Aunt Lisa's Baked Crab Rangoons

For my bridal shower, my mother in law had all the guests bring along a favorite recipe written on a card for me. I got a lot of really great recipes and I'm finally trying them out. The first one we tried was from Dave's Aunt Lisa for baked crab rangoons. Dave LOVES crab rangoon. It is the one thing he has to order every time we go out for chinese.  He saw this recipe and was instantly excited about trying these out.

They were super easy, a little time consuming, but totally worth it.

Baked Crab Rangoons
8oz crab meat
8oz cream cheese
3 green onions, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 pack wonton wrappers (can be found in the produce section- Thanks Lisa!)

1. Preheat oven to 400˚ F. In a bowl, mix crab and cream cheese together throughly.
2. Add green onions and garlic to crab mixture, blend well.

3. Add Worcestershire & soy sauces to crab mixture and stir well.
4. Spray two mini-muffin pans with non stick spray and place a wonton wrapper in each section.

5. Add one heaping teaspoon of crab mixture into the middle of each wonton.
6. Fold flaps of wontons to cover mixture.

7. Bake for 7 minutes

These little guys are tasty!

Fresh Blueberry Muffins

A lot has happened both in the kitchen and out of it since my last post. I again fell into making good things and not taking the time to photograph them. Oops. But this time I have a REAL excuse. This happened:

No, I didn't make that gorgeous cake, but I did get married. We had a beautiful day and are still enjoying married life two weeks later. I was so glad to get to spend time with my friends and family who all traveled up to Wisconsin to share the day with me.

We went up to Door County for our honeymoon and did quite a bit of wine tasting. We also did quite a bit of dining out which ranged from "hmm. I didn't know that was a thing" (a pat of butter as a condiment on a hamburger), to "this is absolutely delicious" and asking the proprietor if everything was made on site (it was- Surprisingly good food at Kitty O'Reilly's Irish Pub ). Then we came back home and jumped right into the thick of things as Dave performed on opening night of Summerfest.

After the dust settled and we got our house back in order and everything from the wedding put away, I could finally get back into the kitchen. An ad for blueberries on sale in the weekly grocery circular sent me craving for some homemade blueberry muffins. The quest began for a delicious looking blueberry muffin recipe. I looked all around, the recipes at cookbooks at home didn't quite pique my fancy, but a recipe I found at Baked Perfection looked simply amazing. The funniest coincidence occurred as well... I actually used the original posting from February 2009 to make these muffins, but when I went back to the website, she had reposted the recipe! They really are that good!

Bakery Style Blueberry Muffins (from Baked Perfection)
Muffins:
2 eggs
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cups sour cream
1 1/2 cups blueberries


Topping:
1/2 cup white sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup butter, cubed
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Grease 12 muffin cups or line with paper muffin liners.

In a medium bowl mix together flour, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon. In a large bowl beat together eggs, white sugar, and brown sugar. Mix in oil, vanilla, and sour cream. Mix dry ingredients into wet mixture (be sure not to over-mix, batter will be lumpy). Gently fold in blueberries. Scoop batter into prepared muffin cups so they are 2/3 of the way full.

To make the topping: mix together 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup flour, 1/4 cup butter, and 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon. Mix with fork, and sprinkle over muffins before baking. 

Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes. 

Strawberry Tart

When I went grocery shopping this week I saw 2lb packages of strawberries on sale. I thought, these can't possibly be good, they're probably selling them at a discount because they're about to go bad or something. Surprisingly though, they looked really good! Then I had to figure out what the heck I was going to do with 2 lbs of strawberries! 

A visit to Confessions of a Tart and the gorgeous photos of her fresh strawberry tart gave me a pretty good idea.

The recipe starts with a Sweet Tart Dough that is frozen before you bake it so no pie weights are necessary (although I just got some at a bridal shower that I have been dying to use)

Ingredients: 

1 ½ Cup all purpose flour

½ cup confectioner's sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

1 stick plus 1 tablespoon cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 large egg yolk

1. Combine flour, sugar and salt. Scatter butter pieces over dry ingredients and combine with a pastry cutter. (Confessions of a Tart has directions for doing this with a food processor. I am not lucky enough to have one, but it works just as well by hand.) Stir egg yolk to break it up and add to the dough.  Turn dough onto a work surface and very lightly knead dough to finish incorporating dry ingredients.

