Cake # 17 Easter Cake

Since tomorrow is my birthday and Ted's annual family Easter party, I decided to make my cake today so I could either bring it to the Easter party tomorrow, or have it for our own Easter at my house on Sunday. Technically this cake is number thirty-three in the recipe book, but because it is literally called "Easter Cake", I thought it would be appropriate to switch up the order a bit. This cake is ridiculous in cost, in effort, and in time. I suggest that if you ever want to try this cake that you set aside at least four hours to work on it, and that you plan out in advance where to get your ingredients from.  For starters, this cake asked for apple pie spice, but four grocery stores later I decided to make my own apple pie spice, which is four teaspoons ground cinnamon, two teaspoons ground nutmeg, and one teaspoon ground cardamom. Secondly, this cake needed two whole pounds of Marzipan. Now, don't get my wrong, I realize had I walked into Cake Cottage my life would have been much easier because they would have Marzipan on supply, but it is far away from Bel Air, and I had to be difficult. So, this was also a part of the disaster that was the four grocery store Easter sugar dough hunt. So many store clerks, and my mother as well, thought that Marzipan was a cheese (I think they were thinking of Mascarpone), and after spending an enormous amount of time in the cheese aisle and the baking aisle, finally a Safeway clerk found some for me in the very back behind icing. They only had a pound and a half of Marzipan, which was five boxes at eight dollars a box; I was not happy but it would have to do. I cleaned the store out of Marzipan. By the time I got home and rolled out the dough, I had lost another half pound of Marzipan, what I had bought from the store was stale.

The cake also required flour, baking powder, butter, light brown sugar, eggs, almond extract, milk, ground almonds, mixed dried fruit, and apricot jelly - in ingredients I did not have alone, this cake cost well over sixty dollars, the real question is will it taste like a sixty dollar cake?  Besides the expense, this cake takes an hour and twenty-five minutes to bake, then thirty more minutes in the pan to bake after it is out of the oven, then another five minutes in the oven, this time to broil with the Marzipan topping. The Marzipan had to be rolled out, and braided, and then brushed with egg whites, like I said, and time-consuming, and effort-taking cake.

Here is what the book's picture looks like:

Here is what my cake looks like:

Fortunately, Ted and I are finally on spring break, so we had time today to work. This hectic is really symbolic of a very hectic week and weekend to come. It started Wednesday, once school let out Ted and I went grocery shopping for all of our Easter dinner supplies. Then Thursday, we got our house cleaned,  took the dog to get a bath and had his nails grinded, weeded our garden, and did laundry. But then, disaster hit. I debated whether or not to even write this because it solidifies what happened, and that is scary to me. Ted had left to go to the Orioles game and I was playing with Evie. We were in her room, and Evie was getting bored and she wanted to play out in the living room, so I opened her door to let her out, and turned around to through her last toy back in its bin, and then I heard a crash. And then the scream. In the ten seconds it took me to chuck the toy in the bin, Evie had fallen down the stairs. How could I be so stupid? I didn't even remember that I had the basement door open from doing the laundry. I didn't see her fall, I wasn't there to catch her, how could she get down there so fast? I seemed to react in slow-motion everything seemed unreal, like walking through water, and at the very same time, by some trick of its own, time skipped ahead and there I had Evie in my arms, holding her running her back up the stairs, checking her for injury, but also too afraid to check. I checked her mouth first, no blood, then her head, no bumps, then I put her down on the floor and like a rocket she took off and began to run. She was okay. She was giggling a few seconds later. I wasn't. I checked for a million other things, I called Ted, I called my mom, I called Ted's mom, I called the on-call nurse. Everything was okay, but it could have been so much worse.

Whether you believe in God, or the spirits of your loved ones, or luck, or just the resilience of babies, I am thankful for all of those things. I know that there are so many more accidents to come, but that doesn't make any of them any easier, and when I checked my daughter every twenty minutes last night and woke her from her sleep, each time I thanked the universe for her life. And this morning, when Evie began to crawl into the dishwasher, I thanked the air for giving me the patience and the chance to watch this curious little monkey get into everything and to help her be safe.

