Margarita Buttercream Frosting

Ok first off, I think this may be my best picture yet! I may be biased as I love frosting so very much, but this looks uber yummy. 

Today was Emily's birthday and she didn't have any particular birthday dessert requests so I decided to try out a new recipe for margarita buttercream frosting. 

I used the key lime cupcake recipe I tried out last year (see post from August 31st, 2012) for the base cake and it seemed to go really well together with the frosting. I was worried it might end up just too much lime but it actually turned to just a very unified flavor grouping. I'm not sure what other cakes would go well with this frosting, but it could be very fun to play with. 

The frosting was very flavorful. The only trouble I had with it was that it contains a lot of liquid ingredients (tequila, lime juice, milk) so I had to add a lot of powdered sugar to get it to thicken up. It was also really overly tangy when it was loose; adding more powdered sugar really helped to mellow it down to a more pleasantly citrus flavor. 

I might want to cut the hole in my piping bag a bit smaller next time. Some of the cupcakes were pretty well loaded with frosting while a few got left out entirely. Made me wish mom was here because I bet she would know what to do with those. Anyway, definitely a keeper frosting recipe. So Happy Birthday Emily! 

Chocolate Chip Mini Cheesecakes

This recipe was already cheesecake miniaturized into cupcake size, but I took it one step farther into mini cupcakes! So very cute! And bite-sized!! I took these to a party and they went over really well. Everyone seemed to like them and they're just the right size that you can't keep your hands away from them. The only thing I'd change if taking it to another party in the future is that I would peel the wrappers off in advance. It ended up being a bit of a pain after eating a bunch of them and made for a small trash pile for the hostess. 

Creamy Grilled Chicken Piccata

Ok so clearly not my photo. I got halfway through eating my plate when I realized that I hadn't taken a picture. There was no stopping at that point so I decided to snag a picture from the original website: http://www.plainchicken.com It was actually a pretty good recipe. I wish it had some fiber in it, but the capers were better than I've had previously. My end complaint was that it was overly citrus-y, but that's an easy fix for next time. Otherwise I just need to plan ahead a bit more since step one is marinate chicken overnight. Oops, that made for a pizza for dinner tonight type delay. But that was yummy too, so I'm pretty ok with it. 

Creamy Lime Squares

These were fairly easy and fun to make. I'm not sure I'm in love with the recipe itself. The crust was delicious but I found the lime section to be a bit overly tart for me, and it also had a strange "skin" on top that I found to be an odd texture. James really liked them though, so they at least won the vote of a citrus dessert lover.

Fudge

An incomplete pan of fudge; not nearly as rare of a photo as a complete pan of fudge would be, at least in my house. Not a whole lot to say here. It's Grandpa Poplawski's good old spoon fudge recipe. It becomes normal fudge if you keep it in the fridge, but I happen to not like it as well that way, so low and behold it sits on the counter top. Not a good friend to the out of site out of mind dieting concept though. Great for my personal yum-happiness rating.

Beefy Beer Mac and Cheese

Ok so I totally forgot to take a photo of this one. It did actually look semi-good at one point. The recipe however I decided was kind of a bust. It was a recipe for beer mac that I found on pinterest and then I added the beef because I had a separate pinterest recipe for beefy mac and cheese so I sort of improvised and combined the two. The end result was that it was really bland. I used a Schlafly's summer ale that wouldn't be as much flavor as a different beer could have been, but it also didn't taste like cheese either. I did substitute a Mexican cheese blend for the cheddar and an Italian cheese blend for the parmesean, but I wouldn't have thought that would make it taste less cheesy. Also I should have just learned by now that I do not like bread crumbs on my pasta, but it was in the recipe. I'm not saying this recipe couldn't be good with a little bit of tweaking, but I doubt I'm going to give it the second chance. 

Italian Lemon Drop Cookies

These were a definite hit. James loved them; which really, what more could you ask for when making a lemon dessert for one specific person. My personal opinion is that they were surprisingly biscuit-y in texture, I prefer frosting made with butter instead of Crisco but that's an easy fix, and they weren't that hard to make, even with the lack of a kitchen aid mixer. 

The recipe said to roll the dough into balls, but I found it was way too sticky to really end up with any sort of smooth ball so I ended up dropping them on the sheet with spoons. Much cleaner. I also would beef up the frosting recipe a bit as far as volume. I ended up running out before I finished frosting the cookies and then had to go back and make them share. I suppose the other option would be to budget your frosting better, but I pretty much always vote for making more frosting.