2. Butter a 9 inch tart pan (I have an 11 inch, it worked really well, so either would be fine) and lightly press dough evenly into pan. 

3. Prick dough with a fork 4-5 times. Freeze for 30 minutes or preferably longer.

4. To bake crust, center a rack in your oven and preheat to 375˚. Butter the shiny side of aluminum foil and fit, buttered side down, tightly against the crust. Put the tart pan on a baking sheet and bake crust for 25 minutes. Remove from oven and carefully remove foil. If the crust has puffed, press down gently with the back of a spoon. Bake for another 8 minutes without the foil until firm and golden brown.  Transfer pan to a rack and cool to room temperature. 

The next part is a Pastry Cream. I've never made a pudding or custard, except from those instant pudding packages that you really can't mess up. I'll admit that the first batch I tried of this sat, sadly liquid, in the fridge with me hoping it would magically firm up. It ended up going down the drain. I guess while waiting for your milk to almost boil is not the most opportune time to begin talking to your fiancé about where you may someday move for some job that you don't even have yet. The second time when I actually stayed in the same room as the stove, the custard turned out just right. 

Ingredients: 

2 cups whole milk

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar

2 large eggs

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

¼ teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Pour milk into a heavy saucepan. Add salt, place over medium-high heat and cook until just before boiling point, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile, whisk together cornstarch and sugar. Add the eggs and whisk until smooth (don't let the eggs and sugar stand for long). 

2. When milk is ready, slowly drizzle a third of the hot milk into the egg mixture, whisking continuously. Pour the egg- milk mixture back into the hot milk and continue whisking until the custard is as thick as lightly whipped cream, about 2 minutes. 

3. Remove from heat and immediately pour through a sieve into a bowl. Stir in vanilla extract. Let cool 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

4. Cut butter into 1 tablespoon pieces and whisk into pastry cream 1 tablespoon at a time until smooth. 

5. Cover bowl with plastic wrap, pressing directly onto top of cream to prevent skin from forming and put into fridge to cool.

Then assemble the tart! 

Fill the tart shell with pastry cream

Hull and slice 1 lb of strawberries (more for an 11in. tart pan), reserving one perfect strawberry for the center

Arrange strawberry slices in circles on top of the pastry cream. Put the reserved whole strawberry in the middle. 

Triple Chip Cookies

These cookies went really fast at the first communion party. So fast that they had to be put away so there would be some left for dessert!

My favorite thing about this recipe: coarse sea salt.  What a revelation! Pair the chocolate-toffee classic cookie flavor with a surprise burst of saltiness and you have found heaven!

Triple Chip Cookies
2 sticks softened salted butter
½ cup sugar
1 ½ cups packed brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 ¾ cups all purpose flour
¾ teaspoon medium coarse sea salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
2 ¼ cups assorted baking chips (I used white chips, milk and dark chocolate chips)

1. Preheat oven to 360˚ F. Cream butter and both sugars until fluffy- about 3 minutes in the KitchenAid. Add both eggs and vanilla and beat an additional 2 minutes.

2. Add baking powder, soda, salt and flour until batter is fully incorporated. Finally, add the chips until well distributed. (At this point I was extremely grateful for the KitchenAid, this is a thick dough!)

3. Drop 2 tablespoons of dough onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Bake 12-14 minutes or until edges are golden brown. Leave cookies on the sheet for 2 minutes after taking them out of the oven. Cool an additional 3 minutes on baking racks, just long enough to make sure they don't burn the roof of your mouth when you dig in!

Snickerdoodles

Or the blog post in which I finally use the KitchenAid, profess my undying love for it, and make some pretty darn good cookies in the process.

You know how some guys are about taking a million different photos of their "tricked out" cars? And you look at those photos and think "what the heck, it's just a car, it doesn't look any different at this angle, or that one, or that one...."