Hopefully next week things will cool down with some Prune and Walnut Swirl cake.

Cake # 16 Applesauce Cake

What a day! It is 9:30pm and I have just finished baking my cake. I know that I had all of your buttocks at the edge of your seats waiting in anticipation for this week's cakeabration! But, as someone always said (because someone always has to say something, don't they?) good things come to those who wait. The story: When Ted and I got our rebate check this year we had a plan. First, one thousand towards our discover card. Second, one thousand in savings for Evalyn's daycare, prom dress, college, wedding, you name it fund. Third, one thousand to pay off our new bedroom furniture. Fourth, one thousand to paint my mustang purple, fix the dent, and get a new stereo (turns out we had no idea how much that would cost). Finally, one thousand for new carpet in both our bedroom and our computer room. (If you've been calculating you will have discovered that we received five thousand in tax returns this year). The discover card, Evalyn's savings, and our bedroom furniture was easy, check, check, and check. (Please tell my I'm not the only one that finds that punny.) My 'stang, well that is another story, turns out a paint job is triple the amount we want to spend, so we haven't moved forward in that purchase, but we are considering getting a new stereo and maybe fixing the dent at least. In the meantime, my scheming mind had no trouble deciding where the left over money from the foiled car plan would go. Naturally, if you get new carpet, you should paint.

So for the past three weeks Ted and I have been painting our bedroom and the computer room. Do not put a paint brush in my hands. Once I paint one room, though I hate painting, I want to paint every room. I begin to analyze every scuff and dent and chip and I decide that it too must be fixed. (I think Ted is about to blow his brains out.) And of course if you get new paint you need new light fixtures, and curtains, and well you get the picture. I am my own version of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," it is called "If You Give Laura a Paintbrush" subtitled "Watching Too Much of HGTV". Possibly what has me on this home remodel high, (as I write this the word "BATHROOM" is flashing in neon over and over in my brain) is the fact that Easter dinner is at my house next week, yikes. My sister's house is immaculate, and my mother's house is amazing, and my aunt's house is charming, (all places where Easter has been held in the past) and I would just like it if my house didn't reek of "kid out of college trying to play house".

Skip ahead to 9:00am this morning. Both rooms have been painted, though touch ups around the house are still continuing, and the carpet people are here. By 3:00pm the carpet is complete are rooms are back in order, cleaned, and dusted, and now I want to leave the house to buy a new comforter to match our new bedroom. Long story short, our two rooms look great, and now I want more! Remodeling, painting, furnishing, carpeting, it is a drug for a woman, and I'm not even a housewife! It wasn't until 8:00 that I began baking my Applesauce cake - sorry Mom C, I know you wanted to try a piece today, come over tomorrow and have some with us, we are thinking it will make an excellent breakfast.

This cake called for butter, flour, cornstarch, baking powder, sugar, eggs, vanilla, applesauce, one apple, and lemon juice. I don't eat applesauce, but the cake looked and smelled good, and my daughter's primary food group right now is applesauce, so I am happy to make something that I know she and her father will love.

Here is the book's cake:

Here is my cake:

Not too shabby! Next week in celebration of Easter I am going to make a very difficult Easter cake, entitled . . . Easter Cake! Be prepared to be stupefied by its marvelousness! Until then, eat cake and be merry.

Cake # 15 Hazelnut Crumble Bars

2:11 p.m. - I am pooped. Is it truly sad that a twenty-six year young woman wants to take a nap around three o' clock everyday? Possibly. I do know that my darling Evalyn woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the dot this morning and desperately wanted to play. So, begrudgingly, on a Saturday, Ted and I got up early and decided to make a day of it. We made Evie breakfast, we played "where is Evie?", we even let Shakespeare join in on the fun, though, by 9:00 a.m. he had fallen back asleep - jerk. Then we went food-shopping and decided to have a lunch date with our daughter. Finally, she went down for a nap, and I had some time to bake my next cake.

This cake intrigued me for a lot of reasons. First, they bars not a cake, which made me question how exactly the word cake is defined. That in turn made me realize that I have all twenty volumes of the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I have never thought to look up the word cake! Which, in turn, made me realize that I was very mad at myself for not thinking of this earlier. Secondly, I was intrigued by one of the ingredients - Nutella, which the recipe books unbrandishly (get it?) calls for a "chocolate hazelnut spread".

