So what's a month or so among friends?

I haven't been great about actually hooking my camera up to my computer and I didn't want to post about some things till I could put up the pictures and now that I have the pictures, it seems so long ago it's almost not worth posting -- see the vicious cycle? Anyway. . .

Here's a picture of a cupcake my boy and I tried to make like the kind we used to get at LuLu's Bakery in the north end (they've since changed it slightly -- perhaps they learned like we did that marshmallow cream melts fairly quickly):

We made chocolate cupcakes and a marshmallow frosting, we then inundated the marshmallow frosting with graham cracker crumbs we'd made in the food processor. My boy injected the graham cracker marshmallow frosting into the center of the cupcake (we need to work on the technique we don't have an actual pastry injector so he had to improvise) while I made a chocolate ganache. After the cupcakes were injected with graham cracker we put the chocolate ganache on top and then sprinkled more graham cracker crumbs on that finally we put a dollop of marshmallow cream on top and toasted it with a torch. As you can see, suzib doesn't seem to mind the melty-ness:

The other culinary feat we accomplished in the last month was bacon cups for a mini Cobb salad for our friend Debbie's bridal shower (her favorite foods are avocado and bacon so you can see how a Cobb salad was basically mandatory). A friend sent my the instructions from the not Martha website. I adapted her recipe merely by using disposable muffin tins and putting them in a disposable roasting pan so the drippings went into it instead of in the bottom of the oven. I also put the bacon once woven on the muffin tins in the freezer briefly so the shrinking was somewhat minimized. Again, I think there are kinks to be worked out. With our system we only made three at a time. With another roasting pan, I think we could have at least made six at a time. They were worth the effort though, they looked great at the party and tasted amazing!!

For a more in depth look at Debbie's shower you can go to Christina's website. I highly recommend looking at the memorable quotes section (the cutting board line is my favorite). Also, you can see the pretty "sheet" cake Christina and I made out of a king sized sheet set. It's not as easy as you might think from the many instructions available online, or, perhaps, Christina and I just aren't terribly coordinated :).