Category / recipes

by princesshotflash

food pictures 01 . . . .

Wow! I just cleaned out my old laptop to make room for my new one. My pictures were crazy–especially my food pictures. I don’t know how I did it. I wanted to reshare with you the pictures and the recipes that went with them. I’ll keep posting them until I don’t have anymore to share.

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pear cake

This is a favorite of my friend, Steve. He always talk about it. It’s so moist from the many juicy pears. If you love pears or happen to have a bunch of ripe pears to use up this is a recipe for you: original or my testing on my old blog

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frying up some sweet potato rice doughnuts

These are so good, taste and looks. not to oily because of the rice flour. After it’s fried up it gets rolled in a cinnamon sugar and a great orange-y color from the sweet potato. Here’s my old post with the recipe and more pictures.

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My Strawberry Layer Cake

This cake has been tweak a bit since the beginning. It still one of my favorite during strawberry season. I love layer cake and this is quite beautiful. I add cinnamon to the batter because I think it brings out the sweetness of the strawberries. I came up with proportions because all the other recipes had so much powder sugar which was so sweet. I like the tanginess of the cream cheese to show up.

April’s Strawberry Cake
Bake: 325º
Time: 45 minutes to 1 hour
2 loaf pans or 2 9″ round cake pans

2 cups of cake flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream, buttermilk or yogurt (I like buttermilk the best)
1 cup strawberries, slice half and mash the other half (you can use frozen strawberries)

Sift together dry ingredients, place on the side. Cream together butter and sugar to light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time to butter/sugar mixture. Making sure egg is mixed in well, then add in the vanilla. Mix dry and wet (sour cream or buttermilk or yogurt) ingredients alternately in 3 addition ending with dry to butter, sugar and egg mixture. Be careful not to over mix. Fold in your strawberries by hand. Pour into loaf pans or cake pans. Bake for 45 min.–1 hour. Cake test should come out clean. Cake should be totally cooled before if frosting.

April’s Cream Cheese Frosting
For a 2 layer cake or 18- 24 cupcakes

2 8oz package cream cheese, at room temperature
4 tbsp of unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla
1 c powder sugar, shifted

Mix cream cheese and butter blend and smooth. Add in vanilla then powder sugar slowly to blend well and smooth. If the frosting is too soft, put it in the refrigerator till it firms up.

Please note: I’ve flavored this frosting dried strawberries that I grind up to a power and added to frosting and mix well. It turns the frosting this pretty speckled pink with subtle strawberry taste. Worth the try.

Hope you have time to try out one or two of these recipes. People will love you when you recipe test. Haha.

by princesshotflash

Recipe testing

I’ve been trying to get my recipes from my old blog here. I thought it would be easy to go back to my old blog to add links from old post. But I was NOT as organized as I thought. So I decided to re-recipe test the favorites and post them the recipes and my recipe page (which is n. Hopefully I can make update to recipe to make them better.

First up

Sweet Potato Pie using Mom’s Pumpkin Shortbread recipe. Here’s the link for the old post: http://princesshotflash.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-sweet-potato-pie.html

Mom’s Pumpkin Shortbread a is a creamy custard-y pumpkin pie with shortbread crust. It’s beloved by my family and friends who have made have tasted this recipe. It’s a staple at our Thanksgiving table. I usually make for Thanksgiving and share it with friends. My cousin is making it now for her family.

In my original post, I substituted sweet potato and baked it in a springform pan instead of a 9 x13 pan. I was converting it to serve at the restaurant. I also made the crust slightly thinner, I half the recipe of crust. But the one thing, I notice was the crust got a little soggy after the first day. I also wanted to try adding some cinnamon and cardamon to the crust. I thought that would go well with the sweet potatoes.

I’m thinking of trying out this Martha Stewart recipe, It has an egg in dough which I was thinking it needed. Then I saw this recipe on FB from the Washington Post–Pumpkin Caramel Tart with Toasted Hazelnut Crust. It sounded to delicious to resist.

So I’m totally dump my idea to change up my mom’s pumpkin pie recipe to try this recipe out with sweet potatoes. I’m bring it to Thanksgiving at my friend’s house. Kind of brave to bring a recipe you never test to dinner. But I haven’t tested a new recipe in a while  and these are close friends. They can be brutally honest that tell me if it sucks.

Recipe testing problem #1

Don’t be lazy and start on time even though you are trying to get through Stranger Things, season 1 so you can start season 2. With that statement, I forgot to take pictures till I go to my friends house. I was running late with the late start and  . . .

Recipe testing problem #2

Guess lazy was a theme for my Thanksgiving baking. Too lazy to go shopping with the crazy Thanksgiving food shoppers, no hazelnuts. I think I have one more can of  macadamia nuts. Got a little scared found only onion flavored mac nuts–well I can bring that to the dinner as an appetizer. But I found a can of plain mac nuts that I would used in the crust. Which digs the lateness hole deeper.

Recipe testing problem #3

Started the caramel for the custard first. Now this is the reason you don’t test new recipes to take to a party/dinner. The sugar and water took forever to melt and liquify. Then with lateness and being impatient, I dumped the cream in too fast and clumped up the melted sugar. I just keep stirring, up the heat, and it started melting. But time sucked the baking time. I had to think on my feet and I decided to go back to my old faithful recipe that I originally thought I would adjust.

In the end

I mixed up my old faithful recipe from mom with oven roasted sweet potatoes and some of the caramel that ended up working. I didn’t add all the sugar from the original recipe because of that addition.

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The crust was delicious and the sweet potato custard was good. I would add a little more milk to it to up the creaminess to counter the sweetness and cut the sugar a little. Overall not a disaster.