Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs

This is a pretty basic recipe, but it is a good one to have. Actually I guess technically it is not a recipe but a preparation. Whatever. If you love hard boiled eggs and want to know how to make them all on your very own, you've come to the right place!!

I like to make 4-6 at a time, cause that's how many fit in my preferred pot, but you could make more if you have a big ole pot. You'll need to put your eggs in the pot and fill it with cold water until there is about an inch of water over top of the eggs.

Put the uncovered pot on the stove to boil. Once the water is boiling, remove the pot from heat and cover it. Set the timer and leave the pot alone for 17 minutes.

Like dis!

Once 17 minutes is up, make up a bowl of ice water. Remove the eggs from the pot and submerge them in the ice water until they are cool to the touch. This process prevents the yolks from cooking more than they should. The icewater keeps the eggs nice and yellow, instead of greyish and gross looking.

That's it - enjoy!

Awesome Poppy Seed Salad Dressing

Over Christmas weekend, we went up to PA to visit Dennis' family. On Christmas eve, we had an awesome dinner thanks to Dennis' dad, Doug. Ham, corn, biscuits, mashed potatoes, & gravy. Num num num!

However, the salad is what I couldn't get enough of! After I had one salad and a main course, when I went back for seconds I had to get another salad. It was spinach with cranberries and slivered almonds, but what really made the salad was the dressing. Turns out Vicki had made the dressing herself and she passed the recipe along to me. So here I am passing it along to you.

Ingredients
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp paprika
1 tbsp poppy seeds
2 tsp minced onion
1/2 cup vegetable oil

I'm sure there is some rhyme or reason to adding the ingredients together, but I just added them to my container in the order they were listed. I used a gravy shaker for this and it worked wonderfully.

The amounts are written on the side which made for easy measuring. Just give it a good shake right before you pour it over your salad.

Vicki's salad consisted of spinach leaves, dried cranberries, and slivered almonds. Dennis is not a fan of almonds, so our salad is a little different. We used a 50/50 Mix of bagged greens that contained spinach leaves and other greens, kept the dried cranberries, and added some goat cheese.

All I can say is... OMG. It was so good! I had a little extra dressing in the bowl when I was done, so I just kept adding greens until I was mopping it up with pieces of spinach. Yummy. Thanks Vicki!!

Holiday Sugar Cookies!! with Icing!!

YAY! I love sugar cookies. I mean really good sugar cookies with icing and sprinkles and nonpareils! Some sprinkles are called nonpareils, btw. So I love sugar cookies, and it's the holiday season and the Christmas season, so naturally I thought I needed to make some. Also, my mom gave me some cute cookie cutters last year so I just had to use them!

Seriously, how precious are these?

Ok back to what's really important... the cookies. I found a recipe for soft sugar cookies because I just hate hard crunchy cookies. Sugar cookies are usually pretty thin so it can be easy for them to be crunchy. This recipe is right on the money. 24 hours later, the cookies are still soft and chewy.

Ingredients

3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

+1 cup all-purpose flour for rolling the dough

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter, softened

1 1/2 cups white sugar

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Combine the flour, baking powder, & salt in a bowl. Easy. In a separate large bowl, combine the butter and sugar with a mixer until it is all creamy or something. The recipe said light and fluffy... sorry but my understanding of butter and sugar does not lend itself to being light and fluffy. So make it creamy! Add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla extract, and then add the flour mixture slowly. Mix well. Or else.

Oh and preheat the oven to 400. Unless you want to go by the recipe, in which case you will need to chill the dough for 2 hours. What these lame-os don't realize is that there is this great invention, the freezer, which did the job for me in about 15 minutes. Haha, suckers.

This next part requires some finesse. I hope you have a rolling pin. You'll need a clean flat surface to roll the dough out. Sprinkle a handful of flour on the surface and drop 1/4 of your dough on it. Knead the dough and sprinkle some more flour over your dough until it's no longer sticky. Roll out the dough until it is only 1/4 inch thick. If the dough sticks to your rolling pin, sprinkle some flour on and rub it in like you are waxing a car.

Once you have rolled out your dough, start cookie cutting! Try to utilize as much of your dough as you can by putting the shapes close together. Make sure you press down with your whole palm so they cut all the way through.

My workstation

Ok! So now you need to grease up some cookie sheets. I put a dab of butter in the pan and then rub it around with a paper towel. There should be a thin layer of butter coating the pan. To get the cookies up, I find it is best to get a spatula under each cookie and lift it without disturbing the other cookies. Pull away any dough that sticks to the cookie, then grab the cookie and put it on the cookie sheet. I tried to arrange them extremely closely together to get as many as possible on a single sheet.

Put the cookie sheet into the oven for 6 minutes. It's so fast! Use this time to whip up some icing.

 
Ingredients

1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar

3 tablespoons butter, softened

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon milk

food color (optional)
sprinkles (optional)

Mix the first 4 ingredients together. I'm sure it can be done by hand, but why would you? Psh. Once you have a big bowl of white icing, you can separate it into smaller bowls and make different colors.

The first batch of icing I made was a little funky looking. It looked like it was trying to separate on me, so my instinct was to throw some more powdered sugar in there. It worked.

The rest is all up to you. Some people have nifty little guns and whatnot to apply the icing, but poor little old me just used the bottom of a spoon. I find it easiest to hold the cookie in one hand and apply with the other, rather than trying to ice the cookie while it is laying on a flat surface. Also, make sure you put any sprinkles on before the icing has time to dry. If you are lucky, your cookies will look like mine because my cookies are da bomb.

