Easter Eats

If there's one thing I love more than a good dinner party, it would be dining as the guest of an equally as (or more) skilled culinary mastermind.

For Easter this year, I got to be an esteemed guest in my SoBe partner in crime's beautiful new home and enjoy a wonderful spread of traditional lamb and mint jelly, with all sorts of fixings.

Of course I'm not one to show up as a guest empty handed. For the cocktail hour (or hours as is the case with my friends) I whipped up these Rachael Ray Sage Sausage Bites with Balsamic Apricot Dip. These little Italian sausage meatballs are always a big hit with a sauce that offers the right mix of sweet and savory.

For dessert, I whipped up one of my all time favorite desserts - one I also consider an Easter staple. Carrot cake. I could not resist trying the Cake Boss Buddy Valastro's recipe, and turned to Ina Garten for the cream cheese frosting. The cake was perfectly moist and flavorful, and the cream cheese frosting rich, but not too sugary.

My efforts, however, were quite humbled by the spectacular spread. I'd never had lamb with mint jelly before, and was pleasantly surprised by the flavor combination (courtesy of Tyler Florence's take on years of tradition). It was lucky too that I saved room after the cocktail hour, since I could not get enough of another one of my friend's veggie pizza, a cream cheese, ranch dressing spread covering croissants and topped with carrots and broccoli. This recipe looks pretty similar to the one she told me.

Of course one of my favorite stars of the show were the lamb cupcakes another friend showed up with. The loving detail with which she placed little white chocolate chips to look like fur, and marshmallows for ears was just priceless!

The recipe I'll never reveal

There's one recipe in my family that consistently gets rave reviews from anyone who tries it.

That's the banana bread. The real appeal, so it seems, is that it is not too sweet like many others. It's just sweet enough. You can taste the banana, not all gussied up with sugar.

No one seems to know exactly where the recipe came from, but my family members on my mom's side remember older ancestors making it. My grandmother baked it all the time when we were little. She liked to dress it up with candied fruit at Christmas. Lots of people like it with chocolate chips. I prefer walnuts.

A few years ago a male friend of mine - a particularly big fan of the banana bread - asked me what spices were in it to make it so superior to any other. That's when it dawned on me.

This was like a trade secret. Something that could make me more marketable in social circles.

Why should I let anyone duplicate it?

That was the moment I decided that from then on out the banana bread recipe would remain top secret. Kind of like insurance. And I'm a stick to my values kind of girl. No blog will change that.

So I guess you'll just have to just admire the picture, and if you're lucky someday I might make you some of it : )

My flirtation with oatmeal raisin cookies

I've never been one for oatmeal raisin cookies. In fact, I always kind of hated them. I don't particularly care for oatmeal or raisins.

When one friend requested them a week or so ago, I kind of wrinkled my nose. But when I offered up cookies to my friend's boyfriend as a thank you for driving us to the wine fest last week, I found myself on the hunt for the perfect oatmeal raisin cookie recipe.

On my first go around I used this recipe from Food Network kitchens. I went through two batches before I had one that could be served without shame to others. Part of the problem may have been that I didn't add the pecans. I also think the oven temperature was too hot. My first batch got too thin, almost melted.

So it was trial and error. I lowered the heat on the oven. Added more oatmeal. Eventually they came out all right, but I felt like they could have had more spices.

I ate through the rejects all week, finding that they made a decent little breakfast with my coffee. Come on, they're oatmeal and raisins! That's fairly healthy ... I almost started liking them.

After I ate the last one Saturday, I wanted more. So Sunday I had another go at it.

This time I altered the recipe, largely based on what was available in my kitchen. I didn't have butter, so I used Crisco. I also threw in a little baking powder, hoping they'd get puffy. For the most part, I halved the original recipe but the big tease came when I discovered I didn't have as much oatmeal as I thought, so just threw in what I had.

They turned out pretty tasty. The lack of oatmeal gave them the texture of a normal cookie, with some oats more or less as garnish. This is what I came up with.

