The Eternal Optimist | A place for friends and family to keep in touch with my life and interests

Valentine’s Day cupcakes

February 14th, 2012 | by Sara | food

Feb
14

One of the decent-looking heart cupcakes.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, I decided to stay up and put up this blog post. I just finished making these for work tomorrow.

I found the idea for these adorable heart cupcakes on the Glorious Treats blog.

Hearts cut out from the cupcake tops.

I made the cupcakes with the Glorious Treats perfectly chocolate cupcakes recipe. I had Hershey’s cocoa and wasn’t sure that counted as “good quality,” so I decided to be safe and go with the Hershey’s dark chocolate cocoa to ensure a great chocolate taste. They turned out tasting great. Very chocolatey, moist and light.

However, in trying to ensure that my cupcakes were domed enough to make the heart cupcakes, I overfilled them a bit. In the end, this made it more difficult to pull off the pretty heart cupcakes, so I don’t recommend it. As long as the cupcake bakes up over the top of the wrapper, you’ll be in good shape. No need to go overboard. (The result for me is some cupcakes with rough — and not so pretty — edges. I photographed the nicer ones of the batch.)

Broken hearts for my co-worker's last day.

I didn’t want to buy a jar of maraschino cherries to make the cherry frosting suggested with the heart cupcakes. (Plus, I’m not a huge fan of cherry-flavored things. I sometimes make things I don’t expect to like, but I didn’t feel like it this time.) So instead I made the vanilla cream cheese frosting that Glorious Treats suggested on the chocolate cupcakes page (and I added some pink gel food coloring).

The assembly worked well. I made mini “sandwiches” with the cut-out heart pieces around a bit of extra frosting. (The cut-out pieces would be great decorations on a platter with the cupcakes, but since these are for work, I usually keep them in Gladware all day so overall presentation isn’t something I strive for.

Because Valentine’s Day also happens to be the last day in our office for one of our co-workers, the bakers in my area are going with a broken-heart theme. So I used some sugar pearls to make cracked hearts on some of the cupcakes.

This is a pretty clean-looking cupcake, but I could have mounded the frosting more in the middle so it would pop up a bit more.

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Hops chart

February 14th, 2012 | by Sara | brewing

Feb
14

I saw this hops chart via a Twitter link today and thought it could come in handy with the brewing … not to mention, it’s a pretty cool-looking graphic. Perhaps someone with more brewing space would want to hang it on his brew room wall.

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Grains — and an idea for the Korte farm

February 12th, 2012 | by Sara | brewing

Feb
12

I realized it’s been awhile since my last post. And since then the brewing bug really hit me. My first batch is still fermenting, but I was reading homebrew sites and getting really excited about future batches. So I started another!

I brewed a honey wheat ale on my day off last week. It’ll be done around the same time as the first one (perhaps a week later). So far all seems to be well with it. Both of the batches are just sitting around and fermenting these days, so I don’t have much to do.

But while I shopped for those ingredients, I also picked up what I need to make a blonde ale and to try a different version of a honey wheat ale. So those will be brewing next.

This was also the first time I bought all my grains. It was a fun experience. The homebrew store has a whole grain room full of bins of malt. So I told the guy what I wanted and he measured it out and ran it through the crusher. I think Grandpa Korte would have been impressed with my budding grain knowledge. It also sparked a great idea for using the old family farm … perhaps we could turn it into a brewery? Grow the grains and brew them onsite? Just an idea.

Tonight I’m soaking used beer bottles to remove the labels. I read that OxiClean is excellent for this. So far so good. I’ve had them soaking about two hours, and all the labels are off. A few of them already have all the residue off as well!

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The start of Bondioli Brewing

January 29th, 2012 | by Sara | food

Jan
29

beer fermentation

Bondioli Brewing is open for business! Or, at least, it has started operations.

I’ve been wanting to try homebrewing for a while. And when I was in Illinois in the fall, Nate gave me some start-up supplies and very helpful instructions for a light oat ale to try as my first batch. So … months later, I’m finally on it. Today was my first brew day. It took about four hours total, and now I have a nice jug of soon-to-be beer fermenting in my closet. I’m still about a month away from the finished product.

My very unscientific explanation of how it works:

The Mash: Grains mix with water. At this point, my kitchen smelled like a brewery — or Soulard. (Soulard was my neighborhood when I lived in St. Louis. It’s also home to Anheuser-Busch, and some days you could smell the grains, which are sometimes referred to by those in Soulard as “beerios,” by my apartment.)

The Sparge: Extracting wort from the grains. Yum, yum! I need to find a useful thing to do with these spent grains. (No, I did not try eating them. That just doesn’t sound appealing. But many breweries sell the grains to farmers, and those grains become dinner for livestock.)

The Boil: Heating the wort and adding hops. Frothy, and yet it isn’t beer.

The Fermentation: Yeast eats away at sugars, creating alcohol and carbonation. It’ll sit like this in my closet (darkest and not-too-hot place in my tiny apartment) for two weeks while it becomes beer.

Disclaimer: I actually know very little about the specifics. While I consider myself knowledgeable about beer and have been on enough brewery tours that I can basically recite how it all works, I haven’t read that much on homebrewing. This batch was done mostly through the guidance of Nate and the instructions he sent me. However, I don’t plan to continue on blindly. I did buy a homebrew book (“The Joy of Homebrewing” by Charlie Papazian, which was recommended to me by a microbrewer) and hope to really know what I’m doing as far as mixing different grains and making variations for future batches.

The sad part? I have a fairly small apartment and no storage area, so I’m pretty limited. Thus, I’m brewing one gallon at a time — that’s just six bottles each time. And I fear my apartment might get too warm in the summer months for proper fermentation and bottle conditioning.