This is the spot where the photo of my cookies should appear. This photo is supposed to make you froth at the mouth because it looks so delectable. Well my macbook decided to suck and deny me my pictures. I will figure out this error and put up a picture of the finished product.

Happy baking!

Cookie recipe & icing recipe - both from AllRecipes.com.

Pumpkin Crème Brûlée

Ugh, so many accents and whatnot. That's the last time you'll be seeing the correct spelling with all of the bells and whistles cause I simply don't have the energy for all of that copy and paste action.

I'm not sure whether I should be telling this story, but ahh here goes.

A few weekends ago, Dennis & I went to the Waterfowl Festival in Easton with my mom. We walked around and looked at stuff and it was a grand ole time. It was a lovely day outside, so we stopped to eat lunch at General Tanukis, one of my favorite restaurants.

At this point I should also mention that we had Dexter in tow. So the four of us are sitting at this table with plenty of people passing by. Some people are scared of Dexter and take a wide berth, but others are friendly and want to pet and play with him. Dexter spent his time either drinking water from a bowl on the ground or sitting under the table waiting for scraps. For a few brief moments, he was sitting in a chair but he got a little too feisty so he had to dismount.

Near the end of our meal, Dennis decided to let Dexter sit in his lap. At this point, some kindly old folks stopped to chat and pet Dexter. Oh boy, was Dexter excited!! So excited that he just couldn't help himself and he managed to pee all over Dennis' lap. Dennis yelled some expletives, scaring the old people and my mom... and probably Dexter too. So there Dennis is, covered in pee. It was sad.

The worst part (and the point of this story) is that Dennis really wanted to get some pumpkin creme brulee. We had met up with my dad at General Tanukis the year before and happened upon this delectable dessert during the holiday season. Dennis had spoken of it several times throughout the year, and the second that we got our menus that very day, he checked for and located the very same pumpkin creme brulee. However, once the urincident occurred (see what I did, I combined urine & incident!! he he!!), Dennis said the day was ruined and since we couldn't get the dessert to go, Dennis had no pumpkin creme brulee. :(

He was really bummed out and I was bummed out for him, so I took it upon myself to recreate this dessert at home. He had a terrible day today so I picked a good day to surprise him. He said it was "good." So get ready for some "good" pumpkin creme brulee!!

Ingredients

3 cups heavy cream

1 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

1/2 teaspoons salt

3/4 cups granulated sugar

1/4 cups granulated sugar, additional

8 large egg yolks

1 15 oz. can pumpkin puree

The original recipe actually calls for dark Jamaican rum as well, but I just don't have those kinds of resources, people. Anyway, combine the first 4 ingredients in a saucepan. The recipe says use a 4 quart sauce pan but how big is that? I just used my biggest pan that wasn't a pot, if that makes any sense. So whisk those ingredients together and then put the pan over medium heat until bubbles form around the edge of the mixture. I didn't really know how to interpret that, especially since the bubbles formed in the middle, so I just removed it from the heat when I saw bubbles. Done deal. This would also be a good time to preheat your oven to 325.

While your mixture is heating, you should crack 8 eggs and save those yolks, yall! I saved the whites too, just because I hate waste. I save the smallest amount of leftovers and Dennis makes fun of me, but last time I saved egg whites I ate them for breakfast the next morning so, suck it Dennis. Anyway, mix the egg yolks with the pumpkin puree using a whisk. Once your first mixture is bubbly, slowly mix it into the pumpkin/egg yolk mixture. I didn't do it slowly, I just poured it all in and they still came out fine so take that as you will.

Once your mixture is well blended, you should pour it equally into 12 little ramekins. I should be so lucky. I don't own ramekins so I had to improvise. I bought 2 aluminum cupcake tins, each holding 6 cupcakes. Of course that wasn't even enough... why would Good Housekeeping lie to me? I think I could make about 6 more, so unless you have larger than average ramekins, I would guess that this recipe actually makes 18.

Now here is the tricky part - these ramekins need to be in a water bath. Have you ever heard of that? I haven't but I'm sure there's some amazing scientific reason behind it. You have to place them into a cake pan and then fill the pan with boiling water until the ramekins are about halfway submerged. This presented a problem for me because I decided to use a 9x13 cake pan (ok) and a 9x9 cake pan (not ok). Luckily, aluminum is very bendy and I was able to fit 8 into the big pan and 4 into the small one. Here's a terrible picture:

See how it's all bendy on top? Also you can't really see the water on top, but on the bottom one you can see the reflection of the oven rack above.

The recipe says cook at 325 for 30-40 minutes, but I cooked the smaller one for 40 and the bigger one for 35. It wasn't strategic or anything, it just took me 5 whole minutes to situate my "ramekins" in their water bath in the larger one. Sheesh.

The recipe says to remove the ramekins from the water and let them cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for at least 3 hours. I, of course, cut corners and put them straight into the fridge. After approximately 3 hours (probably less) I took 2 out and sprinkled "1.5 teaspoons" of sugar on top. I have no idea how much it actually was. I put the broiler on high and moved a rack up to the top space in the oven, then put the ramekins in for 2 minutes. They were pretty awesome.

Here's my finished product with a few bites taken out of it. Oops. Didn't grab my camera fast enough. The muffin pan thing worked out pretty well. I'd do it again. I'm going to take the leftover batter to my mom's house this weekend and pray that she owns real ramekins. She is like, Martha Stewart incarnate, so she will definitely own ramekins. She called Martha Stewart a prostitute a few weekends ago, but that is a story for another time.

The original recipe is from the Good Housekeeping site. Ciao!