Wow! It's been over a month since I last posted a recipe. Balancing out studying and everyday activities I haven't had much time to bake. I checked our fruit bowl the other morning and saw that we had two overly-ripe bananas waiting to be used. I decided then to make muffins! These muffins have a lower fat content, but do not have a chewy or gummy like texture.

This recipe makes exactly 12 average sized muffins.
These have just the right of banana flavor.
I hope you enjoy this recipe.
As the summer approaches I will have more free time to bake and experiment with recipes. Hopefully, I will be posting more. 

Have a good day, everyone! :)

Hope you all had a fantastic Easter celebration with family and friends!
For our dessert after Easter dinner, we made a carrot cake frosted with cream cheese frosting and decorated with the royal icing carrots you saw in my previous blog post.
My mother baked the cake and I was in charge of frosting and decorating. Today I'm sharing the recipe we used for the cake, it is very moist!
Enjoy!

This cake is best paired with a cream cheese frosting, but a plain buttercream frosting would do just fine!

I frosted our cake with cream cheese frosting using just a regular rubber spatula. I thought about doing some piping but after piping out all the carrots the night before I was a little tired of it.
After frosting I just placed the royal icing carrots around the outer rim and the inner circle. I topped the middle portion with King Arthur Flour pastel green sparkling sugar.

Good morning!
I've been wanting to improve my decorating skills for a while now, and I thought it'd be a fun idea to experiment using royal icing. Tomorrow, for those who don't know, (but you really should unless you're living under a rock) is Easter. Growing up in a Christian home, we always celebrated Easter as the resurrection of  Jesus Christ. Be that as it may, my parents still exposed me to society's view of Easter when I was younger. My parents would fill an Easter basket for me, go and get my picture taken with the Easter Bunny at a local store, but were always clear on what the real meaning of it was. 
After my family and I go to church on Easter morning, we come home and have a big lunch. This year for dessert my mom and I are going to be making Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and I thought I'd use my inspiration from Sweet Sugar Belle make these cute royal icing carrots to decorate it with.

I didn't want to make a regular size batch of Royal Icing to make these, because I really didn't want to make 100 carrots out of royal icing (give or take) . I did some searching on the internet and came across this recipe for a small batch of royal icing from Katrina's Kitchen.

Small Batch Royal Icing

You'll need:
2 cups powdered sugar
2 tbsp. meringue powder
1/4 cup warm water
1/2 tsp. vanilla or almond extract (clear is ideal, but I used the regular color and had no problem)

1) Begin by mixing the powdered sugar and the meringue powder together in a bowl using an electric mixer.
2) Add the water and extract slowly. Beat at medium-high speed until stiff peaks begin to form. (This usually takes about 5-7 minutes)

In order to achieve the orange carrot and green stems I used food coloring. My favorite types of food coloring are the gel pastes, they give whatever you're making a vibrant color! In this case I used Wilton's gel formula icing color in orange, and Spectrum's gel paste in 'Leaf Green'.
Simply add in the desired amount and mix it into your icing. (The amount depends on how bright and vibrant you want your icing color to be.)

To pipe the carrots I used Pampered Chef's Decorator Bottle Set . I used a knife to scoop in the icing into the bottles. A little time consuming, but it was easiest for me.

Lay out a sheet of wax or parchment paper onto a cookie sheet in preparation to pipe. I had to tape down the edges of the paper, because they kept popping up. I used the leaf and star tip for the green icing (stems) and the writing tip for the orange icing (carrots). Assuming everyone know what a carrot looks like, there is really not much else to it. I found it easier to pipe the base of the carrots first and then the stem, but either way works. I also found it easier to work upside-down, that is, piping the wider end of the carrot first and then working my way up to the narrow end.

These need to be left sitting out to dry for 24-48 hours.
Mine are still drying in the pictures above, so tomorrow I will show you how they turned out!

