupboard (think garlic, ginger, black pepper, kurkuma, coriander, cinnamon, lemongrass and way more).

Okay, so it sounds a bit random. But I did do a lot of research to find a perfect curry recipe. And very soon I'll come up with an actual recipe to share. Also, despite the randomness of it, the curry was delicious. Even better: the whole room smelled of spices. I was so proud!

On the same day I conquered curry, I made Tang Yuan. These glutinous rice dumplings are very popular in China. I had a lot of fun making the different colours, but adding the filling was horrible. I think the dumplings look horrible as well. And they tasted a bit floury. So there's no way I'm going to share the recipe. Not until I find the perfect way to make these.

Next I'm going to have to conquer mooncakes and red bean soup and even more curry's and and and I'm so excited! Why do we have only one dinner per day? And why are there so many Asian and Indian recipes that I've never tried before or even heard of? We need to get cooking!

Baking up some acorns

Winter should finally be ending some time soon and I’m sure spring can’t wait to happen, yet here I am posting something that looks more like autumn. But don’t worry, you can make this the whole year round! In fact, I made this cake just yesterday. It’s the Banana gingerbread cake I posted a while back. To be fair, I was hoping to give you a new recipe. Not of the cake itself, but how to use a banana cake to create a little banana split to serve. The idea I had in mind was really cute, but when I saw the little cakes turned out to look like acorns, I scratched the whole idea. These acorns are so cute too!

I could have added a small piece of pretzel stick to the end and a bit of milk chocolate to decorate the top. Or dip the top in all the way to make the difference between the nut and the shell more appearant, but there was really no time for that. How long are YOU able to stare at these cakes and put in the extra effort to make them acorn look-a-likes when really you could be eating them. All of them.

It's quite a short post, but all I really wanted to do was share these pictures. Now, the last picture! It's a special one: while I was taking pictures, my sister knew she could do it a whole lot better. So, thanks to the special talent of my sister, I'm sharing her picture: