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Cupcakes Report, Dinners This Week

I’ve been seeing signs of spring for weeks now, but it seems like over the weekend everything decided simultaneously to bloom. Flowering trees everywhere! I love it.

Saturday was my Day of Cupcakes. I made two batches of cupcakes at the same time, which seemed like it was just asking for disaster – like carrots in the vanilla cupcakes or lemon in the carrot cake cupcakes. But I persevered and wound up with two batches of cupcakes: vanilla cupcakes filled with lemon curd and topped with lemon cream cheese buttercream, and carrot cake cupcakes topped with cream cheese buttercream. My family has eaten some of each, and no one made any weird faces, so I am going to call it a win.

Carla was a huge help with the cupcakes. She’s pretty hit-or-miss with wanting to help me bake, and that’s fine. But she was very interested in helping to decorate. I put her in charge of the carrot cake cupcakes, which were adorned with toasted coconut and Cadbury mini-eggs. She did a great job – they are adorable.

They may be cute, but they are FULL of golden raisins. Hork.

I made the chicks for the vanilla cupcakes; Carla provided supportive commentary and added the eyes. I think they turned out to be full of personality.

They all look either stunned or slightly alarmed to have found themselves on top of cupcakes.

Now we’re back to normal, so I need to come up with some dinners for the week ahead.

Hmm. I have been staring blankly at this document for some long minutes now and I still can’t come up with a single dinner idea.

Okay, this is the exact reason I created a “database” of reliably delicious dinners. I will just visit that post and pull out a few options, plus tacos, which just now occurred to me.

Dinners for the Week of April 21-28

  • Tacos: We haven’t had tacos in a while. Let’s do it.
  • Big Salad with Chicken: Okay this isn’t a recipe per se, it’s just a bunch of veggies and lettuce and roasted chicken topped with balsamic dressing.

Okay! That’s a decent starting off point! We also have begun The End of School Year Madness already, so there’s an evening school event one night which will necessitate some sort of grab-bag style dinner. I’ll deal with that at the time.

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Cookie Swap Reminder, Dinners This Week

Carla and one of her friends and I made So Many Cookies this weekend. Like, a staggering number of cookies. So many cookies that I RAN OUT of regular flour (I had whole wheat flour, almond flour, self rising flour, and bread flour, but no all-purpose flour) and had to borrow some from the neighbors. 

I made three batches of dough (cream cheese sugar cookie, regular sugar cookie, chocolate snickerdoodle) and Carla’s friend’s mom made a batch of gingerbread, and I divided all the dough in half and froze half for later, and we STILL had thousands of cookies.

The kids had a blast, making cut outs and rolling snickerdoodles in cinnamon sugar and smashing Jolly Ranchers into smithereens and decorating baked cookies. And I have plenty of dough leftover to make more cookie plates this weekend. 

Also, after Birchie mentioned saltine toffee, I made a batch of that. Our house is cram jammed with sugar, y’all!

Anyway, this is all to say that if you are baking this week, or have baked recently, and want to be included in the Cookie Swap, send me a) a photo of your baking project(s), plus links to the recipe and/or b) a link to your own blog post about your cookie project. Please send your photos and/or links to  lifeofadoctorswife [at] gmail by midnight Eastern time on 12/20. Then I will assemble all the links and photos in a post this weekend and we can all virtually enjoy one another’s delicious creations. 

Now on to the less festive, more grueling side of food prep and consumption: dinners. I continue to be burnt out on dinners. This week, my husband and I have TWO date nights to look forward to, which will be fun in so many ways, including that we will go OUT to dinner. So I’m on the hook for five dinners and I am taking the easy way out.

Dinners for the Week of December 16

  • My Favorite Fall Salad with Roasted Chicken: My grocery store had giant blueberries on sale, so those are for sure going into this salad along with apples, goat cheese, pecans, and red onion.
  • Ham Sandwich: Heck yeah. Ham sandwich time. (“Ham sandwich” is our family shorthand for “make your own dinner.”) (I did buy some ham for my husband, but I also bought him some roast beef and I got ingredients to make black bean tacos.) 
  • Pizza: I also bought ingredients to make homemade pizza.  

Last week before Christmas! Let’s goooooo!

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Dinners This Week

I made a second batch of pumpkin bread this morning. Second batch in a week, I should specify. The first batch went wrong somehow and resulted in a very stodgy, goopy mess that I threw away after exchanging multiple Paul Hollywood quips with my husband.

Today’s batch is better. I mean, it’s not going to win any beauty pageants. (Why doesn’t it ever RISE?) And it was still slightly stodgy, which I don’t understand. (Okay, I didn’t leave it in for the full 65 to 75 minutes the recipe suggests, but when I checked at sixty minutes, the toothpicks came out clean! That should mean DONE and NO STODGE!)

Stodginess aside, it tastes wonderful. Bonus, my house smells wonderfully of cinnamon and cloves and pumpkin.

Speaking of pumpkin… It’s making its way into the menu again this week. You should be aware that I don’t really like pumpkin. Pumpkin bread – okay, and maybe a smattering of other pumpkin desserts – is the lone exception. But my husband suggested it, and then he suggested another pumpkin recipe when I wasn’t properly enthusiastic about the first one, and a) I try to accept his dinner suggestions because I want to encourage him to help me with the Sisyphean task of coming up with meals to eat day in, day out, every day, day after day, until death, and b) he clearly is in a pumpkin frame of mind, so why not feed that craving?

My range of expressions as I go through the Pumpkin Stages of Acceptance. P.S. I look nothing at all like Kristen Wiig.

This week is supposed to be damp and cooler if not cool, so I am going all out with the hearty meals. 

Dinners for the Week of September 23-30

  • Chicken Shawarma with Steamed Broccoli: We haven’t had this old favorite in awhile; it will be good this week.
  • Beef with Sugar Snap Peas: I’m just in the mood for this?? Feels like it bridges the gap between “fresh and summery” and “nourishing and warm” pretty well. I might throw in a red bell pepper if I’m feeling fancy.
  • Apple Cider Glazed Pork Chops with Green Beans: This is a recipe that I used to make ALL the time… and yet I can find no record of it on my blog! Has it really been THAT long since I’ve made it? Well. Time to fix that. 
  • Ground Beef Tacos: My daughter is having a friend sleep over this weekend; the last time she slept over, she was deeply disappointed that we didn’t have tacos for dinner, which was what I’d served the previous time she’d been over. This time, I will make tacos once again. It’s really a gift for all of us.

What’s on your menu plan for this week?