Oatmeal Cherry Muffins

Hey all! One of my co-workers at Guadalupe had cherries and I realized that I had never made cherry muffins before. So I remedied that.



Preheat Oven to 375

Mix together in one bowl
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup oats
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp of nutmeg
1/8 tsp of allspice



Mix together in a larger bowl
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup applesauce

If you don't want to use applesauce, you don't have to. I like the texture that applesauce adds. If you don't, use a full cup of sugar and 3/4 of a cup of milk.



Add to that mixture
1/2 oil
1/2 milk
1 tsp of vanilla



Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix well.



Chop up some fresh cherries. I used about 15 or so for this batch. Don’t add the cherries to the batter, because they are juicy and the batter will become cherry batter. If you want to save time, I'm sure you can use frozen cherries or dried cherries. About 1/2 - 1 cup will do.



Scoop one spoonful of batter into muffin cups. Add cherries. Cover cherries with another spoonful or two of batter until the cups are mostly full.



Sprinkle the tops with sugar and add half a cherry on top.



Bake for 23-25 minutes.
This recipe makes 12 muffins.

ENJOY!!!



<3

Lemon Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Strawberry Frosting

So, since my teacher dropped the word count of our first paper (it only has to be 600 words now), I decided that I had time to procrastinate, and my favorite way to procrastinate is baking.

I absolutely love taking a recipe that I've used before and doing something different with it. That's what I've done with these delicious little things.

First what you will need:

The Cupcakes
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp of salt

1 cube of butter (room temperature)
2/3 cup white sugar
zest from 2 lemons
2 eggs (room temperature)
1 tsp vanilla
2 TBSP oil
1/3 cup lemon juice (2 lemons)
1/2 cup milk (room temperature)

1/2 a bag of mini chocolate chips

The Frosting
2 TBSP of butter (room temperature)
3 cups of powdered sugar
3-4 mushed up strawberries (room temperature)
1/2 tsp of vanilla

It is really important to have these usually cold ingredients at room temperature. The butter whips up nice and fluffy, but if you add a cold egg or cold milk to it, the butter will harden right up and ruin the fluffiness of your batter. It takes about an hour and a half to get butter and eggs to room temperature. To speed up the process I usually cut it in cubes (more surface area). The milk doesn't take that long. I usually take out the milk and then prepare everything else and by the time I need to add it, it's warm enough.

This recipe takes a bit of preparation. First, preheat your oven to 350 F and line a cupcake tin with liners (I did mini-cupcakes, makes about 36 and it makes about 12 regular sized cupcakes). Zest both lemons and juice them. Make sure you pour the juice through a strainer so you don't accidentally get seeds or big chunks of pulp in your batter.

First, combine the dry ingredients in a medium bowl.



In a large bowl, whip up the butter and add the sugar and the lemon zest and whip until all mixed up and fluffy.


(Sorry this one is fuzzy. I was trying to take a picture and keep mixing at the same time.)

Add the eggs one at a time. Again this is important to make sure you have the eggs evenly distributed throughout the batter. Add vanilla. Add oil.



Now, this is also very important. You can't add the lemon juice and the milk at the same time. The acids in the lemon juice will curdle the milk and you don't want that with this recipe. So take the flour mixture and add about 1/3 of it to the wet ingredients. Mix it up really well. Add the lemon juice. Again, mix really well.



Add another 1/3 of the flour mixture (an original 1/3, not a 1/3 of what is left which would actually be about 1/5. YAY! Math!). Mix it well, and then add the mix. Finish it off with the last bit of the flour mixture.



Mix it really well, and make sure you scrape the sides so everything is mixed up. Add the chocolate chips with a spatula.



Scoop into your cupcake liners. For mini cupcakes, bake for about 14 minutes. For regular cupcakes, bake for about 20 minutes.



To make the frosting, take 3-4 strawberry, cut them up and mush them. This is much easier if they are room temperature.



Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and just mix away. It may take awhile to get this consistency, but be patient. Don't add more liquid! Please note that there is no food coloring in this recipe. I don't use food color if I can help it. The pink in this frosting is JUST from the strawberries!



Once your cupcakes are cool, frost them.



AND THEN EAT AND ENJOY!

Chocolate Chip Lemon Coconut Macaroons ...

... or what I like to call "I have homework, so I baked something."

Here is what you need:



1 bag of shredded, sweetened coconut (I used a 14 oz bag)
1/2 cup sugar
6 TBSP flour
4 egg whites
2 tsp vanilla
zest from 1 lemon
splash of lemon juice
Chocolate chips

In one bowl, mix together the coconut, sugar and flour.


Add egg whites and vanilla. (the eggs only look yellow in this picture because of the lighting. Just use the egg whites!!!)


Add the lemon zest and juice. If you don't want lemon, then don't. This recipe actually doesn't call for lemon at all, but I love chocolate and lemon, so I added it.


With a spatula, mix in chocolate chips. The recipe says for 1/2 cup, but I doubt I'm the only one that just dumps the bag in and then says, "okay, that looks like too many, so we're good."

Scoop 'em out onto a cookie sheet and back for about 10 - 15 minutes until the tops and edges are brown and crispy yummy. The smaller the cookie, the less time you want to bake them for.


ENJOY

My Last Semester

My last semester of graduate school started today. I figured that since it was my last semester, I would be able to use this blog for what I meant to use it for - just 500 word blog entries every week. Yeah, well, that's not going to happen.

