sheeBAKES. get it? well if you don’t then you don’t know my name is Sheena. and Sheena bakes. =P

anyways. i haven’t updated this blog in about 2 months, and figured i should. it’s not that i haven’t been cooking, or baking, or eating for that matter (i have been doing a lot of all three). and i can’t really say that i’ve been busy, because really i haven’t, i’ve just been lazy. i still haven’t gotten a job, so i’ve had plenty of time to do some baking, and i have decided to sell some baked goods for the holiday season, just so i can earn a pretty penny or two. i’m hoping to get my logo done up by this weekend, and make up a flyer to pass out to get the ball rollin’. i’m still finalizing the list of goodies i’ll be providing, and i will have a finalized list posted on my blog hopefully very soon. so with that said, i’m hoping it won’t be a total disaster, and that people will enjoy what i can offer. i’m not perfect, far from it, but i’m definitely learning.

here are just a few things that i will be selling:

snickerdoodles:

shortbread cookies:

only the best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies:

carrot cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting:

here a some a couple things that didn’t make the cut:

Madeleine cookies

these turned out too heavy, with a very bread-y texture, not a light buttery taste to it. i will have to perfect my madeleine’s, but i don’t think they will be selling for quite some time. i definitely aim to perfecting them, because i do love love love madeleine’s, i just know it will take time.

Mexican wedding cakes/Russian tea cookies/Snowballs

whatever you want to call them — these are really nice tea cookies, and around this time of the year, they are very popular, and the ones i did make were not bad at all, but they were not great either.

i’m pretty sure i will be adding one or two more cookies to the list, as well as a cake and a pie — and hopefully by this weekend i can post those as well.

in other news – i finally got what i’ve been dreaming of for so long:

my sister in california sent me my early christmas present / a thank you for helping her out with the baby for a few months. =) i’m happy to say that it has made my life significantly better, and i cannot see myself without one, now that i have experienced how lovely it is. i have yet to buy attachments for it such as the ice cream maker attachment, and the pasta rollers — but am definitely expecting nothing short of awesome from them.

tomorrow i have a big day of baking samples of my goods for my mother to hand out to her friends. gotta get my name out there =) i also plan on testing out a few other recipes to see if they make the cut.

well i hope to get this blog updated more often, perhaps this weekend if i’m not too busy baking (or doing last minute school work). bye bye now, fellow readers.

i was perusing AllRecipes.com for a simple dessert that i could bake up with whatever i had on hand. luckily i stumbled on something perfect…French Breakfast Puffs. i had everything i needed on hand..something simple and sugary, perfect for my sugar cravings! no, i didn’t have it for breakfast, instead i had it for dessert after i cooked up a lemon-garlic chicken recipe from the foodnetwork site. it was good, but not as impressive as those puffs! think next time i would let the chicken marinate in the lemon-garlic broth, because it was too subtle for my taste.

Lemon-Garlic Chicken served atop linguine noodles [noodles just tossed with butter, black pepper, and parsley flakes, simple yet delicious]. recipe from here

French Breakfast Puffs, recipe from here but here it is if you’re too lazy to go to the site! i just want everyone to see how simple it is, and try em out! you probably have everything you need on hand =] i didn’t have shortening on hand, but that was easily solved with an oil substitution.

INGREDIENTS

* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1/3 cup shortening
* 1 egg
* 1/2 cup milk
*
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 6 tablespoons margarine, melted

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease 12 muffin cups or line cups with paper muffin liners.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, cream together 1/2 cup sugar and shortening. Beat in egg. Stir flour mixture into shortening mixture alternately with milk. Beat well. Spoon batter into prepared muffin cups.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes. While muffins are baking, combine 1/2 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.
4. Remove muffins from oven and muffin pan. Immediately, dip the tops of the muffins into the melted margarine, then into the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Repeat with each muffin, until all muffin tops are covered. Serve warm.

the lone muffin in a bed of cinnamon sugar. mm mmmm.

the french breakfast puffs aren’t really very “puff-like” more like a little muffin is what they are. it’s not a light airy pastry, it has a breadier feel to it, but veryy good.

highly recommend!

