I am a horrible terrible procrastinating person. I should have posted this ages ago…but better late than never right?
I had friends visiting, and I decided we were eating dinner in Decatur just so we could come here. It was entirely worth it.

We all tried different things, you can choose from one flavor or even a variety of flavors, and some ideas are posted on the wall (click to enlarge it)

I ordered the Mississippi Mud – a mix of chocolate and wedding cake, along with some sweet cream on top. It was perfect. The best way to describe it would be that it was like eating icy, liquid cake. It’s seriously hard to believe you are just eating flavored ice.

Jared, one of the owners, is so enthusiastic about the cafe. One of my friends was too full to eat anything more, but he made her a tiny sample of the limoncello snoball just so she could also try it.

He gave me a tour of everything, starting with the ice: they make their own ice. Once it’s spent a lot of time frozen, it’s ready to move on and become shaved ice. The rectangular block is loaded into the machine, which shaves the ice down and then it can be topped with the flavoring syrups, and even stuffed with soft serve ice cream. They make some of the flavors themselves and sugar free flavors are available. And if you are willing to share with someone else, there is an item called the Super Dome, which is snoDOME instead, topped with chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and fruit.

Beyond snoballs, there is a smoothie called the Queen of the Day which contains Kefir and fresh fruit, along with no added sugar.

I am pretty upset I cannot regularly get over to Decatur, because I adore this place, down to the Mardi Gras floor. The snoballs are the perfect way to cool off, and there’s still plenty of hot weather left, so be sure to check it out.

Notes: cash only, closed Mondays, parking is available behind the building
website

In 5 days, 10 1/2 hours, I will be attending my first REAL UPPER LEVEL MAJOR RELATED CLASS and embark on a quest to graduate before the world supposedly ends with a degree in economics….and another one in political science ~ international affairs. And this hopefully will involve a trip to France, Germany, and Belgium in May.
I have barely updated through the summer, which is incredibly lame, but I have been busy…for example making well over 100 cupcakes on vacation for a bunch of Integra people to devour. The only picture I have of this great feat is someone with Red Bull buttercream all over their hand.
Speaking of cupcakes though, that’s a bit of the idea of a direction I want to go back into. I have fallen for Yelp, and if I want to talk about a restaurant more, that’s where it’ll be.
However, if it involves sweet stuff, it’s coming here.
Starting tomorrow of course.
…although it IS tomorrow, but that’s beyond the point.
So more baking and more about tasty sugary comas…which reminds me also that I never posted about SUGAR COMA OTP! So I may have to do that too.
I would never abandon something I paid for, being a sad little college student.

Until later,
Amanda

When I moved away almost a year ago, Gigi’s Cupcakes was coming soon on Shallowford Road in Chattanooga. Now, it is one of four places to pick up a cupcake, at least from what I can tell. On my couple day visit, I hit two quite different spots for a cupcake, and will go to at least one more the next time I grace that little city with my presence. (Gigi’s not included, for obvious reasons such as I don’t have to drive 120 miles to get there.)

Custom Couture Cakes by A Bountiful Harvest
This bakery used to be located closer to downtown, but is now in Hixson, not too far from where my parents live. My mom and I were on our way to Sonic when we passed it…yes, Sonic.
Amusing thing about Sonic: it is essentially the closest place to get food to their house. Now, I live nowhere near one. Therefore when my mom mentioned getting something to drink there I freaked out. If I’m going outside of the perimeter for Sonic, I’m apparently REALLY going outside.
So, we drive by it, a rather weird little shopping center with not much parking, and I can’t stop thinking about it to the point we turn around and go back.
I immediately walk up to the cupcake case, and see all the cupcakes are $3+, making me think cupcakes in Chattanooga are seriously backwards and using New York for pricing points.
Turns out, every single baked good Couture Cakes makes is gluten free, contains no refined white sugars, and is nearly entirely organic. Since I don’t have to worry about gluten, I began instead to worry that maybe the cake would taste weird.

Up front is my cupcake: Caramel Dream. It’s a Belgian chocolate cake with caramel inside, caramel mousse on top, and topped with more caramel.
Weird tasting? Hell no. It sure wasn’t the same as a normal flour cake texturally, but nothing tasted funny. They use quinoa and almond flour for the cakes. The cupcake was pretty big, it wouldn’t be worth $3.50 whatsoever if standard ingredients were used.
I really liked that the cupcake was not overly sweet. The mousse tasted like I would imagine caramel ice cream would taste if you made it solid yet not cold.
My mom had a white chocolate strawberry cheesecake cupcake, and we picked out white chocolate peanut butter cup ones for my brother and dad.