My schedule:

Monday:
WRTG 2010 = 8:35 - 9:25
Office Hours = 10:00 - 11:30
COMM 6640 = 11:50 - 1:10pm

Tuesday:
Utah Opera/Utah Symphony (Internship) = 9:00 - 2:00pm
Guadalupe School (Work) = 5:30 - 9:30pm

Wednesday:
WRTG 2010 = 8:35 - 9:25
Office Hours = 10:00 - 11:30
COMM 6640 = 11:50 - 1:10pm

SLUG (copy editing) = 6:00 - 8:00pm

Thursday:
Utah Opera/Utah Symphony (Internship) = 9:00 - 2:00pm
Guadalupe School (Work) = 5:30 - 9:30pm

Friday:
WRTG 2010 = 8:35 - 9:25
Office Hours = 10:00 - 11:30

And that schedule is not including everything I have to do for my Masters project. So yeah, no time. But I love being busy, so it won't be too bad.

I almost wish I did have time, just so you could all see my trip through insanity this semester. :)

Why I Need a 4.0 ...

... and why I can still do better.

I am going to preface this post with the following message:

This is not a dig for compliments. This is not a plea for people to reassure me. I don't want any of that. These are my actual feelings and the way my brain works. Throwing out compliments or reassuring me is a way to debase my feelings--an underhanded way to tell me that I am wrong and I shouldn't feel this way and I need to get over it.

So yeah, don't do that.

This is just an explanation, so people can understand me a little bit more.

I got a 4.0 this last semester. Finally. My first one in my masters degree. A big deal or so people assume, but to me, it is what I expect of myself. A 4.0 means I can't be any better. It is the top of the measuring stick when it comes to school.

I can't be any better. But then I think back to all the times that I procrastinated this paper or didn't read that article or should have been working on something but instead I was playing facebook games. And I can be better. I wasn't good enough. I did not do my best. It's really hard for me not to judge myself based on grades (that's a whole different blog post about how we're trained and taught toward the grade). But it isn't just grades. It's just that now that I am in school going toward this degree, that is what it is focused on.

Anything and everything I do is done with the idea that I could have and should have done better. These feelings come from always feeling mediocre when I was younger. Nothing I ever did was good enough, and I was never good enough at any one thing to be great. I could and still can do a lot of things, but I am always stuck in the potential phase. "You have great potential." I got really tired hearing that. I also got really tired of hearing "You could do better," or "Your best isn't good enough," or "Why can't you be more like your sister?" (which my mom doesn't ever remember saying to me, but she did, but not nearly as often as someone else).

My first semester of graduate school, I got a 3.455 - and people praised me. "You did so good for your first semester. That's really really good."

And I'm screaming in my head ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I GOT TWO Bs!!!

My second semester I got a 3.79. Much, much better. Just one stupid B+ in a class that I didn't want to take but had to take anyway. The worst part though is that it was the class I tried my hardest in. Just wasn't good enough.

This semester, yes, I got a 4.0. My overall average is now at a 3.739 (which lets me breathe a bit easier), but I had an easy semester. I only had 2 classes and a few hours of an internship that wasn't nearly as much work as I was expecting. So the work load was less, and my grades were higher, which makes me feel even worse.

Next semester, I have less school work and more real life work, work that won't give me a grade. I have one class (which I'm excited to take) and my Masters Project that I have to complete. I have a 10-hour-a-week internship with Utah Symphony and Opera, I have copy editing with SLUG magazine, I have 8-10 hours a week at Guadalupe School. I'm going to be busy and I am going to love being busy.

But the entire time, with every thing I have to do, I am going to be thinking that I can do it better. I can be better. But can I really? That is the worst part. The self-doubt. Because even when I do my best, I feel that it is not good enough. And without a grade to tell me how well I'm doing, without a grade to tell me that I can't do any better, then I am always going to think that I am not good enough. And that is why I need a 4.0.

So, I don't know if that worked. I don't know if I managed to explain myself, but if you give me a compliment, if you tell me "oh you're so smart" and I look away or mumble something about being better, try not to be offended. I'm working really hard on accepting compliments by just saying "thank you" and not contradicting the complimenter. But in my mind, I need to learn to accept them, too, and know that they are true. In my mind, the compliments are not true. I battle with this almost every day. I don't believe them. I am smart, but I can always be smarter. I do my work and meet my deadline, but I can always work harder. I am mediocre. I can always do better.

My New Year's resolution is to work on this. To be better.

But, but, but ... I TEACH YOU THINGS

I saw this picture on tumblr today.



It makes me sad because while I do my best to teach students how to write, this is the reality of writing in high school and college.

Crepes

I decided to be a bit adventurous.

Crepes!!!



2 eggs
3/4 cup flour (there is only 1/4 cup shown in the first picture, but you need more than that as I discovered AFTER I took this picture)
MIX THE EGGS AND FLOUR TOGETHER FIRST

Add 1/2 cup milk
1/2 TBSP sugar
1/8 tsp vanilla
A pinch of salt

THE BATTER WILL BE REALLY THIN! Most websites and recipes say to let the batter refrigerate for an hour, but I was hungry, so I didn’t.

On medium heat, melt a little bit of butter in a non-stick pan.

As you pour the batter into the pan, swirl the pan around. This takes talent that I do not have, but you want the crepe to be thin. If you use a smaller pan than I do then your crepes will probably end up round. :)

(ugh my stove is dirty ... don't look at that ... )

Let it cook (the top of the crepe will look dry) for only a couple minutes and then flip it over. There should be this lace-like pattern on the crepe. Again, cook for a couple minutes.



This recipe made about 4 crepes for me. I ate mine with jam. You can eat crepes with anything.