We have just added some great new summer outdoor recipes to inyourkitchen.com including grilled chicken with fresh herbs, garlic and lemon , watermelon and feta skewers , jicama, mango and radish crudite , grilled fruit with maple cinnamon mascarpone cheese , guacamole and a lemonade strawberry sparkling cocktail . These are some of inyourkitchens’ favorite recipes for entertaining outdoors in the summer months. If you have some favorites you want to share, why not get out the video camera this weekend and have your friends film you cooking your favorite grilling recipes. Then all you have to do is simply upload them to inyourkitchen.com for all of us to enjoy!
Don’t forget to checkout Laura Jong’s In Season guide, letting you know what’s fresh, delicious and ready to eat right now. Laura is a produce merchandiser for specialty produce right here in San Diego. Laura also has some great video guides to choosing produce.

So it seems that the world has gone cupcake mad. Cupcakes are hot! Every week there is a new cupcake shop opening, a new flavor to try and a new blog to read. It was of course Sprinkles Cupcakes that Paris Hilton requested among other things when she was released from jail (the final time).
My friend Chimena is cupcake crazy. Last week we baked over 48 vegan cupcakes from her new favorite book Vegan Cupcakes Takeover the World for her daughter Chloe’s 11th birthday. Chimena even chooses cupcakes as the focus of her blog Cupcakes single moms and so much more check it out to read about some of her cupcake adventures.

So when my sister Lynda called me from Ireland two months ago to tell me she is getting married in August talk sooner or later turned to wedding cakes.
Living in another country and only flying home for two weeks makes it difficult enough to be bridesmaid and help plan a wedding. However I would feel kind of weird if someone else made the cake. My Dad always tells the story of my poor Granny baking two tradtional 4 tiered fruitcakes for my parents and my aunts weddings. Everytime she baked a cake and turned her back some neighbor or visiting relative would sit down at the table, pour themselves a cup of tea and cut a nice big slice of fruit cake! Poor Granny would turn around too polite to say anything and start on another cake.
So with time, equipment and fear of baking those traditional 10 ton fruit cakes I have decided to bake a cupcake wedding cake. So far the plan is to make all the gum paste decorations here in San Diego and then outsource the baking of the actual cupcakes to my chef friends in Dublin. What’s a couple of dozen cupcakes between friends?
Today I will take a trip to my local cake decorating store to get some ideas. If you have cupcakes or have experience baking cakes and wedding cakes please give me some advice!!!

just wanted to let you know that Inyourktichen.com just won Website of the Day from ADOBE for May 19th, they even gave us this fun little badge to put on the website.
Big congratulations to the Inyourkitchen design team at Digaworks .
We also have some fun new recipes on the site as promised in partnership with Parade magazine and Parade.com . Fran Carpentier has some great easy grilling recipes that are really fun.
Inspired by Fran’s recipes I am off to the Farmers Market in La Jolla in half an hour to pick up some produce for the BBQ I’m hosting tonight. I got some great feta cheese from an old Greek man last week. It was a little pricy at $10 but well worth it, very creamy and reminded me of the feta cheese I used to buy from giant vats in my local grocery store when I spent a summer in a sleepy little village called Nea Fokea , Greece.
After my shopping spree at the market I definitely think I deserve a few hours lying by the pool and reading my book before my friends come over. I will post some pics tomorrow,

Enjoy your Sunday,
Diane