Pug Update

Hello internet,

I realize it’s been awhile since I’ve posted about Josie, so here’s an update for you.

St. Pugtrick’s Day with our little family.

She swallowed a palm tree seed (a big one), which got stuck in her stomach and basically blocked her up.  She had to have an emergency surgery, but the recovery went really well.  Around the same time, she was stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock.  She passed out on the living room floor and her breathing got very shallow.  Luckily, we drove to the vet at the speed of sound and she bounced back fairly quickly.

Needless to say, we have had some major health scares with Josie in 2013 and I’m so thankful she’s still with us.  I have to admit she has benefited greatly from “mommy guilt” these past few months.  She’s been getting extra treats, extra love, extra playtime…you name it!

Josie (left) and Bailey (right) hanging out on the slide.

For St. Patrick’s Day, we took her and her best pug pal, Bailey, to a pug meetup event at a local doggy daycare.

They had toys, jungle gym equipment, and even a little water feature for the pups to swim in!

Josie was not sure about the swimming pool.

If you don’t know this already, pugs are one of the goofiest breeds of dogs out there.  They love to make people laugh, they look ridiculous, and they roll around snorting all day long.  To see a group of 20 pugs roaming around a jungle gym was one of the most glorious things of my life.

Most of the pugs had some sort of green spirit for St. Patrick’s Day, which added to the hilarity.

I think this lab had his fill of pugs:

Passed out pooch

We had a wonderful time playing with the pugs, but the best part was how zonked Josie was afterward.

Passed out pooch in the car.

What’s your favorite breed of dog?  How do your pets benefit from guilt?  Extra treats?  Sleeping on the bed?

-Mads

White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Buttercream Frosting: Sweets for Your Sweetiepie Week!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to another themed week of goodies: Sweets for Your Sweetiepie Week!!!

Our lovely team of rock star bloggers have put their heads together to ensure that you have a recipe to make for your loved ones this Valentines Day!

If you’ve been tuning in for a while, you know that I get amped up over any holiday and V-Day is no exception. I love an excuse to give out hugs, tell people I care about them, and most importantly to binge on chocolate and wine. This year I am in class all night, so my celebration will have to wait until the weekend. Luckily, my class is Human Sexuality, which is the most exciting class you could have on Valentines Day. I’m hoping we talk about something upbeat like fetishes or swinger parties, and not erectile dysfunction or supernumerary nipples.  Ok wait, both of those topics are great too.  I guess I’m super excited for class!  Maybe I’ll become a sex therapist?!

Anyway, I made these treats so we could enjoy ourselves all week long!

Jonathan is not a huge dessert fan, usually because he claims they are too “sweet”. But his favorite sweet to indulge in is white chocolate. We were recently at a party with a make-your-own-cupcake bar (GENIUS) and I spotted Jonathan helping himself to a few different varieties, which inspired these White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Buttercream Frosting.

Can you think of a better combo than white chocolate and raspberry? I cannot.

For the cupcakes you will need:

• 1 stick butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 4 oz. white chocolate bar
• 8 oz. white chocolate chips (a smidge more than 1/2 bag)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease a cupcake pan or use these adorable cupcake wrappers for V-day!

Cream together butter and sugar.  Add the vanilla and eggs until smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt.

In a saucepan over low heat, melt the 4 oz. white chocolate bar and milk.  White chocolate has a funny way of melting, which is to say it doesn’t melt well.  It gets kind of runny and chunky, but pay that no attention.

Ghirardelli FTW!

Slowly combine the flour mixture with the butter and sugar mixture until smooth.  Try not to whip the crap out of your batter because it will harden your cupcakes.  Nobody wants a cement cupcake.  Be GENTLE!

Slowly add the melted chocolate mixture to the batter until creamy.  Then add your 8 oz. of chocolate chips.

The extra white chocolate chips tossed in at the end really give this recipe an extra oompf of creamy white chocolate flavor!

Double white chocolate intensity

Pour the batter into the greased cupcake pan.

Bake at 375 degrees for 16-18 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Let the cupcakes cool completely before moving to the frosting stage.

For the frosting you will need:

• 1 1/2 stick butter
• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 4 Tbsp heavy whipping cream
• pinch of salt
• 3 Tbsp raspberry jam

Whip together butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, whipping cream, and pinch of salt until it looks like frosting (about 30 seconds on high).

Then add the raspberry jam and mix it into the frosting with a rubber scraper.  If you are lucky, your friend Jeanne from Inside NanaBread’s Head will send you a giant jar of delicious homemade raspberry, cranberry, and cherry jam for you to use in this recipe. If you aren’t lucky, you will walk with your head hung in shame to the grocery store to get sub par jam.

