Ambition & Inertia

Do you ever feel like you're treading water, barely keeping your head above the surface, while everyone around you is racing towards the finish line of some major triathlon?

I have an amazing family and group of close friends. I've been lucky enough to travel and participate in some one-of-a-kind experiences. I have a master's degree in a "hard" science. I've published in a major journal. I have more designations and certificates of completion than I know what do to with. I'm generally happy with my life. Yet, I never feel like I'm doing enough. 

All kinds of people from my past have returned home for the holidays in the last two weeks.  One friend travels to exotic countries and has the craziest experiences. Others completed their PhDs earlier this year. My little baby sister got married. All around me, my friends are buying houses, completing their families, climbing the ranks in their careers.  And it's making me panic. I completed my master's degree over 2 years ago. My last work designation, a year ago. I made plans to go to Europe and instead let my passport expire. No house. No husband. No kids. What in the world have I been doing lately?

Needless to say, I'm in a complete funk. I'm distracted and easily frustrated. Total overload to the point where I want nothing more than to crawl into my cave and hibernate until summer. My mind's going a million miles a minute. Go for an MBA? New designation? Classes in an unrelated field just for fun? (data mining, anyone?) Where to meet the guy? Or forget the guy and look into adopting? Time for a new pet - hedgehog or Italian Greyhound? Get back into belly dance? Pick a city and start looking to buy a house? Or just screw it all and take life as it comes at me? So much to think about...

Which meant this week's baking project had to be over the top. I needed something that required more concentration than usual in order to quiet my mind, if only for an hour or two. And then I found SprinkleBakes' Sparkling Champagne Cupcake recipe. Difficult enough to distract me and perfect for New Years Eve. It sounded so good, I didn't even attempt to make any changes to it! 

Sparkling Champagne Cupcakes

My pictures don't do this recipe justice. And I screwed up the frosting. But they taste amazing, and the next time I make them, I'll post some better pictures!

Ingredients - Champagne Cupcakes

1 stick butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla (I used clear vanilla throughout this recipe so as not to discolor the batter or frosting)

1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup sour cream

1/2 cup champagne or sparkling wine (I used M. Lawrence "Fizz", a demi-sec sparkling wine from my favorite winery in Traverse City, MI.  I would have rather used their "Wet" wine because it's a bit sweeter, but it's impossible to find around here!)

Preparation - Champagne Cupcakes

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cream butter and sugar, 2-3 minutes, or until light and fluffy.

3. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat after each addition.

4. Add vanilla and mix until combined.

5. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

6. In another bowl, whisk together the sour cream and sparkling wine.

7. Add flour and wine mixtures to the butter/sugar mixture alternately, beginning and finishing with the flour mixture. Mix until just combined after each addition.

8. Fill each cupcake tin with 1/4 cup of the batter.

9. Cook 17-22 minutes. (Mine took about 19 minutes.) Transfer to wire rack and let cool.  

10. Cut the center out of each cupcake in preparation for the filling. (I used the "small" attachment to my cupcake corer.) Trim the excess cupcake off the core, and save the top for covering the filling in the next step.

The texture of these cupcakes are amazing.
Almost more muffin-like than cupcake-like. And the flavor? To die for!

My mom gave me a cupcake corer for Christmas.  Best. Present. Ever.

Ingredients - Champagne Filling
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream, divided
1/2 cup champagne or sparkling wine
2 T cornstarch
5 T sugar
1 egg + 2 egg yolks
2 T unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla

Preparation - Champagne Filling
1. In a small bowl, whisk the cornstarch with 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream.
2. In a small saucepan, bring the remaining heavy whipping cream, sugar, and sparkling wine to a boil. Remove from heat.
3. Beat the whole egg and 2 yolks into the cornstarch mixture.
4. Add 1/3 cup of the hot wine mixture to the cornstarch mixture.  Whisk constantly.
5. Place the remaining wine mixture back on the burner and bring to a boil.
6. Add the cornstarch mixture to the boiling wine mixture in a steady pour, and whisk continuously until mixture thickens. 
7. Remove from heat and beat in butter and vanilla.
8. Fill each cupcake with filling.(I filled a sandwich baggie with the filling and snipped the corner off since I ran out of pastry bags. Worked perfectly!)
9. Use the trimmed cupcake core tops you saved above to cover the filling.

Cored cupcakes filled with the champagne filling.

Filled cupcakes (with core tops replaced) all ready to be frosted!