I totally had a moment today where I had to tell myself to stop taking photos of the KitchenAid and focus on the food. Hence the paucity of prep photos with this recipe. It really is ridiculous.

Now that I'm working again, I have really missed my kitchen time. I'm missing my cuddle time with the fiance too, to be entirely honest. I can just hear him now "I can't believe you wrote that in your blog!" (he is far too shy about any sort of public acknowledgement of our coupleness- I have no idea how he is going to react at the wedding when we will be forced to kiss. multiple times. in front of an audience.) And again, after that parenthetical statement I can hear him... echoing his earlier statement. Poor guy.

For whatever reason, my second job has decided in the last few weeks that they really love me, and I've been closing at the store at least two nights a week (after a full day in the classroom), and working at the store all weekend. Kitchen time has been close to nil. I think the most cooking I've done is browning some beef for tacos. Cuddle time has faired a little better, but not much.

Somehow, I managed to get tomorrow off work. Which is a darn good thing, because we have a family gathering for one of Dave's cousin's first communion. Dave's aunt asked me to bring cookies to the party and I jumped at the chance. Making food for other people is probably my favorite thing in the world, after cuddling. (Yes, I'm being ridiculous on purpose. Again, I have to say, Poor Dave) The interesting aspect of this food assignment is that two of the young children in the family cannot have food dyes. So the awesome looking Monster Cookies my darling matron of honor made were out. Then I had two genius thoughts: Snickerdoodles! Some variation on classic chocolate chip cookies- look for that recipe to follow soon! So the cinnamon-sweet adventure in the kitchen for this weekend began.

Snickerdoodles (from the ever awe-inspiring SmittenKitchen)

2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
2 sticks unsalted butter (room temperature)
1 ¾ cups sugar
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
2 large eggs

1. Sift together four, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt; set aside. In a mixing bowl (or in the bowl of your KitchenAid, yay!) combine butter and 1 ½ cups sugar. Beat on medium speed until light and fluffy- about 2 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add eggs and beat to combine.  Add dry ingredients and beat to combine. Chill dough to desired scooping consistency (about an hour worked for me).

My favorite thing in the kitchen!

2. Preheat oven to 400 ° F with one rack in the top third and one rack in the bottom thrd of the oven. Line baking sheets with parchment or silicone baking mats.

3. In a small bowl, combine ¼ cup of sugar and the ground cinnamon. Use a medium cookie scoop to form balls of dough and roll in cinnamon sugar. Place about 2 inches apart on baking sheets.

4. Bake until the cookies are set in the center and begin to crack, about 10 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through. *the cookies will NOT brown. So seriously, just about 10 minutes. Or you'll burn the bottoms of the cookies. Not that I did that with the first set in the oven or anything*

5. Transfer sheets to a wire rack to cool, about 5 minutes, before transferring cookies to the rack to finish cooling.

6. Eat these bad boys. It seems silly that something so simple is so good. But there it is.

Pop-tarts

On one of our new (salad size) plates, thanks Aunt Vicki!

Pop-tarts are one of those things that I used to eat as a kid that, for whatever reason, my mother didn't let my younger brothers eat because they "aren't good for you". I am not about to argue with that statement, I stopped eating them myself after reading the nutritional info on a package once. I suspect she didn't let them eat poptarts because they always chose the chocolatey- s'more flavored ones, or anything that didn't even hint at fruit fillings. When I saw a recipe for homemade pop-tarts I got really excited, these have to be at least healthier due to the lack of preservatives and the fact that I get to choose what gets put inside, right? 

Making these was fairly easy, it is a nice cool day (read: rainy and chilly, ugh April in Wisconsin) so the dough was really easy to work with. The biggest issue I had was moving the tarts from the counter, where I had rolled them out, filled and topped them, to the baking sheet. If you push down on those edges hard, you end up sticking the tart to the counter even more. I was also a little surprised at the small size of these. I am not a pro at cutting things perfectly evenly, so I had some that came out fairly regularly sized, and some that were tiny. But none of them were comparable in size to the pop-tarts you buy in the store. Not a problem, just not what I was expecting. 

