Buttercream

For the buttercream, I just made a standard half batch. I took three Wilton's Cooking Classes and basically followed there recipe. 

Devil's Food Cake

Often bakers, even professional ones, will use box cake mixes. I know, que gasp. But it's true. I have talked with several professional bakers and they use box mixes with extenders. The extenders usually give the "fun" flavors, like caramel or mocha. Not that this isn't a perfectly legitimate way of baking a cake, I was just tired of eating cake that has preservatives and chemicals in it. So I a made cake from scratch. I was reading about making faux-hostess cupcakes and found this recipe from Martha Stewart.

What happened was pure deliciousness!

Meatloaf

 My mother never made meatloaf. It just wasn't something she cooked. We had it maybe once or twice growing up when my stepfather made it. I don't remember if I liked it or not, but I know I enjoy it now. We probably have once a month or so, or whenever we feel lazy and don't want to go to the grocery store. Why does meatloaf get such a bad rap? It can be delicious, healthy, fun and a great way to help clean out your pantry. It was also voted as the #7 favorite dish in the U.S. in 2007, according to Good Housekeeping.

Chocolate Mousse

For my birthday, I didn't want a cake. We often have cupcakes or cake around, so I wanted some chocolate mousse. So DH used the book from his one baking class in school, Baking and Pastry, as a recipe for my mouse. It was delicious!

Spaghetti Squash

So this is half of a wonderful thing, a spaghetti squash. I decided to post this when my neighbor told me she had never heard of one. I must admit, my husband introduced them to me this winter. It was love with one bite. And they are super easy to prepare.
Spaghetti squash look like a more oblong melon. To cook them, it's super easy to roast it. Stay with me, when my husband first said, "Can you roast chicken for dinner?" I freaked out. I thought that it would be an intense preparation that could not be easy or quick. I was wrong. This is both easy and quick (as it is with chicken as well).

Oyster Festival

When you think of Valentine's Day you think of foods like chocolate covered strawberries and oysters - aphrodisiacs. Foods that are supposed to stimulate sex drive and stuff like that. This weekend I had about as much of that as I could take. My husband took me to the Stumpy Point Oyster Festival.

This was their 26th go round, and the church that puts it on does a great job. It's all you can eat steamed or fried oysters plus sides and fried fish from 12-5 at the community center. All that for $25. Pretty sweet deal.

Cole Slaw

It is a terrible thing to think of serving pulled pork without also serving cole slaw.  You can't have one without the other. Sometimes it's fun to put them on the same bun. So, we made the slaw from scratch. I found the recipe at Seasonal Chef.

Pulled Pork

Who doesn't love an excuse to be lazy and eat for hours on a Sunday? Seriously? We decided that we would get together with our neighbors to watch grown men run into each other with pads on. She made potato soup and a 7 layer dip and I made pulled pork. I was tickled to see pulled pork as a top 10 Super Bowl food on Savour Fare.

I'm originally from South Carolina, so pork barbecue is a fond childhood memory. Sadly, the barbecue in this state is different enough that I don't really care for it. So I'm trying to recreate childhood goodness is a pulled pork sandwhich.

Whoopie Pies

I must admit I get a Williams - Sonoma magazine in the mail, and it sits on my coffee table for me to look at and drool over. The most recent one had whoopie pies. It looked so yummy that I decided I would make them. After scouring the Internet, I found a recipe that my husband agreed sounded pretty good.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

It has been a long time since I was on here, and I have decided to embrace the kitchen and catalog more of what I do anyway for my own mental storage. This way I can remember when I made what and how and so on. I'm going to work on my camera shots too. Try to breath some life into this blog and make it more interesting.
Without further ado, the best chocolate chip cookies ever, well at least according to my husband.
This recipe is adapted from a Nestle cookbook, "Best-Loved Cookies." I tried for years (literally) to make a cookie better than my husband (before we were married). His recipe called for pudding and I never felt right putting pudding in a cookie recipe. But the key for him was he sugar ratio. You need a 3:1 ratio of brown sugar to white.
Armed with this knowledge I went out to conquer. I found this recipe under the "Light Delights" section of the cookbook, but after I reworked it, there is nothing light about it.