Friday Baking Backlog

I'm so lazy with blogging and downloading photos these days, so here's several weeks worth of baking....

Several weeks ago, Nigel and I made chocolate mousse from one of our standard kids' cookbooks. We beat 2 cups of heavy cream, melted 1 1/4 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and combined the cream and chocolate. The picture in the book showed the mousse in small coffee cups, so we put ours into our tiny ones from Ethiopia.

Speaking of Ethiopia, that same week I made Ethiopian black-eyed pea cakes from a kids' ethnic vegetarian cookbook. It was so simple:

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups dried black-eyed peas
1 sweet potato
1 onion, diced
small chili (optional; I used 1/2 of a seeded jalapeno)

Directions
Soak peas over night in water, covered. Drain away water and rub peas between your hands to loosen the skins. Cover the peas with water again and drain away the water and skins. Peel the sweet potato, cut it into pieces and boil until tender. Add the onion to a food processor and pulse. Do the same with the potato, peas and chili. (I had to do this in batches because it seems like my food processor was too small.) Flour a work surface. Make flat patties using 2 tablespoons of the bean mixture. Place the patties onto the floured surface (I turned them over once so each side would have flour). Fry in olive oil (I added a small bit of butter, too) until brown and flip to brown the other side. Eat immediately.

Conclusion
These cakes are pretty much bean burgers, sans bread or any other binder. Next time I'll add some salt, though. Tim suggested that they could be a good sandwich base... perhaps with bacon and avocado.

The following week, Nigel and I made Jello shapes. Or at least we attempted to. Being the non-baking person I am, I halved the mixture between 2 shallow dishes, making the Jello too thin for cookie cutters. No worries, though. Nigel still enjoyed stirring up the mixture and eating the jiggly goo.

The week after that, our dear friend Amy invited us over to make Halloween cookies with her son, James. The boys rolled out the dough, cut out the shapes and decorated the cookies. Yummy fun!

And finally, this week, Nigel and I made a lemon cake for Tim. My mom makes super delicious tiny lemon cakes during the holidays, so this was my lazy attempt to duplicate. Instead of lots of tiny cakes, Nigel and I made one loaf-shaped cake. Next, we created a glaze from powdered sugar, lemon juice and orange juice. Nigel liked rolling the lemons on the counter before I squeezed the juice.

What have you been baking?