Also it’s worth noting that they have a ton of different flavors, the owner told us they have around 200 flavors and they bake throughout the day, so the selection not only changes day by day but could be different hour by hour. They also have chocolates, which additionally come in sugar-free, and cookies which come in gluten-free only, or additionally sugar-free or dairy-free. It’s a very cool shop, and I’m glad that they decided to add cupcakes when they moved locations because I would have never tried a gluten free cupcake otherwise.

Chattanooga Cupcakes: your more typical cupcake bakery, $2.75 a cupcake, which I can deal with I guess. (I suppose you can charge whatever you want when you are one of a few rather than one of several like in Atlanta, where I feel $2.50 is generally charged for the popular spots.)
Again, not an impressive location. It can be cute to have whimsical pastels for a building color, but so far down Broad Street, it just looks kind of odd. The interior wasn’t as cute as the outside painted it out to be, it was kind of cold to be honest.
I took my cupcake home, so I didn’t eat there. I wouldn’t have wanted to though.
There were lots of options even at 8pm at night on a Friday. I decided to go with another chocolate cake.

(as you can see, the lemonade I got to accompany the cupcake didn’t make it home)
This cupcake is the Domino Effect – chocolate cake, topped with “white truffle frosting” (vanilla, for real) and then topped with chocolate specks.
Initially I was also drawn to this cake because LOOK AT THAT FROSTING. IT’S TALLER THAN THE CUPCAKE.
The cupcake seriously was being crushed under its weight, I’m not even kidding. I removed the frosting to try to eat cake AND frosting, and the cake was just entirely stuck to it.
The cake was basic chocolate, nothing special whatsoever. The frosting was awesome. My mom actually came in and ate a piece of it that I had taken off. I was slightly horrified. I also think I dumped out a good third of it.

I liked the cake, but I can make stuff of this quality in my own kitchen. I really liked that their box included an insert to keep the cupcake in place on the drive home, although the cupcake was bigger than the insert, so it was deformed. No big deal, because that’s better than the alternative of cake all over my car.

Not up to the same standards of Atlanta, but a valiant attempt for the city. And in any case bravo to both of them for changing/opening their businesses in the past year and both doing well.

One of my friends mentioned she doesn’t “get” cupcakes, and I told her to just wait for the frozen yogurt explosion. They’ve already got one….

Okay…sorry for the abandonment…things got too chaotic for my life and I had to take a huge break from stuff and well, I am ready for school to start and for it to stop being so bloody hot.

However, I convinced Joe to buy a grill last week, and we went to Whole Foods in John’s Creek/Duluth to pick up things to christen it. It happened to be some sort of local food tasting day, which was SUPER AWESOME. I really want to get a jar of Bella Cucina sweet pepper pesto sometime as it was incredible. Pretty much everything was worth noting for tastiness, and it all can be bought there from grass fed beef to honey butter. Oh the honey butter.

Here is what we had on the grill though.

left: beer & cheese brats (quite possibly the best brat I have had while being in the south) and roasted red pepper and thai chicken sausages.

Jamaican Jerk and Theo’s Steakhouse steak kebabs. Both were super tasty…and made an amazing sandwich the next day for lunch.

I made bell pepper/tomato kebabs, and then decided to add in a jalapeno. Then because I am an idiot, I ate half of one of the jalapeno peppers, forgot I hadn’t washed my hand because in my mind I thought I used a fork, and touched my eye. ….ow
Oh and this is the first time I ever had grilled pineapple. It was amazing.

The next plan is smoking a chicken. That shall be fun.

And I will now try to post more, though I think I always say that, but whatever. I’M TRYING.

I have a couple random things to post about but I don’t want to give them all their own posts.

First, I just finished my free Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Chick-Fil-A. They had this whole crazy thing where you could reserve one for free, and being a college student, I am all over that. The sandwich is actually on the menu next week and I think it’s like $2.99 by itself so that’s not bad.
I only took a picture of the bag because it just looks like a red tinted chicken sandwich really. BUT IT HAS A SPECIAL BAG.