Thank you, Jeanne!

If raspberries are in season, it might be fun to make a raspberry compote to use in the frosting instead of jarred jam. I didn’t do this because raspberries were $4 when I created this recipe.

Spread the frosting evenly over the cupcakes and top with fresh raspberries or sprinkles.  These cupcakes were divine and got the stamp of approval from the hubby and my coworkers!  Num!

White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Buttercream Frosting

What are you making for Valentine’s Day this year?  What are your plans this holiday?

-Mads

Please check out the rest of the sweets on other blogs throughout the week! These bloggers are fearless bakers and make me drool on a daily basis. I hope you find something you want to make for your sweetheart!

Sunday:

• Inside NanaBread’s Head–Retro Raspberry Divinity (& GIVEAWAY)
• Comfortably Domestic–Red Velvet Vanilla Marble Cupcakes with Milk Chocolate Buttercream

Monday:

• Kvetchin’ Kitchen–Chocolate-Dipped Peanut Butter Pudding Cookies
• The Hill Country Cook–Mini Meringue Strawberry Pie

Tuesday:

• Munching in the Mitten–Chocolate Pistachio Biscotti
• Bakeaholic Mama–Samoa Crack Dip

Wednesday:

• Climbing Grier Mountain–Avocado Peppermint Chocolate Mousse
• Country Cleaver–Cherry Garcia Chocolate Bark

Thursday:

• My post above–White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Buttercream Frosting
• Tenaciously Yours–S’more on a Stick

Friday:

• Decadent Philistines Save the World–Lemon Marshmallows
• Comfortably Domestic–Mini Chocolate Mousse Pies

Saturday:

• From My Sweet Heart–Berry Smoothie Ice Cream

New year: Same old me

Hello internet!

I hope your holiday season was relaxing, joyful, and filled with friends and food.

Mine certainly was!

Happy 2013!!!

I like to set 1 or 2 fairly general goals for my new year resolutions.  If I get too specific, I usually abandon it after a week or two.  Specific goals are good for work projects, but for an entire year of behavior, I find broad topics are more useful to me.  Whatever floats your boat.

My previous resolutions:
2010-Get involved in an online community
2011-Get to know California
2012-Eat less and move more

I have succeeded in all of those goals!  In fact, last year I lost 23 pounds just by eating less and moving more (only a few of which I gained back during the holidays…woops).

This year’s resolutions are as follows:
1) Continue my journey of eating less and moving more.  It is a habit already, but I want to make sure I don’t slip back into old patterns of Eating All The Things.
2) Don’t become a couch potato.  I’m going to try to do 1 new and exciting thing per month.  Examples of this include attending a concert, visiting a museum, hiking in a new spot, etc.

With school and work, I became a home-body last semester.  Instead of going out and living life, I stayed home and soaked up every spare minute of couch time I could find.  The blog suffered big time because sitting on the couch is not fun to write about or read about.

This year, the “do 1 new and exciting thing per month” goal is really an effort to prevent myself from shriveling up into a couch potato during my downtime.

What are your resolutions for 2013?  Did you keep your resolutions from last year?

-Mads

One Kitchen Many Hearts: Secret Santa

Happy holidays, my fine internet friends!

It’s time for another One Kitchen Many Hearts (OKMH) post from my sisters around the internet:

Top left to bottom right: Me, Kirsten, Megan, Jeanne, Allison, and Kat

The holidays at our house were filled with family, holiday ham, presents, and Christmas jammies.  It has also been filled with runny noses, which did not bring out much holiday cheer in myself or my husband.  But nothing could have warmed my heart more than opening my Secret Santa OKMH box from my friend Jeanne (aka Inside NanaBread’s Head)!!!

Guess who?

There were squees of delight happening all over Twitter and Facebook when I found the box in my apartment.  The package arrived right after finals week had destroyed me, so the timing was perfect.

When I opened it up, my jaw about fell off my face.

Can’t you feel the love spilling out of every inch of this box and through the computer screen?  I mean, really.  There was so much care an attention paid to the details of this box that I wanted to fly to Texas just to give Jeanne a hug!

Somehow she remembered that my previous Christmas was void of any real decorations, so she MADE ME A TREE FULL OF HAND CRAFTED ORNAMENTS.  My heart grew 3 times that day.

