coconut cupcakes with lime curd filling

I felt extra crafty over the weekend and decided to bake cupcakes for my coworkers birthday. She loves all things lemon flavored (lemon bars being her number 1 weakness). I've had this Ina Garten coconut cupcake bookmarked forever and decided that a coconut cupcake with lime curd filling would be the perfect baking challenge. I read over the reviews for the recipe and it seemed like the key to a light and fluffy cupcake was the beat the butter and sugar for at least 5 mins. I decided to use the whisk attachment instead of the paddle attachment just for extra precaution. It seemed to do the trick, the cupcakes came out moist and fluffy. I didn't have a single cupcake left at the end of the day. I'm going to call this a success and giving myself a pat on the back.

I am in love with the mini flower cupcake liners. They are so festive!

I wish...

I was crafty enough to piece together a fun vacation video like this

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Foodgawker vs Punchfork

I've been a fan of Foodgawker ever since it came out. Who needs cookbooks when you have Foodgawker! I'm usually on there towards the last hour of work and I need to madly figure out what I'm going to make for dinner. The one thing I didn't like about FG is that half the time, when it was my turn to try out the recipe, I would fail miserably. At least when I take recipes off of Food Network, there were many reviews/friendly suggestions on how to tweak the recipe to make it foolproof.


I recently found Punchfork which uses real time data (from twitter/facebook likes etc) to rank all the food related blog posts. So the creme de la creme are feature on the front page. I hate to say it (since it feels like a popularity contest) but those recipes have never let me down (I have yet to have a recipe from Smitten Kitchen turn out bad!).

Dahlia Lounge

I can't imagine another chef in Seattle that has more restaurants than Tom Douglas. Just in South Lake Union he has 4 restaurants in the span of 2 blocks. I went to Dahlia Workshop for breakfast last month.

They only serve biscuits there and fancy ones at that. I got the frittata biscuit.

It definitely was not my light breakfast and by the time lunch time rolled around, I still wasn't hungry. They do seem to have a pretty interesting sounding happy hour that I will have to come back to take advantage of. As for breakfast, I don't know if I would come back again. It wasn't all that special. I'd rather spend my money at the other TD establishments

I finished...

my first knitting project! A super simple circle scarf but at least I know I will wear it. I'm on the hunt for my next project. I think it will be a scarf again.