Hummingbird Cupcakes (at home!)

Since Andrea and I enjoyed the Hummingbird Cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery when we were in NYC, I decided to make them for her birthday!  I managed to find the recipe through the Amazon "look inside this book" feature and copied it down to make the cupcakes and the cream cheese frosting.

They came out delicious!  (Sorry I don't have any photos!  They were gobbled up too quickly!)  I used less sugar (4 cups instead of 5) in the frosting because we felt it was sweet enough already.  I also didn't have quite enough vegetable oil for the batter, so I topped it off with applesauce.  Next time I'll try to substitute even more to cut down on the calories.  The bits of pineapple and banana, plus the crushed pecans, were delicious.  The recipe made 24 cupcakes, and we had a tiny bit left over so we made 4 mini ones as well - we wanted to try them before telling everyone how awesome they are.

I'm glad I found the recipe and that I was able to make it.  I want to play with it a little and turn it into a muffin recipe - cut down on the sugar, mainly, and use whole-grain flours.  It's definitely do-able with a little trial and error.  The bananas provided plenty of sweetness, and since I successfully substituted some applesauce in for some of the oil, I think I could take that substitution a little further to cut down on the oil.  I can't wait to give this a shot!

Magnolia Bakery: Hummingbird Cupcake

Here's a little inspiration that I wanted to save for a future occasion.  I went to New York City for Restaurant Week, and before checking out a few galleries we stopped at Magnolia Bakery for a breakfast cupcake.  ("Breakfast" and "cupcake" are allowed to be used in the same phrase on rare and special occasions!)

There were a lot of classic choices - vanilla with chocolate frosting, chocolate with buttercream frosting, etc etc etc.  Those don't excite me too much.  If I have a cupcake, I want it to be a special one.  I chose the Hummingbird Cupcake based on the description: banana and pineapple with a cream cheese frosting and pecans on top and crushed up inside.  YUM!  It was absolutely delicious.  I thought this would be great to recreate at home next time I need to make a sweet treat like this - and I can make it healthier too.  It's also a neat flavor combination for a potential future muffin.

Fried Pineapple Rice

This is my fried rice version of last night's dinner, Pineapple Rice. The leftovers were already all mixed together so I kind of just dumped them in the pan with some of the toasted sesame oil (canola blend). I also made one quick scrambled egg and some pan-fried tofu (in the same toasted sesame oil blend).

The tofu was an interesting addition. It was good in little pieces, but I would like to make it again with thin slices so they crisp up like bacon. Yum!

I thought the rice was good. The sweetness of the pineapple dressing was really emphasized (and Ken didn't like it). It had the consistency of fried rice. I liked it a lot. I wouldn't make it just to make it, but I would make it with the leftovers again.

Pineapple Rice

I check 101 Cookbooks every day for a new recipe, even though I figured out the pattern of how often they are posted. Sometimes there are recipes that I am just not interested in, or there are sometimes posts that aren't recipes at all. I find myself constantly waiting for something new and exciting to be posted - unless the most recent recipe is the perfect recipe for me. The current Pineapple Rice recipe had me from the picture. It is an amazing sounding taste of Hawaii.

After collecting the ingredients, I finally had time to make this last night for dinner. I have to admit that this recipe took me a very long time. I usually don't remember to keep track of time, but this took me about an hour. I used brown Basmati rice, which was delicious and smelled so wonderful. The dressing was pretty easy to make, although there were a lot of components. (Luckily, it was worth it.) There was also chopping and toasting cashews, chopping scallions and shallots and pineapple, and the tofu, which I never got around to. The recipe uses seitan, but I am not familiar with that, nor did I have it on hand, so I intended to use tofu. Unfortunately I did not think of it soon enough and it was still defrosting when everything else was done, and I just couldn't wait!

One addition I made to this recipe was chopped pineapple. Two reasons for this: one, it is Pineapple Rice and the only pineapple is in the dressing, which felt just so wrong to me, and two, I used a 20-oz can of pineapple and needed only 1 cup for the dressing. I chopped it up pretty small, so it melded in nicely with the rest of the ingredients.

I would recommend serving this dish hot. For one thing, my rice was already pretty hot since I had just cooked it, and it also makes it feel a little more substantial. I kept the rice in the pot after it had finished, just mixing it around a bit, and added the dressing and the rest of the ingredients in with the burner on low just to heat it up.

The final result was absolutely delicious and I am already dying to make it again. The recipe suggests trying a fried rice version with the leftovers, so I forced myself to save a little so that I could try it. (That may be another post.) I make a lot of things, but this is something I am going to include in my regular rotation for sure.