Pot Pie Pot Pie Chicken Pot Pie!

I cooked a homemade vegan chicken pot pie, which consisted of freshly steamed asparagus, corn boiled and cut off of the cob, boiled potatoes, seitan, a vegan nutritional yeast gravy, fresh chives, and cracked salt and pepper. It was super yummy and the flaky crust made it even yummier. FYI to those who want to make a vegan pot pie - buy pepperidge farms puff pastry - it's really good and it's vegan! Between 1 and 10, I would rate this as a 7 on the difficulty scale. It's not so much hard as it is time consuming, especially if you're going to cook all of the vegetables yourself rather than use canned.

I also made a lemon cupcake with cream cheese frosting. I would upload a picture, but the one I have is the wrong type of file. Damn technology! I got the recipe from bake and destory, a chicago-based baking blog. I actually saw the writer by johnny sprockets one day, and i'm not going to lie, I was a tad bit star struck. If I'm going to live up to the bad ass baking reputation I want to gain, I think I'm going to have to get like 5 more cupcake tattoos and sew some more kick ass aprons. But don't you worry, aprons are on their way. I'm planning to amp up my sewing game and house wares are my specialty, so get prepared to read about it on my blog!

I got to go! I'm watching DC Cupcakes on TLC and some lady is chewing out a guy over moldy strawberries. We cupcake lovers are biiitches!

Bake a Bunch

Hello, stranger. It has been quite a while hasn't it? My life has been pretty crazy with trying to find employment and an apartment so I haven't been too focused on updating my blog. My life is kind of settling down...well not really because i'm going to be working all of the time and moving in a week or two...but at least I've made a life for myself in Chicago! I haven't ventured on too many cooking excursions, but I have made a few yummy fares for the 4th of July and a goodbye party for Heather and Jonathan.

These are some vanilla cupcakes with a mixed berry buttercream frosting. I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from Jennifer McCann's blog and I whipped up a buttercream frosting from 1/2 c. each of ebal and veggie shortening, a bunch of powdered sugar, a little bit of vanilla, and a bunch of mixed frozen berries...wow how much more vague can i get? Just mess around with the proportions until you get the right consistency. I couldn't find hand mixers and I was in a hurry to get these to the dinner I was having with Aaron's family, so I used a food processor. I wouldn't recommend this usually, but it is a nice alternative when you're in a hurry and hand mixers are absent. I made a make shift pastry bag from a ziploc bag and cut the end with zig zag scissors to try and get a swirly affect - I can't wait to buy real pastry bags!

Mini's - so cute!

The frosting recipe made enough for another batch of cupcakes I was going to bake for Evan's 4th of July party. This time around I thought I would make an agave nectar cupcake to kind of offset the sweetness of the frosting. I think I liked it more with the agave because it was a nice contrast to the frosting and had a more dense consistency, but Aaron thought the vanilla worked better because it was fluffier. Who the hell knows!

For Heather and Jon's going away dinner, Suzanne made a monster vegan lasagna, while I baked basil garlic breadsticks from Sara Lewis' "The Bread Book." Check this book out if you're interested in learning more about baking bread and if you find the bread lingo a little confusing to you. The book includes a variety of sweet breads, rustic breads, breakfast breads, etc. to choose from and its a lot cheaper compared to those $40.00 bibles on bread they sell at Barnes & Noble.

these pictures suck - sorry!