Have a nice day everyone :)

Good morning everyone!
In our family, we enjoy having lots of fresh fruit on hand. For a while, my dad and I were eating bananas like crazy, so we stocked up on them. Unfortunately , we didn't get to all of them in time and they began to brown. 
I decided to use them up this morning and make banana muffins for my dad's birthday.

Good afternoon everyone!
I was looking through some of my old recipes and photos and came across this muffin recipe and thought I would share it with you. Now a days, when we see a recipe that has 'low fat' in the description it usually involves applesauce- but this one does not!

Ingredients-

1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup white sugar
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
2/3 cup vanilla fat-free yogurt
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
3 tbsp. 1% low-fat milk OR light vanilla soy milk
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup strawberry jam (I used this kind)

Begin by preheating your oven to 375 degrees.
Combine flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl, stirring well with a whisk.
Using a mixing spoon, make a well in the flour mixture. You can simply do this by just "digging" (so to speak) a little hole in the middle of the mixture. Set aside.
In a separate bowl combine yogurt, butter, milk, and eggs stirring well with a whisk.
Add yogurt mixture to flour mixture, stirring until moist. Be careful not to over-mix.

Line a standard muffin tin with paper liners and spray each cavity lightly with cooking spray.
Spoon in 1 tbsp batter into each liner, then adding a tsp. of jam. Once this is done for each muffin, evenly distribute remaining muffin batter.

In a small bowl, combine sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over batter.
Bake for 15 minutes and cool on a wire rack for about 15 minutes as well.

As the title of my blog states, I have a mild obsession with cupcakes (anything in cake-like form is kind of my weakness).
Since my Mom's birthday was this past Sunday, I made her cupcakes and so I thought, "Why not dinner as well?"
I decided to make her a pasta dish with broccoli and shrimp!

Spinich Pasta with Shrimp and Broccoli

Ingredients:
1 package Spinich pasta (or your personal favorite)
25-30 frozen, pre-cooked cocktail shrimps, shelled
1 family-sized bag frozen broccoli (this is all we had on hand, but I'm sure fresh broccoli would make this dish even better!)
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp minced garlic or garlic paste
roughly, 1 tbsp parsley
roughly, 1 tbsp basil
1 tsp black pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
salt, to taste
olive oil, for cooking

Start by preparing your pasta according to the directions on the box.
Do the same for the frozen broccoli or fresh broccoli.

Drizzle a large skillet with olive oil and turn to medium/high heat. Add onions and let them brown.
Once slightly browned, (make sure they don't burn!) add shrimp, 1/2 of the garlic and seasonings.
Stir around for 1-5 minutes or until shrimp begins to heat up. Add it the pre-cooked broccoli.
Mix it all together.

Leaving drained pasta in pot or pouring into a large pasta bowl, mix with 2 tbsp olive oil and remaining garlic.
Once shrimp and broccoli is heated mix in the pasta and serve.

Enjoy!

Hello!
Today I made Raspberry-Lemon bars. They were very good, and a big hit!
Here's the recipe I revised from King Arthur Flour:



Ingredients:
For the Crust-
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup all=purpose white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour (regular flour will do just fine if you don't have it on hand)
1/4 cup confectioners' sugar
Zest of 1 lemon

Topping-
2 large eggs
1 cup granulated white sugar
2 tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 cup frozen raspberries
2 tbsp all-purpose white flour
Zest of 1 lemon
a pinch of salt

Begin by preheating your oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl, combine flour and confectioners sugar. Using a pastry cutter, cut in the butter (I cut my stick of butter into thirds to make it easier).
Press this mixture into a 9x9 baking pan and bake for 20 minutes, or until lightly brown.
While that is baking, combine the eggs, sugar, flour, and salt. Using a blender or food processor, mash up your raspberries with the lemon juice, and add to the rest of the other ingredients.
Once the crust part is finished and still hot, pour the topping over it and continue baking for about 25 minutes.
Let cool (you can even put it in the fridge) , then sprinkle with confectioners' sugar.

Enjoy!!