Butter+Milk

Sounds fattening but it's not!

Buttermilk Mission #1
I'd never used buttermilk in baking so I looked up tons of buttermilk recipes... mostly biscuits, pancakes and chicken. But I wanted cake, and I just happened to scroll through this Vanilla Buttermilk Pound Cake on my Google Reader. It's a recipe from Cooking Light, so it's healthy :-)

It makes 5 small loaves! It made great little gifts for my gloomy friends.... jk!

Look at how moist it is! It was delicious. It was actually quite light and delicate. And the flavor was not too sweet, but the perfect sweetness for an afternoon snack... which is exactly what it was for me.

Best Part= the chewy top and edges!

Buttermilk Mission #2
Of course I had a lot of buttermilk leftover so I needed another recipe! I gave in to the millions of pancake recipes and tried this one on Cooking Light also...

I made these to freeze for future breakfast so I can't comment on how they are. I had a little niblet of a piece and it tasted good! They were quite thick, and very fluffy!

I packed these for breakfast for Ed and he loved them :-)

Pizza Pizza!

Homemade Pizza Trial #2:

Thinner crust! Half turkey pepperoni, half tomatoes and olives. YUM!

Made on our new Pizza Stone :-)

And whose got it better than me? I have a boyfriend who prepares me a salad just the way I like it. Plus he writes me messages with the ingredients:

"I LOVE YOU"
I love you too, babe!

Going With The Flow

I always look for the "perfect" recipe. By that I mean, I have this non-existent recipe in my mind, something that involves everything that I want. A "perfect" recipe. So I look on millions of websites and search after search, I can never find that "perfect" recipe. A lot of times, I end up finding a very basic recipe, or one that has something that I want, and then completely change everything else. I go with the flow with many recipes... now why can't I do that with my life?

On Friday, I wanted a Chocolate Cookie. I was thinking a chocolate chip cookie, but I wanted something super chocolatey. And I remembered that I had recently stocked up on Ghirardelli Unsweetened Cocoa Powder! So at that point, I wanted a super soft, chewy, fudgy, brownie-like cookie. I had made amazing chocolate cookies from Martha Stewart, so I wanted a different source. DORIE GREENSPAN.

I have a lot of her stuff bookmarked on Google Reader, so I browsed my starred items. CHOCOLATE CHUNKERS!!

I busted out the love of my baking-life. I haven't used it in a while because I just mix everything by hand when I'm too lazy to bust this beauty out.

Dry.

Wet.
Annoying Point*- Melting the chocolate chips in a double boiler. The action itself is not annoying, but I didn't read the directions carefully enough to know this part, and it required more bowls than I had expected. Yeah I'm lazy :-)

Chunks.
I got the recipe here, and I played around with the "chunker" part... A.K.A. use up all my leftover pantry stuff! ---> Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips, Dried Cherries, Butterscotch Chips, White Chocolate Chips, Sliced Almonds, Walnuts... I think that was it.


I was convinced that the cookies were gonna come out gross because the batter was soooo much runnier than I had expected. Maybe I did do something wrong. I know for a fact that my chunks didn't add up to the amount of chunks in the recipe because it said in the directions that the batter should be mostly chunks.

Taste? Texture? Delish. Fudgy. ---> SUCCESS!

Next time, I would probably omit the butterscotch chips. It's such a strong flavor, that it got in the way of the chocolate/cherry combo. And I love chocolate and cherries.

A Slice Of Life

The thing I like most about pizza is the versatility. You can top it with so many different things. You can adjust the thickness of the crust. You can make different shapes. It's like whatever you want, you can have, especially if you make it yourself!

Now, I have never "made" pizza. I have now constructed my own pizza, but I still have never "made" pizza dough. Thank god for Trader Joe's and other markets for selling ready made pizza dough (because I don't have patience for yeast)!

I must say that this pizza creation night with Ed was one of the most fun times I've had cooking with him. It was so like, D.I.Y. and anything goes.

Ed <3 Plain, Chicken Parm, Extra Cheese, Floppy
Miki <3 Thin Crust, Vegetables, White, Salad, Anything from All' Antica

Me and Ed always compromise. I attempted at making half the pie thick and half the pie thin... it kinda worked out haha. Compromising on the toppings was easy. He wanted grilled chicken, and I wanted balsamic roasted eggplant. So we first prepared our toppings.


Then, I wanted to be THE pizza man and throw the dough all up in the air.

(I think I was trying to sing some Italian song yelling "AMORÉ!")

Then, I calmed down and just spread with my fingers.


Plopped the toppings on.


And BAM!

