Java Chip Cupcakes (no endorsement from Starbucks implied)

The other day I drove out to Malibu to hike to a waterfall (aka face my death numerous times) and have dinner with some friends from Heidelberg. It was a fantastic day, but... well, that's for another post. Anyway, since I spent the day exhausting myself and didn't get to my car until around 10:45, I wasn't sure how conscious I was going to be for the hour and a half drive back home.

About halfway down PCH I decided that I was going to get some coffee as insurance against falling asleep at the wheel (although I didn't feel too sleepy at that moment, I wasn't exactly feeling energetic, and I didn't want to take my chances). I stopped at a gas station and bought some cheap cinnamon coffee at the convenience store before I set on my merry way.

So anyway, the coffee worked, in case you were wondering. But since I really only sipped on it (not wanting to over-caffeinate myself before bedtime), I had a lot of coffee left over, and I wanted to do something creative with it. Drinking it would be a good idea. But I had a better one.

Coffee-flavored cupcakes.

But then I got to thinking about how I could take it one step further. I mean, coffee cupcakes would be good, but there had to be a way to make them fattier tastier. Then I remembered everyone's favorite Starbucks drink (and by everyone I mean people who don't really like coffee coffee and really just like sugary drinks. Which is not necessarily a bad way to be, unless you're asking your arteries): the Java Chip Frappucino, aka chocolate, sugar, cream... oh yeah, and some coffee.

After some experimentation, this was the result:

Behold the Java Chip Cupcake in all its delicious, caffeinated glory.

I doctored up a basic white cake recipe to be slightly chocalatey and very caffeine-y, and I liked what I tasted, so I decided to share with you.

Cupcakes

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs (or 1/2 cup egg substitute, which is what I used to save on calories)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup (ish) chocolate pieces (or mini chocolate chips)
1/2 cup coffee

Directions


1.

Cream together butter and sugar.

2.

Add vanilla and eggs. Mix until nice, creamy, and smooth.

3.

In separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and cocoa.

4.

Chop up the chocolate into small pieces (if necessary).

5.

Mix in the flour mixture and the chocolate pieces.

6.

The best part... add the coffee :)

The finished batter is so delicious you could just eat it with a spoon!

7.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, then let cool.

Frosting

Ingredients:
3 cups powdered sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup marshmallow creme
1/3 cup powdered coffee drink mix (i used a white chocolate caramel cappuccino mix, but I'm sure     that just about any other flavor would work just as well).
1/4 cup milk

Directions:

Pretty simple. Combine all the ingredients until smooth. Add milk until it's the texture you want.

Frost the cupcakes (when they're cool, of course) and then they're ready to eat and DELICIOUS!









Some suggestions for variety:

• Add oreos instead of chocolate chips
• Top with whipped cream instead of frosting, just like a blended drink at your favorite coffee shop
• For extra decadence, drizzle chocolate sauce over the top
• For even more decadence, chocolate ganache would be great injected into the middle or as a layer  in between the cupcakes and the frosting.

It's been one of those days of the good variety.

Let me clarify that, at least for today, when I say "it's been one of those days" I mean one of those of the good variety. The ones that are incredibly full yet at the same time relaxing, at the end of which you can sit down, eat dinner, unwind, and feel satisfied about everything you managed to accomplish in such a short time.

This morning, I got up shortly after 6 am, which one would not assume is the start to a good day. However, there was reason for me to get up with the sun on a Saturday: my mom and I spent the morning scouring garage sales, which, may I mention, is one of my favorite things to do (if I'm in the right mood, of course... otherwise it's just kind of weird looking through people's old stuff). We've been looking since last summer for a good desk to go in my room to replace the one I've had for years, which is currently in a state of disrepair-- not to mention that with it's locker-style drawers, it clashes horribly with the rest of my shabby-chic style furniture. Well anyway, today we finally found a suitable replacement! It's got some gunk on it, but the bones are good, and I wanted a fixer-upper anyway. Plus, we were able to get it for $10. That's it. And now I'll have a fun summer project painting my desk and making it good as new (if not better).

