Filling a Cupcake with Pudding

Cut a small hole in the corner of a pastry or plastic bag; insert a small round tip. Fill with pudding. Push the tip through the top of each cupcake. Squeeze pastry bag to fill cupcake, stopping when filling starts to come out of the hole. Remove excess filling from top of cupcake.

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Tacos, Burritos and Enchiladas: Salsa Chicken Burrito Filling

Jan 31, 2008 Excellent! I used the 'Taco Seasoning I' recipe (on this site) instead of the store packet, and omitted the cumin and chili (it's already in the seasoning). Mixed this with the tomatoe sauce and salsa and poured it onto the chicken in a slow cooker. After shredding the meat, I added a can of refried beans and heated that through in the slow cooker. Put mixture in large burrito style shells, added tomatoe, some more salsa, and cheddar cheese. Wrapped 5 of these and placed in 9 x 13 baking pan, topped with enchilada sauce, green onions, monterey jack and cheddar cheese. Baked at 375F for about 15 minutes, and voila!

—ET 

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Savory Pies: Chinese Steamed Buns with Barbecued Pork Filling

Apr 11, 2008 A decent dish; I'd be willing to cook it again. Although the filling was a tad too sweet, I nevertheless got used to it and ended up liking it more than the filling of some buns I've bought in restaurants. The dough was a little dry, yeasty, and bland, not quite as sweet as most buns, but not really bothersome. Like another reviewer observed, the directions are incorrect. I cut the dough recipe in half without changing the quantity of meat and even then I ended up with a bit more dough than I needed. In step one, the yeast-flour-water mixture never bubbled. In step four, follow the directions and put only two tablespoons of filling in each bun. (I was tempted to put in more. I was wrong.) If you use enough dough in a bun so that you can put in, say, two heaping tablespoons comfortably, the bun will end up uncomfortably large. And you'll also end up with an imbalance between meat and bread in each bite. I also learned that one should make the dough thinner than one thinks. (The dough rises a lot.) But the hardest thing about making buns is getting the dough to be a uniform thickness on all sides. I guess I just need to practice how to make a bun with a good balance of meat and dough everywhere. Following my revised recipe makes two _main course_ servings. If you freeze the buns before steaming, they freeze well. Incidentally, it took me 2.5 hours to cook from start to finish.

—Mark P 

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