Fall Tasting Round-Up

So this week has been full of recipes, crafts, favors and coffee from our Fall tasting event! What a fun week it's been. Posting, social sharing and hearing from all of you. I have a feeling this is the start of something special.

Here's a round-up of all our postings this week so you can find them in one place. Please continue to visit these lovely ladies blogs (My Life at Playtime and A Simply Raw Life) and come back here for more coffee, lots of baking along with local and travel adventures.

The Coffee Tasting

Hosting a Coffee Tasting 

The Savory

Black Rice Salad with Sweet Potato, Kale and Avocado

Goat Cheese, Honey, Rosemary and Pine Nuts Crostini 

Proscuitto, Manchego Cheese, Fig Jam Crostini 

 The Sweet

Pumpkin Muffins with Cream Cheese Frosting

Double Chocolate Cookie Dough Tartelettes

Acorn Shaped Sugar Cookies

Dark Chocolate Cups with Hemp Seeds 

Raw Apple Pie Crumble

The DIY

Coconut Vanilla Body Butter

Painted Pine Cone Garland

Products Featured

Minted, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Artisana Foods, Manitoba Harvest, Bake It Pretty and Navitas Naturals. You all made it for a fantastic evening. Hope to work with you all again in the future. Enjoy!

Pumpkin Muffins + Cream Cheese Frosting

Can you just stand all this delicious food and recipe's we've been serving you this week.

Now who doesn't like cream cheese frosting and pumpkin muffins? Don't tell me if you do. These were some tasty morsels made for our Fall tasting. I was there the night before the event while she was making these. The whole house smelled amazing and her kids kept asking to eat them. Always a good sign. So hop on over to Deborah's blog to read about how to make these pumpkin cream cheese goodies at My Life at Playtime.

Enjoy! #mylifesimplysweet 

Dark Chocolate Cups + Double Chocolate Tartelettes

We've got chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. Go to A Simply Raw Life, she has two amazing recipes for these chocolate delicacies. I partook of both during our Fall tasting event. I am really craving these treats right now, they would be SOOOO good with a cup of coffee.

Above image is the Double Chocolate Cookie Dough Tartelettes with Chocolate Frosting. I know I had you at "Cookie Dough."  Felicia did an awesome demo at our event of how to make these, super easy and really, really good desserts.

Dark Chocolate Cups with Hemp Seeds  I think besides the chocolate I'm kind of addicted to the Hemp seeds, they are really good, nutty and filling. To me the taste like a cross between a sunflower seed and sesame seeds.

Both these amazing chocolate desserts were made possible by products from Artisana Foods, Manitoba Harvest and Navitas Naturals.  Thanks to them for providing the goods, we loved them all.

Enjoy these great recipes!  #mylifesimplysweet

Proscuitto + Goat Cheese Crostini's

What to make for the Fall tasting event? I had Proscuitto, figs and cheese on my mind, so that's what was up first. I had one request from Deborah "Goat Cheese and Honey things".  It's my fall back easy appetizer recipe that I make all the time. I might start doing a twist on it, I saw some good ideas the other day that I'll try to incorporate. 

Image above courtesy of Deborah from My Life At Playtime

For these recipe's here's the start:

1. LaBrea Bakery baguette - this is the one I use, it's the perfect texture. If you happen to live in France I'm sure you can find some amazing baguettes. But here in L.A. I found this to be my favorite. Plus it's available in every major grocery store.

2. Slice these bad boys on the diagonal, layer slices on a cookie sheet, drizzle with olive oil and toast for about 10 minutes on 425 F. I like them crunchy, so I turn them over and toast for another 5 minutes.

Now you can layer just about anything you want on these toasted slices [Crostini]

Proscuitto, Fig Jam, Manchego Cheese Recipe

Ingredients in the order below:

Fig Jam [buy a high quality jam and schmear it on the crostini]

Manchego Cheese [slice thinly, layer over fig jam]

Proscuitto [good quality thinly sliced, tear the pieces into smaller bites. This makes it easier when you take a bite into the bread all the meat doesn't come off at once. ]

Super easy to do and then arrange on a nice serving platter. I choose a big ole slab of cut tree trunk, it just made it festive and Fall. 

Goat Cheese & Honey Crostini

Ingredients in the order below: 

Goat Cheese [Room temperature, schmear it on each crostini] 

Honey [drizzle over goat cheese]

Fresh Rosemary [finely chop]  

Toasted Pine Nuts [I buy raw and lightly toast them in a cast iron skillet on the oven top]

Serve on a pretty platter and your all done!! 

Image above courtesy of Deborah from My Life At Playtime

Enjoy! #mylifesimplesweet

Coconut Vanilla Body Butters

One of the lovely gifts we sent home with everyone at our event were these Coconut Vanilla Body Butters. Take a look at how easy they are to make on Deborah's blog at My Life at Playtime.  #mylifesimplysweet

Coffee Tasting #mylifesimplysweet

For our first Fall tasting event we decided we would do a coffee tasting. Stumptown Coffee Roasters gladly supplied a few of their amazing coffees for the tasting. If you haven't checked them out here in L.A. they just opened a store in Downtown, see my visit here. You'll love their coffee and the cool vibe of the place.