to all my 2 viewers, sorry i haven’t updated my blog in a couple months! it’s not that i haven’t been cooking or baking, i’ve just been either too lazy to update, or nothing was that noteworthy to blog. well tonight i think it’s blogworthy. tis the season where leaves begin to fall to the ground, where sweaters and boots are dawned, and where we just want some good comfort foods to soothe after a long day. it was a rainy day today here in the easy bay area of california. rained hard all day, and it was just the perfect day to have a nice big hearty bowl of chili (with cornbread of course!). chili is great. i have never made it prior to today, and i am extremely happy with the results.  i got the original recipe from here. i saw how the chili called for mesquite bbq sauce and my favorite…chocolate! i have heard of putting chocolate in chili, as well as other things such as beer and orange juice. i made the recipe into my own by adding half a bottle of New Blegium Hoptober beer, a splash of orange juice, and twice the amount of chocolate. the beer and chocolate really did make a huge difference. the orange juice, since it was so minimal didn’t do much, but i’m sure i will try it again in the future. the chili was not too spicy, but it left a good fire feeling in your mouth. and as for the cornbread, mmm, thats all i have to say.

pot o’ chili

cornbread

sprinkle that chili with some raw onion and shredded cheese mmm.

delicious, isn’t it? i was really disappointed i forgot to put the best garnish on top of the chili..avocado! since it goes great with everything. i bought avos just for this purpose! ah well.

anyhoo, here’s another comfort food that i cooked up a couple weeks ago, that i was too lazy to post.

country fried steak, onion roasted potatoes (and broccoli) =] . was mm mm good!
recipe from here

this week i realized how much food is apart of my life, and my passion for baking, cooking (and eating). i knew i always enjoyed doing it, but something really hit me this week, where i realized that this is what i love doing. i made use of the several times this week, and thought i was about to break my hand mixer (seeing that it’s my mom’s which she had since her wedding. 30 years old!) it’s probably time to invest in a good mixer, preferably the god of all mixers:

Someday :) Anyways. Here’s what went down in the kitchen this past week: better-than-brownies chocolate cookies. i found the recipe off on The Brown Eyed Baker’s blog, and they looked sooo good and chocolately and fudgey delicious that i had to try them. i did enjoy them, but they were a little too rich for my taste, since it was made with bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate, the chocolate flavor was intense. if i were to make them again, i would substitute some of the bittersweet chocolate with milk, just to lighten it up. but i do enjoy my share of dark chocolate every now and then :)

Better-than-Brownies Chocolate Cookies, recipe here

drench it in a glass of milk and it’s even better! milk is required to eat this cookies, they are far too rich to eat without!

next up: bread baking 101. I have Tosca Reno’s Eat Clean Diet Cookbook, which has a bunch of yummy looking healthy recipes, and the one I chose this week was just a simple Whole Wheat Bread. It turned out pretty decent, soft, whole wheaty, bready. I had a slice with nutella and oh my, nutella makes everything so freakin good.

serve atop with some fruit preserves, nutella, butter, peanut butter, or even make a turkey or vegetable sandwich with it. the good thing about it, its versatile.

then we have my first ever cheesecake, made specifically for National Cheesecake day which was yesterday, but I didn’t really get to enjoy it until today because I wanted to let it chill overnight, and I started baking it pretty late. instead of a simple new york cheesecake, I opted for something more, but not too crazy: banana cream cheesecake. i was going through my bookmark of blogs, searching each for the perfect cheesecake recipe when i found it. it was so simple, yet so good. who doesn’t love banana cream pie? and then cheesecake! well honestly, i’m not a hugeee cheesecake fan, but i do enjoy it every once in a while. my favorite being tony’s mother’s cheesecake, which is just so soft and cheesecakey goodness. yum! topped with strawberry preserves oooh yeah. well anyways, i attempted to bake my first cheesecake, this is where i thought my hand mixer was going to give out. it was overheating and it’s not as powerful as one would hope to blend together 4 boxes of cream cheese. yikes. but it definitely turned out good for being my first cheesecake. i know that in the future when i have made many more cheesecakes, they will just get better :)

unfortunately i didn’t have a springform pan to make the cheesecake with, and i didn’t want to purchase pie pans, so i just used a 9inch cake pan, which turned out to work just fine. i didn’t want to over fill the pan, and so i ended up having leftover crust pieces [made of nilla wafers! so good] and a good amount of extra batter. so i filled out 8 cupcake slots, and made cheesecake cupcakes too!

