Bridal shower cookies

With MLF in the UK, I was left on my own to bake and frost a batch of custom bridal shower sugar cookies. After 4+ hours in the kitchen, I emerged with these wedding cake and wedding dress cookies.... and a GIANT mess of a kitchen. With MLF's help, I probably could have finished decorating these cookies in a jiffy AND had a cleaned-up kitchen in no time. I miss him.

Superstars!!!!

Lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream frosting. It's a yellow lemon theme, fyi. :)

Red velvetly goodness

Red velvet cake is one of my favorites. I can't say why. Maybe it's the shocking color. Or maybe it's the hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it flavor. The cake has cocoa powder in it which makes it taste slightly like a chocolate cake, though it don't really taste that chocolatey. It tastes smooth, sweet, and rich. Red velvet cake recipes differ widely in proportions of ingredients and secret ingredients, but they will always call for buttermilk, vinegar and of course, red food coloring!

The bright red batter is quite a fun change from the usual white or chocolate battered cakes.

This pic makes them look browner than they really were. In real life, they were actually pretty red!

Get Low, low, low, low, low, low, low

It's mid-July and here I am catching up on early month posts. Oops. Anyway...For the Fourth of July, MLF and I, along with a few friends, made trips to Charleston and Asheville. The cuisine of Charleston can be summerized in two words: low country or new South. Menus abounded with oversize biscuits, fancy egg benedicts with crab cake, stuffed french toast, fresh seafood, coconut cake, and the butteriest mac and cheese, all served with a large helping of Southern hospitality. When it comes to eating in the former British colony, it's hard to go wrong. The number of exceptional restaurants to pick from is amazing. The few we ate at were The Peninsula Grill, Poogan's Porch, Cru Cafe and Sermet's. We didn't have one complaint- and that's a big deal for us!

An oversized biscuit at Poogan's Porch.

MLF started off one day with a ridiculously large portion of peaches and cream-stuffed french toast with warm syrup at the Palmetto restaurant in the Charleston Place Hotel.

Beautifully prepared eggs benedict with Canadian ham.

THE best mac and cheese in the world. So rich it could have been dessert. Be sure to get this at the Cru Cafe, located on Motley St.