Life and Lemons

"Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!"

-Cave Johnson in Portal 2 

Surely, words we can all live by. Don't look at me like that. I'm allowed to quote video games.

Well, I have some recipes for the week but they both require a little background.
First off, I posted a little while ago about an upcoming hipster-themed party. The result, you ask? These babies:

Le Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

My only regret is that you can't have a peek at the awesome lemon custard filling. I was far too interested in eating them at this point and had lost patience. So the camera was put away and I spent the rest of my evening on the sofa munching away. I generally aim for humbleness when it comes to my baking but these were pretty damn good. And I must give credit to my friend who helped me make these- she's also a baker and completely nailed the lemon custard. 

For the cupcake recipe we used Martha's Lemon Meringue Cupcake Recipe as well as her Lemon Curd Recipe for the filling.

However, we used our own recipe for the frosting since I, in my infinite silliness, left the corn syrup behind. The meringue frosting was a very simple mixture of egg whites and sugar, beat to death (aka stiff peaks), lopped on the top of the cupcakes and stuck in the broiler for a few minutes. You will literally see the tips brown before your eyes so make sure you're watching them carefully- 500+ degrees will do that. 

We had buckets of fun trying to eat these without getting the meringue on our stick-on mustaches.

This second recipe- if you can call it a recipe- was inspired by my terrible morning. I had a package of Shin Ramyun sitting in my cupboard since I moved in and I was saving it for a rainy day or for whenever I needed some spicy comfort food. Today happened to be a rainy day and a day in need of comfort food so out came the emergency ramyun.

shin ramyun 4ever <3

I won't go into details about the morning but it involved rain, auto insurance claims, bumper-to-bumper traffic, missed meetings and general unhappiness. So, I'm not just going to post a picture of a bag of noodles and call it a recipe. That would be super lame. I'm going to post a picture of how I transformed these noodles into a more balanced - but still ridiculously high in sodium- meal.

A masterpiece

Ramen my way:

Step 1. Boil water.

Step 2. Add spicy packet.

Step 3. Add noodles and cook for 3 minutes.

Step 4. Find vegetables in your fridge (pictured: spinach and mushrooms). Throw those in. Cook.

Step 5. By far the most important step. Crack an egg into the pot. Cook until still squishy/slightly runny.

Step 6. Shovel into mouth with chopsticks until full belly is achieved.

Honestly, after running and ramen I feel heaps better and ready to tackle anything.