Stuffed Mushrooms

I didn't know what to cook for dinner, so I made stuffed mushrooms last night out of things I had on hand. It turned out really tasty.

Ingredients:
7 Large mushrooms (stems removed)
2 Spicy Italian turkey sausages (casings removed)
3 Baby Bell Pepe rs (+ other veggies if you like)
Some panko
Olive oil

Cook sausages and crumble as you cook them. Add the chopped bell peppers and mushroom stems. Cook. And panko.

Sprinkle olive oil on mushrooms. Top with turkey filling. Top with cheese. Bake 25 minutes. The cheese got hard when it was cooked, but it added some texture to the dish. I had leftover turkey filling, so I used it this morning to make an omelet.

Happy Independence Day: Flag Cake

I found this neat cake online at 17andbaking and decided to make it for the July 4th holiday. You can read the creator's blog here.

Start with any simple white cake recipe. Split into 3 parts and dye 2 parts of the batter with food coloring (red & blue). I used the gel kind of coloring since the color is really vibrant without having to use much.



Bake the 3 cakes. Once the cakes have cooled off, use a cake leveler to level off the top of the cakes and then split the red and white cakes in half (resulting in a total of 5 cakes).



Starting with a white cake, top with a thin layer of icing:



Place one of the red cakes on top of the iced white cake:



And top red cake with a layer of icing:



Here comes the trickiest part of assembling the flag cake. Cut a circle in the middle of the blue cake. Place the remaining red cake on top of the remaining white cake, and cut a circle in the middle. I used a ramekin as a stencil:





Place the outer ring of the blue cake on top of the assembled layers. Ice the inside ring and place the white and red inner circle in the middle of the blue cake.



Ice the top and sides.



And there you have a flag cake! The cake is plain on the outside because once you cut into it, you'll have a big impact!



Thanks to 17 and Baking's Elissa for sharing this with us on the food blogs out there. It was pretty fun making this cake. Though, I had to drive around to 4 different stores to get a cake leveler. Oh, and the left over cake parts are not waste. You can eat them plain, or make another cake out of them ;)

I had enough batter leftover to make 6 cupcakes (I didn't want to waste the batter).