Josie ran over and instinctively knew there was something in the box for her.  I thought she was charging over to eat the ornaments, but she simply grabbed the squeaky toy meant for her and went about her business.  It was hilarious!  I wish I had a better picture or even a video of that moment, but alas, this is all I have:

I immediately put the ornaments up.  They are all adorable, but here are some of my absolute favorites:

Love penguins? An owl holding a Christmas tree? Josie the pug?  C’mon!  Too cute!

Jeanne also found some goodies that were perfect to warm up our holiday season:

Nums

This gingerbread candle is amazeballs and has been burning every day since we got it! I highly recommend this scent as a holiday gift.

I painted my nails Christmas red.

She also included a homemade batch of the best gingerbread cookies in the world.  Jonathan doesn’t usually like desserts (wha?), but he was asking for these cookies like crazy.

Jeanne made our Christmas extra Christmas-y this year, which was really the best gift I could have asked for.  Without snow on the ground and my family close by, it was really special to have some new traditions to start with my new family.

Thank you, Jeanne!

What was your favorite gift this holiday season?  What is your favorite tradition for Christmas?

-Mads

p.s. Check out what I gave Megan at Wanna Be a Country Cleaver.  To sneak a peek at what the other ladies got, visit Tenaciously Yours, Decadent Philistines Save the World, and Comfortably Domestic.

 

COOKIE WEEK: Glazed Honey Lemon Cookies

Hello interwebs,

The holidays are upon us, which means that it’s time for another Cookie Week celebration!

A few of my blogging friends have banned together to bake cookies and raise awareness and $$$ for Cookies for Kids Cancer.  Through the Glad to Give program, each cookie that we exchange raises cash to help treat children with cancer.  Isn’t that fantastic?

Let’s be real, I was going to make the cookies anyway, but now I can feel better that the goodness from those cookies is going to other places besides just my hips.  If you want to participate, it takes just a few clicks to enter the # of cookies you exchanged this year on Glad to Give.  

To prepare for Cookie Week, I made a list of 5 cookie recipes that I’ve never tried before.  I felt so adventurous, so alive!  But let me tell you, these glazed honey lemon cookies were the best.  Jonathan has requested them daily since we finished them off.
The recipe comes from Taste of Home Cookie cookbook.  You will need:

7 Tbsp. butter

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 egg

1 and 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/3 cup honey

1/4 cup plain yogurt

2 tsp lemon rind

1/2 tsp lemon extract (or juice from the lemon you just zested, eh?)

For the icing (you might as well double this icing recipe, right?):

1 cup powdered sugar

2 Tbsp lemon juice

2 tsp lemon zest

Cream together butter and sugar.  Then beat in the egg.

Who can tell me the difference between regular honey and clover honey?

In a separate bowl, combine the honey, yogurt, and lemon zest.

Unappetizing? Perhaps, but the smell is divine!

In yet another, separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt.  I don’t have a picture of this step because I’m not on top of it.  Please imagine a bowl of dry ingredients in your head.  Not entertaining enough?  Oh, perhaps that’s why I forgot to take a snap of it.  Moving along…

Add the dry ingredients alternatively with your honey mixture to the wet ingredients.  Your batter should look and smell like heaven right now.

I always use a cookie scoop for the next step.  I held out on getting a cookie scoop for years, but it is SO worth it.  Please go out and save yourself a whole bunch of time and effort by buying a cookie scoop.  *end rant

Now take your freckled and fuzzy arm and scoop some cookies!

My batter was runny, which made for pancake-like cookies.  Delicious delicious pancake cookies made from unicorn tears.

While the cookies are in the oven, mix together your icing ingredients.

When your cookies have had some time to cool, ice those puppies up!  Get messy!  Get funky!  Get durtay!

Naked cookies need icing love.

I topped mine off with a little extra zest because I’m zesty and bold.  And it made them look much cuter.

Stay tuned for the rest of Cookie Week!  There are giveaways, stories, and more COOKIES!!!

Comfortably Domestic–Decorated Shortbread Cookies (plus a King Arthur Giveaway)
Inside NanaBread’s Head–Dark Chocolate Turtle Thumbprints
Bakeaholic Mama–Bacon Maple Sugar Cookies
Wanna be a Country Cleaver–Homemade Mint Oreos

Tenaciously Yours–Colossal Cookies
Comfortably Domestic–Gingersnaps Reboot
Decadent Philistines Save the World–Sesame Plum Thumbprints
Bakeaholic Mama–P-town Toffee Cookies

Munching in the Mitten–Salted Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

What are you making this holiday season?  What is your absolute favorite holiday cookie?

-Mads