Happy New Years!

Since I haven't written in this foodie blog of mine in a while and some people have visited it in the past couple of days, I thought I'd share my new years with you guys!

Since Brian and I got married, I've started trying to start some of our own traditions. In the south, one thing you HAVE to do is eat black eyed peas on New Years Day. It brings in luck for the year to come, and who doesn't need more luck?

So I was posed with the question do I use canned or dried beans? Canned would be easier. Dried would be tastier. So I found some directions online for soaking and cooking black eyed peas. I bought two bags of dried peas at 89 cents a piece (wow - what a great money saver) and soaked them for about 10 in hours in water. First, I sifted through the beans to make sure there were no rocks to be found. That would NOT be yummy. Then I put the peas in a big mixing bowl. The directions said to add double the water compared to the peas. So I filled my bowl REALLY full of water.

It was really fun to watch the peas grow in the water. A word to the wise though...there is NO need to taste the peas before you cook them in something. They taste like canned sour monkey droppings before they are cooked and seasoned. Ugh.

So, I let them soak for about 10 hours. My mom told me she had never heard of anyone cooking black eyed peas in the crock pot. But, I'm lazy and the crock pot is so handy. I found some recipes online, so I knew it was possible.

Brian drained the peas and rinsed them off. I put a slow cooker liner in the crock pot. If you've never used one of these, they are WELL worth the money. It's a heavy duty plastic liner that fits right in your crock pot no matter what size it is. Mine fits perfectly, and it's one of the wider oval pots. You can cook anything in the liner and when you're done you can just throw it away. There's is no clean up unless you cut the liner like I did the first few times. Back to the peas...

I put the peas in the crock pot and covered them in more water. This step will vary depending upon your preference. I knew that I wanted my water to end up being more like a starchy gravy so I put a little more water than peas. Then I put in some worchestershire, Dale's steak seasoning, lots of salt, pepper, onion powder, celery seed, and about a table spoon of minced garlic. And then there's the ham...

My dad gave Brian and I a ham for Christmas. It was one of those spiral sliced hams, but the end isn't sliced. We had just pulled it all apart and put the slices in bags in the freezer that same day and had cut the end up in to big chunks. I put a quart ziploc bag full of ham chunks in the beans. We let it sit over night and Brian was on the morning watch since he's an early riser.

I woke up yesterday morning and asked Brian how they were. He said they were GREAT. Well, he says that everything is great, so I went and tried it for myself.

OH. EM. GEE. They were FABULOUS. I don't normally LOVE my food. But these I loved. The ham had gotten so tender that it just fell apart in your mouth. I added another bag of ham chunks even though I knew they weren't going to get as tender as the first bag.

Then I made a pan of cornbread. I decided to use my muffin tins for portion control. This is the recipe I used. I normally would just paste the recipe here but the website has a converter so you can make a different amount of servings. I changed the 9 to 24 and got a bunch of weird numbers. I decided to try a factor of 3 since it made 9 servings to begin with. I put in 27 and it made what should have been 27 cornbread muffins but I made it in 24 and some really big muffins in the last batch. In the muffin tin, they only need about 15-17 minutes to cook.

This meal was SO good. The cornbread was sweet and the peas and pea gravy were salty so it was a marriage made in New Years Heaven. Pair that with some plum wine and it was an AWESOME New Years Day!!

The Kitchen Princess Got Married!

So, I haven't posted in FOREVER! I've been busy busy busy. Me and my prince got married on September 4'th and then we moved two weeks later. Yikes! I haven't done a whole lot of cooking because I've been baking cupcakes like a baking crazy woman!

Since I'm selling my cupcakes now, I probably won't be posting too many recipes, but I'll try and post some. For now, here are some pictures of the wedding!

Christina's!

Sooooo! I have been blessed to be able to put my cupcakes in Christina's downtown! HOW EXCITING! A venue for my cupckes! So I baked my bootay off this weekend and took them in this morning!

Peach Cupcakes

The Peach Cupcakes with Honey Frosting won the poll last week, so yesterday I got started baking up some yumminess! I removed my peaches from the fridge and realized that I had no idea how to peel a peach. I'm pretty sure that we just ate right through the skin as a child, so I was bumfuzzled.

I googled some info and they all wanted me to boil the peaches, the submerge them in an ice bath and then peel the skin away. Um, I'm too lazy for that.

So I found another site that suggested quartering them and peeling back the skin with a pearing knife which is just what I did. And I can't believe it, but this is the first time that I haven't taken pictures of the steps to make this cupcake.

:/

Anyways. I made some honey and brown sugar frosting (um...yum!) and iced them away and topped it with a little drizzle of honey. Here are the pics!

Why are the cupcakes iced two ways you ask? Well, because I tried a new tip and it wasn't working so well, so I switched to another method!

Twitter!

You can now follow us on Twitter! We'll be doing special give-a-ways via Twitter, so follow follow follow!


The Sweetery On Twitter

Chocolate Malt Cupcakes

So I had been wanting to try a chocolate malt cupcake for a while. We went to Gigi's Cupcakes of Flowood this Saturday and they had a beautiful Chocolate Malt Cupcake.

So when I was making the batter for a Peanut Butter Cup Cupcake today, I used what was left and added some more ingredients to make the Chocolate Malt Cupcake. Brian brought me home some malt powder to use in the icing and then I made them reallly cute. Here's some pics!

Carrot Cake Truffles

An old friend is coming in to town tomorrow and she mentioned on The Sweetery's page that she liked carrot cake. I made carrot cake cupcakes for a local very lovely lady and had some carrot cake left over so I made her some carrot cake truffles! Check em out!