Pinteresting a Welcome Barbecue

Pin It It's been quite a while since I last blogged.  I don't know what happened to the past three weeks! Anyway, last week was definitely a hectic one as one of my best friends from the Philippines came over for a visit.  Naturally, because it is her first time in the US, she had to be taken on a whirlwind tour of NYC.  I'll save the tips on how we did it way under her budget for another post.

Ever since I got hooked on Pinterest, I had sworn that I would try to do as much of the pins as I can.  I found the perfect opportunity to do so when we had an intimate barbecue to welcome my friend to NY.  While I decided to keep it simple by having a salad, burgers and hotdogs for the main "entree", I (with a lot of help from our guest!) put a little more effort on the appetizers and dessert.

For starters, we had tuna ceviche (recipe in the next post), chips with mango salsa (recipe here), and my Pinterest-inspired mini tacos.  I topped off the mini tacos with mango salsa and they were incredibly easy to assemble and looked impressive on the table.  We made the taco-seasoned ground turkey and mango salsa a day before so we only needed to assemble it before the party.

Finally for dessert, we made what would be my third attempt at banana pudding pie, coconut cupcakes a la Ina Garten frosted via Pinterest instructions, and another Pinterest-inspired dessert of red velvet brownies.

The photo sucks... and so does my frosting skills.  But I imagine with practice and a little bit more generosity with the frosting, my cupcakes will be much prettier in time.

 I followed the red velvet brownie recipe to the letter, except I took them out of the oven about 5 minutes earlier because of the much warmer weather.  They were just fine.  Also, the recipe calls for a white chocolate frosting, which I'm not a big fan of because I find it way too sweet.  So I decided to use Ina Garten's cream cheese frosting, along with some changes as I wrote here.  I also used 1/3 less fat Philadelphia neufchatel cream cheese with no noticeable change in flavor.

All desserts, except for the banana pudding pie, were done ahead of the party so there really wasn't much to do on the day itself.  And most importantly, everybody seemed to enjoy our little gathering and we had an awesome time reminiscing about high school.

There's Always Time for Banana Puddin' Pie!

Pin It And I'm back from my CFA exam hiatus. Hopefully, I pass it so I never have to take the darn thing again!

Anyway, I was obsessing about making this pie the two weeks prior to the exam, my way of finding delicious distraction from all the studying I'd been doing. So despite the test looming, I spent a little time trying this recipe that didn't use instant pudding.  My first try had a great meringue, but my pudding sucked.  It was delicious, but the pudding itself was too soupy.  That was mainly due to my impatience.  I was thinking, it had eggs, it had flour, so maybe it didn't need to be too thick when I poured the pudding over the bananas.  Big mistake.  This is a relatively easy dessert to make, so take the time to actually thicken the pudding into the desired consistency before pouring into the banana.  On my second try a week later (the husband told me I don't wait too long to correct my mistakes), it took about 20 minutes for the pudding to thicken with constant stirring. So the pudding was great, but my meringue wasn't so great.  I might have to wait a little longer for the third try, though.

Meringue from the first attempt

Pudding from the second attempt

So here are the tweaks I made.  For some reason, I have a resistance to making my own pie crust.  So I used ready made crusts for both attempts: shortbread and graham.  I know, I know... I refused to make the pudding with instant mix, but I used store-bought crusts, so sue me.  I find that the shortbread keeps its crunch better than the graham crust so I actually prefer it. 

For the pudding, this recipe was, as the Chopped judges would have put it, cloyingly sweet. I had cut the sugar in half for the first pie, and it was still too sweet for me.  So for the second pie, I only used 1/2 cup plus about 2 teaspoons of sugar for the pudding, and only about 1/8 cup for the meringue.  Also, I used fat free half and half instead of whole milk, which is probably why my first attempt wouldn't thicken.  So I used slightly less half and half and more flour than the recipe.  Two cups of milk made too much pudding for my ready made crusts anyway.  I ended up using 1 and 1/2 cups of half and half, and 1/4 cup plus 1 teaspoon of flour.  Make sure you bring the pudding to a boil before lowering the heat so that your pudding doesn't taste like raw flour.  Finally, I squeezed a little bit of lemon juice onto the bananas to keep them from turning brown.

Even though there was still something to be desired from my second attempt, this is still a delicious and inexpensive dessert that I hope to get right someday.  Heck, I finished the whole of the first soupy pie myself! Hubby couldn't bring himself to eat sweet banana soup.  This is definitely a dessert that must be consumed within two days, so it's best when you're having company.  Even with the lemon juice, the bananas turned brown after some time. Oh, and the pie must have cost less than $5 to make, so it would be a crowd pleaser and a money saver at the same time.

Super Duper Easy Blueberry Cobbler

Pin It I found this recipe for blueberry cobbler that takes literally 10 minutes to prepare.  Really a quick dessert especially for a weeknight.  I can imagine this would be super yummy with ripe Philippine mangoes too.  Maybe I'll try it with the mangoes we get here.  I used frozen blueberries for this experiment.

As usual, I made some revisions. One is replacing the milk with fat free half and half.  Then I cut the sugar to about only half a cup for the batter.  It was plenty sweet even with less sugar.  In addition, I sprinkled a little bit of dark brown sugar and ground cinnamon on top of the blueberries after I put them in the batter. 

 Perhaps because I used fat free half and half, my cobbler was done in 40 minutes.  I served it warm with vanilla soy ice cream on top. The crust was crunchy and chewy at the same time, and the blueberries gooey.  With the cold ice cream, this dessert delivers a variety of textures and temperatures that will satisfy your weeknight dessert cravings.  And because there were no eggs in the batter, I imagine this is a lower cholesterol dessert.  My hubby suggested it would actually be also good for breakfast with yogurt on top and I agree.  Being forced to watch the Food Network does seem to be getting to him.