After that we went to breakfast (perhaps one would call it brunch?) at Flappy Jacks, a new(ish) restaurant in this awkward location by the freeway. The way I say that doesn't make it sound appealing, but trust me, it actually is. The decor inside is quirky, with license plates and Route 66 type things. Plus, the breakfast menu is HUGE. I debated back and forth between pancakes or a crepe with strawberries, bananas, and nutella before deciding upon the better-for-me-but-still-ridiculously-tasty Veggie Benedict, which was basically a bunch of good stuff on top of an English muffin with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce. Plus there were avocados involved-- and when avocados are involved, 90% of the time that's the dish I'm going to order (perhaps this is my one stereotypical "California Girl" trait). Anyway, it was actually kind of fun eating in a booth with a view of the freeway, because it made it feel like we were on a road trip. Which for some reason made me crave a cup of good, solid diner coffee. Probably because in pretty much every movie or TV show when people go on a road trip and stop in a diner, or really pretty much anytime they're in a diner regardless of whether a road trip is involved or not, they always have a simple, comforting mug of coffee. Must be a Pavlov's dogs kind of thing.

I ordered the coffee, in case you were wondering.

This isn't the coffee I drank today, but that doesn't matter. Coffee is always good.

So if you couldn't already tell, the morning was perfect. After that, we decided to get crafty, and I've spent pretty much the entire afternoon going crazy tie-dyeing things and cutting up T-shirts and pants. I feel like I've been pretty productive, if you ask me.

The moral of the story? Sometimes it's not so bad waking up voluntarily at six in the morning, because that means by the time 6 pm rolls around you may have accomplished a whole lot more than you do in a normal day.

I'm dreaming of the end of the semester

... which is weird, because it's over.

The past two nights I've had those horrible kinds of dreams where you have to do something monumental, but you waited until the last minute, and it's just a strugglefest until you wake up and realize that you don't have to do that at all and don't need to be stressed out about it.

It's weird.

Two nights ago, I had a dream that we were packing to leave Moore Haus (wait, I did that like a week ago...). So I procrastinated on putting my whole life in two suitcases until the last moment, as per usual in dreams like this. One by one my roommates (not actual roommates from Moore Haus... nor was this my actual room in Moore Haus) went to sleep, and I was still packing in the dark, calculating how much I had left to do and at what point I could stop, how much I could leave unpacked until the morning of our departure. In the dream, we had to board the bus to Frankfurt Airport at 7 am (which is actually much more reasonable than our actual bus-boarding time, 5:45 am). So I set my alarm for a few hours before 7. The next morning (dream morning, not real morning) I woke up and played card games and talked with people, then thought "Oh yeah! I need to pack because we're leaving this country soon!" Then I looked at the clock to see how much time I had left, and it was 8:15. When I finally woke up for real, I could relax because I realized I was at home in my own room and my packing/departure was already over and done with (although my unpacking is still a completely different story).

Last night I had another end of the semester dream. This time it was a final. As we were walking into the classroom, I realized that I probably should have studied more, because I had completely blown off putting any work into it since it was the last final. We were seated and given the tests... I believe it was some sort of foreign language test. The girl next to me would not stop talking during the test and I could not concentrate for the life of me. I moved seats and was able to concentrate more, but then I realized the test was multiple pages long and required me to translate entire sentences from multiple texts we had read. I started stressing because I hadn't memorized the texts, so I didn't know what to do (this doesn't exactly make sense in real life, but whatever...dreams never make sense once you look bring them to the waking world). After I called over the teacher, she told me that the texts were in the study guide and we were supposed to bring them along. Of course, I had forgotten to do so. So then I stressed that I would not have enough time to complete this impossible test. And once again, I woke up realizing that the semester was over and I didn't have to worry about these things anymore.

I find it strange that I've been having these stress-filled dreams, because I'm not currently stressed in waking life. So it doesn't make sense that my dreams are so rushed and traumatic when that's the opposite of what I'm actually thinking and feeling. Any dream interpreters out there who can shed some light on the situation? Anyway, maybe now that I've brought it out into the open I'll dream about something else tonight.

Lately

Lately I've been feeling a lot like writing. The issue with this, though, is that my moments of inspiration and the days in which I have time to write never seem to overlap. Although I've been home for a little over a week now and certainly have had plenty of time to write, any concrete ideas have been nowhere to be found, and if I have the inclination at all to write, all I can muster are vague, wispy clouds of ideas that don't materialize into anything more than a sentence fragment (we'll just blame it on the jet lag...).

Now that I'm starting to get into my own kind of new routine back at home, settling in, and getting over jet lag, I finally have inspiration teasing me with ideas I can't wait to write about. Of course, I need to let them stew in my brain a little to make sure I know how I want the whole story to play out (or really, how I even want the opening scene to play out...), but I'm thankful that I finally have some productive thoughts that I want to follow through to completion, that I actually WANT to sit and think about nothing but my story. FINALLY!

