House Spouse

I shouldn’t have eaten one (+) of these cupcakes, that is. I also shouldn’t have taken every opportunity to taste the frosting and the cupcake batter while I was making them. But I did. And now my bathroom scale has been reminding me every morning since.

Andrew’s birthday was last week, and while we had decided that the camera we bought in January was his gift I forgot to give him a card on his birthday. I at least picked it out and purchased it before the day, but I don’t get home from class until 11 p.m. on Wednesdays, and it just slipped my mind. So, I made it up to him with 24 carrot cupcakes color coordinated to match the card.

I should tell you that these cupcakes are unbelievable. I might even say that making these was my most successful baking venture to date.

I got the recipe from Smitten Kitchen. She provides instructions for making a layer cake with the recipe, but I opted for the cupcakes because they take about half as much time to bake and cool.

I’ve made mention before how much I love snacks. Finger foods, especially the salty, spicy and crispy ones, are really all I need to be happiness and life satisfaction. When Gourmet arrived in our mail box this month, we were excited for two reasons: one, we don’t remember ordering Gourmet (though we have a vague memory of it being tacked on to an Amazon order around Christmas time as a ’special gift.’), and two, the spread on Korean dishes in the middle of the magazine is gorgeous and inspiring. The photo I’ve included in this post really pales in comparison to the luscious photos in the spread.

Being that I had no desire to create a meal for eight with eleven dishes and three separate beverages, I picked out three I thought would make a nice dinner. The most appealing, of course, were the snackish foods: cucumber apple pickle, soy-pickled jalepeños and shrimp and scallion pancakes.
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I could eat chips and dip for every meal of every day. I suppose I should reword that. I want to eat chips and dip all the time, but I most certainly cannot. Not even more than once a week really. I don’t share Andrew’s crazy metabolism. What I do share with him, though, is a brand new mandoline. Really, it’s “his,” because he got it for his birthday, but you know how it goes with the married set. This new mandoline is awesome because we can use it to make homemade chips. (Do you like how I brought that full circle? I do.)

A classmate of mine and his wife came to our house for some pizza and the Simpson’s last week. I wanted to put out a snack for them to munch on while I finished up the pizza, so I prepared some oven-baked potato and sweet potato chips and whipped up some yogurt dip. It turned out delicious, and they didn’t even realize the dip was made with yogurt. The amount of olive oil I used was so negligible that I didn’t feel more than one or two ounces of guilt when I ate about a third of the chips before my friends showed up.
(Recipe after the jump)
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