Lemon Blossoms

A few days ago while my wife and I ate lunch, we watched a Paula Deen TV episode about making different foods for a dinner club event.  My wife, who really likes foods with lemon flavoring, was especially intrigued by Paula’s Lemon Blossoms, a lemon muffin with a lemon glaze.  She asked me to consider making those for something we could take as part of a house-warming gift for a party this weekend.  Being the obliging husband (and loving to make desserts) I said sure.

The next day we went to the store where I picked up the cake mix, box of pudding, a lemon, and one pound bag of powdered sugar.

Just before I started to mix the ingredients, I turned on our oven to 350 degrees in the conventional bake mode.  Into the bowl of our stand mixer, I dumped the 4 eggs, yellow cake mix, lemon pudding mix, and 3 /4 cup of oil.  I used the whisk beater attachment and mixed all the ingredients for about two minutes.  The resulting batter is a very thick and sticky yellow goo.  It stuck to everything, the whisk, spatula, bowl, and fingers.  I finally used my (clean) fingers and a spatula to remove the batter from the whisk and sides of the bowl.

I got out our mini-muffin pan and gave it a good coating of cooking spray and spooned some of the batter into each muffin hole.  I was just re-reading Paula’s directions that say to pour a small amount of batter, there is no way you can pour this batter!  I tried to fill each muffin hole about half full, which I estimated was about a tablespoon of batter.

I put the muffin pan in the oven to bake for twelve minutes then I started on making the glaze.  I dumped the powder sugar (yes, I purposely skipped the step of sifting of the sugar) into a medium mixing bowl and zested the lemon into the bowl.  I added the lemon juice, oil, and water into the bowl and stirred it with a large spoon for a few minutes to make a creamy glaze.

When the cooking time was up, I removed the muffin pan from the oven and found that while I had nice muffins, I had put too much batter in each hole, and the muffins spread out over the top of the pan (muffin tops), it turned out not to be a problem.  I turned the pan over onto a small clean kitchen towel, knocked all the muffins out, and let them cool while sitting upside down for several minutes before glazing.

To glaze the muffins I used the same technique as Paula on her TV program: sticking a fork into the bottom of the muffin and then dipping the muffin in the glaze.  The glaze was very thick and quite a bit was covering the muffin and slowly dripping off.  I realized that for each muffin I could not be holding the fork over the bowl to recover most of the glaze.  I quick solution was to grab our spatula holder that clips over the side of a bowl, and use it to hold the fork while the muffin drained.  To make the glaze thinner and flow more easily, I added an additional tablespoon of water to the glaze.

My glazing process was to insert the fork in the bottom of the muffin, place the muffin in the glaze (top down), and spoon the glaze over the sides and bottom of the muffin.  Using the spoon, gently remove the muffin from the glaze and insert the fork in the spatula holder so the excess glaze could drip back into the bowl.  After about thirty seconds of draining, I would place the glazed muffin on a wire rack over a cookie sheet to finish drying the glaze.

When I made the second pan of muffin, I filled each hole with about half a tablespoon of batter, this made muffins that didn’t flow over the top of the pan, but they seem quite small.  I found the best technique for filling the muffin pan was to use a spoon to scoop up some batter from the mixing bowl and using a wet finger, slide the batter from the spoon into the muffin pan.

I ended up making about forty-eight muffin, most of which made it through the glazing process (though some were eaten along the way).  These muffins have a pleasant lemony flavor that is not as overpowering as the lemon flavor in desserts like lemon meringue pie.

While I was busy baking and glazing, my wife came into the kitchen, we talked about the muffin size, and we decided that Paula used a muffin pan that had larger holes than our mini-muffin pan.  I tried making three muffins using our standard sized cupcake pan, but I felt these muffins were too large and seemed to collapse in the middle when they cooled.  We had the video stored on our DVR so we watched that segment of the show and decided that before the next time I make these, we will need to find an intermediate sized muffin pan.

Find the recipe here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/lemon-blossoms-recipe/index.html

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell

Lemon Shrimp Lettuce Boats

While searching for shrimp recipes on the internet, I came across the recipe for Lime Shrimp Lettuce Wraps by Paula Deen.  When I went in the kitchen to make the recipe, I found that I needed to make a couple of substitutions because I didn’t have some of the ingredient.  I could have made a run to the store, but I decided to see how it would turn out.

My first change is the type citrus juice, the recipe calls for three-tablespoons of fresh lime juice, I didn’t have any limes, so I used three-tablespoons of Real Lemon juice from the refrigerator. 

My next change was in regards to the three-teaspoons of fresh grated ginger.  I thought that I had a piece of fresh ginger, but I couldn’t find it in the refrigerator, so I substituted one-teaspoon of ground ginger.  I know that ground spices are more potent than fresh spices, that is why I reduced the amount of ginger.

The third change was the red bell pepper.  When I was at the store a few days prior to making this recipe, I went to get a red pepper, and we saw the price was $4 a pepper.  No way were we going to buy those.  We had some mini-peppers at home that we had purchased from Costco and I substituted three small peppers for the one-half pepper specified in the recipe.

The next change was the recipe calls for a pound of medium shrimp, peeled and deveined, and chopped.  I did not chop the shrimp but left them whole.  This was by accident, but when we ate the meal, we were glad that I did as we could see the shrimp and know what we were eating.

The last change was to replace the iceberg lettuce with heart of romaine lettuce that we use for all our salad.  The romaine lettuce has a better texture and tastes better than the iceberg

I started by getting out a medium sized bowl and mixing the three-tablespoons of lemon juice with two-tablespoons of vegetable oil, one-tablespoon lite soy sauce, one minced clove of garlic, and one-teaspoon of ground ginger.  I stirred this mixture together and added the rinsed shrimp into the bowl.  I stirred the shrimp with the sauce to make sure all the shrimp were coated, then covered the bowl with plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator to marinade the shrimp for thirty minutes.

While the shrimp were marinating, I diced my three small red and yellow peppers, a couple of green onions and opened a five-ounce can of water chestnuts, drained the can and chopped the chestnuts.  I mixed the peppers, onions, and water chestnuts in a bowl and set them aside.

I decided to use our new ten-inch stainless steel skillet and set it on the cook top on medium-high heat.  Once the pan was hot, I added about a tablespoon of grape seed oil.  Into the hot oil, I poured the vegetables to cook for about three minutes, stirring occasionally.

Once the vegetables were cooked, I added the shrimp and marinade into the skillet and stirred while cooking for another three minutes.  Once the shrimp were cooked (pink in color), I added another tablespoon of the soy sauce and stirred everything together.

I had already cleaned and prepared romaine lettuce leaves and had them ready on our plates.  I spooned about 1/3 cup of the shrimp mixture onto the lettuce and we sat down to eat.  The prepared romaine lettuce leave looked like little boats sitting on the plate and the romaine lettuce leaves do not roll very well, so we pinched the sides up and ate them like a taco.

We both enjoyed eating our “boats” they were a little messy with the juice running out the end, but still delicious.  The lemon was a good choice and next time I will try the fresh lime juice.  We were both glad that I only used one–teaspoon of the ground ginger, any additional would have been too overpowering for the shrimp.

After we finished eating, we had some of the shrimp and sauce left over.  I added this to a bowl in the refrigerator that contained the leftover angel hair pasta from the previous shrimp recipe: Lime Pasta with Roasted Shrimp.

Later, we really enjoyed eating the leftover shrimp and pasta.  The new ginger/lemon sauce had marinated the noodles and added an oriental flavor to the entire dish that enhanced the both the pasta and the shrimp. 

I will be making this recipe again, but I will double the recipe and use the leftovers for mixing with pasta.

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell