Mascarpone Cupcakes!

These mascarpone cupcakes just might be my favorite cupcakes. They are of course, a Giada recipe. The texture is really light, sort of like angel food cake but has so much more flavor and smells REALLY good. The strawberry icing is just up my alley since I do not like chocolate or things that are super sweet.

Mike's mom came into town to take our engagement pictures and wanted to try this recipe after seeing it in one of the cookbooks I had laying around. Mike loves them so I decided to surprise him and bake them before he got home from work.

The only bad thing about the cupcakes is that I'm tempted to eat every single one!

Cooking with Leftovers: Baby Spinach

I love baby spinach... there are so many things you can add this to... a sandwich, salad, quesadilla filling, lasagna filling etc. However, the bag only comes in one size, giant. Therefore, I'm constantly stuck with half a bag of leftover baby spinach that inevitably goes bad before I can use it. This issue came up again last week when I made chicken, mushroom and spinach quesadillas for my weeknight dinners. I had to use up a good amount of spinach before it went bad so I tried this Giada recipe, penne with spinach sauce.

I did make a couple of changes to the recipe... I can't really get on board with whole wheat pasta so I used Ronzoni Smart Pasta instead. I also substituted feta for goat cheese, reduced the amount by half and used no-fat cream cheese.

The pasta turned out really good! Its good warm or cold. I'm having it this week with some garlic-herb chicken!

Michael Hardisty Photography

Mike's finally getting his blog up and running! I've posted a link to it under my blog list. You can also find it HERE. There aren't any real posts yet... still working on that. Until then, you can check out his flickr page HERE or click the link on his blog!

Hope you guys enjoy the photos... I do, but I'm biased :)