This was also one of my biggest forays into the kitchen since I've started working full (and then some) time again. It was good to start with something so simple and easy, I didn't have to re-check the recipe a million times, and once I got started it was nice to just let my instincts take over. Additionally, I got to break out a bunch of new cooking tools. Dave's mom threw me a bridal shower last weekend and we got so many nice things! It was nice to use a substantial mixing bowl (rather than the plastic ones I've been using up to now.) We are also loving our new dishes! We are so lucky to have such wonderful and loving people in our lives.

Homemade Pop-tarts (from King Arthur Flour/Smitten Kitchen)

Ingredients (pastry)

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into pats

1 large egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 additional large egg (to brush on pastry)

Fillings: you can use anything for a filling, we did the cinnamon-sugar filling

Cinnamon Sugar Filling

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon (or less if you wish)

4 teaspoons all-purpose flour

Jam filling 

3/4 cup jam

1 tablespoon cornstarch mixed with tablespoon cold water

Other good ideas (that my mother most definitely would NOT APPROVE of) include Nutella and chocolate chips

Using my new mixing bowls. Thanks Aunt Lisa!

1. Whisk together the flour, sugar and salt. Work in the butter with your fingers, pastry blender or food processor until pea-sized lumps of butter are still visible and the mixture holds together when you squeeze it.

2. Whisk the first egg and milk together and stir them into the dough, mixing until everything is cohesive, kneading briefly if needed.

3. Divide the dough in half, shape into a smooth rectangle, about 3/5 inches. If you'd like to wait to finish the recipe, these dough rectangles can be wrapped in plastic and refrigerated for 2 days.

4. Place one piece of the dough onto a lightly floured workspace and roll it into a rectangle about 1/8 inch thick, large enough that you can trim it to an even 9x12. Repeat with the second piece of dough. Set trimmings aside.

5. Cut each piece of dough into thirds horizontally and vertically (forming 9 rectangles).

6. Beat the additional egg and brush it over the surface of the first dough. Place a heaping tablespoon of filling into the center of each rectangle, keeping the edges clear (so you can seal them). Place a second rectangle over the first, pressing firmly along the edge of the rectangle. Repeat with the rest of the dough/filling. Press the tines of a fork along the edges of the rectangles. 

You can't tell, but these are on my brand new HUGE baking sheet, again, thanks go to Aunt Lisa!

7. Place the tarts on a parchment lined baking sheet. Prick the top of each pop-tart with a fork or toothpick so steam can escape while baking. 

8. Refrigerate the baking pan of tarts for 30 minutes while the oven is preheating to 350 F. 

9. Bake the pop tarts for 20 to 25 minutes, until they're a light golden brown. Cool in pan on rack. Store in an airtight container for up to a week.

 Remember those trimmings you saved? You can sprinkle those with some more of the cinnamon-sugar filling and bake them for 13-15 minutes and have a nice little bite sized snack!

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

After teaching all week (I know, I know, everyone else in the world with a full time job is sick of hearing me complain about ACTUALLY working) I was exhausted. Too exhausted to document my cooking experience with these delicious carrot cake cupcakes.

I was a little anxious about having planned to make these for a benefit we are going to on Saturday, mostly because when I decided to make them I thought I was going to have plenty of time to play in the kitchen on Friday. Thank goodness the recipe was so ridiculously simple that I kept having to re-read it to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

My only issue with the recipe was that my carrots must have had a lot of moisture, because the cooking time listed in the original recipe didn't turn out to be enough. The first dozen, which I was planning on keeping at home anyway, turned out a little soggy at first and one cup that I overfilled didn't really cook all the way through even after additional time in the oven. The second dozen turned out fine after a few more uninterrupted minutes in the oven.

I snuck tastes of enough of the frosting and batter before washing the bowls that I haven't eaten one yet, but Dave had one and said it was delicious. That's always a good sign.

For the actual recipe, you'll have to go over to Smitten Kitchen and check out her beautiful rendition of these cupcakes. Pretend mine look like that too. Because I totally did all that piping rather than just spread the frosting on with a knife. Yeah.