I am Jennifer, Kimberly’s older sister.  I am a stay at home mom in Seattle of two lovely little boys and enjoy baking and cooking as much as I can (which with 2 little ones isn’t as often as I would like to).  This is my first attempt at food photography and food blogging, but hey you have to try everything once.

The inspiration for this recipe came from my sister in law’s love of fudge. I thought for Christmas that I would make her a few types of fudge.  So I set out on my search for some good recipes.  In my search through tastespotting.com I came across Not So Humble Pie.  She had some amazing fudge recipes so I decided to try them.  My favorite was the Bailey’s Vanilla Bean Fudge.  The result was a creamy and smooth vanilla fudge with a hint of Bailey’s.  This has become a new holiday favorite of ours – our entire family loved it.  Enjoy!

Bailey’s Vanilla Bean Fudge

Courtesy of Not So Humble Pie

2 cups granulated sugar
1 stick unsalted butter
1/3 cup heavy cream (40% milk fat)
1/2 cup plus one tablespoon Baileys Irish cream
2 cups good quality white chocolate chips
1/2 vanilla bean scraped, reserving seeds
7 ounce jar marshmallow creme

Line a 9×9 inch pan with foil and coat with a little butter or nonstick spray.

Combine sugar, butter, heavy cream and Irish creme into a heavy bottomed sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Once boiling, attach a candy thermometer and reduce the heat to a hair above medium low and cook for 7-10 minutes until your thermometer reads 234°F , stirring constantly.

Once your mixture hits the appropriate temperature, remove from heat and add the white chocolate chips, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is smooth. Add the vanilla bean and marshmallow creme and mix until well blended.

Pour the mixture into your prepared pan and allow to cool on a wire rack until room temperature.

A few weeks ago while visiting friends on Vancouver Island we took a break from New Moon madness to go to an Epicure party.  Although my friend Danielle was the host of the party it was being held at a more conveniently located house in town.  Having only ever had the salsa from epicure I was excited to try some of the other products, you really can’t turn down a chance to sit around and visit with people while ’sampling’ food.  Although I typically like to create things from scratch I had a fun time trying all the different spice mixtures and ended up getting a variety of mexican inspired products. 

Not many people know about my obsession with all things mexican…

While sampling at the party I had tunnel vision for the queso dip which is probably one of my favourite foods of all time.  I was pleasantly surprised with the queso dip from Epicure.  Nothing sounds better than a big bowl of warm cheese and unlimited chips to dip in them.  In fact on a recent trip to Jamaica I had queso and chips as a ‘snack’ before lunch and dinner every day.  Who really needs that much cheese, I know I do!  I really just can’t imagine a more perfect meal really.

For any of you who haven’t had the epicure salsa you are definitely missing out.  It has the flavour that I always wish my homemade salsa had.  I thank/blame Danielle for introducing me to the salsa because just like with my queso I want a huge bowl to scarf down.  I find that I am constantly looking for reasons to have salsa on things.

I am looking forward to my next trip to the island so I can pick up my goodies and start making all things mexican.

My little sister is getting married on August 1st to a wonderful man, we are all very excited for her and so this past weekend was to celebrate her.

This was a coordinated effort of myself, Jennifer my older sister, Julie Megan’s best friend, and Amy Megan’s soon to be sister in law.  We have spent the last month or more planning out the shower from the invitations and favors to food and dessert.  I have to say I am very happy the whole thing is over.

Sean and I arrived in Seattle late friday night and knew that Saturday was going to be consumed with grocery shopping and food prep, for me that is.  With the help of my mom we got all the grocery shopping done which left saturday evening for making as much of the food as we could ahead of time.  Since the shower was scheduled for Sunday afternoon we knew we wouldn’t have enough time to get it all done the day of.

It was smooth sailing for most of the evening, and then came the 48 cupcakes I had to make.

I have spent the last few weeks trying out different cupcake and frosting recipes to find the best one for this special day.  My sister is an asian at heart and so we wanted to have an asian theme for both the food and the dessert.  I was determined to make a yummy green tea cupcake, and in the end I succeeded thanks to Magnolia Bakery for their Vanilla Cupcake recipe, which I doctored up with some matcha powder.  Since I believe that anything is better with cream cheese frosting, I used my moms cream cheese frosting recipe and added some matcha powder and lavender.  It was delicious!

Back to the 48 cupcakes…when I was making the recipe I assumed it was for 12 cupcakes and since I needed 24 I just doubled the recipe.  I told my mom it looked like a lot of batter but she said that the recipe looked just right, that was until I told her I doubled it.  Lets just say I was about to have 48 green tea cupcakes on my hands on top of the other flavours I was going to be making.

Thanks to a mishap putting the cupcakes into the oven which resulted with a pan of them dumped on the oven door, we were back to 24.

Since I had spent my time making the perfect green tea cupcake I relied on other people recipes for the 2nd type of cupcake and the food, and let me just say they did not disappoint.

For my second cupcake I picked Annie Eats Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cupcake for a couple of reasons, 1. I absolutely love raspberries and 2. the picture sold me before even looking at the recipe.  I was a little intimidated by the idea of making a ganache, which has always seemed fancy, but turns out with the simple steps she provided turned out beautifully.  Everyone loved the cupcakes and for that I thank Annie Eats for such a great recipe.

My sister Jennifer made a vanilla cupcake but to make it that much more exciting did a cream cheese frosting with some citrus in it.  It was light and refreshing and a nice change from the bold flavours of the green tea and the richness of the chocolate cupcake.  We ended up with such amazing cupcakes no one went home hungry.

Since the shower started at 2 we wanted to make sure we had some food but since it wasn’t meant to be lunch we just wanted lighter fare.  After much looking in food blogs I stumbled across a couple of recipes for some asian inspired salads.  I knew that the Asian Inspired Slaw with Peanut Vinaigrette from Running with Tweezers was going to be really good thanks in part to the amazing peanut vinaigrette.  The other salad that I picked was a Soba Noodle Salad from the blog Blue Kitchen.  It went nicely with the theme and wonderful for such a hot day.

My little sister absolutely loves my mom’s wontons to the point where she will just eat the filling with a spoon.  We knew that this was a must at her shower and so thanks to my mom we had a huge tray of her wonderful wontons.  They were so popular that all of them were gone before Megan even got any, thankfully I had a few more in the kitchen waiting to be cooked so she was able to have a couple, but not the dozens she would have liked.

The final food item to be selected was salad rolls which are easy to make and usually very popular at parties.  There isn’t much of a recipe as long as you have rice paper wrappers, vermicelli noodles and a variety of vegetables.

Thanks to shesimmers.com, which I am currently obsessed with, we came up with two sauces for dipping both the wontons and the salad rolls in.  She has such amazing recipes but we ended up using her Sweet Chili Sauce and the Peanut Sauce.  My mom not usually a fan of peanut sauce, I know crazy, absolutely loved it.

Now that the food was all prepared and the guest were arriving we spent the afternoon eating, laughing and playing some games.  I am so happy to have been a part of this day for Megan and I look forward to the big event in August where she is going to be a beautiful bride.

Recipes

Green Tea Cupcake with Green Tea Lavender Cream Cheese Frosting

Adapted from Magnolia Bakery Vanilla Cupcake Recipe

1 1/2 cups self-rising flour

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour

1 cup (2 Sticks) unsalted butter, softened

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs, at room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons matcha powder

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a small bowl, combine the flours and matcha powder and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream butter until smooth on a medium speed.  Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes.  Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add the dry ingredients in three parts, alternating with the milk and vanilla.  With each addition, beat until the ingredients are incororated but do not overbeat.  Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the batter in the bowl to make sure the ingredients are well blended.  Carefully spoon the batter into the cupcake liners filling them 3/4 of the way full.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean

Cream Cheese Frosting

2 1/2 cups powdered sugar

8 ounces cream cheese – room temperature

1/4 cup butter – room temperature

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons matcha powder

lavender to taste

Beat with a mixer until smooth

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