Gluten Free Banana Peanut Butter Cupcake Win!

When you look at this photo, you may think, "Hmm, it looks like that frosting was just slapped onto those poor cupcakes."

If you thought that you would be correct.  I don't believe in skimping on frosting, and these batches were especially thick and delicious.

Yesterday I posted about improv cooking, which is a show that frequently plays in my kitchen.  More often than not, it gets rave reviews.  Improv baking, on the other hand, is a much more dangerous game.  However, it is a game from which I will never back down.  You see, like most creative individuals, I often have a very specific picture in my head of what I want to achieve, but quite a nebulous plan to achieve my desired result. I'm rarely satisfied with any one recipe I can find, so I simply improvise.  I have been improvising more and more since going gluten free, and my successes are so very sweet.  Like this one:  Banana Peanut Butter Cupcakes!  There's chocolate cupcake in the picture too, but we won't mention those.  I actually followed a recipe for them and was not thrilled with the result.  Banana Peanut Butter though, OMG.  I could die right now.

I should mention that I did not make these cupcakes purely for my own pleasure.  My little sister turned 22 this weekend, and she decided to celebrate her birthday by running the Atlantic City Marathon.  She finished in just over four hours (4:02) and placed 19th in her age class.  A performance like that surely deserves some protein and potassium in the form of a delicious miniature cake.  Don't you agree?

Here's what I made for her (more or less)

Banana Peanut Butter Cupcakes
makes 12 cupcakes

2 cups all purpose gluten free flour (I like Bob's Red Mill)
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp guar gum
2/3 cup sugar
2 mashed bananas
1/4 cup applesauce
1/2 - 1 cup peanut butter (sorry, I did not measure.  It was probably closer to a cup)
1/2 cup hot water

Wisk together dry ingredients.  Mix in wet ingredients and beat until smooth.  Fill a lined cupcake tin and bake at 325 degrees for 22 minutes.  Perfection.

Oh, what's that?  You noticed that these cupcakes are vegan?  Yes, yes they are.

Hmm?  What did you say?  That's right.  The only fat comes from the peanut butter.

And yes, they have a fabulous moist crumb.  Honestly, if I did not know they were gluten free I would never have guessed.  My sweets-spurning boyfriend even ate two.

Now vegan frosting?  No,  no, that will not happen in my kitchen.  I have tried to make vegan buttercream with coconut oil, and it was a total bust.  I love coconut oil in other things, but not on top of my cupcakes.  I frosted half of these with a cinnamon honey buttercream and the other half with a dark chocolate buttercream.  Sorry, no real recipe for those.  Buttercream is stupidly simple:  beat a bit of confectioner's sugar and  your flavoring into a softened stick of butter.  Continue to beat and slowly add sugar until your mixture tastes like frosting instead of butter.  Done.  No excuses to ruin these babies with canned frosting.  Happy Birthday and Congratulations on your awesome marathon time, Sarah!

Improv Soup: Loaded Baked Potato

I am somewhat of an improvisational cook.  Sometimes this results in amazing, one-of-a-kind meals, and sometimes it results in somewhat of a failure.  Some soothsayers may say that nothing I cook is a fail, but case in point of a less than successful dish was last week's Sunday dinner.    I was pretty tired after my long day in the kitchen, and I may have made some shortcuts that didn't pay off when making cornmeal-breaded chicken tenders and buffalo dipping sauce.  My sweet boyfriend ate it anyway, but his confused tone when he asked, "So what is in this breading?" was a clear tip off that it was not tasty.
Anyway, this Sunday's foray in the kitchen was much more successful, and for once I remember what I did to construct such a lovely meal!

After two entire weeks of more acid reflux than anyone should ever experience (no more coffee for me!) I was craving simple yet tasty foods, so a potato soup came to mind.  However, my usual potato soup is pretty acidic with vinegar and mustard to spice it up.  Not feeling an acidic dish, I decided to try a loaded baked potato soup without making another trip to the store.  I threw all of this into my crock pot:

Loaded Baked Potato Soup
serves 6-8

5 Yukon Gold potatoes, diced
3 cups chicken broth
2 cups almond milk (any milk or milk substitute would work)
1 cup cheddar cheese
1/2 cup butter (had I used actual dairy or a milk with a higher fat content I would have reduced the amount of butter)
onion powder (an actual diced onion would be fab, but I didn't have one)
1 clove garlic, crushed
dried chives
black pepper
salt to taste

I set the slow cooker on low and left it for about 6 hours.  Then I used an immersion blender to blend most of the soup, leaving some chunks of potato.  Next I cooked about a half pound of bacon in the oven (425 degrees for 15 min--thank you pinterest!)  and diced it after it cooled.  Once I stirred in the diced bacon and a little bit of bacon fat, dinner was ready!  Instead of unconvincingly reassuring comments and quizzical looks, this time my boyfriend said something along the lines of "This soup is bangin'!  You nailed it!" (This was not a direct apology for threatening to put me back into the binder of women when dinner was not ready promptly at five, but I chose to take it as an indirect apology ;-)) With a nice texture and bacon in every bite of the soup, I had to agree--I nailed it.  Even my mostly vegetarian sister had some...although she had just run a marathon.