What you need:

3/4 cup Crisco

1/2 cup sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tsps. vanilla

1 cup flour

3/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking powder

2 tsps. allspice

2 tsps. cinnamon

1 tsp. cloves

2 cups oats

raisins to taste

What to do:

Use blender to mix Crisco and sugar. Start on a low speed and blend until combined, then turn to a higher speed and beat until fluffy. Add the brown sugar and combine. Add the eggs one at a time and combine. Mix in the vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients and mix. Stir in the oatmeal and raisins.

Pre-heat the oven 325. Drop cookie dough on baking sheet and cook for about 12 minutes.

Sunday Mimosa Brunch

Every so often my friends and I come up with a bright idea for a themed party. Most of them revolve around food and wine. There have been so many of these bright ideas that I now have a list in the back of my planner. Perhaps it's a bucket list of sorts before I turn 30.

This weekend we crossed one of the items off the list, the Sunday Mimosa Brunch. The idea came out of a wine tasting about a month ago as we tasted some delicious sparkling wines and heralded the virtues of a good bubbly.

If there's one thing better than a good mimosa and some hearty egg dish on a Sunday morning, it's sharing it with good company.

The best thing about a brunch party is that most of the dishes you can make the night before. I whipped up the Paula Deen hashbrown casserole and the Tyler Florence blueberry scones (both things I mastered before). So Sunday morning I merely rolled out of bed, made a few last minute preparations and then hit the mimosas. My friends brought an assortment of quiche, pound cake and little toasts with salmon and cucumbers. It was all delicious.

And what better entertainment for a ladies Sunday brunch then dreaming up the next party. We probably added a half dozen items to the pre-30 bucket list of food and wine fun during the party alone. Next up, a paella party at the beach. Stay tuned ...

Today, I just wanted a snickerdoodle ...

... It was Monday. A good day for a good baked product.

A few hours into the afternoon, when I started to get a little bored and thinking I needed some more coffee, I thought about heading out to Main Street to find a good one at some random bakery.

But I've been disappointed by baked goods too many times. Take for example the red velvet cupcake at Starbucks last week. It looked so perfect in the case, the rich red color carefully topped with a nice swirl of frosting...

It sucked. It was stale, like so many once-frozen products. And the frosting wasn't even cream cheese.

I wanted a snickerdoodle so bad and I didn't want to be disappointed. So I decided to make my own.

A quick search of the Food Network web site produced this recipe from Emeril, obviously a winner.

And thanks to the beauty of a well-stocked fridge and cupboard with plenty of basics ... and then some, all I needed to stop and pick up was some Crisco.

For $2.69 - probably the price I would have paid for one crappy cookie at some shi shi bakery - I had dozens of them within an hour of making it home from work.

Now that's what I call a good way to end Monday : )

Scones, revisited

So a few years ago I picked up this little scone habit.

I don't remember quite how it started. A friend of mine in high school seemed to eat them a lot. Then I started buying them at Starbucks with my Americano nearly every morning.

But after a while those dollars add up, and one tires of the hard, frozen and over processed taste of the Starbucks pastries.

I figured I might as well just start making them.

Thus opened the door to my scone obsession.

I started with a blueberry scone with lemon glaze, courtesy of Tyler Florence. I then moved on to create my own cinnamon scone recipe, determined to get a one up on Starbucks. I tried raspberry, peach, peppermint chocolate. Some Sundays I just set up my own little scone test kitchen and baked all morning.

As with many obsessions, this one turned out to be somewhat passing. At some point, I tired of making scones every Sunday and their creation in my kitchen became more and more infrequent.

But apparently the memory of the scones still lingers, particularly in the mind of the locally famous weatherman who works at the TV station in our building. A few weeks ago he reminded me how much he loved the blueberry scones, so I promised to make some for him.

So that's what I did Sunday. I dug out the original Tyler Florence blueberry scone recipe that started it all.

One thing about these scones: they're more like biscuits. Or the really, really fresh scones you get at some independent bakeries. They're moist, not hard. My British friend actually said he liked them better than the traditional scone you find at stores (now that's an endorsement).

