Tag: #cupcakes

Weekend Foodie Warriors- Easter Edition!

Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends ๐Ÿ™‚ Hope youโ€™ve had a great week so far! For this #throwbackthursday edition of Foodie Adventures, weโ€™re showing you our family’s Easter celebration and experimenting with a new gluten-free and dairy-free version of a carrot cake recipe to celebrate! ๐Ÿฐ๐Ÿฅ•๐Ÿ’œ

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Weekend Foodie Warriors- Take 58!

Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends ๐Ÿ™‚ Hope youโ€™ve had a great week so far! For this special edition of Foodie Adventures, weโ€™re taking you behind the scenes of the invite-only Foodie McFooderton Chef’s Alliance event, dedicated to showcasing great local BBQ, chefs, and local makers! ๐Ÿ’œAlso don’t miss our first experience with cooking lamb! ๐Ÿ™Œ

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Weekend Foodie Warriors – Take 55!

Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends ๐Ÿ™‚ Hope youโ€™ve had a great week so far! For this edition of Foodie Adventures, allow us to introduce to you a brand new BBQ food truck in Greenville, The Snickering Coyote, and take you behind the scenes of how we made our new Lemon Cranberry cupcake recipe!

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Weekend Foodie Warriors – Take 53!

Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends ๐Ÿ™‚ Hope youโ€™ve had a great weekend! For this edition of Foodie Adventures, weโ€™re taking you on a tour of our weekend at The Toasty Farmer’s Market, plus new product reviews from Wildflower Cupcakes & Dessert Bar! โ„๐Ÿง

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Weekend Foodie Warriors – Take 46!

Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends ๐Ÿ™‚ Hope you had a great 4th of July weekend! For this edition of Foodie Adventures, check out our eats from our Saturday festivities, Making South Carolina’s famous “Bird Dogs”, and adventures in making homemade ice cream!


4th of July Festivities

Greenville, SC

We spent a very quiet 4th of July with Jamie’s family, compared to my family’s festivities of the past, with the entire extended family all in one place. Only a few were there on Saturday, as we were all trying to be very good about social distancing.

Jamie’s brother broke out the smoker again for these awesome 14-hour smoked BBQ’ed Boston butts, complete with grilled sausages and a ton of sides from the rest of the family that visited. Broccoli salad, potato salad, quick-pickled cucumbers, and coleslaw were some of the ones pictured below.

We also were tasked with making dessert, and if you saw our Instagram on Saturday, you got to check out this “Recipe Refresh” early! If you missed out, no worries, we’re going to break it down for you.

Our amazing Lucious Lemon Cake recipe got an upgrade with the cupcake sizes, same great filling, and an amazing lemon-raspberry glaze, topped with blueberries and luster dust โœจ (to make them a little more festive looking)! We call these our Red, White, and Blue cupcakes! My friends that we went to visit later on that evening cleaned us out of the second dozen we made, they were a smash hit with the raspberry frosting! ๐Ÿง


Making South Carolina’s “Bird Dogs”

Greenville, SC

Inspired by: Mac Smith’s Country Store and Grill

One of the first places that Jamie’s family took me to was this tiny little hole-in-the-wall restaurant they loved called Mac Smith’s (their link is above, go check them out!).

This restaurant, which originally started out as a gas station, turned into a butcher shop and country store, and eventually turned into the little restaurant known and loved by locals today. They’ve been in business for 75 years, and their signature country sausage is made from a 50-year-old family recipe, which can be bought and shipped to breakfast tables across the country!

Besides their sausages, what they’re really know for are their “Bird dogs”. This is one of those hyper-local regional favorites, to the point that if you tried to ask Google what it is, you’d find more pictures of German Shorthaired Pointers or ab exercises before you’d find out anything about this chicken-y delight.

Check out my Guy Fieri inspired rendition of me narrating the above, I had such fun with this! ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ™Œ

Could not resist channeling my inner Guy Fieri – such a big Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives fan!

No one is really sure who created the first โ€œBird dogโ€ or where the idea came from, but at Mac Smithโ€™s itโ€™s one of their most popular dishes in the menu! Starting with a toasted hot dog bun, line the bottom with cheddar cheese and a few slices of bacon. Next, make your own homemade honey mustard (totally worth it to make from scratch), add a couple chicken tenders, top with the honey mustard, and viola!

The recipe for our homemade version is here to make this classic South Carolina special, wherever you are!


Adventures in Ice Cream

Lake Norman, NC

Throwing it back to Father’s Day weekend for a minute! My uncle came down to visit us and hang out with my grandma (she’s 95 now, her birthday just recently passed!).

One of my favorite activities that we’ve done in the past with my uncle is make ice cream together. He has an old fashioned ice cream machine he breaks out every Christmas, when the whole family comes over to celebrate! It’s also a make-your-own pizza party too (if the thought of homemade ice cream sundaes wasn’t already enticing enough).

