Christmas was a few days ago, and I received exactly what I asked for: a DSLR camera! I'm super, super, super ridiculously excited to take photos with it and shoot videos, and I got the chance to do some cool, casual, super-not-cliche food photography on Christmas!
The day started off with some cupcakes my brother baked and I frosted. Yeah, okay, cupcakes for breakfast. At least there's fruit on top?
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| Cake mix with chocolate frosting, garnished with a single raspberry |
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| Honestly, presentation is half the battle. The battle of DELICIOUSNESS. |
My mom is weirdly really into fake flowers. I think she likes the look of flowers but doesn't like how high-maintenance they are. So we've got a bunch of bouquets of garishly-colored fake plastic flowers, and I had some fun playing around with their colors and textures. They almost look real.
I made baked brie for the first time in my LIFE, and it turned out amazingly. A billion calories worth of pure, moist, heart-aching deliciousness. I took about a thousand photos of it because I was just so goddamn proud.
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| Blackberry and raspberry compote on a wheel of baked brie |
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| Gotta love those action shots. |
My dad made caprese, which was equally delicious. My brother and my dad and I ended up talking about Taylor Swift at dinner and how she's basically the greatest poet of my generation. We played "Blank Space" for my mom who wasn't really that into it.
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| Mozarella, tomatoes, basil leaves, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (i.e. a classic) |
My brother, who's a Food Network fanatic, took it upon himself to whip up these amazing honey mustard pork chops. They were baked to perfection - not too chewy or hard, and certainly not undercooked.
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| A little garnish of rosemary can go a long way. |
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| I told them to pose nicely and this is what they came up with. |
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| A plate full of goodness (caprese, baked brie, honey mustard pork chops, and some feta mashed potatoes in the back) |
For dessert, I decided to make this weird egg yolk chocolate drink. Chocolate zapatista (not really, though the second word did begin with a z).
It was bizarre and pasty and I don't think we had the right cocoa powder, so I ended up adding a bunch of milk and baking chocolate and cinnamon, and it basically turned out like a really thick, cinnamon-y, grainy fondue thing. Nobody really liked it, but we all ate/drank it anyway. My dad actually finished it within approximately 23 seconds. And as he was sitting there, hungrily staring at our glasses, watching my mom complain about how much cinnamon was in the drink, he literally bit into the cinnamon stick. I guess he didn't realize that cinnamon sticks are mostly useless and taste like tree.
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| At least it looked pretty...sigh |
I recently bought myself Hulu Plus (because obviously Netflix is for dweebz), and one of the first films I watched was Fanny and Alexander. So of course I couldn't help but compare my dining room snapshots to the Christmas dinner scenes in the film - everything was red and glittery and shiny, and of course our family isn't as rife with intergenerational marriage conflicts and complex family dynamics (considering the nuclear is only four people, including myself), and of course we aren't as lavishily rich, but I think my mom, a comparable matriarch, decorated the dining room sort of similarly.
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