Albeit delicious, this is NOT shaping up to be a low fat week.  Tomorrow I'll tell you about the gluten free peanut butter banana cupcakes I engineered!  Perfect for marathon recovery, don't you think?

Paper Cranes for Neil

I've been quiet for a while, partly because I've been busy, and partly because I have so much to say I don't know where to start. I'll begin with some horrific turned good news. Most of you probably don't know this, as I couldn't bring myself to blog about it, but about three weeks ago one of my sister's best friends was in a bad car accident. On January 23, 2009, he was driving home with another friend on a narrow, winding country road near our houses. No one knows exactly what happened, but somehow he lost control of the car, spun around, and hit a tree on the driver's side. The passenger came home from the hospital the next day with a concussion. He still won't/can't talk about the accident. The driver, Neil, the sweetest kid I know, was airlifted to Robert Wood Johnson hospital in New Brunswick, where he remains in ICU with severe head injuries. For a while his future was uncertain, but I am so happy to say that for the past few days he's been opening his eyes, trying to focus on people's faces, and moving his right hand and leg. Today he showed the most hopeful signs of progress and moved his eyes toward sounds. His parents have been blogging about Neil's journey here. His family is really wonderful. They're so generous, kind, and full of honest loving faith. I've been thinking about them and Neil a lot, and now I'm so relieved to have something more than hope or a prayer to hang on to.

My sister has been organizing some of their friends to make origami paper cranes for Neil. Here's a link to the facebook group. According to the Japanese, one thousand paper cranes = one thousand good wishes. Neil's father spent some time living in Japan, so this custom has special meaning to the Stone family. So far Sarah has between 100 and 200 cranes, which still make lively and colorful decorations, but it's far from 1000. If you'd like to make some, email me for our mailing address and we'll add yours to one of our garlands for Neil's room. The doctors and nurses say that Neil will be able to move to a rehab facility soon. Hopefully there he will have even more room for our good wishes!

Book Review: The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken by Laura Schenone

I have had the luxury of knowing my family history on my mother's side back to 1621 or so when, ten generations ago, Thomas Jenkins and his family arrived in Baltimore from Wales. One of my great uncles, among his many accomplishments, traced our family geneology back to his parent's native Wales and Ireland. I haven't had that good fortune on my father's side of the family. I know my great-grandparents' entrance papers from Ellis Island are somewhere in my aunt's house, so I could embark on that quest for family answers if I want to. That bug still hasn't bitten, but after reading about Laura Schenone's own personal quest for family history, I have definitely thought about it more. Overall, I enjoyed Schenone's memoir, Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. At times I found her pretentious and ungrateful for the living family members she had, but her acknowledgement of these weaknesses tempered my annoyance.

The book began with Laura making Christmas ravioli alone in her kitchen. She and her husband had chosen to forgo the big family Christmas that year. At first I found this bold decision refreshing, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how you can justify cutting your living family out of Christmas while you are grasping at ways to be closer to the great-great-greats that you never met and a land you've never seen. This sense of dissatisfaction with her "family of today" was even further illustrated when she scoffed at her Great Aunt Tessie's ravioli recipe because it contained cream cheese, not a traditional Italian soft cheese. However, her dissatisfaction did launch the quest for her own personal grail, without which we would not have this book.

I was intrigued by Schenone's questions about the origins of a person's predisposition towards a particular cuisine or natural setting. For example, she has a strong affinity for chestnuts and the seaside. Her Italian ancestors hail from Genoa, a coastal community rich in chestnut trees--so much that many residents make their own chestnut flour instead of spending hard-earned money on typical wheat or grain flour. Can culinary preferences or tolerance for a certain climate be programmed into your genes? These questions yield inconclusive findings, but it's great food for thought, especailly for this evolution-loving girl.

At times the book was saved by the majestic, delicious descriptions of Northern Italy and its generous, hospitable people. More redeeming qualities include further explanations of Schenone's relations with her immediate family and eventual reconcilliations. The narrative's flaws were not enough to keep this reader away, and they even taught me a lesson. If you feel like you are missing something in your life or your family, you are probably not going to find it halfway around the world with people you've never met.