Multi-Cereal Treats

Earlier in the summer, M and I bought a giant multi-pack of cereals from Costco. It had 30 boxes of Kellogg's cereals in it. As of this morning, we still had 10 boxes left. I'd eaten all of the Raisin Bran, all the Frosted Mini Wheats, and a good portion of the Frosted Flakes. I decided to make a variation on Rice Krispie Treats to try to get rid of some of the cereal before we move next weekend. I used Rice Krispies, Corn Pops, Fruit Loops, and Corn Flakes. All in all, not a bad way to use up an excess of cereal. Now...what in the world and I going to do with the leftover Apple Jacks? I never did like those...

Recipe - okay, you probably know this one, but just in case!

• 3 TBSP Butter
• 4 C Mini Marshmallows
• 6 C Cereal (we used 7 mini boxes that we measured to have just under a cup in each of them)

1. Melt butter in large pot over medium heat.
2. Add marshmallows and stir until melted.
3. Turn off heat and stir in cereals.
   
4. Put in a 9" X 13" pan coated with non-stick spray.
   

Lavender Milk Tea Cupcakes for Sweetest Kitchen's Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge!

Inspiration

I am in law school. I study for a significant portion of my waking hours. One of the locations I like to study at is the public library. It looks like this:

This library is great. It has lots of big tables, tons of plugs, and best of all, a wonderful little coffee shop in the lobby. When I face a particularly grueling day of studying, I go to this library and promise myself the reward of their amazing lavender milky tea. I'd never had milky tea before this coffee shop, but it's quite popular in Hong Kong. (Thanks for the knowledge, Wikipedia). Anyway, what I like most about this tea isn't the it's milk + tea (that's fairly standard, I'd say), it's the lavender. Lavender is absolutely delicious in this drink and completely makes it the wonderful thing that it is.

The Great Search

Culinary Lavender

The coffee shop makes their lavender milk tea with a lavender syrup. After searching the internet, I found a few different options of incorporating lavender into baking.

1. Lavender Oil
2. Lavender Sugar
3. Lavender Syrup

Unfortunately for me, these all required me to find the product, find some lavender, or pay stupidly expensive shipping costs and risk the lavender product not arriving in time to enter the competition.

Lavender is tricky. It is a flower, but it's not a flower people always eat. That means that if you're using lavender in cooking, you have to be exceedingly careful that it is food grade lavender, preferably organic, and not covered in pesticides or inedible oils meant for massages, etc.

There is a wonderful cooking store in Des Moines (Shout Out: Kitchen Collage) and I recently bought lemon and orange oil there by a brand that makes lavender oil. However, they did not carry the particular line from the brand that has lavender oil in it, so my local search continued.

There is a farm here in Iowa called Mariposa Farms that sells fresh herbs in tons of grocery stores. According to their website, one of the herbs they sell is lavender. I decided to check the local grocery store chain Hy Vee. No luck.

My next thought was that I would go to the fancy gourmet market - Gateway Market - and see if they had fresh lavender or any type of lavender product. I met a lovely store clerk there would was an absolute peach. They didn't have any lavender, but he offered to call his ex-wife (seriously, WHAT A NICE MAN!!) because she owned a bakery and might have some info. This was the low point of the day, as she told him that she got her lavender supply from Chicago and she wouldn't be willing to sell any to me since she herself is a baker. Boo.

At this point, I went to my mother's house and pouted. Considered a different theme all together. BUT NO, THIS WAS A FLAVOR COMBINATION OF WONDER. Then my mother suggested we hit up one of the health food stores right by her house. They have tons of herbs available by the scoop and also a wide selection of teas. At this point, I was just hoping for a lavender tea I could sift the lavender out of or something. But, BUT, they had a huge bin of fresh lavender and it was very reasonably priced. So, thank you Campbell's Nutrition for helping me out on this quest! I couldn't have done it without you!

Issue #1: How to get the lavender in the cake

From the list above, I quickly eliminated making lavender oil. It looked complicated and I don't know much about oils. I considered lavender sugar and it might have been preferable, but I didn't have two weeks to let it steep. I decided to go with making lavender syrup. I tried to use my skills from 7th Grade science to cook the syrup back down to just sugar crystals, but I got too nervous about burning the whole thing and pretty much just ended up with a thick and concentrated lavender syrup. It also had buds floating in it because my summer rental lacks a fine enough strainer to get them all out. Still, it smelled amazing and I decided it would work fine as substitution for a bit of liquid and sugar in the recipe.

Issue #2: How to get the tea in the cake

I didn't want a subtle tea flavor - I wanted these to actually taste like tea. I found a recipe that suggested 6 tea bags was the magic number in making the flavor actually be tea-y, so I used 3 of my family sized tea bags.
The difficult part of this was that many of the lavender cupcake recipes out there substitute the lavender syrup for any other liquid in the cupcake. But...I don't think you can steep tea bags in syrup. So, I had to come up with a way to make this work. I briefly considered using ice tea mix, but I have a deep aversion to instant tea and couldn't bring myself to do it. I ended up using a tried and true white cupcake recipe as the base and steeped the tea bags in the listed amount of milk after boiling it. I know from experience that this cupcake can be a bit dry, so instead of adding extra milk as I normally would, I added the lavender syrup instead. VICTORY.

Recipe

Concentrated Lavender Syrup

• 1 Cup Granulated Sugar
• 1 Cup Water
• 1/4 C Culinary Lavender Blossoms
  

1. Put all the ingredients in a pot. Boil. After boiling, turn off heat, cover, and let sit.
   
2. After 5 minutes sitting, strain the mixture into a sauce pan, removing as many blossoms as possible.
   
3. Bring the mixture to a boil. Allow to boil for 3-5 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent burning. This will boil off some of the water and make a more concentrated syrup.
4. Place in refrigerator and allow to cool. Make sure you use this the day you make it, as the sugar tried to escape the solution since it was beyond saturation the next day. Oh, science.
   

Cupcakes

• 3/4 C Milk
• 6 Black Tea Bags
• 3-6 Tbsp Lavender Syrup
  
• Heaping 3/4 C Sugar
• 1/2 C Unsalted Butter (softened)
  
• 2 Eggs
• 1/8 Tsp Vanilla Extract
• Scant 1/8 Tsp Lemon Oil (Optional, I'm just obsessed with it right now)
  
• 1 1/2 C Flour
• 1 3/4 Tsp Baking Powder

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a 12 cup muffin tin with liners - you will probably have about 4 extra cupcakes on top of this, however.
   
2. Bring the milk to a boil, either in your narrowest sauce pan or in the microwave. Add the tea bags and allow to steep, off the heat, covered. You want to get the most tea out of these bags as possible, and the most difficult part for me was having deep enough milk.
   
3. After about 5 minutes, squeeze out the tea bags and transfer the milk/tea mixture back into a measuring cup.I lost about 1/4C of milk when it boiled, it will probably vary for you. To make up the difference, add lavender syrup. If you've added 6 TBSP and it's not yet back up to 3/4 C, add in milk until you get there. It will dilute the tea mixture, but that's better then overpowering lavender. Put in the freezer to cool down quickly - do not use right away!!
   
4. Cream together butter and sugar. Do it longer than normal , at least 5 minutes. This batter needs air.
5. Add in eggs, one at a time, and beat them in for about a minute each.
   
6. Add in vanilla & lemon oil. Beat thoroughly.
7. Add in flour and baking powder. Beat thoroughly.
8. Add in milk/tea/lavender mixture. This is a lot of liquid for the batter to take up, so give it time. Beat until very well incorporated.
   
9. Fill the cupcake liners. I would opt for just under 1/4 C of batter for each. I went above this and got weird, spread out, cookie tops that I ended up pulling off. (The muffin top was not all that.) This is probably a symptom of my janky summer oven, but just to be safe, go on the small side.
10. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the tops are firm and stick inserted comes out cleanly.
11. Allow to cool in the tin for at least 10 minutes before removing them. I am the worst about removing things early, but these are a pretty fragile cake, so really let them sit.

Frosting - Adapted from Our Best Bites

• 4 1/2 TBSP Flour
• 3/4 C Milk (I usually use skim, but I used whole milk because I really wanted a very milky flavor)
• 3/4 C Unsalted Butter (real butter, and softened)
  
• 3/4 C Flour
• 1 TBSP of Lavender Syrup

1. If this is your first time with a frosting like this, I highly recommend you hop over to Our Best Bites for their wonderful mixture tutorial.
2. Add flour and milk to a pan. I like to use my 10" frying pan. Heat over medium heat, and whisk constantly to get flour to dissolve into milk.
3. Keep whisking. As soon as you see the whisk drag and the bottom of the pan peep through, remove from heat.
4. Strain through your finest sifter to get out clumps, and refrigerate. Make sure it's really not warm, or it will ruin everything in the following steps.
5. Cream together butter and sugar.
   