And a note on the recipe: You might want to try your own luck coming up with the lemon glaze topping. I find that if you follow Tyler's instructions, the glaze is really runny and watery. I like mine thicker, so tend to just melt the butter, use less lemon juice and then add in the confectioners sugar until I reach the desired consistency.

I forgot all of this however, and went with Tyler's method. I ended up adding a ton of confectioners sugar to thicken it up, and then had a serious glaze surplus.

So I went with the obvious solution. I made an Ina Garten pound cake to soak up the rest of it. This worked out well since I had all of the ingredients in my kitchen except for the buttermilk, but found recipes on line for a substitute that involved about 3 tablespoons of lemon juice to three quarters a cup of milk.

And that was the culmination of my Sunday morning baking. Who knows, maybe this will jump start another scone revolution and I'll end up sharing my recipe for the cinnamon ones ...

Holiday cheer by way of 1,500 cupcakes

So there's this phenomenon every year at my place of employment. I call it the Holiday Cheer Epidemic, because that's exactly what our top boss asked for a few years ago to counter a rash of bad news in the paper. Holiday Cheer stories. The kind that people find uplifting.

It makes sense to some degree. The holidays move people to volunteer time, donate presents and otherwise do nice things for people who aren't as fortunate. That's a lot of what is going on in the community.

I'll be honest that some of these efforts have rubbed me the wrong way over the years, coming off as condescending or self-serving. Besides, people who need help need it all year long. Not just at Christmas.

And the irony of Holiday Cheer stories is that once you cut through the warmth they really aren't that cheery. They're really about people who are hungry, homeless or otherwise struggling to get by, and that can be tough to get across in a simple news story.

But over the years I've become less jaded and figured out a way to write Holiday Cheer stories to my liking. The solution has been to look for genuine people trying in the very simplest (AKA: not attention grabbing and splashy) ways to make the holidays a little more bearable for some people. Besides, why not cash in on this spirit of giving and generosity and inspire people to help out the children.

This week I found Chef Cindy.

I heard about Chef Cindy doing another Holiday Cheer story at one of the high schools. I wrote a story last week about how the year-round food pantry the school had started to help needy kids and their families was empty. They got cleaned out right before Thanksgiving. After the story ran, the school got an outpouring of support - food, clothes and over $4,000 to help families with things like utilities. One of the largest donations was a batch of food to feed 400 people from the area food bank.

As we were waiting for the food to arrive on Wednesday the lady from the food bank started casually telling me about a woman who made 1,500 cupcakes to send home with homeless and needy children for Christmas. I'm not sure she realized that's a heck of a lot of baking.

"Did you say 1,500?" I asked her, just as a point of clarification. Journalists like to be accurate.

She looked at me like I had just landed from Mars for questioning whether a single woman was really baking 1,500 cupcakes to distribute to poor children.

"Uh, huh," she replied. "1,500. They're going out Friday."

I had my notebook out and started doing some basic long division. That would be about 125 dozen cupcakes ... You could maybe fit four dozen in a standard oven at a time ... Baking time is about 25 to 30 minutes ...

I couldn't believe someone was actually doing this.

So I set out on my quest to write about the Cupcake Lady.

I went back to the office and pitched the story to my editors. They signed off, so I called the food bank and asked them if they could put me in contact with Chef Cindy. And then I did the thing most journalists hate. I waited.

A few hours went by before the lady from the food bank called me back and gave me Chef Cindy's number.

"She's a little," she paused. "Shy. But I think she'll talk to you since this is such a good story."

I called and left a message, waited about an hour and got no answer. Of course we had to try and get photos of her baking, and that meant we had to do it Thursday.

I think I let two hours pass before I walked down to the restaurant where she was alleged to be baking. It was closed, the dining room dark, but I could see a light on back in the kitchen.

"Do I go around the back and knock on the door?" I thought. "Would that be creepy?"

It's important to note this kind of determined reporting is usually reserved for big stories or tracking down bad guys. I still can't believe I put forth this much effort toward a story about cupcakes. Stories about baked goods just shouldn't be so challenging.