Ingredients - Champagne Frosting

1 cup + 1 T Champagne or Sparkling Wine

2 sticks butter, softened

2 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Preparation - Champagne Frosting

1. In a small saucepan, simmer 1 cup sparkling wine until reduced to 2 T. (This step took longer than I expected. Use a high heat temp and try for more of a "boil" than a "simmer"!)

2. Allow wine mixture to cool. (This is the step I completely forgot about. It made my frosting too runny and I had to add extra powdered sugar to thicken the frosting up.)

3. Cream butter and sugar together, 2-3 minutes, or until light and fluffy.

4. Add the cooled reduced wine plus 1 T of regular wine to butter mixture and mix well.

5. Frost and decorate your cupcakes!

Decorated cupcakes. The frosting is so sad looking! 

For decorating, I used a mixture of sugar pearls and pieces that I found at TJ Maxx.

This was my "practice" cupcake. (And by "practice", I mean that this is the one I took
bites out of as I was going to "make sure" the flavors were coming together right!)
 I cored out a deeper piece in my actual cupcakes to use up more of the filling.

My "practice" cupcake again.  This time with my chosen sparkling wine!

Unfortunately now I'm back to thinking about the future. Should I relax and learn to enjoy standing still? Or do I let my competitive side take over and start making some changes? At the very least, I think I need a pet. And some goals for next year. (Looks like the competitive side is winning....) Good thing I have some leftover wine and cupcakes to help me make these decisions!

Christmas Cut-Outs & Frosting

I'm completely in the minority here, but Christmas is one of my least favorite holidays.  Don't get me wrong, the idea is great. But Christmas does crazy things to people.  Stress, forced shopping, social obligations galore, cold, grey skies (at least in Michigan)....the list just goes on and on. And instead of thinking about what this time of year is supposed to be all about, people get overwhelmed and tend to take their anger and frustration out on strangers.  As soon as Thanksgiving is over, I go into total hibernation mode just to avoid the road rage and lack of common courtesy that takes over the month of December. 

In the midst of all this stress, my department was responsible for our company's monthly team building lunch.  It had been a rough week - we are finalizing renewals and trying to plan for for the coming year, dealing with lots of changes, and my boss was put through the wringer dealing with one particularly nasty individual.  So we decided to go all out and do a full on Christmas dinner with ham, green bean casserole, cheesy potatoes, mac & cheese, rolls, pies, and (my contribution) a frost your own cookie bar!  It was a ton of work, but in the end, it reminded us all of why we love working together.  We had so much fun planning and cooking as a team, enjoying a couple minutes where we could stop worrying about who was on the other end of the ringing phones and focus on our friendships in the office, and then spending the rest of the day in a total food coma before pulling the leftovers out for a late afternoon snack.  This one little event completely put me back into the Christmas mood, so today I'm sharing my Christmas cookie and frosting recipes with you, in the hope that you'll gather up your family and friends and spend an afternoon focusing on the things that truly matter in life :)

Mama K's Cut-Out Christmas Cookies

Ingredients:

5.5 cups all-purpose flour
2 T baking powder
2 tsp salt
2 cup sugar
1.5 cups (3 sticks) margarine
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Preparation Directions:
1. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.
2. Cream softened margarine, about 2 minutes.
3. And sugar and beat about 2 minutes.
4. Beat in eggs and vanilla one at a time, until well mixed.
5. Add flour mixture to butter mixture in three sections, each time mixing until just combined.
6. Form dough into a ball and wrap in wax paper.  Chill overnight, or at least several hours.  If you are only chilling for a few hours, I recommend forming the dough into two balls and wrapping each separately.

When you are ready to cut out your cookies:
1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
2. Line your counter with wax paper, and sprinkle liberally with flour.
3. Grab a quarter of your dough and roll into a circle using a rolling pin.  Depending on how sticky your dough is, you may need to pat flour onto the dough or your rolling pin.  Be careful not to use too much flour!  I like to make a combination of thick and thin cookies, so sometimes I roll my dough to be 1/4 inch thick (for thicker cookies) and other times I made it about 1/8 inch thick (for thin cookies.)  
4. Dip your cookie cutters in flour to make it easier to remove your cookies from the cutters and press the cutter firmly into the dough.  Wiggle the cutter back and forth several times.  Place the cookie on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  
5. Continue cutting out cookies until you run out of dough.  Grab the leftover pieces of dough and combine them with another quarter of the reserved dough.  Repeat steps 1-5 until all your dough has been used.  I can usually get about 75 small cookies cut out, you may get less if you use bigger cutters.
6. Bake your cookies in the oven until the edges are just turning golden brown.  This generally takes 6-10 minutes.  My thinnest cookies took about 7 minutes, while my thickest cookies took almost 10.  I set my oven timer to 7 minutes for each batch and watched them like a hawk :)
7. Let cookies cool on the cookie sheet for 1-2 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.  When cool, they are ready to frost (recipe below) and decorate!

