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?

Stuff Nigel Says

Yesterday I asked Nigel what they talked about in "chapel" at preschool. He said, "Oh nothing much, just the fruit and the spearmint."

Shamless Plug

Did you know you can listen to me talk about RVA with the editor of Cleveland magazine? Well, you can. Check out this podcast. I also made my debut onto the Texas media scene this month with this Q&A in Fort Worth Child magazine.

Friday Cooking: Chocolate Fudge Cake

When the librarian showed me where the kids' cookbooks are, she had no idea she was creating an obsessive monster! This week we picked out four cookbooks: two about healthy snacks and meals, one with ethnic vegetarian dishes, and one that talks about how chocolate comes about. This week's recipe comes from Mom and Me Cookbook: Have fun in the kitchen by Annabel Karmel. I got this book because we own a baby cookbook by the author; it was really helpful when I made Nigel's baby food and wasn't sure about quantities, safety, etc.

Nigel chose this recipe from all of those books. I even brought out the books we own to try and sway him to something else. No dice. Thus, Chocolate Fudge Cake was born. While the recipes in this book aren't as healthy as her baby cookbook, the directions were simple and Nigel could follow along with the pictures. He really enjoyed beating the graham crackers with his mini rolling pin and dumping all of the ingredients into the bowl. The "cake" is a little more sticky than I thought it'd be, (I guess the syrup keeps it from turning into a block.) but it was still pretty tasty. It kind of reminded me of the Sweet Dream Pie.

Ingredients
8oz graham crackers
5oz semisweet chocolate (we used dark)
5oz milk chocolate
1/2 cup golden syrup or light corn syrup
1 stick of butter
1/2 cup raisins (we used dried cranberries and dried cherries)
3/4 chopped dried apricots

Directions
Line an 8-inch square pan with plastic wrap. Break the graham crackers into small pieces. Melt the chocolate, butter and syrup in a double boiler. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the crackers and fruit. Spoon the mixture in the pan and press down. Cool for 1-2 hours and cut.

We DON'T Own A Home!

Seven years and one month ago, Tim and I started our lives over together: as newlyweds in a new house (and me with a new job). Today, we closed on the sale of that same house, and we're essentially starting our lives over again: in a new state, with an awesome son (and a new job — with a recent promotion — for Tim).

It's a little bittersweet. We have so many lovely memories in that home... me babysitting the previous owners' kids while they still lived there, two graduations for Tim, dinners with friends, Nigel's first steps, Nigel's first words. But considering it had been on the market for more than a year, we'd said goodbye to it a long time ago. We are just so happy to have that monkey off our back. Who would have thought we'd be more excited about selling a house than we were about buying one?! We've got some recovering to do, but things could be a lot worse. A huge thanks to our awesome Realtor and friend, Anne Soffee. Anne made a lot of personal sacrifices for us this past year, and we're very grateful. And thanks also go out to everyone who checked in on our house, mowed the lawn, brought in the mail, etc., especially my mom and brothers. Another chapter begins!

Friday Cooking: Cereal Bars

How many people does it take to make cereal bars? Three! One to dump in the dry ingredients (6 cups of cereal, 1/2 cup of dried cranberries and a few chocolate chips); one to melt the 3 tablespoons of butter and a bag of mini marshmallows ... and wash the pot of melted marshmallows; and one to put some muscle into stirring the super sticky mess and spread it into a pan. For such a simple recipe (from the library book Peanut Butter and Jelly Sushi ), these bars were a bit of a pain. And ours certainly don't look like the neat pressed bars in the book. The sticky cereal kept sticking to the spoon. I guess some cooking spray would have helped with that, but I don't use that stuff so we don't have any. Oh well, Nigel enjoyed picking out the different types of cereal (Grape Nuts, wheat chex, Cheerios and blueberry Kashi flakes) and watching the marshmallows melt.

Balloon Bust

When Tim moved down last fall, he told us about the Plano Balloon Festival. I've been looking forward to it all year! Unfortunately, this year was a bit of a bust. Citing weather concerns, the balloons didn't launch at all during the entire 3-day event. And by the time we left around 7:45 on Saturday, only 2 balloon were inflated for the glow portion.

Nevertheless, fun was still had. We enjoyed a picnic with Uncle Dan and Aunt Nancy, and Nigel had fun in the kids' area. Maybe next year we'll see some balloons take flight.