First, the definition of cake: a comparatively small flattened sort of bread, round, oval, or otherwise regularly shaped, usually baked hard on both sides. The word cake originated in our language 1230, but as you can probably guess from its sound, it is Germanic in origin. In this sense then, these bars, certainly do fit under the category of a cake, so I learned something new and I got to use a volume from my dictionary, which makes me happy.

Second, Nutella. This product scared me as a child. I saw a lady once at a Mars supermarket pick it up and put it in her cart, I had never heard of it before, but I knew it was brown. I asked my mother what it was, and she said you put it on your bread, like you do with jelly. So, I always assumed that it was a nut and a fruit mixture based off its name and my mother's remark. And, as any seven year old child would do, I imagined the most disgustingly flavored jelly (after all, it was brown) and in my mind added peanuts, and tried to determine a taste, and all I remember was it had to be bad. Twenty years later, here I am again confronted with Nutella. (I feel like you must say its name with your best William Shatner impression, pronouncing each of its three syllables, and shaking your fist in the air). However, this time, I discovered that it was a chocolate and nut mixture....wait what?! How did I possibly go twenty years without ever bothering to learn what Nutella actually was? There is a slap in my face for my myopic ways. No matter - tried a bite of it, and still not a huge fan.

But in this mysterious cake bar? Excellent. This recipe called for eggs, vanilla, light brown sugar, butter, flour, baking powder, hazelnuts, "chocolate hazelnut spread", raw brown sugar, and forty minutes of bake time in the oven at 325 degrees.

I think the reason why I like these bars so much is because of the infamous hazelnut. When I was a kid, every year at Christmas my parents would buy those variety nut packages (I know, so many jokes - fingers cannot keep up with my mind to type them) and the hazelnuts were always the hardest to crack. They barely stayed in the nut-cracker and they were harder than my husband's head. It was a lot of work, for such a little nut, but the reward was great- sweet, crunchy, nutty (bleh no adjective better than that I guess), and I loved their taste. So biting into these bars, well it reminded me of Christmas, and of my old home.

Here is what the picture in the book looks like:

And here are my bars:

Tonight, is a girl's night out, hopefully they will like my nutty bars! Stay tuned for cake number sixteen an applesauce cake- that is for you Mom C!

Cake # 14 Lemon Drizzle Loaf

What is better than a big slice of starchy goodness after an afternoon of too many shots and mixed drinks and a night of hugging the porcelain god? Two slices! And what makes this cake even better, was that this was the first cake in our challenge that Ted really took charge of! He, the sweetheart of a husband he is, (I was teaching my kids appositives yesterday, so it seemed fitting) told me to stay in bed and let him handle the cake. I ended up helping a little bit, but he took charge. And Evalyn helped daddy cook. When Ted had the fridge open to get the butter, Evie grabbed two eggs from the shelf and ran away with them. Ted chucked the butter on the table and grabbed the first egg out of her hand, by the time he had put that on the table, Evie had already grabbed another egg and the lemon juice! So here she was parading around the kitchen with two eggs and a bottle of lemon juice in her hands...too cute! Fortunately, Ted was able to recover all goods before they went bad. (Get it? I crack myself up.)

School has been more than a little bit hectic this year and we have been so busy at home painting and rearranging, that life has been more about getting things ticked off the list, versus enjoying the minutes. So needless to say, when a friend asked us to happy hour, I was in. Sure, all night yesterday I was regretting my choices, but now after two slices of cake in my belly (that is actually staying down) and some Gatorade to build up my missing electrolytes; I am feeling good. Maybe this cake was all I needed - well that two aspirin and a long sleep.

This cake called for butter, flower, baking powder, sugar, eggs, lemon juice, lemon rind, and powdered sugar for the icing.

Here is Ted's version of the cake:

Here is the book's picture:

Next week I am making a hazelnut crumble bar...does this classify as a cake? According to the book it does- so thy book's will be done. ' ill then.