What’s on the Menu (#3)

Here’s Chapter 3 of some of our more recent home cooking trials and tribulations.  We enjoyed both victory and defeat!  This selection covered both dessert and breakfast offerings…

I’d copied a recipe for Cranberry Brownie Cupcakes from Catherine’s blog site, “Living the Gourmet” at http://livingthegourmet.com/.  I failed to take photos of the process but Laurie took this photo of the finished product.

These cupcakes were easy to make and between the fudge brownie mix, the whole cranberry sauce, the almond milk and the sour cream, they were nice and moist…as well as very rich and satisfying!  As you can see, we got a baker’s dozen (13) cupcakes from the recipe.  As an extra plus, these cupcakes were so moist that we enjoyed the last one a week after they were baked!

I tried to come up with the link to Catherine’s recipe but I couldn’t figure out how to efficiently search her prolific site.  So here’s the recipe:

Ingredients: 1 box of fudge brownie mix, ¾ cup of whole cranberry sauce, ½ cup of almond milk, ½ cup of sour cream, ¼ cup of canola oil, 2 eggs, butter for greasing the cupcake tins and powdered sugar for dusting.

Instructions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl and mix.  Butter the cupcake tins…Laurie used cupcake wrappers.  Using a quarter-cup measuring cup, scoop the batter into the wrappers or tins.  Bake for 18 -20 minutes or until the toothpick test comes out clean.  Dust with powdered sugar when cooled.

  

Keeping it simple tends to work best for us!  This may look like just a couple of easy-over fried eggs with Béarnaise sauce slathered over the top…but it’s deliciously more than that!

This was one of our versions of eggs Benedict!  A toasted buttered English muffin topped with some very nice smoked salmon from Costco and then covered with those 2 easy-over fried eggs and that Béarnaise sauce!  Of course I sprinkled Tabasco sauce on my serving…  This was a very satisfying and luscious breakfast!

Next we decided to try making little individual quiches.  Laurie used our old antique round bottomed muffin tin for this creation.  She sprayed the tins with Pam cooking spray and then she added a little bit of hash brown potatoes and a bit of cut up grilled chicken. 

Then we added shredded sharp cheddar cheese to 8 of them and shredded mixed Italian cheese to the other 4.  After that we added our egg mixture and put them in the oven to bake…

Pretty aren’t they?!  Like little mini-quiches… On the surface they look great!

Even prettier up close…but the first clue that not all was well was the darker bottom portion of this little quiche…

They shouldn’t have looked like this when finished!  ...Way too many ‘air pockets’ and they weren’t very moist.  We’re guessing that we overcooked them and dried them out but we’re not sure… You can’t win them all!

Fear not… They didn’t go to waste.  I consumed them as lunches or snacks over the next few days…just adding Tabasco and or ketchup.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by to see what’s being served!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave