McVitie's Green Tea Biscuits

Two things first: I just finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and was kind of disappointed! I think I prefer the original. Although if they made this into a movie with Colin Firth (and, heck, throw in Clive Owen too), then I would probably re-assess my position. Secondly, according to Sitemeter, I have finally crossed the 10,000 visit threshhold! Woohoo! I know that's totally small potatoes to most bloggers, but I am easily made happy, what can I say! So, thanks visitors!


The other day, I was feeling rather down after seeing the man off so I went on a shopping spree at Mitsuwa and some Chinese grocery stores back home. You know all those rules about how to avoid impulse buying? Yeah, not one of those held with me, which is how I ended up with this little bag of McVitie's Green Tea Digestive Biscuits. I loooove their regular digestives (not to mention the chocolate dipped ones and ESPECIALLY the chocolate caramel--the last time we were in London I think I bought about 5 tubes) and I usually like green tea anything, so into the basket they went. And look! The logo and everything. Okay, I know this photo doesn't give a good sense of scale, but check it out--these are really little.


See? Wee! You know I'm a sucker for anything miniaturized. There are about 8 in one of these little snack-sized bags. But, enough about that--how does it taste? Pretty good, actually!


The green tea filling actually tastes like green tea, which is nice (and a change from other green tea flavored snacks, which sometimes taste like white chocolate colored green). Of course, I love the digestive biscuit, no question about that. Together, they are a little bit sweeter than I normally go for, but with a hot cup of tea (naturally), they are a great snack. I have to go and buy more bags now (well, after I finish watching Ninja Warrior) so excuse me!

More birthday baking: Pink Lemonade Cupcakes & Brownies, Oh My!

Man, this is a seriously backdated post. I started drafting this sometime in September, right when the weather was just beginning to cool off....well, it's officially COLD now, and I've been remiss in blogging, but it's been a really busy month! We've been travelling pretty much every weekend in October (2 weddings in a row) and it's going to be busy probably through the end of the month. But, there are some good food-related trips coming up so I anticipate some good blogging opportunities.


A couple of my coworkers had birthdays in the end of August and beginning of September, so I decided on two different items, even if there were actually three birthdays--hey, a cupcake is a cupcake! The two As got pink lemonade cupcakes, and Hurricane, who is a devotee of the cupcake truck, got brownies baked into cupcakes. (As much as he loves the cupcake truck, I hear him complain all the time about how they never have just plain vanilla or plain chocolate.) As an aside, I bought some of these parchment baking cups by If You Care and they are soooo nonstick that the brownies just kind of slid out of the cups.

I used the brownie recipe from the Martha Stewart baking handbook, because I had a couple of bars of chocolate I wanted to use, but it's definitely not the best recipe I personally have tried. Those honors still go to the King Arthur recipe that's printed on the back of their cocoa packages. Still, a brownie is a brownie!


I couldn't resist making these pink lemonade cupcakes when I saw them while I was googling away one day--I mean, they're lemonade flavored and they're pink! I was already in love with the idea. I used the recipe from Cast Sugar. I have to be honest; I wasn't that crazy about the texture of the cupcake. When baked, it almost felt like a Chinese steamed cake, which is not the texture I want from a cupcake! But hey, it uses no butter and no egg yolks, so at least it's (sort of) healthier than a normal cupcake. And the frosting made up for what the cupcake lacked. And did I mention how pink and cute they were? I almost felt bad for bestowing such a girly cupcake upon the birthday boy. Almost.

Anyway, hopefully I will have time to blog more regularly soon. This weekend we are going to the Sheep & Wool Festival, where I will attempt to stop myself from kidnapping an alpaca...