The Sweet Life

I have a confession to make.  I have a bookmark folder titled "Recipes to Try."  For those of you like-minded individuals, this may not seem all that odd.  I do a lot of research and find a lot of information on the internet and there are times when I come across a recipe that I want to revisit.  Well, I recently made some "power" bars from a recipe I marked maybe a year ago. It's not easy to eat healthy snacks when you work in a pastry shop.  When it's busy, you're lucky if you get to sit down and eat lunch, let alone eat the recommended snacks to keep your blood sugar level.  It's easier to just eat scraps of the cake you're cutting, or whatever someone else on the team is cutting.  Also being a woman who loves her sleep, I often skip breakfast, using those extra 20 minutes to keep my eyes closed and pretend I didn't hear the alarm!  I now have a couple of these guys stashed in my tool drawer at work for hunger emergencies. We're ad...

I'm known as the Cupcake Lady in a certain circle.  This is the third year my friends Corey and Marcy have hosted a Crawfish Boil/Joint Birthday Bash, and as usual, my cupcakes have been requested.  This time I made PB&J and Coconut cupcakes. My trend lately has been making desserts and pastries that I didn't like very much or eat as a child.  First, the variation on the Pop-Tarts , and now PB&J.  See, I didn't like jelly, and occasionally eat it as an adult on toast (mostly after a night of drinking when we hit the 24 hour breakfast spot), but I decided to make a cupcake version.  Instead of using jelly, I cooked some grape juice with agar agar to make a fluid gel.  I baked a vanilla cupcake, cut a cone out of the top, filled the hole with the gel, then topped them with a peanut butter buttercream.  Not peanut butter and confectioner's sugar, but the real deal!  I also tried out a coconut cupcake recipe I've been sitting on for a while ...

Coconut Panna Cotta Marcona Almond Toffee Streusel, Salted Vanilla Caramel, Salted Coconut Chips, Pineapple Foam, Basil Gel and Micro Basil. I am guilty of not getting stuff done. It's been a combination of time, stress, problems with work, and being overwhelmed with life in general. I haven't updated my blog in a long time, nor have I posted pics from the farm or other projects. I haven't given up hope yet; I hope to get around to some of this soon. See, my mom had surgery a couple of days ago and I'm in Katy for a couple of weeks taking care of her. I hope to get more stuff sorted out and posted while she sleeps between medicine doses. S. and I cooked another dinner in April sans his friend Ryan. It was a bit more stressful and we were pressed for time since he wanted to get as much as he could from Green City Market on Saturday morning. I was sick starting the previous Saturday with allergies and asthma, and had a cough I could not shake, which meant I couldn...