White Cupcakes with Beetroot-Tinted Buttercream Frosting

Strictly speaking, these cupcakes aren't very healthy, but they're yummy! And at least better for you than boxed cake mix or store bought cupcakes, which have a scary list of chemical ingredients.

The Stop & Shop's plot to kill people:


Ingredients:

(Cake)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup coconut oil + 2 ts canola oil
2 eggs
3 ts vanilla
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 ts baking powder
3/4 cup milk



(Frosting)
5 TB butter
2 cups confectioners sugar
1-2 TB milk, half & half, or cream
1/2 ts vanilla
1/4 ts beetroot powder



A Note on Flours:

Your hippie sissy doesn't normally use white flour, but in this case as we're making WHITE cake it's a necessity. For most baking, I use white whole wheat or whole wheat pastry flour, and for bread I use whatever whole wheat flour I have in the house. If you must use white flour in your baking, make sure you use UNBLEACHED all-purpose flour (it will say unbleached on the label very prominently; all other white flour is bleached). I recommend King Arthur because they're a New England company and have decent corporate ethics. Please don't use bleached white flour. It's not good for you and it makes your sissy cry. Remember:

BLEACHED WHITE FLOUR is the Satan of the food industry;
HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP is the Antichrist*!

Your sissy happens to have a whole unopened bag of unbleached King Arthur left over from Nan's birthday bash, so you can pick it up next time you're here along with your cardamom, beetroot powder, and the size 4 clothes that Next sent me by mistake.

* Except for the corn syrup in Peeps, which is a perfectly acceptable use.

Steps:

1. CREAM THE COCONUT OIL AND SUGAR.

Preheat the oven to 350. Put 1/2 cup of coconut oil in a bowl and beat it with an electric beater for two minutes. Add the sugar and cream them together for five minutes. It won't cream exactly like butter--it will be a bit more grainy. Add the 2 ts of canola oil (or other neutral oil) and cream for a couple more minutes. The addition of the canola oil smooths everything out. Beat in the vanilla extract.

The creamed coconut oil and sugar:


2. ADD THE EGGS.

Add one egg and beat for two more minutes, then add the second egg and do the same. All this beating has a purpose, I promise! You want your batter to be light and fluffy, otherwise you'll end up with a cornbread consistency instead of a cake consistency.

After the addition of the eggs:


3. FINISH THE BATTER.

In a second bowl, mix the flour and baking powder together with a whisk and pour them into the first bowl. You can also sift them together if you like, but your sissy doesn't have a sifter so she uses the whisk instead. Use a wooden spoon to stir the flour mixture into the batter until well mixed. Add the milk and stir until smooth. Spoon the batter into cupcake tins and bake for approximately 20 minutes. It will make approximately 18 cupcakes depending on how big you make them.

The finished batter:


4. MAKE THE FROSTING.

Cream the 5 TB butter in a medium bowl until light and fluffy. Add the sugar, beetroot powder, vanilla, and milk or cream and beat until combined. If you want the frosting thinner, add more milk. I used a tablespoon but that's because I like the frosting to be thick. More liquid will make it easier to spread. The beetroot powder will turn the frosting a nice rosy pink. No, it will not make it taste like beets, so don't worry.



This last photo is closest to the true color of the frosting. The others were taken at night under artificial light. Yes, we ate most of the cupcakes before morning!

Rosemary White Bean Dip

This is a yummy bean dip made out of white beans. It has no "weird" ingredients so maybe Toby would even eat it! Heehee.

Ingredients:

2 cups white beans (canned are fine)
3 TB extra virgin olive oil
2 TB red wine vinegar
2 ts dried rosemary
salt and pepper



Steps:

1. SOAK THE BEANS (you can skip this if using canned beans)

Put a cup or so of beans into a bowl and fill with cold water. Let it sit overnight, or up to 24 hours. The longer you let them sit the more water they'll absorb and the less time you'll have to cook them on the stove; I've found that the beans don't soak up any more water after the 24 hour mark so I try not to go past that time. Plus you don't want them to start fermenting!

Unsoaked beans:


Soaked beans. They poof up a lot!


Take your soaked beans, rinse them a couple times under cold water, and put them in a pot with fresh water (not the water from the bowl). Simmer them until soft. This might take anywhere from 20 to 35 minutes depending on how long you let them soak.

2. MAKE THE DIP

Put 2 cups of the beans, the olive oil, and the vinegar into the food processor or blender and puree. If the dip is too thick to blend properly, you can add more liquid to thin it out. Add it slowly because a little bit of liquid can make a big difference. Adding more oil will make it taste richer. The vinegar will tart it up (so you should like that since you're such a tart!) and if you want to keep it tasting the same, add water. When it's pureed nice and smooth, take the dip out of the blender and stir in the rosemary and the salt and pepper to taste. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours to soften the rosemary and blend the flavors. We usually eat it with bread or ricecakes but you could put it on pita bread like hummus too. It looks more or less like this when it's done:

Supper 04-05-11

Parmesan, raw cheddar, and parsley omelets
Spinach
Whole berry cranberry sauce

How to Make Shrikhand

Today we're making Shrikhand, which is a strained yogurt dessert. This recipe is adapted from the book Indian by Parragon Publishing in the UK. Shrikhand is super easy to make and yummy, which is why I chose it for the first recipe.

Ingredients:

An entire 32 oz container of WHOLE MILK yogurt (do not use nonfat or 2%!).
2 TB milk
1/4 ts saffron threads
heaping 1/4 ts ground cardamom
heaping 1/4 cup confectioner's sugar




Steps:

1. STRAIN THE YOGURT.

Dump the yogurt from the container into a clean cotton dishcloth washed without fabric softeners (because you don't want your yogurt to taste like Bounce). Put the empty yogurt container back into the fridge. Suspend the dishcloth with yogurt over a bowl in the sink. I use clothespins to hold it to the faucet. Do this right before you go to bed and let it drain overnight. It needs to hang there for at least six hours. The watery liquid that drains out of the yogurt is called whey. When you get up in the morning, take the dishcloth with the strained yogurt carefully off the faucet (don't drop it back into the whey!). Scrape the yogurt out of the dishcloth back into the yogurt container. The yogurt should have a soft, cream cheese-like consistency. It will be about half the volume of what it was in its unstrained form. If it's still liquidy and sticking to the towel, that means you were impatient and didn't let it drain long enough. Listen to your sissy! She knows whereof she speaks. Save the whey that drained into the bowl in another container and put it in the fridge. Tomorrow we'll make whey biscuits with it.

The bowl before and after the yogurt has been strained:



The strained yogurt and the whey:



2. ADD THE SPICES

Take 1/4 teaspoon of the saffron and gently roast it over low heat for about a minute in a small, dry pan, until it releases its aroma. Be careful not to burn it. As soon as it's roasted, add 2 tablespoons of milk to the pan and heat it for about 45 seconds until bubbles start to form around the edge. Turn off the heat and dump the milk-saffron mixture into the container with the yogurt. Also add to the container a heaping 1/4 teaspoon of cardamom (your sissy will give you a little in a baggie if you want, since it's expensive to buy just for one recipe) and a heaping 1/4 cup of confectioner's sugar. Mix it up with a spoon. The mixture will be thick and will turn a pale yellow from the spices. Cover the container, put it into the fridge and let it chill before you eat it. Note that shrikhand is super rich and you don't need to eat as much of it as you do with unstrained yogurt. It's almost like ice cream. Yum!

Images: Saffron in the pan, mixed yogurt.

Food is good!

Dear Sissy,

This is a food blog for you. In this blog I will inflict my idea of cooking on you. In return you can call me names like "weird old hippie." Then we'll laugh because we're soooo funny!

I'm going to try to put every "recipe" I make here. Except the ones that come out shitty. On the days that things come out shitty, I'll just post a big pic of something else you like, such as:



Tomorrow we're going to make delicious shrikhand and rosemary bean dip. I already started straining the yogurt and soaking the beans. It's gonna be wicked awesome, you'll see!