From the monthly archives: May 2010
for all of you out there whose cakes fell, brownies burnt, and cookies spread so thin you couldn’t even differentiate where one ended and the other began…. it happens to the best of us! my friend liz sent me a weight watchers recipe for pink lemonade cookies last year and i never got around to making them, so i had the brilliant idea to make them for the bbq of my friend shannon who is on weight watchers and is also a mary kay lady (they serve pink lemonade at their events)– how perfect would that be to give her a custom treat she could enjoy?
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what do you get when you combine a kook and a cook? apparently, raisinets bars. you have heard me talk about my friend ed from work, well i forgot to mention that there are in fact TWO awesome, hilarious eds at work who enjoy my baked goods. presumably as a joke, the other ed suggested that i make a raisinets casserole or something to that effect yesterday. today, he suggested a raisinets tostada, or loaf. yes, this all sounds pretty crazy, but it inspired me to make an actual raisinets treat. i did a quick search of the internet and although i found some cookie recipes, ended up going with oatmeal bars. this is another one of those treats that you can convince yourself that it is healthy– dark chocolate and raisins provide antioxidants, oatmeal provides whole grains, vitamins & minerals, fiber, etc. sure, they have butter and sugar, but we can look past that, can’t we? we all have flaws.
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they say better late than never, and this statement applies twice-over when it comes to baked goods! may was full of birthdays. i am not exaggerating here… my dad was the first, brother in law the 2nd, childhood friend the 3rd, good friend/ex-boyfriend the 4th, step brother the 5th, so on and so forth… there were about four days without any birthdays i was aware of. i know i wanted to bake for jeremy (the good friend/ex)’s birthday, but a ton of stuff came up and i wanted to find the perfect recipe. we used to sit down and devour entire packages of peanut butter chocolate cookies, so i wanted to head in that direction, but i did not want to repeat cookies i have made him before, nor send him a dud.
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i typically post about things i made from scratch, but every so often i like to share a product review since–let’s face it– we all use mixes sometimes. about a year and a half ago my doctor put me on a sugar free diet. that’s right…no sugar, no honey, no molasses, no sucanat, nothing. okay, except a little bit of fruit (thankfully!!). for someone like me this sounded like a death sentence! some of you out there may be thinking that it isn’t a big deal since there are some great tasting sugar-free alternatives out there, that diabetics and dieters eat these products all the time; unfortunately, as i have found out, my body and artificial sweeteners do not get along. at all.
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every so often i try to find a chocolate chip cookie recipe that i like better than the standard tollhouse one (see: Exhibit A), but i usually end up sticking with my old standby. this time, it was a recipe on the back of the flour package that i was trying. since i had a vegan potluck to go to and i enjoy providing a dairy-free alternative to my lactard friends at work, i decided to make a dairy-free, egg-free version. but then, i had an idea! i have made plenty of regular cookies, and plenty of vegan cookies, but i don’t believe i have ever made them side by side to compare how the same recipe turns out with the replacements– until now.
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my friend sheryl, who i made the depression cake for, was planning her grad school graduation party, and in the discussions I agreed to make her a vegan cake. Initially, she requested a banana cake with peanut butter and chocolate, however I was unable to find a banana cake recipe that would be perfect for a party (people tend to be picky about banana things), so after a trial run of banana versus chocolate, we decided that her cake would be chocolate and peanut butter. i did not want to just use the same recipe that i used for her birthday cake, so i tried out a similar one that got great reviews. the samples were devoured, and we had a winner on our hands!
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As I have mentioned before, my mom and stepdad live in Nashville, which was devastated by a flood a little over a week ago. Thankfully, their house was not damaged, but the community was drastically affected.
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it was birthday time on my team again– this time for kevin, who runs eleet music, so the logical cake choice for him was music-related. i considered one that was shaped like a musical note, but i realized that since i don’t have a pan shaped like that i would be cutting from a half-sheet, which would result in less cake. and around here, we like more cake! i went with what i thought was the next best thing, decorating a cake with a bar of “happy birthday to you”. when i was looking up the sheet music, i found that no two were identical (different keys, etc), so i just picked one. turns out that i still can’t decorate a cake very well…but it’s the thought that counts. right…? i hope so.
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angel food sounds innocent enough, right? you wouldn’t dare think that angel food could do wrong…but don’t let it fool you! this recipe (temporarily) broke stan, my kitchenaid mixer!!! i have done plenty of egg-white whipping, but for some reason this time everything went haywire– seemed like the motor was burning and the pin that holds the head to the base popped out. i gave up for the night and decided to try again after a few days. it seemed that in order to get the holes to line up exactly i needed a third hand, and well, i only have two. thankfully. even more thankfully, i am a yogi, so i was able to use my shin to prop up the head while using my hands to line up the pin and slide it in. i would have paid to be an on-looker.
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