Chocolate-Covered Baby Balls [Or, Multiple Weeks' Worth of Food, Mostly Dessert]

Okay, I swear this post isn’t a chocoholic pedophile’s fantasy (I feel gross just saying that)! Hear me out and I’ll explain – it’ll be worth the wait, I promise!

Tonight I had the most satisfying, amaaazing, and simple dinner ever. My hungry belly loved this meal!

Hello, summer deliciousness!

I channeled Angela‘s hot-over-cold approach to dinner with this dish, and I was surprisingly delighted by the result. I sauteed a yellow zucchini, some spinach, chard, and spring onions and piled that on top of a bed of a cold Southwestern Black Bean, Corn, and Quinoa salad I whipped up a few nights ago. Paired with lots of raw sugar snap peas and hummus, this meal screamed “SUMMER!” to me, especially since the veggies came straight from my CSA share. My roommate and I have a half-share (every other week) from a local organic farm, and they deliver the boxes straight to our work. It’s pretty much the most convenient thing ever! I didn’t get a chance to photograph this week’s haul since my roomie picked up the share, but here’s last week’s deliciousness:

First share o' the year!

That box included arugula, broccoli, cilantro, garlic scapes, head lettuce, kohlrabi, radish, Red Russian kale, salad mix, spinach, and strawberries. Holy freshness, Batman!

Anyway, after tonight’s dinner, I desperately wanted something sweet to round out my fabulous meal. Too bad I didn’t have any chocolate-covered baby balls left!

Oh, my.

Yeah, I know that photo is grainy, ugly-colored, and badly composed, not to mention a little nauseating. But its subject is so damn delicious that I’m posting it anyway. A chocolate-covered baby ball, you see, is born when two awesome bloggers’ recipes collide; more specifically, when Averie’s No-Bake Vegan Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Balls take a dip in Katie’s Pseudo Magic Shell. This chocolate covered hunk o’ peanut butter is a totally Katie-inspired dessert, hence the “baby” in its name.

Unfortunately, though, I didn’t have any baby balls left for dessert tonight. Nor did I have its flattened cousin:

Mmmffff.

Yep, that’s essentially a homemade peanut butter cup comprised of the same ingredients as the baby balls. Freakin’ amazing. ‘Nough said.

So without baby balls or peanut butter cups ready for my sweet tooth, what could I eat for dessert tonight? Not these cupcakes, sadly:

Multicolored brethren.

I made these for my roomie’s birthday last week. Using some VCTOTW recipes as a base, I made Peanut Butter Cupcakes with chocolate frosting aaand Mint Chocolate Cupcakes with vanilla frosting. The vanilla frosting is dotted with – get this – accidentally!vegan mint chocolate chips I discovered at Woodman’s recently. Score!

Sadly, though, those cuppers are no more. I considered devouring the only fruit from today’s CSA share…

(Okay, this photo is from our first share, but whatever!)

…but decided to save them for tomorrow. Instead, I went with a perfect dessert for a hot day – banana soft serve, of course!

Very soft serve.

It was a little more soup than soft serve, but that didn’t detract from its cool deliciousness. I made Averie’s vanilla variation, and used maple syrup for a sweetener, and it was almost too sweet! Now that I’m the ripe old age of 23, I find myself much less able to tolerate eXtReMe sweetness. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing!

So – that’s pretty much a summary of the foodie happenings in my life lately. What’s the most delicious thing you’ve eaten recently?

Simple Saturday Sandwich

Hey-o! This poor ol’ blog is a bit dusty. I have tons of food pics from the last couple of weeks in iPhoto just waitin’ for their moment in the spotlight, but instead I’m just gonna post one from today.

Why, yes, I frequently put my plate on the living room floor... cough, cough.