Gorrrrrrgeous :-)

Taste? The pizza dough tasted wayyyyy to Whole Wheat-y. The toppings were amazing! The dough was still too thick for me. So for next time, (because me and Ed are now obsessed with making pizza), we got a pizza stone! Hopefully my pizza dough stretching out skills will improve with time, and I'll also try some of my other favorite toppings! ANCHOVIIIIESSSSSSS.... yes....

I Scream For Even More Ice Cream!

I've been on such an ice cream kick! Last summer, I ate ice cream like twice (in America. In Japan, I ate it a lot more!). So this year, I started craving the Carvelanche (with bananas and Reese's PB cups!) early. And then I discovered Sedutto! So on trip #2 to Sedutto, I got to try even more stuff!

I knew this time that I wanted to try their plain Frozen Yogurt. The first time I had this tangy delicious treat was at the Lord And Taylor's cafe with my mom. Then, it was the Pinkberry frenzy. And now comes Sedutto. The plain was delish! Nice and creamy. If you've never had plain fro-yo you must. It tastes like my favorite Japanese yogurt called Bulgaria.If you've never had Bulgaria, it tastes like Yakult, the tiny little yogurt drinks. omfg :-)


So I got that, and half a small of Peanut Butter Crunch and the other half Midnight Cookies and Cream! For PB lovers, you must get this one. And if you love chocolate ice cream, and cookies and cream, but want both and can't decide, get the Midnight Cookies and Cream!


The boyfriend got a LARGE of half Milky Way and half Cake Batter. It's so convenient how he coincidentally wants exactly what I want (him to get)! AKA---> he gets whatever else I feel embarrassed to order because I don't want people to think I actually eat ALL of it! But I do...

OMG! The Milky Way is soooooo good and caramelly and the Cake Batter has huge chunks of yellow cake pieces. Why would you ever go to Coldstone when Sedutto has the best creations already!?

So it is now official that I live on the BEST street ever! Lulu, All' Antica, Sedutto.... what's next a Sushi of Gari?!

Sedutto
67 Garth Road
Scarsdale, NY 10583
Phone: 914-374-0760

Open
Mon-Thu 11:30am-10pm
Fri-Sat 11:30am-11pm
Sun 12pm-10pm

An Asian Flair

I've been seeing these Mochi Cakes all over Tastespotting and me being Japanese and pretty much obsessed with incorporating Japanese-ness into everything, I was totally intrigued! I had an idea of what the cake's texture would be like: Firm and Chewy.

My printer was on BROKEN mode, so here was my ghetto "printout"


The recipes I had been finding were with blueberries.... and I thought for me, it wouldn't be dessert-y enough with healthy old blueberries. So I browsed the supermarket slowly and ended up with this combo...

Basically, this cake substitutes Rice Flour (aka Mochiko) for regular Flour. The recipe called for regular sugar and 2 cups of it! But since I was going to put in Raisinets, I figured I could cut down the sugar by half! Oh and I thought, "eff sugar, let's do honey!"... I love honey in everything!

This recipe was enough for 2 8x8 pans! I did one with chopped pecans, and one without.

And since they were so firm, it was the easiest thing to get them out of the pans! And cutting it was sooooo easy to.. the knife just slid right through :-)


The raisinets sank to the bottom :-( But it was delicious nonetheless!!

Sedutto... Imported From The Upper East Side

So, I of course notice every new store on Garth Road because I live there. I noticed Sedutto, a frozen yogurt/ice cream place, about 2 months ago, and I did some research. I thought it might've been a chain place, but I only found information from one source.

A few weeks ago, I went in to check out their selection. OMFG! There's like 3439208402394 flavors of ice cream, hard frozen yogurt, and soft serve frozen yogurt! Plus, they have every topping you could ever think of! I had a nice chat with the owner and he says that it is a rebirth of the original Sedutto's on the UES in NYC. He closed it down a few years ago, and decided to open it back up here in Scarsdale.

On Saturday, when it was nice and hot and I was getting sweaty, i decided that ice cream would be the ideal dessert! So me and Ed took a trip to Sedutto. After about 20 minutes of flavor tastings, I felt I was ready to make my order. Ed is easy... he knew exactly what he wanted.


1/2 Moose Tracks and 1/2 Cookies and Cream- These were both awesome. They do not skimp on the chunks! Tons of cookies, tons of fudge, and tons of mini PB cups!


Lemme try this. 1/2 Sugar Free-Non Fat Cherry Vanilla and 1/2 Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Frozen Yogurt- Of course these were delicious because at the end of my 20 minutes of indecision, these are the flavors I went with!


There were definitely runner ups though... Milky Way, Banana Fudge, Red Bean, Peanut Butter (something)... so basically, I will definitely be back soon!