My mom knows I love experimenting with local produce when it comes to my food. When I brought home some South Carolina Peaches and strawberries from the farmer’s market, she had this great idea to make ice cream out of them – dairy free of course! ๐Ÿค—

We ended up using a recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie’s food blog (that link is in blue, check it out!), which we added the fresh chopped up peaches and strawberries to. Check out the slideshow above for the process, and the pics below for the finished product! ๐Ÿ˜‹๐Ÿฆ๐Ÿ’œ

It was delish! If youโ€™ve never tried ice cream made with coconut milk, I highly recommend it. ๐Ÿ’œ What’s your favorite ice cream mix ins? Have you ever made ice cream at home? Let us know of some cool flavors we should try next. ๐Ÿ˜


So how was your weekend Foodie Friends? What’s a hyper-local special dish your town is known for? Sound out in the comments below to let us know your suggestions of what dishes to make or places we should visit next. As always, feel free to like, comment, & share ๐Ÿค—

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Weekend Foodie Warriors – Take 40!

Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends ๐Ÿ™‚ Hope you had a great Easter weekend! For this holiday edition of Foodie Adventures, join us for our Good Friday Fun, Easter Dinner, and Birthday Cake making!


Good Friday Fun

We have a lot of friends and neighbors who have been working tirelessly on the front lines of this virus for the last few months, including doctors, nurses, and grocery store workers.

My mom and I have always been good at sewing (must be in the genes), and spent a lot of my childhood home-making clothing, quilts, baby bibs, and embroidering blankets for our family, friends, and those around us. Every time one of our family members gets married or has a baby, they get a one-of-a-kind quilt made just for them to help commemorate the special occasion.

We knew that putting our sewing skills to work now more than ever would be helpful, as face masks were in short supply and the ones online were so astronomically priced. So we began making and giving them away to whoever needed them! See the slideshow below for some of our fabrics we used and in-action shots.

And these are pictures of the finished products! 100% cotton on the back and Batik fabric on the front, which is one of the tightest, thickly woven fabrics that the CDC reccomends when making homemade masks. The kid sized masks had elastic straps for ease and convenience for both the kiddos and parents and the adult ones had adjustable cloth tie straps.

So far we’ve made about 110 masks since the week before Easter!


Easter Dinner

For Easter this year it was pretty quiet, with only my immediate family, Jamie, and I, making sure to keep our distance and not going near my grandma as much as we could just in case (she’ll be 95 next month!).

Of course we started the day with a special drink, cranberry pineapple mimosas! We took no pictures of those though, but let me tell you, they were delish. ๐Ÿ˜‹๐Ÿน

Couldn’t have drinks without some appetizers to tide us over, here was our spread!

A variety of crackers (both regular and GF!), goat cheese, havarti, and some smoked gouda rounded out the plate.

For dinner, or supper rather, since we ate around 1-2 pm, we had both turkey and ham (Grandma’s favorite), along with tons of yummy sides! We made Roasted french onion potatoes, Brussel sprouts with bacon and onions, Balsamic brown sugar glazed carrots, and of course, both Mashed and Sweet potatoes.

We always try to eat at the dining room table during holidays, and this year was no exception! We have these gorgeous hand painted glasses we got from a yard sale a couple years ago and they remind us of spring, so we ended up using those and our pretty blue flowered plates to match.

For dessert, we each got a dark chocolate bunny and ate the last of our three pies from Buttermilk Sky Pie Shop, this one was their seasonal Lemon Icebox flavor, super delish!! I think this one and the Chocolate creme flavors were our two favorites.


Birthday Cake Making!

So if you follow us on Instagram (c’mon, y’all are professionals, I know you have ๐Ÿ˜, if not, click the link above ๐Ÿ”ผ), you would’ve seen us mid-icing these birthday cakes on our story, but here’s a brief overview of what went on!

Jamie’s coworkers are awesome and he’s started a trend of making them each a small cake (the flavors are always surprises) for their special day. The first cake we ever made is below for a March birthday, a Hershey’s chocolate cake with extra chocolate chips, a fresh strawberry compote filling made with local strawberry jam, and a bitter-sweet chocolate buttercream. Needless to say – this cake was a massive hit! ๐ŸŽ‚

There were two April birthdays back-to-back this month, so we made two seperate flavors. One was the same Hershey’s chocolate cake from above (which hapened to sink in the middle this go around, I think we opened the oven accidentally too many times ๐Ÿคฆโ€โ™€๏ธ) with the mocha frosting recipe from the right hand picture below as the frosting and filling.

The other was a lemon cake recipe from Alex Guarnaschelli (one of my favorite Food Network Chefs ever), using the lemon frosting from the recipe above, and then the filling from the same Good Housekeeping cookbook below (which made almost a lemon curd-like filling). I’ve had this cookbook since I graduated college, and it’s the same book my mom had to teach her how to cook when she was growing up, and she got me a similar copy as a present. This is the best book to not only find basic recipes in but also teach yourself how to make sauces, work with different cuts of meat, and identify herbs and spices.

With the extra cake filling for both of these, we also made filled cupcakes, which was super fun too! ๐Ÿง This lemon one was absolutely a winner, and while neither of these recipes are non-dairy, I’m working on creating the non-dairy substitutions this week that will be added to the blog! Stay tuned for those!! ๐Ÿ™Œ๐Ÿ˜


So how was your weekend Foodie Friends? What’s been your favorite place to get take-out or carry out over the last week? Was the Easter Bunny good to you this year? Sound out in the comments below to let us know your suggestions of what dishes to make or places we should visit next. As always, feel free to like, comment, & share ๐Ÿค—

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