Hello everyone! Today’s BirthMay post is my first cooking adventure – ham, cheese, and croissant cups!

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This is my third annual BirthMay! What is BirthMay, you ask? Well I blog every day in May because it’s my birth month! I started BirthMay in 2017 and did it again in 2018 so I knew I had to do it again this year.

So this year I decided I wanted to learn to cook, and so I bought a cookbook, looked up a few recipes, and decided to finally get started! All the travel at the beginning of the year did push this back but we’re making progress already. (I think.)

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So I got this recipe from Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings Hungry for More cookbook that I bought at Target a few weeks ago. I was going to start with a lunch or dinner but decided on a breakfast items instead. Honestly, my parents are being quite the roadblocks on this adventure because everything I suggested was met with “well, we don’t really eat that kind of food” because Chrissy does take a lot of inspiration from Thai food, as that’s her background. They’re so not adventurous! Anyway, I finally found something that they didn’t cry about so phew!

I picked her croissant bread pudding ham cups recipe. The recipe called for ham, eggs, half-and-half, granulated sugar, vanilla extract, salt, croissants, and berries as an optional side. We already had a lot of this stuff so I just went out the night before to pick up ham, half-and-half, croissants, and berries. I’d originally planned to do half these and half egg-mozzarella ham cups, which is another recipe in her book, but ended up doing the croissant ones because I had a lot of them left over.

Oh, also I couldn’t find the cooking spray (I started before my mom got up and she has little to no order in the kitchen that I could understand) so I used canola oil. I actually used too much so now I know that we don’t need a ton! Chrissy was right about putting the ham in the cup, you do feel silly doing it!

The next bit I sort of rushed through, apparently I was supposed to let the croissant sit in the egg mixture for 15 minutes before putting them in the cups so I should really read the whole recipe before starting because around that time everyone kept coming into the kitchen and distracting me, so I completely missed that trying to hurry through the rest. Oh, I also ended up adding some cheese to the top too just for the fun of it. Either way, it all made it into the cups and eventually was ready for the oven.

I hadn’t started preheating yet so I wouldn’t feel rushed so I started that and while I waited for it to finish doing it’s thing, I cleaned up. I definitely learned that from Hannah Hart from My Drunk Kitchen on YouTube. “Clean as you go!” she would always say and clean as I went I did. Eventually the oven was ready and I put them in!

At this point my mom started making a meal of her own so I’m pretty sure she didn’t think my idea would work out LOL. What a vote of confidence.

About 15 minutes later, they were done! They started looking golden brown on the top so I figured they were ready and I turned off the oven. However, when I bake I always leave the cake or cupcakes or whatever it is in the oven for a bit after so that it will fully finish and won’t be so hot when I go to take out the items. It doesn’t look like that works as well for cooking because the tops of the ham got burnt! Or maybe they already were and I didn’t notice, who knows. But I got them out, served them on the plates, added the berries, and put them on the table. Here they are, served and ready to go!

TADA! You can see the poor ham got quite burnt haha but overall they were pretty yummy! I think they were a little more bland than what we’re used to but that might be because I didn’t really let it sit maybe? I also think I should have added more cheese because I could barely tell it was in there. Now, the recipe is meant to make 6 but I had my smaller cupcake tins rather than the larger muffin ones so I had plenty to work with actually. I mean, some were more full than others but overall it wasn’t bad! I was glad my mom was around to stop me from making more egg mixture and filling the cups because I didn’t expect them to rise as much as they did. They would have overflowed for sure if I had made more and tried to fill them. Phew!

As for how they tasted? Well I mentioned I used too much oil earlier so that made them very oily. Otherwise they were pretty good! Like I said, a little bland so I would want to add tomatoes or something more fresh next time for sure. Maybe that’s what the berries are meant to be for though and I ate them at the start! Either way, I think this was mostly a success since my parents did say they liked them.

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So that’s the first cooking adventure all done! I wonder what I’ll make next time. Maybe I’ll check out something from Pinterest or something!

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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