Good Friday

In honor of Good Friday I made hot cross buns this week!  I used a combination of a few recipes so I'll share those soon - the bun recipe is from epicurious.com and the frosting recipe came from my mom (tangerine)!

Have a great weekend!

Breakfast of champions

Some oatmeal, flaxseed, granola, and almonds. Not exactly cheese grits with cream and bacon, but it will do. :)

Sauerkraut Sunday

Today the hubby and I went to the California Ave farmers market after a long absence. How could I have gone so long without a chicken naan wrap? Anyway, we discovered many new booths since we'd last been there - including gourmet sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is among my least favorite foods, but my hubby loves anything vinegary - ick!  I insisted that he try the krautwich (even if he wasn't hungry) because it looked so interesting.  The guy gave us two for the price of one. The krautwich was like sauerkraut in a giant pretzel. Interesting! I observed while eating butter chicken in a naan wrap. :)

I heart waffles

When we were in Norway, we discovered heart-shaped Norwegian waffles.  We ordered the waffle iron on amazon right after we got back, but somehow the weeks slipped away from us before we finally got our act together to make some waffles.  Last Sunday, in honor of our wedding anniversary, we finally were organized and motivated enough to veer from our normal Sunday routine of oatmeal and coffee.  Using a recipe from the Joy of Cooking, we made heart-shaped waffles!

getting the iron hot

The waffles were delicious - crispy on the outside, soft on the inside.  Paired with coffee and the Sunday New York Times, it was the perfect Sunday morning.  What is not pictured is that I also spent the morning cuddled in my LSU Tigers snuggie... but that is for a different post. :)

elements of a perfect Sunday morning

First Anniversary! Time to eat cake!

Today was our first wedding anniversary!  Since our wedding cake topper is still in New Orleans in my parent's freezer, I decided to make almond white cake cupcakes so that we could eat a slice of our wedding cake (in spirit) today.  It turns out to be hard to find a recipe for white almond wedding cake, but I found a well reviewed version on allrecipes.com (and I had all of the ingredients)!  Anything with 4.5 stars after 9,200 reviews is worth a try!

the ingredients

A special thanks to John for supplying us with farm fresh eggs.  Look at those yolks!  To keep the cake white - I set aside the yolks to use for something else as the recipe only called for the whites.

yolks from my co-worker's chickens

Snowy white almond cake batter.

batter was SO hard not to just eat raw... 

Little white cupcakes - the recipe yield was 30 cupcakes.  They weren't as almond tasting as I expected.  Next time I would double the amount of almond extract to get them to taste more like our actual wedding cake.

cupcakes hot from the oven

The cakes were topped with a little almond vanilla frosting and a sprinkle of white pearls for decoration and crunch (my favorite texture).

wedding cupcakes to eat

I also put 15 cupcakes in a to go tray to take to work tomorrow and share with my co-workers.  I'm always brining sweet treats to work since I like baking more than I like eatings desserts  (I'm more of a cheese kind of a person).

wedding cupcakes to share!

We shared our wedding cake cupcakes with Alison and Eli, who are getting married later this year.  It was fun to share the tradition of eating wedding cake (a realistic recreation in our case) a year later with our best friends.

girl crush

Isn't Gwyneth the cutest in this video?  I think I need to start watching Glee...

Tom Hanks and Tiaras

Since Big and Money Pit, I've always had a weakness for Tom Hanks...