We're still not sure who killed Amanda Palmer, but I put her into a food coma and that's pretty awesome.

Hi guys! I promise there's food in here, but I have to be a fangirl for a moment. You'll probably learn more about me than you could from all the rest of my posts combined here. If you don't want to hear about me (or, well, about Amanda Palmer, really) you can scroll down to the recipe.

Today I'm going to take you into a fantasy world that is very much like the real world that you live in right now, except that you're me a few weeks ago.

There's a lot of music that I listen to, a lot of art that I look at, a lot of books and comics that I read. I'm not going to say these things that I do are the best things, but they're usually the things I love (okay, except for the music, my car doesn't have a CD player so I'm usually stuck listening to whatever's on the radio). With all the media that we have such easy access to these days, it's easy to not think about it most of the time--but I bet you all have someone, an artist, writer, musician, something, that really makes you think or care or push yourself or whatever. Think for a bit and I bet you'll come up with someone--a song that changed you, a poem that you memorized in grade school and never forgot, a book that suddenly made your mind click in the right way so that you're looking at the world in a way that makes sense to you now.

Now imagine that there's a thing that you do. Something that you do and know you're doing well and people love and appreciate--in my case, food. And that person who changed everything has a blog, and they write in their blog about a show that they're doing that--wow, is only about an hour away, that's not a bad drive at all. And there are rehearsals, and there are a lot of people, and the rehearsals are long, and they need to eat. And that person--your person--needs people to do your thing and bring it there. Amanda Palmer needed people to bring food to Cabaret rehearsals in Cambridge. My person. My thing. I couldn't not do it.

Most of the time when I mention her to people, I get a weird look and a confused "who?" in response, so for those of you giving me that look right now, she is a musical artist and force of nature. (I say "musical artist" because I really feel that in this case "musician" doesn't cover it.) Now, I didn't know anything about Amanda Palmer a year ago. I'd be giving you the same look that you're giving me right now if I were on the other end of this conversation, but that changed drastically in a very short period of time.

I don't know exactly how to describe Amanda's music. I think she files it as "punk cabaret," which may not make sense if you're not familiar with it, but I promise it fits. What I can say about it is that when I was introduced to her solo CD "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" (there's a book now, too) I was in a really bad place that I needed to get out of. I'm not going to describe it in depth--there was some depression, some anxiety, some trauma--I was broken. I'm not going to give Amanda all the credit here (I cannot express my gratitude to Mike for being there and talking me through things or just holding me when I break down in the middle of the night and he has to be at work at 6am--he has been my rock and he doesn't understand how much he's done). But when Mike's not around, or when I need to be alone, I listen to her music. And it was listening to her music that started making my brain tick the right way again, that pushed me to go beyond just crying to Mike and heal myself. It's not quite "empowerment," there's more to it than that, but I can't express it. And then at some point, she freed herself from her record company, and to celebrate she posted a free song for her fans. I listened to it and I cried and I laughed and I suddenly knew that despite everything, I was going to be okay. So that's what Amanda Palmer means to me. What she creates helped me find my own strength that I know was there all along, but not quite within reach, and jump up and grab it and hold on to it. At some later point, I started feeling depressed again, and with that strength that I'd found I was able to fight it off by myself without running back to antidepressants or just being miserable, and it felt great to be able to do that. Amanda, if you're reading this, thank you so much for doing what you do.

It's not like I'm completely better now. Honestly, people terrify me. I've always been shy around people I don't know, but for some reason in the past few years I get scared to go to parties. Social anxiety isn't fun at all. Mine's bad enough that, when Amanda made that blog post about wanting people to bring food, I was almost too scared to send an email about it. But I did, and I worked things out, and I thought about food and what kind of food vegetarians and vegans and people who can't eat rice-based products and carnivores all love, and I made a whole lot of falafel and I went to that rehearsal and fed the cast of Cabaret, including Amanda Fucking Palmer. (I hope people here aren't offended by swears, but I'm pretty sure that if you write a lot about her you have to include that. It may or may not actually be her legal middle name. Okay, it's not, but her lawyers apparently actually thought it was, and it belongs there. I can't censor her.)

Okay, okay, I'm getting to the food. Here. Sorry. I didn't turn into a burbling puddle of fangirl when I met her, so I kind of had to here, just because I needed to get it out. (I doubt it would even be possible to turn into a burbling puddle of fangirl around her--she's so down to earth and so real [in the sense that I usually expect people who are even remotely famous to have some manufactured personality]). She's an incredible person to hang out with. She asked me about me, and we talked about how cool it is that the internet lets people who are artists make a living off their art without "making it big" and how cool that is, and about food comas and crazy schedules, and I told her about how I sort of want to be her fiance when I grow up (oh, right, she's engaged to Neil Gaiman, if you didn't know that--somehow it seems right that my two favorite famous people/biggest influences are going to get married).

