Week 14: Sandwiches - BLATs

There are so many great ideas for good sandwiches out there. Mmm I love sandwiches. After a busy weekend, we wanted to make a low key but tasty dinner.  We tossed around the idea of making some french dips, but Andrew brilliantly suggested BLTs. 

When we were standing at the bacon looking for what we wanted, a fabulous butcher came over and offered to season some thick cut bacon straight from his butcher block.  We briefly looked at each other and said "DUH. Yes." We went with the chipotle seasoning and it smelled fantastic. 

Fresh tasty ingredients are the trick.  The lettuce has to crunch, the avocado has to be soft, and the tomatoes have to be juicy.

We bought a nice loaf of artisan bread and it toasted beautifully.  It had a nice crispy edge with a soft warm middle.

I used grapeseed mayo and while I generally take objection to mayo, on toasted bread for BLTs is one of my few exceptions.

Bacon on top of the tomatoes.

A few slices of the avocado.

The lettuce on top to hold it all in.

And you have one amazing sandwich. 

Such an easy quick dinner I don't know why I don't make these more often. 

Week 4 - Frosting/Filling - Chocolate Avocado Cupcakes with Avocado Frosting

I have always made my own frosting. I can't stand the stuff in the can.  But, I have a pretty standard recipe and I don't mess with it very often.  For this week's challenge I'd had designs on doing eclairs or something else fancy, but we have guests in town and it's been a busy week so I chose to go a bit more low key, but new.  I present: Chocolate avocado cupcakes with avocado frosting. 

The avocado in the chocolate cake part is mixed in with the liquid ingredients.

The batter was far thicker than I am accustomed to with cake batter, but I also forgot that I replaced the vanilla extract with scraping out a vanilla bean.  Even so, I don't think the 1 tsp. of vanilla would have changed the consistency that much. 

The recipe called for the muffin tins to be filled most of the way up rather than the normal half full.

I wish I'd filled them up even a bit more, so they would pop up over the cupcake tin, but they cooked up just right and I couldn't wait for them to cool so that I could make the frosting and taste these suckers!

Making the frosting was pretty easy - just mashing the avocado really well (I used a combo of a handheld mixer and then smashing with a spatula against the side of the bowl),  then mixing with vanilla and powdered sugar. The avocado essentially replaces the butter.  In addition to making a new frosting I've never tried, I also busted out my piping bag and got some practice with that.  I am not great at it, but it was pretty and I like how they turned out aesthetically. 

My wonderful in-laws and my wonderful husband were my guinea pigs and humored me by trying my creation.  The verdict was that the cupcake combo was good - not amazing, but good. We all agreed that doing either the chocolate avocado cake or the avocado frosting would be enough - this combo was a bit of overkill.  In the future I'd pair the chocolate avocado cake with a lemon frosting, or a simple buttercream, or perhaps even a whipped cream frosting.  The avocado frosting could be paired with a nice lemon or white cake.  

 It was fun to try out something new.  And it was in no way a bust - there was nary a crumb left, so it was certainly not disgusting. :)