Banana Cream Cheesecake. recipe here

this picture does no justice to how it tastes.

how cute! topped with a nilla wafer and whipped cream, deelish!

lastly, is a recipe from August’s edition of the Rachael Ray magazine. there are a bunch of recipes in this issue that i want to try, but seeing that i had almost all of the ingredients for this dish was perfect. it’s a Moroccan Skillet Chicken with Pine Nut Couscous. and yes it tastes as good as it sounds:

i just love couscous. with pine nuts especially! the two just pair together perfectly, and it goes so well with this moroccan dish. it uses so many flavorful spices; sweet paprika, turmeric, coriander, cumin, and cinnamon! yum! and anything that adds green olives is okay in my book. and the lemon slices and lemon juice add a citrus-like and almost refreshing taste to it. i would definitely make it again in the future, especially since all you really need is the spices and you are set!

i don’t know if i am going to cook anything up today, but i’m probably going to take a pause from baking, seeing that my refrigerator is getting full!

portabello mushrooms have to be one of my top 5 favorite foods. i almost forgot that i had a few in the fridge, and wanted to use them up before they went bad. i saw a recipe for stuffed portabello mushrooms a while ago, and never got to doing it until tonight at about 10 o’clock at night. i used this recipe just as a base to see what types of flavors and stuff to add. i ended up using ground turkey because it was all i had on me, and it worked out just fine. i don’t usually measure things out when i’m cooking stuff off the top of my head, and like i mentioned, i didn’t use that exact recipe from the site. here’s what i did use:

3 portabello mushroom caps, stem and dark parts scooped out
1 lb ground turkey
a few strips of bacon chopped up
half of an onion chopped
few cloves of garlic chopped
about a tablespoon or more of tomato paste
a few sundried tomatoes chopped
a good tablespoon or more of herbs de provance
little bit of garlic salt
little bit of sea salt
little bit of ground black pepper
some leftover shredded 4 cheese mix
grated mozzarella cheese
evoo

prehead oven to 400 degrees
1) heat pan with some evoo, then toss in onions and garlic, til soft
2) add chopped up bacon and ground turkey til browned
3) add spices + sundried tomatoes
4) add tomato paste, mix around
5) take the meat mixture and add to the portabello mushroom caps
6) add the shredded/grated cheese atop meat
7) put in oven for about 15 minutes, til cheese is gooey and melty on top
8) ENJOY

i also cooked up some yummy garlic cheese wedges again, because they go so well with…everything! since tony loves them so much, i knew he would at least enjoy those, if not the mushrooms. but the good thing is he enjoyed the stuffed mushrooms as well =)

ground turkey + bacon stuffed portabello mushrooms

garlic cheese wedges

oh how i love garlic. used plenty of it for these dishes, and was inspired to do so because my sister in california went to the gilroy garlic festival (jealous!).  you can never have too much garlic in my opinion. =)

today i really wanted to go to long john silver’s for a basket of fried goodness. i haven’t been there in ages. well, i was busy and it was crappy out, so i didn’t go. instead i decided to make my own fried goodness! i whipped out the last portabello mushroom i had, some button mushrooms, and my eggplant, and went to work. i realized i couldn’t just eat this fried goodness by itself, and had to have some mashed taters along with it! then i said to myself, “okay, you need to eat some vegetables along side this.” well instead of going with my first thought of frying up some kale, i decided to make a raw kale salad with avocado. then it hit me. bacon would make this meal the ultimate fried goodness meal. i haven’t eaten bacon in a whileee..and since i started eating meat again [not as much as i used to, but on occasion], i decided to whip out the bacon.

i found a recipe for “chicken fried portabello mushroom” a few months ago and never got to use it. i followed it loosely, and it’s from the food network site, found here

this definitely filled my fried food craving i had, and i don’t think i want to eat fried food for a while now. you know how its just so delicious while you eat it, but then afterwards you just feel like going for a really long run, but at the same time you wanna lay down [and of course, the bed always wins in this scenario].

when i was frying all this up, i realized i rarely ever fry when i cook, which is a really good thing, hah. but seriously, if you ever have a hankering for some fried mushrooms from brown’s chicken or something of the sort, fried vegetables are really easy to do. you basically just need eggs, flour, and seasonings…and the fried item of choice. and i just remembered the other day i was hankering for some brown’s chicken fried mushrooms baddd. who knew?! you could fry your own!

well here are the results of my fried-night [if it was friday,(fryday) i could make a funny, but its not.]

fried mushrooms + egg plant slices

serve that shit with some ranch! ha ha .

kale salad with mashed avocado and bacon.

[also contains evoo, lemon juice, sea salt, and pine nuts for some more crunch]
unfortunately, i think my kale was going bad, it was more bitter than usual. raw kale can be hard for people to eat, cause its not as “soft” as lettuce. but it tastes great blended up in smoothies! green smoothies mmm. you can hardly taste the greens. trust me. i usually drink them daily =] and after tonight, i think i shall just sip on them tomorrow to get rid of this terrible fried feeling. heh

fried eggplant

fried portabello shroom

cheesy bacon mash

i did add a little gravy to this, but not photograph it cause it looked awful, and honestly didn’t taste great, mainly cuz i was just making it out of head, and didn’t know what i was doing. haha. if you are going to serve this stuff with gravy, i suggest looking up a recipe, if you don’t already know how to make some. mine started off just tasting like flour and grease, but got a little better as i added some other stuff.

well we all know everyone loves nutella. and everyone loves brownies. put the two together = true love. this is what i did.

look at the fudgey goodness inside of that brownie. i definitely think they were/are tasty, especially since i forgot to add the vanilla extract! i was so sidetracked by the nutella i was spooning into my mouth. the brownies would probably taste even better when following the recipe’s directions and not leaving anything out. i shall try that next time, and i think i will add chopped hazlenuts too. the brownies only have a hint of nutella in them. you’ll taste it more towards the end of your bite. but they are yummy, and definitely what i needed to fill my chocolate and sugar hankering today. =]

recipe from here

okay so i don’t eat raw all the time, rarely, but i do enjoy raw foods. here’s what i’m enjoying right this minute:

mm mm mmmm. everything’s always better with avocado btw. =]

raw pesto served atop zucchini noodles.

raw pesto consists of pine nuts, basil, flax & sunflower oil, nutritional yeast, one clove of garlic and a wee bit of avocado.
i couldn’t decide which type of “noodle” i wanted, so i have the spaghetti type spiralized noodle, as well as the fat noodle i made using a vegetable peeler. spiralizing is fun!

seeing that i had a few vegetables that are good for grilling, i decided to whip out the grill — the george forman that is. i couldn’t decide what i wanted to grill so i did a few: portabello mushroom, zucchini, eggplant and i even added tofu just for the heck of it. and i decided to get “creative” and grill some fruit on the stovetop grill. unfortunately the pineapple i bought the other day is gone, so i was left with apples and/or bananas. i did one of each.

so my photo editing can really use a lot of work, and so can my photo capturing. haha. but you get the idea.

i decided to make a wrap out of the veggies and brown rice.

and added to that wrap i of course had to put some fresh avocado and this hot sauce that i purhchased a month or two ago:

the hot sauce is not hot at all, and it has more of a curry-like taste, which i find yummy for sure. i can definitely taste the cumin!

grilled cinnamon apple slices and banana w/shredded coconut:

the banana was tricky. it was very mushy and hard to get off the grill, but it tasted yummy. on top of the apples i sprinkled cinnamon, and on both fruits i drizzled agave nectar. i really wanted to use honey, but apparently we’re all out!

then earlier today i felt like baking something simple, and i’ve had this recipe bookmarked that i’ve been wanting to try for toasted coconut shortbread. here are the results:

toasted coconut shortbread, recipe from here

they taste great dipped into tea, or coffee whichever you decide.

for other grilling ideas, visit HERE where it’s grilling week!

helloo. so i haven’t updated in what seems like forever, so i decided i needed to whip up something yummy and healthy today. seeing that i haven’t cooked quinoa* in a while, i figured i would. the dish contains various things from my kitchen, and it turned out yummy.

quinoa salad

quinoa salad recipe:
1 cup quinoa cooked
few spears of asparagus (steamed or boiled)
1 cup edamame unthawed and deshelled
1 cup black beans or your choice of beans (canned or cooked dry)
1 cup raw corn (i like raw corn, it tastes a lot fressher, and it is concidered a vegetable before it is cooked, then it is a starch)
few sprigs of fresh dill
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
a little less than 1/4 cup lemon juice
sea salt and pepper to taste

directions:
cook quinoa in 2 cups of water over stove, let simmer for 15-20 minutes.
chop up your cooked asparagus while waiting.
once quinoa is done cooking, let cool.
once cool, mix in edamame, asparagus, black beans, corn
add in evoo & lemon juice
add sea salt and pepper to taste
stir well.
served best cold or at room temperature.

it is a fairly simple recipe that i put together today, using ingredients that i’ve had lying around, or just purchased at the market this weekend.

*Quinoa (pronounced keen-wa) is a grain-like crop grown primarily for its edible seeds. It is a pseudocereal rather than a true cereal, or grain, as it is not a grass. As a chenopod, quinoa is closely related to species such as beets, spinach and tumbleweeds. Its leaves are also eaten as a leaf vegetable, much like amaranth, but the commercial availability of quinoa greens is currently limited.(wikipedia).