Anyway, I don’t care for it. I love spicy food, so this should be a perfect match, but meh. It started to not taste like it was spiced up at all after about half, and when I finished it there was a funny aftertaste that I think is common with cheap methods of spicing up food. Sorry Chick-Fil-A. It’s also NOT that spicy to me, which means that to a lot of people, they’re gonna cry eating it. I found myself more thirsty at the end because of its ridiculously high sodium content (1730 mg of sodium, delicious). I feel bloated and gross, seriously, over a single sandwich. It just irritates me that somehow spicier = more salt. Whatever.
I don’t like it, and I won’t be getting one again. Now I feel like all I can do for the rest of the day is drink water. If you dare to eat it, I seriously recommend that you drink at least a glass of water before doing so because trying to fix it after the fact isn’t working.

Second, I got an email last week about an event over at the West Egg Cafe this Thursday (6/3) that sounds really cool. Batdorf & Bronson will be providing a coffee from each coffee growing region of the world, and West Egg Cafe will be preparing cupcakes to match, some of them being new flavors! It starts at 7pm and it’s free, but you’ll need to RSVP on this Facebook event page so they know how many people to bake for. I meant to post about it earlier but I got distracted :[

In case you are in Atlanta and happen to live under a rock, Pinkberry is opening up here in a month’s time. Red Mango was awarding franchises in the area, and if they did in fact do any such thing, perhaps by the end of the year we’ll see them popping up. Some chain called Menchie’s has two locations, with more to come. Yoforia is expanding, and there’s several other options. Not going to say much about it but Pinkberry has been the best tasting out of all I’ve tried….pomegranate froyo + Fruity Pebbles cereal…try it when they open, TRUST ME.
But sometimes, you just wanna make some yogurt at home. This doesn’t always require an ice cream machine: a popsicle mold is a perfectly good way to make frozen yogurt too in the form of yogurt pops. I’ve been going a bit crazy lately making my own stuff, so consider this part one, because the experimentation is definitely not stopping here.

First up, I made blackberry lime frozen yogurt in my ice cream maker. It was okay, for some reason the flavor of the yogurt was stronger than I would have liked because it overpowered everything else. A bit more sugar might solve that, or maybe not eating a couple blackberries first… also if you want to save some for later, add a tablespoon of vodka. It’s not enough to get anyone tipsy obviously, but it will help keep the yogurt from becoming rock solid…believe me.

Blackberry Lime Frozen Yogurt
1 half pint package of blackberries
Juice of half a lime
1/4 cup sugar
2 cups Greek yogurt (I used 2%)

Freeze the container of your ice cream maker for at least 12-24 hours.
Place blackberries in bowl, add lime juice and sugar. Let macerate for at least ten minutes. Then, smash away until they don’t look like berries anymore. Add the yogurt and mix well.
Pour yogurt mixture into ice cream maker and let it run until the yogurt resembles soft serve ice cream. Serve immediately.

Next up, I wanted to make popsicles because I kind of went crazy on frozen yogurt supplies at Trader Joe’s that day. I pretty much winged this, and this should be enough to fill 6 popsicles if you have a mold like this. I am really unsure about how much liquid they hold…you can always just drink the leftover mixture like me.

Pomegranate Lemon Yogurt Pops
2 cups 2% Greek yogurt
6 oz pomegranate juice
Juice of half a lemon
1/4 cup vanilla sugar (add more if you want them sweeter)
2 oz 2% milk
1 tbsp orange liqueur

Combine all ingredients, pour into a popsicle mold and let freeze overnight.

More to come, I have 3 cups of yogurt in my fridge!

For a long time now, nothing is going to taste very good because every single thing I ate for brunch tasted amazing. I have to say it was quite a surprise to get an email inviting me to a brunch at Park 75…I did not realize that it was inside the Four Seasons. I felt so special, and then I counted down the days until Saturday. Believe me, that took awhile because I did next to nothing all week.
Finally, Saturday. I took Joe along because I could bring a guest, and I’m a nice girlfriend. We showed up and met some fellow bloggers in the lounge before everything got started.

First order of business: mimosas on the fifth floor terrace, the location of six square garden plots for the restaurant. Chef Robert Gerstenecker told us all about the gardens: they started out with only two and are hoping to expand. There is everything from peppers to tomatoes to herbs to a hydroponic lettuce garden, as seen above. There is also a bee hive, and a second one is just getting started. The honey along with the vegetables and herbs grown up here are used by the restaurant, from honey butter to salad.

Back inside the restaurant, we sat down at tables and Chef Robert explained what was on tap for our brunch, which included trying several dishes, and then checking out the kitchen, where we would try some dessert.
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