That right tharrr is my Saturday lunch. Inspired by this Voracious Vegan post re: delicious marinated tofu, I whipped up a similar marinade of my own (lemon juice + soy sauce + a bit o’ balsamic vinegar + a small glug of olive oil + Bragg’s + a dash of curry powder). After letting a couple of pre-pressed tofu slices soak up that liquid for half an hour, I cooked ‘em up and then made a simple sandwich of tofu + a tiny bit of Vegenaise (which I very rarely use) + ARUGULA FROM MY GARDEN. First harvest of the season, woo! With a side of carrot sticks and TJ’s tomato-basil hummus*, this made a delightful summer Saturday lunch, and the bottle of Fat Squirrel was the perfect accompaniment. Oh, Wisconsin, I love you and your local, vegan-friendly breweries!

*Kinda not a fan of this hummus. I usually prefer hummus of the simple garlic type, but sometimes I forget that and get distracted by the idea of more exciting hummus. Next time I will put on my blinders and make a beeline for the straight-up chickpeas + tahini + garlic variety.

Anybody else have a simple yet delicious Saturday meal?

BUI: Baking Under the Influence (…of the internetz)

This is a cautionary tale, folks, a warning for those of you who sometimes feel an urge to bake but can’t drag yourselves away from the internerdz while doing so. You’ve got the recipe open on one tab, Gmail on another, Google Reader on a third, Jezebel on the next, and the PPK on yet another. Your iTunes is blasting some ridiculous and probably embarrassing tunes, and maybe you’re trying to keep up a Gchat conversation simultaneously. This is worse than drunk!baking, people. It’s distracted baking, and – much like texting while driving* – it can have Serious Consequences.

Sometimes, baking while under the influence of the INTERNETZZZ!!!11!1!!! can cause you to do things that make you seriously question your intelligence… or at least your ability to perform the simplest of tasks. Graduating magna cum laude with distinction in my major from a top college? No sweat; I can pull that off in my sleep. But reading a recipe? That’s beyond me. Somewhere between the [super embarassing] S Club 7 music video I watched on YouTube and the irritated e-mail I fired off to my best friend, I misread 1/4 tsp as 1/4 cup. Yeah. And the ingredient in question? Blackstrap molasses.

And the most embarrassing bit – the bit I very nearly decided to omit from this post – is that it took me an obscenely long time to realize my error. It wasn’t ’til I’d combined the wet and dry ingredients and was wondering why the result was more batter than dough that I figured something was wrong. And then – suddenly – I thought, “Hey… chocolate chip cookie dough isn’t s’posed to be brown.” Y’think?

So – let’s just say that my chocolate chip cookies quickly morphed into chocolate chip-molasses cookies. The good news? Dreena’s recipe can stand up to even this assault of stupidity; they were still surprisingly delicious, if a little too sweet, given the inclusion of maple syrup + sugar + way too much molasses.

Somethin' just ain't right.

I’d just like to try and recoup a meager 2% of my Baking Legitimacy by saying that this fiasco was caused because I was baking for the end results. When I bake for the sake of baking, I treat each step in a recipe with love and care, tenderly measuring flour and leveling the top of my measuring cups with a knife to ensure precision. I use my best Pampered Chef spatula to scrape the sides of a bowl, making sure no speck of flour goes unmixed. But baking for the end results is a much more slapdash experience, a mad rush of pouring and distracted stirring wherein all I care about is the finished product (and maybe a few spoonfuls of batter along the way). I’m disconnected from the end product and the recipe on the page; I’m pouring and mixing and measuring individual ingredients without thinking about how they’ll work together as a whole. It’s bad juju, man.

So, in conclusion – focus on your baking! That series of tubes might be super distracting, but don’t let it distract you so much that you commit a baking mistake that would make Betty Crocker cry and shun you from her kitchen forever.

*Plz don’t text while driving. It’s stupid and irresponsible. Guess what? In the olden days, people couldn’t even talk on the phone while driving – and they survived! You can wait 10 minutes to text your bff about the slowpoke old lady doing 25 in a 55 MPH zone. Trust.