6. Add the lavender syrup to the flour/milk mixture. Pour that mixture on the butter and sugar. Beat forever. No really, it takes at least 5 minutes.
7. This frosting looks weird for a bit, but do not despair. Keep mixing!
8. Eventually, it will be gorgeous, poofy, and milky deliciousness.
   

Assembly

1. Frost cupcakes generously. Add sanding sugar or lavender blossoms as garnish. (I used this light blue sanding sugar.)

Oh right, this is a contest!

Now, about this contest! It's all explained here - it's The Sweetest Kitchen's Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge. Every month, there's a different ingredient that must be used in the cupcake. This month's ingredient was tea!

Voting starts on or about July 20th, so please go check it out! I'll remind you when the time comes!

This competition is really awesome because there are such wonderful prizes!
The winner of July’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive prizes from:

• Bake It Pretty; $5 electronic gift card -- I used their liners for this cupcake!
  


• Beanilla; Tahitian vanilla fleur de sel & 3 organic Indonesian vanilla beans


• Rishi Tea; the new Tsuki tea pot and 2 tins of tea


• Soapylove Glycerin Soap Design; a Soapy Pop


• Sweet Cuppin Cakes; a prize pack worth $25

Thanks to all our prize sponsors!

Smitten Kitchen's Lemon Bread

I made Smitten Kitchen's Braided Lemon Bread. Oh, my goodness. So, so delicious. I followed the recipe except that I recently bought some lemon oil so I substituted that for the lemon zest and I used some fancy lemon juice the boyfriend got at Costco instead of fresh. Also, um, I beat yeast. I made it work! In case you hadn't noticed, yeast and I don't tend to get along. This is one of the only things I've ever made with yeast that worked out. Woohoo!

Red Velvet Cupcakes without Food Coloring

Okay, I admit it, they aren't red. They are light brown and look like a milk chocolate cupcake. But they (theoretically) taste the same as red velvet cupcakes, I didn't have to go to the store, I got to use up my expiring buttermilk, and I got to test out a recipe for my secret project.

Also, I must admit, they are not very good. The recipe I used had me add 1 tablespoon of baking soda. I believe that was too much, as they taste really, really alkaline. Not a fan. Cream cheese frosting made them better, but I'm going to use a different recipe for the secret project.

Boyfriend's boss liked them though. And she was in desperate need of a cupcake because she found out she'd lost a big case just prior to encountering them.

Key Lime Pie

My friend Allison came through on a quick visit earlier this week while back in the Midwest for a wedding. She and I had recently dicussed Ben & Jerry's Key Lime Ice Cream and our inability to find it. This is unfortunate because it sounds pretty awesome.

With Allison coming to town and her birthday just around the corner, I decided to make the next best thing - a key lime pie.

Key lime pie is one of the first things I ever learned to bake. I probably made 5-10 of them in the summer of 2007. That summer, I worked three jobs (Security, Alumni Relations, and a Thai restaurant), had six roommates, and taught myself how to stay alive in America. This on the heels my adventures in the Czech Republic, from which I returned with what Allison and others will always call "clown mouth" -- AKA lesions on the sides of my mouth from vitamin deficiency and clear indication that I was not an adult. ANYWAY, BACK TO THE PIE.

Key lime pie is really, really easy. I consider it one of those things where, if you go above 4 ingredients for the filling, you're doing it wrong.

Key Lime Pie
4 Egg Yolks
1 Can Sweet & Condensed Milk (I'd use Eagle Brand or Carnation - brand names for something like this)
1/2 Cup Lime Juice (Fresh is best, even if it's just a normal lime, not a key lime)
1 tsp Vanilla
9" crust (You can make your own graham cracker crust, but sometimes I'm lazy and just buy a pre-made one. Homemade is amazing, but sometimes I'm not up for the mess.)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Stir together egg yolks and S&C milk until smooth. You really want smoothness.
3. Wisk in lime juice until well-combine and consistent throughout. If you think this thing needs to be green (heathen), then add your food coloring in.
4. Pour into crust and bake for 15 minutes. Allow to cool to room temperature and then refrigerate until serving.