Of course, one cannot ride on the excitement of a first snippet of inspiration forever... I found this blog post to be stock full of good advice for gathering ideas for a story. I might try some of these for my next story, or even for this current one when the going gets tough.

Also, on a slightly related note, I highly suggest the aforementioned blog to any aspiring writers. The advice is so relevant and, well, for lack of a better word, good. If you ever want to make your story perfect (well, as close to perfect as anything human-made can ever be) in every detail, follow this advice.

Anyway, enough of this for now. I have go feed my creativity :) Happy writing, reading, or whatever else you choose to do!

Dressing for the Faire

I think I've finally come to accept the fact that I'm not living in Europe anymore. Well, maybe.

But since I can no longer traipse the same streets that people have been walking down for hundreds of years, I figured I'd do the next best thing, something I've always kind of wanted to do but never got around to doing: go to the Renaissance Faire!

I'm going to rally some friends, lend out some costumes, and of course, make a costume of my own-- any excuse to make a new historical costume is a good one.

So for the past few days I've been gathering supplies, although no exact date for this visit has yet been set (it will be soon enough, plus I need time to make my costume!).

I'm using a fairly simple pattern (at least from what I can tell), so hopefully it won't take too long/be too hard. Then again, anything should be easier than an 18th century gown, and we've been down that road before.

This is the lovely fabric for the bodice/vest/corset thingy (technical term, by the way)

Fabric for the two skirts. The pink will be the under skirt, and the blue will be the drape-y overskirt.

All the pretty fabrics! :)

So anyway, I'm pretty excited about this new project and even more excited about going to the Faire with friends sometime soonish! Excessive fabric, turkey legs, weird people, and abridged performances of Shakespeare, here I come!

Adventures in Baking: Toffee Layer Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting

As most of you probably know already, I am no longer in Deutschland. It was a FANTASTIC year that will be hard to beat, but there are benefits to being home as well.

One of those benefits? A fully stocked kitchen, and all of the food is MINE (okay, technically my family's and not solely mine, but the point still stands: none of the food is labeled and I can touch ALL OF IT). Can you tell I'm excited? I've been itching to bake, but didn't really get around to it much in Germany because most of the baking ingredients in the house belonged to somebody else and I was too lazy (slash didn't want to spend the money) to buy all the necessary ingredients for delicacies such as layer cake.

So now, a few short days after returning home, I have finally broken out the oven mits, measuring cups, and washcloths (because I get flour everywhere, without fail). Never before has home sweet home been so literal.

However, I didn't want to do any ordinary baking... too boring. So I decided to be experimental, which is always dangerous since cake-making is really just chemistry, and any fiddling with the pre-approved ingredients and measurements can lead to some disastrous results. But if there's anything I learned this year, it's if you and some friends get in a car with a random Irishman to escape from the cold and not wait for a taxi, he may take you to his family's old farmhouse and let you hold a day-old lamb.

By which I mean if you do something a little risky and out of the ordinary, you may get something even better than you expected

So, long story short, I changed a few details of a basic cake recipe with mixed results. Some changes were out of a desire for experimentation, some were out of necessity (read: some brown sugar instead of exclusively white). Without further ado, I present to you my recipe for toffee cake with peanut butter frosting (needs a catchier name... suggestions are welcome in the comments).

Ingredients
Cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 cups low-fat vanilla yogurt (replacement for oil)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon*
1/2 cup toffee bits*

                                            *these ingredients I just threw in the batter until it looked like a sufficient amount. I didn't think to measure them until later, sadly, so these measurements are just educated guesses.

Frosting
2 tablespoons peanut butter (creamy, though crunchy would also be an interesting choice)
3 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup vanilla soymilk (regular milk will do just fine; I just like the flavor that vanilla soymilk gives to frosting)
1 stick (8 teaspoons) butter


Directions (Cake)

1.  Preheat the oven to 350. Trust me, you'll want to do this first. I always forget and then have to wait for the oven to heat up with nothing else to do as far as cake-making goes.
2. Put all of the cake ingredients in mixer. Mix until smooth. 
3. Pour the cake batter into two pre-greased 9 inch cake pans. 
4. Bake for 30 minutes*

           *I had some difficulty here with the top baking too quickly compared to the rest of the cake (probably because of the sugar in the yogurt, which I didn't take into account). I would tell you how to fix this problem if I knew how (suggestions?). To avoid it, substitute more tried and true ingredients such as apple sauce or oil for the yogurt.