FOOD STARTS HERE.

You may have noticed up there that I said I made a whole lot of falafel. I'm posting the recipe, of course. I was asked for it. I'd be posting it anyway, but that seems important. I made double-batches of this recipe, and I made three double-batches, so essentially six of these. It was a lot of food. It was stressful for a couple minutes when I wasn't sure they were going to finish in time for me to put on real clothes and pack things up and drive to Cambridge. I'm going to tell you right off the bat not to make double-batches of this unless you have a HUGE food processor--it was quite difficult to integrate everything at times and required a lot of "pulse, stop, push stuff around with a spoon, put the cover back on, pulse again, repeat." If you don't have a food processor, that's totally okay too! It'll take a lot longer, but you can dice everything really small and fork-crush the garbanzo beans into it. And the best part of this recipe is that it's baked instead of deep-fried--no greasy oil making it heavy in your stomach and it's SO much healthier. YES.

RECIPE: Baked Falafel

Adapted from ChowVegan

Ingredients:

-1 15-oz can garbanzo beans (chickpeas)

-1 small onion (or large shallot), chopped

-2 or 3 cloves of garlic

-1 tbsp fresh parsley

-1 tbsp fresh cilantro

-1 tsp lemon juice

-1 tsp coriander

-1 tsp cumin

-1/4 tsp dried red pepper flakes (double for spicier falafels) (yes I know it doesn't pluralize like that just work with me here)

-2 tbsp flour

-1 tsp baking powder

-IF YOU'RE FORK CRUSHING: 1 tsp olive oil (adding this in the food processor will make it come out very liquid)

Instructions:

1. Drain and rinse the garbanzo beans. Leave them in a colander in the sink until you use them so they drain adequately; you don't want to add too much extra liquid here.

2. Slice the onions, peel the garlic, and throw them both into the food processor along with the parsley and cilantro. Pulse until everything is finely minced; it will sort of look like a coarse crushed ice type of dessert.

3. Pour in the garbanzo beans and everything else (coriander, cumin, lemon juice, red pepper flakes, flour, baking powder). Using a wooden spoon, try to stir the mixture enough to get the garbanzo beans at least slightly integrated with the onion mixture--this will probably be a lot easier in single batches than it was in double batches.

4. Turn on your food processor and let it do its thing, stopping frequently to mix things around and make sure it's fairly evenly textured. It won't be perfect, but if you don't do this you'll end up with hummus at the bottom and mostly-whole-garbanzos at the top. Be careful not to let it go too long, or you'll just end up with hummus.

5. Heat your oven to 375 degrees (F). Take out and oil some cookie sheets. Roll the falafel into balls and press them to make patties, placing on the cookie sheets. They don't spread like cookies, so you can put them pretty close together, but keep in mind that you do have to flip them halfway through baking so if they're too close that gets difficult.

6. Bake your falafel for thirty minutes, taking it out and flipping them over halfway through.

7. When your falafel is done, let it cool for a few minutes, then serve in a pita with lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and tahini sauce. (Adding hummus is a common practice, but it's one that I don't understand since falafel is pretty much hummus that's been processed for a shorter time and then cooked. If you want hummus, you can add it.)

The tahini sauce recipe that I used was perfect and can be found here. I followed it to the letter, so there's not much point in my typing it up again (it's late and I'm sort of tired).

Step 2. If you're using a food processor, slicing things like this works--if you fork-crush the garbanzo beans, mince everything really really tiny. (Instructions for fork-crushing are at Chow Vegan, linked above.)

Step 2, continued. This is just the above stuff after being processed for a few seconds, but it looks so fresh and delicious that I had to take a picture. I don't know why it looks so dessert-like to me.

Step 3. Everything else, added.

Step 4. If you look closely, you might notice a whole garbanzo bean or two. That's okay--I just crushed them with the spoon as I came across them. It's better to have more texture than to turn your falafel into hummus--can you see on the right how it sort of already looks like hummus on the bottom?

Step 5. This was a little closer than they should be, but like I said, only because it was difficult to flip them.

This was a lot of falafel.

It got eaten, though!

