Lanna Cafe Coffee and Tiramisu Cupcakes

If you love coffee so much, what's the best way to share with the world how much you love it? You could do what our friend Bryan Acosta recently did, and that means starting up your own coffee roasting company. Better yet, Bryan combined his love for coffee with his passion for the villages of Thailand and came up with Lanna Cafe.

Lanna Cafe is a non-profit company dedicated to...

"...raising awareness for the needs of those living in the Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand. Lanna Cafe uses proceeds from coffee sales and donations to sponsor a wide variety of holistic and sustainable community development projects. Our goal is to assist resource-poor hill tribes by increasing their social and economic opportunities through the funding and facilitation of culturally appropriate activities."

Justin thinks this is {literally} the best coffee he has ever had, so I decided to marry together Lanna Cafe coffee with cupcake into a delectable Tiramisu treat! Last night we met up with Bryan and his wife Carly at Lanna Cafe's booth at the River Park farmer's market. They each got to try their own Tiramisu cupcake and the census was pretty positive!

I was joking around with Carly, telling her that this was going to be the picture that comes up on my phone whenever she calls me from now on!


How to make these yummy little things...

{Step 1}: Make vanilla cupcakes. After cupcakes have cooled, use a butter knife to cut out a cone from the top.

{Step 2}: Mix 1/3 cup of Lanna Coffee with 1/3 cup Kalua. Pour 2 teaspoons {or more!} of this mixture into each cupcake. Dip the cut-out cone into this mixture too and then set aside.

{Step 3}: Fill and top each cupcake with vanilla buttercream.

{Step 4}: Top with the coffee/Kalua-soaked cut-out cone.

{Step 5}: Add more vanilla buttercream and a Lanna Cafe coffee bean or chocolate chip on top.

{Step 6}: Dust with cocoa powder and cinnamon. Enjoy with your favorite cup of Lanna Cafe coffee!

Want to get your hands on your own bag of delicious Lanna Cafe coffee? Of course you do! Choose from light and smooth Classic Roast, medium-bodied Lanna Roast, or rich and full Premium Roast.

~ Visit Lanna Cafe's website at www.lannacafeusa.org to order
- OR -
~ Visit the Lanna Cafe booth Tuesdays 5-9 pm at the River Park farmer's market

How Cupcakes Can Stop Al-Qaida

You gotta love these British spies' sense of humor! I see cupcakes bringing world peace very soon. I wonder if anyone actually made the recipe...

British spies swap cupcake recipes into al-Qaida magazine

By Laura Rozen | The Envoy – Fri, Jun 3, 2011



Readers of al-Qaida's "Inspire" magazine got a tasty surprise thanks to British intelligence operatives: recipes, courtesy of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," for mini cupcakes.

British spies reportedly hacked into the website of the English-language quarterly published by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula last year, swapping in the cupcake recipes to replace the bombmaking how-to guides set to appear in an article entitled "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."

"When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to 'Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom' by 'The AQ Chef' they were greeted with garbled computer code," the Daily Telegraph's Duncan Gardham writes.

"The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for 'The Best Cupcakes in America' published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show," Gardham wrote.

"The little cupcake is big again," the cupcake feature said. "Self-contained and satisfying, it summons memories of childhood even as it's updated for today's sweet-toothed hipsters."

"We're increasingly using cybertools as part of our work," a British government official--speaking anonymously, of course--told the Associated Press, as he confirmed the hacking operation.

The spy-hacking operation was reportedly conducted by officials with Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI6, and eavesdropping agency, the GCHQ. Since the whole operation was kept under wraps, one can only surmise that the MI6 agents involved were making an additional political statement about the extremely patriarchal outlook of militant Islam by selecting a cupcake recipe endorsed by a well-known lesbian talk show host

"Inspire" magazine, which began publishing last year, is reportedly the editorial brain-child of the Yemen-based, New Mexican-born Islamist radical Anwar al-Awlaki, who has become a propaganda chief for al-Qaida's Yemeni offshoot.

Several recent suspects in terrorist attacks targeting the United States have reportedly been inspired by the English-speaking al-Awlaki. Among them: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the wealthy, Nigerian-born London university student who was charged with attempting to blow up a Christmas Day 2009 flight to Detroit; and Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 fellow soldiers in a 2009 attack on troops at Ft. Hood, Texas.

The United States reportedly targeted al-Awlaki for a drone attack last month but missed.

Chocolate and Vanilla say "Thank You"!

My sweet Aunt Joann {my hubby's dad's cousin's wife...yeah, we'll just go with "Aunt" on that one!} is so appreciative of all the excellent care she has been getting from her therapists and caregivers that she wanted to tell them "thank you" the best way anyone can...with cupcakes!

These are vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and candy pearls, and chocolate cupcakes double-dipped in chocolate ganache and topped with strawberries and chocolate ganache on the tippy top.