Chocolate Sheet Cake Cupcakes

My favorite cake is chocolate sheet cake, and here is the secret recipe:

The recipe has been "passed on" to me by my grandma - who makes this cake every time we visit. I always think it tastes better when she makes it, even now. The reason I say "passed on" in the way that I do is because the first time I asked her for the recipe, she told me to go online and look up "Texas Sheet Cake". So there are various versions of this cake floating around, but my favorite is Grandma's.

Throughout the - let's say 10 - years I have been making this cake, I have learned many things:

1. You have to mix the ingredients in the specified order
2. You have to wait for the chocolate mixture to cool before adding it to the other ingredients
3. The cake will come out really badly without baking soda

To start out, combine flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl.

Then on the stovetop, heat up butter, water, and cocoa.

Bring to a boil and let cool.

In another bowl, combine eggs, buttermilk, soda, and vanilla.

Pour the cooled chocolate mixture over the flour/sugar combination.

Stir in the egg mixture as well,

and finally add cinnamon if you wish.

Then, you can bake it in a sheet cake pan for 20 minutes at 350 and ice it with the icing glaze (Classic Style), or you can get crazy and pour it into cupcake pans and bake at 350 for about 17 minutes (what I did.)

17 minutes-ish later:

Yum.

Then, for the icing, I used the recipe on this site: Obsessed with Baking. It is similar to this recipe: Pioneer Woman's That's The Best Frosting I've Ever Had. I made the PW version for a different set of cupcakes I made a couple of days before, and I'll have to say that despite the different methods, they both came out pretty much the same. I had a slight problem with getting the Obsessed with Baking version to really come together nicely but it tasted great. To cover up the imperfections, I decided to cover the icing with sprinkles, which was a great idea. They turned out gorgeous!

And check this out:

WoW!

Zatar Bread

Okay, so I know I've had this "Zatar Bread Coming Soon" post up for like a month... I've been super busy and haven't had time to write out the recipe. The gallery of pictures above shows the steps I took the first time I made zatar bread myself - the bread came out SO delicious, and the pictures came out pretty great as well, so I really wanted to share the recipe. The only problem with it was that it took FOREVER to make and had way too many steps. It called for letting the bread rise about 5 different times. The bread was really good, though, so I thought that I would keep the recipe and try it again.

Then, thanks to Lisa, I came across a miracle bread recipe. It is a bread recipe in which you can make a large batch of dough, keep it in the fridge for up to two weeks, and use it throughout those two weeks to make all different kinds of bread. I used the first batch I made to make pita bread, zatar bread, and a baguette - all from the same batch of dough that took me about 10 minutes to make.

I will share the EASY zatar bread recipe soon as well as the other bread recipes I mentioned, as I didn't take pictures the first time I made them and I want a chance to make them again and document the steps with pictures. I adapted the recipes from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day (click on book title to see book on Amazon), but I adapted the methods used in the book to make them friendly to the tools and equipment I already had on hand in my kitchen. I would highly recommend this book, as I have had great success so far with every recipe I have tried!

And finally, for those of you who don't know, zatar bread is a Middle Eastern flatbread made with olive oil and zatar (a spice blend). The zatar spice blend I use came from Jamie's family and I am almost out. I probably have enough to make one more batch, so I'll have to get some more! Zatar is a strong spice made from thyme, oregano, and other spices - at first I did not care for it - but it has grown on me and now I enjoy it a lot on flatbread. It is great to dip freshly baked zatar bread into homemade hummus or just eat it by itself!

Biscuits and Gravy

Last year, my friend Lisa introduced me to homemade biscuits and gravy. This recipe is super easy and quick to make as well as extremely delicious. We don't have it all the time because it is not the healthiest breakfast choice, but we do enjoy it every once in a while!

I start by baking one can of buttermilk biscuits according to the package directions.

Then, I slice the sausage into patties (or buy patties already made) and cook them in a pan over medium-high heat until they are done. You can use whatever amount of sausage you would like. When I am making this for two, I use about 1/2 lb., but for 4 people you would want to make a whole pound of sausage - two patties per person is usually a good amount. A variation would be to crumble the sausage instead of making it into patties - either way would end up tasting great!

After the sausage is cooked, I add a tablespoon or so of SmartBalance to the pork fat that is left in the pan. I want to end up with about 2T of fat in the pan, so I add more or less than 1T of SB to get to that amount.

I then add 2T of flour, let it cook for about a minute, and then whisk it into the butter mixture.

I pour in about a cup of milk and whisk it all together.

Then I add salt and pepper,

and let it cook until it gets thick.

I add more milk if it needs to be thinned out a bit, and then we assemble our plates. To assemble, open up a biscuit, place a sausage patty on top, and pour on the gravy! If you made crumbled sausage, you could just stir it into the gravy before pouring it over the biscuits. Jamie and I like to eat the extra biscuits with honey, and we like to eat a big fruit salad on the side! Enjoy!