By Amanda Palmer! (Sorry I'm pointing at your boob, Amanda. I was trying to point at the sandwich to say "I made that!" but I guess I couldn't really tell where the sandwich was.) Are you familiar with The Princess Bride? You know that part where Buttercup kisses the King because "he's always been so kind to her, and she's killing herself once they reach the honeymoon suite" but he's too excited that she kissed him to process what she said and just says "Isn't that nice. SHE KISSED ME!" Well, that's sort of what it was like, except Amanda wasn't planning on killing herself or anything. It was just sort of awesome and surreal, so despite the fact that I'm all scrunched up and the camera added like 50 pounds to me (that's a lie, maybe 10) it's my favorite picture ever. (Photo credit to someone in the cast who took the picture with my camera. I'm terrible with names so I can't tell you who.)

And, of course, the rest of a hungry cast, all of whom were SUPER COOL. (Photo credit to Amanda's phone, I'm not actually sure who took the picture. Someone in the cast. Amanda posted in on twitter.)

And then Amanda went into a food coma power nap and told me it wasn't creepy if I took a picture as long as I promised it was sexy. I think this is a pretty sexy nap picture, don't you?

OKAY I'm pretty exhausted now because it's been a busy few days and is going to continue to be a busy few days, so I'm gonna leave you with that. And I'll probably come back and edit this post to add some appropriate links tomorrow. And I know I said I'd post Friday and it's technically Saturday, but I'm still awake so to me it's still Friday. ALSO THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: since it's technically Saturday, it's now officially Mike's birthday! Wish him a happy birthday in the comments, he totally deserves it. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIKE I LOVE YOU.

Oh, one more thing. If you're anywhere in the Boston area--actually, within four hours of the Boston area, go see Cabaret. I saw a little bit of rehearsal and it was amazing. I can't wait. Buy tickets here.

Ice Cream Cupcake Roundup: Raspberry Lemonade Ice Cream Cupcake Cones!

About a month ago, one of the other food-blogs I read, The Cupcake Project, posted something that I found extremely exciting: they were having the third annual ice cream cupcake roundup! It's a contest that they do in conjunction with Scoopalicious, an ice cream blog that I was unaware of until I read the post on Cupcake Project. They also posted the contest, of course. And, well, ice cream and cupcakes are both delicious, but I'd never thought much before about how to combine the two. After a little thinking and some sketching, I had a plan--a layout, at least--but no idea about flavors.

I thought. And I thought some more. At first I was thinking, flowers? Lavender? But that didn't work; I wanted something fruity and summery and refreshing, and after almost a whole month of thinking, I finally figured it out: everyone likes raspberry lemonade in the summer, right? So if I could somehow capture that in ice-cream-cupcake-form, it would be delicious! I went about looking for recipes, but wasn't too pleased with any until Patricia of Technicolor Kitchen posted a recipe for Sour Lime Cakes, and I thought, well, how hard can it be to adapt that to lemon? (After thinking about this for a little while and getting excited, I read in her post that she actually adapted a lemon recipe to make the lime one, which made my idea seem even better, if slightly less original.) I then started searching my usual recipe haunts--Recipezaar in particular--for a delicious-looking raspberry frosting. When Recipezaar didn't come up with anything that seemed right for my vision, I went back to the Cupcake Project, but while there were lots of raspberry-related posts, nothing seemed to be frosting. I then returned to Technicolor Kitchen and was very glad I did, because back in November (before I started blogging and reading other blogs) she'd posted a cupcake with Raspberry Cream, which looked like the perfect consistency for my plan.

I found all this maybe two days ago, which gave me very little time to actually execute my plan. Originally, I'd hoped to try out a few recipes so I could change one if I didn't like it, but as the contest ends tomorrow (!) I was now in a hurry. Luckily, I've used recipes from Technicolor Kitchen before, and they've come out wonderfully--I was not afraid of the recipes turning out badly, just that my plan may go horribly wrong. Luckily for me, it didn't, and I would now like to give you another picture-heavy post (recipes included, of course) and make sure I've done everything else to enter the contest successfully.

I'm starting with the final product: each cone contained a raspberry at the bottom (inspired by those novelty ice cream cone things you could get at an ice cream truck when you were a kid, with the gumball at the bottom--Screwballs, they were called). On top of that was a layer of vanilla ice cream, which was scooped in very carefully with a very small spoon--I was terrified of breaking the cone! Two more raspberries, crushed this time, went on top of that, and then another layer of ice cream. On top of that went a nice layer of the raspberry cream frosting and two mini-cupcakes complete coated in the frosting, held together with a toothpick, and they actually came out looking like scoops of nice cream! YAY! (That was, of course, my goal.) I'll be honest here, though: I meant to top them with another raspberry. I forgot, though, because by the time the whole thing was assembled the ice cream was starting to melt and drip out of the cone and I wanted to be able to eat it like a cone of ice cream instead of dropping it in a bowl and eating it with a spoon. It was messy, yes, but it definitely worked--I ate mine over a bowl but didn't have to put it down. (Mike volunteered to eat the cross-section, and he ate his in a bowl. He seemed equally satisfied, so form probably wasn't particularly important. And yes, we did have to cut an ice cream cone in half to do this.)

This is Mia, my favorite little kid. She got to be our guinea pig (notice I remembered the raspberry on hers). She seemed quite happy with her special dessert (everyone else just had normal cupcakes), so these cones are great for both kids and grown-ups alike! (I've been babysitting Mia since she was two--she's almost eight now! Boy, do I feel old.)

So, if you want to make some of these yourself, here are the recipes! Don't double them! (I doubled them. I don't know why I always do this. I ended up with 55 cupcakes. Unless you want 55 cupcakes [granted 24 of them were mini] then don't double the recipes.)

Sour Lemon Cupcakes
Adapted from Technicolor Kitchen, link above!

Ingredients:
-1 cup unsalted butter, melted (not softened! actually melted!)
-1 1/2 cups plus 2 1/2 tbsp sugar
-2 eggs
-1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
-1/4 cup lemon juice
-Zest of one giant lemon (or two normal-sized lemons, I don't know if giant lemons are a normal thing to have but my grocery store had them for some reason)
-2 cups plus 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
-2 tsp baking powder

Instructions:
1. Preheat the oven 325 degrees F.
2. Get all your ingredients out and in one place. Put the flour and baking powder into a bowl and sift together (or stir with a fork for a while). You'll want everything prepared because everything has to be sort of speedy once the butter is melted.
3. Cut the butter into small pieces (along the tablespoon lines) and toss it into a large microwave-safe bowl (everything else will be added to this, so large is important!). Cover with wax paper and microwave in 30-second increments, taking it out and stirring after each one. (I think it took me four or five 30-second cycles for the butter to be completely melted, and as I said, I doubled this so was melting two cups of butter--the point here is that it won't take all that long.)
4. Add the eggs, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and yogurt to the melted butter and stir until everything is combined. Add the flour and baking powder mixture in small amounts, stirring each pile until smooth before adding more (it probably isn't necessary to do it in bits, but I find it much easier--I'm not sure if it affects how the cupcakes come out, but mine came out fine). The batter will be thick and sticky and smell like lemonade.
5. If you forgot to preheat the oven, then heat the oven now. It's probably fine; the oven should heat in the amount of time it takes to fill the cupcake pan.
6. If you're using cupcake liners, put them in the cupcake pan. If you're using butter and flour, then butter and flour the cupcake pan. If you're using a baking spray (such as Baker's Joy, which works wonders) then spray the pan. Fill each cupcake-hole (is there a name for these?) to about 2/3 full with the batter.
7. For mini-cupcakes, bake for 12-15 minutes. For full-sized cupcakes, bake for 18-20 minutes.
8. Remove from the oven and let cool. (I let mine cool overnight--partially because I didn't want the frosting to melt when I put it on, and partially because by the time all the batches came out of the oven it was 1am and I wanted to go to bed, not make frosting.)

Step 3. I would love to tell you that this is a delicious hollandaise sauce or something. I really would. But in reality, it's four sticks of butter, melted in the microwave. I'm almost disgusted at the idea, but the end result makes it completely okay.

Step 4. Batter! Yet again, I didn't remember to take a picture until I'd already put one batch (consisting of 12 mini cupcakes and 12 normal-sized cupcakes) in the oven, so this isn't the full amount, but since I doubled the recipe you probably still won't have this much. Also, I know you're not supposed to eat batter due to it having raw eggs in it and stuff, but this is some delicious cupcake batter.

Step 6. I used Baker's Joy for the mini-cupcakes (since they would be going in the ice cream cone and the wrapper would be a kind of gross thing to bite into) and cupcake liners for the normal-sized ones. I don't think I got a great picture of the liners, but they're PLAID! If you don't know me then you don't know how much I love plaid, but it's pretty much the best thing ever. And I found it on cupcake liners. AWESOME.

Raspberry Cream Frosting

Also adapted from Technicolor Kitchen, also with a link above.

Ingredients:

-8 oz plain frozen raspberries

-2 cup heavy or whipping cream

-1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp confectioner's sugar

-1 1/2 tsp almond extract

-A small container (mine was 6oz) of fresh raspberries

Instructions:

1. At least a few hours before you want to make the frosting, place the frozen raspberries in a bowl and let sit at room temperature to thaw. (I let them sit out for a while, and then refrigerated them overnight.) Don't strain them or anything; you want the juices.