Mind you this was my first ever coffee tasting, which is surprising considering how much I love it. I asked around at local coffee roasters for the best way to go about this. Cupping is the method that most are doing, it's really for the experts. So I decided to use a French Press method. This way it's something that everyone can easily duplicate. I borrowed and bought a few French Presses for the occasion.

As I didn't want to make this too formal and stop the party flow, we discreetly mentioned to everyone that it was time do to the tasting if they were interested. We had an even mix of men and women who participated.  I supplied the coffee mugs from Anthropologie and typed up the instructions as follows: 

Tasting Instructions 

Step 1: Take a Cup and Piece of Paper

Step 2: Pour a little Coffee & Taste

Step 3: Write Down Notes Next to # 

Step 4: Pick Your Favorite

Step 5: Revelation of Brand (End of Night) 

Before the party I prepared the notes by staining this cute paper from Anna Rifle Paper Co. purchased from Anthropologie with a few coffee cup marks. Funny thing happened at the party a few of my friends sorted thru the papers to find a clean one, finally realizing that I purposely stained them. Oh I love you guys!

The other thing I did was make this a blind coffee tasting. I put #'s on all the French Presses and put the coffee in Paper Bags all numbered as well. This way if anyone moved a pot of coffee around we still knew which brand it was.  All together I had 7 coffee's to taste. In the future I think I'd pick 5 at the most. 

Here's the set-up: 

The last photo is the reveal. Gather everyone who tasted the coffee and made notes. One by one reveal what brand is in the bag. You can read a few coffee notes from the tasters and any notes you have from the brands yourself. It's up to you how formal you want this to be.

One of the great things during the tasting is it really stimulated conversation between everyone. It wasn't as easy as I thought to come up with descriptive words on what you were tasting. Maybe next time I'll put some adjectives or teaser words around to help that out. Maybe notes from the coffee roasters.

Another thing I learned, is you need something to cleanse your palate. Water maybe, well I had Acorn shaped sugar cookies to put out. Which warranted one comment on Coffee #6 "Good with Cookies."  Hmmm?

What brands of coffee did I use?  Los Angeles has quite a coffee scene these days with a few local coffee roasters and the newly opened Stumptown Coffee, based in Portland. My suggestion is use local coffee roasters and brands, make it easy for your guest to go out and buy their favorites.

So here's what we tasted and there was no clear winner. I expected that, it's like wine, it's what taste good to you.

#1 Handsome Coffee Roasters - Cristobal Fernandez

#2 Stumptown Coffee Roasters - Hair Bender

#3 Intelligentsia - Organic La Perla Oaxaca Mexico

#4 Handsome Coffee Roasters - Los Girasoles

#5 Groundwork - Black Gold

#6 Folgers (I had to throw in a basic less booszchee brand) 

#7 Stumptown Coffee Roasters - Holler Mountain

Throw in a basic coffee that you can get at your local grocery store. This makes for a fun evening and teasing. My fellow coffee snob and occasional blogger Roger happened to pick Folgers and well we can't stop teasing the poor man. Here's his notes:

We couldn't let people leave without trying Stumptown Coffee who was so kind as to supply us a few bags of coffee for the tasting. This meant we sent everyone home with a bag of beans. #mylifesimplysweet

My Life Simply Sweet

This past weekend two of my fellow bloggers and Alt Summit attendees planned a Fall tasting event called My Life Simply Sweet. This week we will be sharing all the festivities from the event, which included our first ever Coffee tasting with Stumptown Coffee Roasters as our sponsor mixed in with a few local roasters in the L.A. area that I gathered up. You'll also see a recipe for another easy appetizer, as seen below.

Now let me introduce you to these ladies, first up is Felicia, a wife and mom of one, from A Simply Raw Life. Felicia features wonderful raw food recipes from smoothies to desserts to just about anything you can think of in the raw food category, and let me tell you her food is delicious. This week she'll be sharing her recipe's made from the great sponsors and products of Artisana Foods, Manitoba Harvest and Navitas Naturals. Check out her blog this week for those post and make sure you click on the links for these goodies: Green Smoothies and Raw Chocolate Tartelettes.

Deborah from My Life at Playtime is a wife and mom of 3, who shares all her family adventures, art lessons, diy decor and handmade goodies. She lent her lovely home for this event and will be sharing a few posts sponsored by Minted and Bake It Pretty. You'll get to see the details on how to make the garland and body butter below. She might even share her first time making cream cheese frosting for her pumpkin muffins.

Together with It Sweet & Savory we hosted this lovely event we called My Life Simply Sweet, get it? It's perfect for us. Check out our hashtag on Instagram and just about every other social network this week as we share the details #mylifesimplysweet.

And doesn't that table garland below just scream Fall, look for that this week on Deborah's blog.

Image above courtesy of Deborah.