Directions (Frosting)

1. Put all the frosting ingredients in mixer.
2. Mix until smooth.

A note about the frosting: the measurement of 1/4 cup milk does not need to be exact; it really depends on what you want the consistency of the frosting to be. Feel free to include more or less.

Super smooth frosting... mmmmm.

 Another note: if you want a subtler peanut butter taste, try one tablespoon instead of two. A little goes a surprisingly long way.

Put a nice big glob on the first layer as "glue" between the two layers.

Spread like so

Add the next layer, frost, and sprinkle some toffee bits on top for good measure. Voila!

Please pardon this cake... as an experiment it sinks a little in the middle... I've made prettier ones, I swear.

The end result is a dense, spongy cake and not-too-sweet frosting. Success!

A reflection.

Yesterday was our LAST DAY OF CLASSES.
Today was our first day of finals.
Which means the end is near!

I feel like this is all I've been saying lately, but that's because it's almost all I can think about. I'm not ready to say goodbye.

I want to live in a place like this forever.

It's not necessarily that going home is bad or anything, it's more that I'm not ready to move on. Something about saying goodbye to this place seems so final, because it's  not like you can simply hop onto a plane and fly to Europe any time you like (I WISH).

Also, the friends that I have made here are amazing, and I love them all. I can't imagine not being able to walk a few feet to their rooms and just do nothing together. I will miss all the silly little shenanigans that occur on random days in Moore Haus, walking to and from class and everywhere in between, the cobblestone streets of Heidelberg, the castle at night in all it's magical beauty, the view of Heidelberg after dark, Moore Haus and its thin walls and awesome inhabitants and rumored secret passageway(s).





While I know that life has many more adventures to come, I'm having a hard time leaving this one behind. Living in the land of fairy tales has proved to be the best year of my life.

I still can't believe this whole year was real.

In less than a year,

I have lived on the same street as a castle (which was partially destroyed in, I believe, Louis XIV's expansionary wars) of a prince electorate, walked in the same places as Goethe and Mark Twain, used my German outside of the classroom, and lived in the city which was a center of the German Romantic movement (the Heidelberg Romantic is actually a thing).

I  have practically memorized the cadence of the Deutsche Bahn conductor as he announces, "Meine Damen und Herren, in wenigen Minuten erreichen wir ________ Hauptbahnhof."

I have been to Switzerland (twice), Ireland, England, Austria, Spain, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Turkey, and various parts of Germany.... and decided that I have to come back.

I have thrown a snowball out my window, tripped on a cobblestone (several times), stargazed at a castle, eaten Gruyere cheese in Gruyere, played games with Irish people, looked for cars in the wrong direction while crossing a London street, pet stray dogs, stopped to admire the beauty of everything that is surrounding me, run out to explore Nuremburg in the hour I had in between trains, exchanged currency several times, bartered at the Grand Bazaar, learned how to fence, made friends with a few Germans and also a girl from Siberia, and discovered that I may want to also be a translator as well as an author/publisher.

More importantly I have completely changed while still being the same person I've always been. I have grown more into myself while learning how better to reach out to others. I have made an effort to be more outgoing, more friendly, more weird, more spontaneous, and more driven.

I have made new friends with whom I have so much in common, learned how to play "zoo" and a million other of Chelsea's silly games. I have stayed up till 4 in the morning talking with some great people, built a fort and giggled in it for hours, eaten a chocolate cake while drinking hot chocolate with friends on Valentine's Day (then decided so much chocolate at once was a bad life decision), been nested upon (ask Brandie... it's odd), met fellow Diet Coke addicts, and sat in a room filled with people in which we said and did almost nothing and still felt that we had fun.

Most importantly I have learned more precisely how to define my faith, what I believe, and make my faith more mine than it's ever been before.

I'm really going to miss hanging out at the neighbors' place.

Croatia= best first trip in which we got lost at a beautiful state park where no one spoke English and seriously considered hitch-hiking despite knowing full well the dangers. 

So basically it's safe to say that this year will be tough to top. But I don't want to make it sound like this is all about me... despite the wonderful surroundings, this year would have been nothing if not for all of the amazing people with whom I shared it. Never before have I lived in such close quarters with so many people-- and from what I've heard, it's remarkable that we all get along so well. There will never be a community like the community of Heidelberg 2011-2012 students.