I opted not to stalk her through the back of the kitchen.

"I'm sure she'll call me back later." I thought.

I left the office and headed home. Around eight-o-clock it was bugging me I never heard from her. The chances of us getting any kind of photo in her kitchen were getting slimmer and slimmer.

I dialed the number I had saved in my phone as Cupcake Lady and to my surprise she answered.

"Hello," said an obviously frazzled voice on the other end. "This is Cindy."

"Hi," I started. "This is Tiffany, the reporter from the Herald-Tribune. I think the food bank told you I might be calling.

She gushed a sigh.

"Oh," she said, clearly regretting she picked up the phone.

She continued with a note of exasperation:

"I'm a little busy. I'm on my way to Sam's Club. I RAN OUT OF EGGS. I only have 500 cupcakes done. I have A THOUSAND I need to finish by Friday. I'm going to be up all night. I DON'T KNOW HOW I will ever finish."

For a moment I wished I could volunteer to help, but reporters don't really do that sort of thing. So instead I just asked if we could come hang out and get some photos of her baking.

"I'm not really very photogenic," she said. "I'm a mess. I'm covered in cake batter. And I can't really have you in my kitchen. I HAVE TO FINISH A THOUSAND CUPCAKES."

My attempts to sway her were useless. I agreed that we would just come get a picture of her when she dropped off the cupcakes Friday morning at the food bank.

It took most of the day Thursday to even get a time flushed out for when the big drop would happen. Then finally we got word: 8 a.m. Friday morning.

I barely get my butt to work before 10 a.m. most days, but for the Cupcake Lady, I'd get there early.

Shortly after the photographer and I arrived, the woman from the food bank came down to greet us with a shocked expression.

"She's gone," she said. "She must have come really early and just left the cupcakes. They were here when the first person got here."

"Sneaky," I thought, annoyed, but kind of admiring the Cupcake Lady for eluding us.

Anyway, as it always does, it all worked out in the end. I called Chef Cindy and, after laughing a little - probably for pulling one over on me - she did chat with me for a bit about why she took on this effort.

"It just bothered me so much," she said. "That some children go hungry. I can't solve their problems, but maybe I can make them happy."

These are the kind of stories I love, anytime of year. Normal, everyday people doing creative and extraordinary things to make a difference. Even a little one, especially for children.

But those are the stories that are also hardest to write. How do you take an incredible person, all their emotions and drive, and put them into words on paper?

We went to a school later and watched the principal and guidance counselor hand out the cupcakes and bags of food for the winter holidays to about 50 homeless and needy children.

Watching this sort of thing used to really upset me when I started covering schools seven years ago. It's hard to comprehend so many kids not having anything to eat for two weeks but a bag of beefaroni and canned veggies when some of us are so lucky. The TV reporter said she was ready to start crying. So did the lady from the food bank when we were at Booker High on Wednesday.

Even after so many stories and so many years covering schools, I still get choked up a little sometimes. But I guess you kind of get used to it after awhile. All you can do is use your talents to try to help them.

At some point the lead for my story just popped in my head, inspired by the ultimate of holiday cheesiness and drawing the parallel between Chef Cindy and Santa.

"She came in early Friday, leaving no trace of her visit but 1,500 cupcakes."

The whole time I worked on this I kept trying to wrap my mind around 1,500 cupcakes. Just how much is that? Well if you're curious, check out the sweet graphic on the story.

And Chef Cindy may have tried to dupe me, but clearly didn't get up early enough in the morning. Everyone reading the story would want to know what the Cupcake Lady looked like. As it turned out, we had a nice picture of her in our archives from a cooking demo she did a few years ago, so we were able to run that with the story (I don't think, by the way, Cindy was opposed to running her picture in the paper, I think she just didn't want to make a big deal about her part in the cupcake situation).

So as I said to our graphic artist in sheer fun when it was all done:

"Put that in your Kitchenaid and mix it."

Happy holidays!