2. Pour the thawed raspberries (with their juices!) into a small saucepan. Place on the stove on medium heat. Cook the raspberries until they release the rest of their juices, mashing them as you go (I used a slotted spoon and it worked wonderfully). This will take about 6-8 minutes.

3. Now the cooked raspberries have to cool, so if you're in a hurry, put the pan in an icewater bath--just make sure none of the water gets into the raspberries. The icewater will cool them in about 15 minutes.

4. Place a fine mesh strainer over a bowl (I used the same bowl I thawed the raspberries in) and pour the raspberry-mush into it. Using a rubber spatula or a spoon or whatever suits your fancy, press the raspberry-mush against the mesh, stir it around, scrape the edges, etc. until most of the juice has left the mush and is in the bowl. You won't get all of it; I ended up with a soft squishy ball of raspberry seeds and skin and a little juice after playing with it for 15-20 minutes, and a lot of my efforts were pretty pointless, giving me only very small amounts of liquid. So I guess the point here is: don't obsess over this! Just get as much of the juice out as you can and it's okay if there's still some in the strainer.

5. Add the confectioner's sugar and almond extract to the raspberry juice and stir until the sugar has dissolved.

6. Make whipped cream! I use my KitchenAid (with the whisk attachment) for this. I'm not sure how to do it without an electric mixer of some sort--if you have a handheld electric one that will work fine too, but I think if you used an egg beater or just a whisk it would take forever. The end result should be pretty stiff peaks of whipped cream.

7. Fold the raspberry juice/sugar/almond extract mixture into the whipped cream. I did this in small amounts too, but I think that would be unnecessary if you don't double the recipe. How long you spend folding it will affect how uniform the color is, but probably not the taste--I tried to keep some slightly darker pink areas and a few white streaks, but once I frosted things with it everything sort of blended together.

8. Chill until ready to frost the cupcakes. I recommend frosting them as close to serving time as possible, since whipped cream can lose its form if left alone for too long, but unless you're keeping them around for days you're probably okay. BUT! Do NOT frost the cupcakes until they're completely cool! Otherwise the frosting will just melt off of them, and that would be really sad.

9. When you frost the cupcakes, top each with a fresh raspberry. (This seems completely unnecessary, and it probably is, but it takes the cupcakes from looking like normal cupcakes to ADORABLE cupcakes. And it's so easy! So it's worth it.)

Step 2: After probably 2 minutes of cooking and a little mashing. There's already a lot of juice there!

Step 3: In the icewater bath, all mashed up. I was actually sort of surprised to see how many seeds there were--I think that is why I don't eat raspberries more often.

Step 7: This is after I'd folded a tiny bit of the raspberry juice into the whipped cream and poured a little more in to keep going. I only took this picture because it looked like my whipped cream was bleeding profusely and I found that amusing. I have a sort of sick sense of humor.

Also step 7: Yeah okay it still sort of looks bloody, but there's plenty of folding left to do. Don't worry, it came out a nice pretty pink color.

Step 9: You saw the Raspberry Lemonade Ice Cream Cupcake Cones up at the top, but this is what happened to the rest of them (well, okay, the rest of them are on my kitchen counters without frosting because I made way too many cupcakes and I'll have to give them to people). While Mia enjoyed her cone, all the grown-ups ate these "normal" cupcakes instead.

So, if you want to make the cones, the only extra things you'll need are the cone and the ice cream! The vanilla was perfect--I got it at a local farmstand-type ice cream place. It would be easy to play around with the flavors, but you don't want anything too strong--the raspberry and lemon flavors are the important part. As for the normal cupcakes: they were SUCH a great summer dessert. The raspberry cream is light and airy and complements the fairly dense cake perfectly. Each has a little bit of sweet and a little bit of sour--I made the frosting a little bit sweeter than the original recipe called for because they'd be going on a sour cake, and it came out wonderfully. And seriously--don't the little raspberries on top make them look so adorable?

Okay, so: if my creation comes out in the top three of the contest, I will be (a) thrilled because I'll win an Oxo gift pack and (b) begging all of you to go vote in the public-voting part so I can win the ice cream maker. I have no idea what my chances are of getting that far, but I'm warning you in advance that it might happen.

Now, go make some cupcakes and enjoy the wonderful weather!

UPDATE: It turns out that while doubling the cupcake recipe was a little on the silly side, doubling the frosting didn't make nearly enough to cover all of them--it seems that keeping the cupcake recipe as is and doubling the frosting would be the way to go. I have therefore EDITED THE FROSTING RECIPE to show an amount that will cover all the cupcakes (and probably leave you with a little left over, but that's not really something to complain about).