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1K finisher!

January 29th, 2012 | by Sara | d.c.

Jan
29

My friend and I reach the finish line. (Note our snazzy race numbers.)

The 1K Beer Walk, that is. Last weekend I participated in the event, which was organized by the Washington Wine Academy‘s DC School of Beer.

It’s a clever concept, and I couldn’t resist. We were even given race numbers. Wondering what is really involved? It’s actually just a beer tasting, but it has 10 stations spaced out over the course of 1 kilometer. So, yes, I did walk a 1K (actually about 2K because I more or less walked the course backward to get to the starting line when I arrived). It was held in the Crystal City Shops, which I had never been to but is now on the list of things that are likely to appear in my suburban nightmare. From what I can tell, it’s about three blocks of shops all connected underground — a huge maze. And almost everything was closed on Sunday (when I was there), so it was rather creepy.

And this was one event where they didn’t skimp on the tasting tickets. COULD I have drunk more beer? Sure. I was feeling fine at the end, but I just didn’t feel I NEEDED more beer. And yet I had seven (of 20) tickets left, which I gave away to some lucky random stranger at the last stop. (By the way, if you read this and attend next year, you should know that the last station is by far the best. Not only does it have the largest selection of beers, it has a DJ and turns into a huge dance party.

I had beer from breweries including:

Baying Hound Aleworks (Md.)
Port City (Va.)
Ommegang (N.Y.)
Yuengling (Pa.)
Anchor (Calif.)
Sam Adams (Mass.)
Flying Dog (Md.)
Brooklyn (N.Y.)

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Cat shadows

January 28th, 2012 | by Sara | animals

Jan
28

cats

I find it very amusing how often Griffin and Loki lie in the exact same position, often all the way down to the same paw curling or their heads turned the same way. (I think this is Loki’s doing as he still very much plays the role of the baby — at age 4. He probably replicates Griffin’s poses.) I’ve been collecting some shots, so here’s a sampling of their shadow behavior.

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Helping a friend roar through her 20s

January 28th, 2012 | by Sara | d.c.

Jan
28

Apparently the iPhone camera gave us all sparkly eyes.

Last Saturday, I went to a Roaring ’20s party for a friend’s 29th birthday. Almost everyone dressed up, and we had the upper floor of the bar to ourselves. It was great fun to see everyone in ’20s garb. We should really have more sophisticated themed parties.

(Special thanks to Jennifer for letting me borrow her awesome flapper dress!)

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Cookies and cream

January 21st, 2012 | by Sara | food

Jan
21

When I first read this Chocolate Therapy blog post about Oreo cupcakes, I was itching to make them. And I didn’t wait too long. I made them for a co-worker’s final day last week, and they get my seal of approval.

A warning: It made 36 cupcakes for me and I filled most of my wrappers about 3/4 full instead of just 1/2 full. Because of that, I made a second batch of icing late at night, which pushed my baking well beyond midnight. So I recommend either making an extra half-batch of icing in the first place or having a backup plan for finishing off some of your last cupcakes.

The icing method is different from what I’ve made before. It is a bit time-consuming. (Be sure to do the first milk/flour step before you make the cupcakes so it has time to cool.) But it is pretty amazing. I’m going to say it’s worth the time.

Also, because it made 36 cupcakes, I used an entire package of Oreos. (This was disappointing because I was hoping to eat the leftovers.)

I finally bought proper cupcake decorating tips, so I used a 1M tip on a decorating bag for the icing. (For most of the cupcakes, I used the 1M swirl directions from Wilton.) And I topped them off with mini Oreos.

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Fun and frustration with fondant

January 17th, 2012 | by Sara | food

Jan
17

This was the finished product. I was happy it at least resembled something even if it wasn't as smooth and awesome as I had imagined it would be.

To celebrate a co-worker (our resident promoter of Apple products), I attempted to make an iPad cake last night. In my mind, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make out of marshmallow fondant.

This was my kitchen counter when I finally finished. Quite the mess.

Well, I don’t make fondant all that often, so I don’t really remember any tricks from time to time. In the end, I had three complete fails and had destroyed my layer of “dirty icing” underneath. And I didn’t have another jar of icing to even patch it up and have it pass for a normal-looking cake (and no patience to make homemade frosting at that point). I did, however, have a gigantic mess.

I finally took a break and refrigerated my fondant to make it a little harder. When I came back for my last-ditch effort, it sort of worked. I had used up most of my white fondant so I used the white icing border as the iPad border and just placed a fondant screen and logo on it. Not exactly what I envisioned, but at least it managed to make it through.

For the cake itself, I tried a dark chocolate cake from MarthaStewart.com. I was making it in a 13X9 pan instead of two round pans, so I thought mine might have to bake a bit longer. However, I checked it 10 minutes before the given baking time, and it was already done. Yikes! In fact, when I tasted it today, I thought it was almost a bit overdone. It got a bit dry for my taste, so either that’s how the cake is or was caused by over-baking.

I hope baking night No. 2 for the week will go a little more smoothly.

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Making my own seltzer

January 15th, 2012 | by Sara | food

Jan
15

I’ve been loving fresh lime sodas (and drinking them multiple times a week) since I got back from my India trip last spring. A friend told me how well SodaStream works to make carbonated water, even if you don’t use the SodaStream flavors with it.

Well, I got one for Christmas, and I’m sold. It’s excellent. So fast. So easy. And I won’t have to lug bottles of seltzer from the grocery store anymore (or pay for bottles of water mixed with air).

Now I can have TWO lime sodas each night! (kidding … kinda)

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