My recipe book, ball of chilled dough, and SPRINKLES!

Rolled out dough.  I probably don't have enough flour on the wax paper here.
You need just enough to keep the dough from sticking to the wax paper and
ruining the cut out when you try to pick it up.

Using cookie cutters to cut out the cookies.
I found these at Target for less than $10.

Repeating, over and over!

Cut outs on a cookie sheet.

Cut out star cookies waiting for the oven.  The stars were rolled out pretty thick
and they ended up puffing up during baking.  If you're making thick cookies, you may
want to space them out just a little bit more than I did.

Cookies cooling on a wire rack.  Notice they are just barely browning
at the edges.  They'll get crispy if you bake them much longer!

The full operation. My kitchen was covered in flour! 

Pink Christmas Doggie decided to help me celebrate
cookie making with some bubbly wine!

Butter Cream Frosting

Ingredients:

1 lb (4.5 cups sifted) confectioners sugar

0.5 cup (1 stick) margarine

1 tsp vanilla

3 T milk

Preparation Instructions:

1. Soften margarine in the microwave.  
2. Beat together sugar, margarine, vanilla, and milk until smooth.
3. Add small amounts of milk until desired consistency is reached.
4. Divide frosting into as many bowls as wanted.  Add food coloring, flavoring extracts, etc to each to make different types of frosting.  I usually like at least one bowl of red, one of green, and one white bowl of frosting for Christmas cookies.  I generally flavor my white frosting with peppermint extract.  You'll probably need 10-20 drops of food coloring for each bowl, but start with just a few and add more until you get the color you desire.  If you want to make chocolate frosting, add 2 T unsweetened cocoa and 3/4 cup melted semi-sweet chocolate chips to white frosting and blend well.  I have trouble with my chocolate frosting being hard to spread, so I usually microwave it for 30 seconds right before using it.  
5. Frost and decorate your cookies!  Frosting will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator, if needed.

My four kinds of frosting - red, green, white peppermint, and chocolate.
(note: this is two batches of the above recipe.  It frosted 250 cookies and
I still have frosting left over!)

Crushed candy canes for decorations.
Question - Is my family the only one that has a
"kitchen hammer" used for doing things l like crushing candy canes?

I go overboard on decorations :0  Here I have all kinds of sprinkles,
mini m&ms, holiday chocolate chips, crushed candy canes, and
crushed Andes mints.

The finished product!

Peanut Butter Pudding Cookies

Peanut Butter Pudding Cookies

Recipe Adapted from Sweet Pea's Kitchen by way of FoodGawker

Ingredients:

2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 3.4 ounce box instant pudding

3/4 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter

1/2 cup Splenda

1/4 cup Splenda brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp honey

3 cups add-ins

Preparation Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2) In a medium bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, salt, and the pudding mix.  (Note: I've used vanilla, white chocolate, and Oreo pudding mixes in different versions of these cookies.  All have been amazing!  The picture above uses the vanilla pudding mix.)

3) Beat softened butter, peanut butter, Splenda, & Splenda brown sugar at a medium speed until fluffy.  This can taken 2-4 minutes.

4) Add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla and honey, beating well after each addition.  

5) Add the flour mixture to the wet mixture in three batches.  After each addition, beat until just mixed.

6) Pour in your add-ins and mix until distributed evenly.  (I used semi-sweet chocolate chips and peanut butter m&ms in the picture, but the possibilities are endless!)

7) Roll dough into 1 inch balls and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  (I like to use a cookie scoop to make sure my cookies are roughly the same size. )  Flatten the balls slightly.  Spray lightly with PAM Baking Spray.  (Using Splenda instead of real sugar means that your cookies won't brown.  Spraying with PAM causes them to brown so they don't look under baked!)

8) Bake 10 minutes (again, remember my recipe uses Splenda....don't overbake trying to get them to brown!)  Let cool on the cookie sheet for several minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!