Tie-Dye Cake

This family sure likes to make cake! And pudding:

Mumsy poured the warm (homemade!) pudding into the cake pans to harden, then flipped them onto the cake layers as everything was assembled. Since the cakes had shrunk slightly while baking, the pudding was trimmed, the process repeated, and then everything frosted. It's easiest to do all this when excessively-frequently cake making means you have several colors of frosting living in the back of the fridge, and when you somehow have four 9" round cake pans. Here's my favorite picture:

Peanut Butter Brownies

There are unfortunately no pictures, for a few reasons. First, this is the kind of thing that you begin shoving in your mouth with reckless abandon the second they come out of the oven, and don't stop until the pan is empty (or your heart stops beating, whichever comes first). Second, they weren't that photogenic because they had to travel from a hot apartment to movie night in the air conditioned library, and Giovanni wasn't around anyway. Finally, part of the point of pictures is education and motivation, and these brownies frankly are too good to be made. If you do make them, however, be sure to give them to me before you taste them, otherwise you could end up in the hospital. Good thing the library we ate them in was right next to the ER!

Brownies:

Whitney says to add things in three phases:

1) 1 c butter, melted; add 1 c cocoa
2) 2 c sugar; add 3 eggs (we used a whole egg and 2 egg whites); add 2 tsp vanilla
3) 1 c flour; add 1/2 tsp salt

Bake at 350 F in a 9x13 pan for 25-30 minutes (I think ours took longer?). The middle will be gooey and chocolately and soooo good...*faints*.

The original recipe is half this and makes an 8x8 pan with 2 eggs. For a jelly roll pan, use 1.5x the recipe.

Frosting:
1 stick butter, slightly soft
1 # powdered sugar
1/2 c peanut butter (could use more)
whole milk to consistency (can use another kind of milk, or probably half & half, etc.)

Zebra Beans #1

The plan was to use some of the super pretty bell peppers (I bought a bunch on sale, chopped, and froze them to simplify things in the future :) ) to make zebra beans - white and black beans mixed. The first lesson was that when you soak black beans with white beans, the color that comes out of the black beans and otherwise ends up down the drain, gets adopted by the white beans and makes super ugly gray beans. The second was that (probably because of a size difference) white and black beans take different times to cook. They still made good Cuban beans, but don't ask for a picture. Since they weren't heavenly as Cuban beans usually are, I'm wondering if there's something about the white beans that doesn't work so well. Anyone can has informations?

Stay tuned for experiment take two!

Frenchish Bread Roll

This was this, take 2, and without the heat, because it was super nice out and the heroic air circulator fan managed to not fall off the window sill enough to keep the kitchen cool despite having the oven on 425 for a loooong time.

Since last time the second rise was mostly a sideways instead of lengthwise expansion, this loaf got rolled out and rolled up, in an attempt to prevent a reoccurrence of the Big Sideways Blob Problem. It didn't rise as much as it needed to have to not look silly, but BOY you should have tasted it! Giovanni's batteries died before I could get a picture of the crumb, but the rolling that created the silly flap in the picture above was actually visible in the crumb of the bread, and for many slices, you could actually unroll it! The crust, due to the special treatment discussed here, was nice and hard, and the middle felt like a pillow. If only we could have a bathtub full of bread insides to sleep on!

Hummus Quesadilla

The pinto beans were a bit elderly and not quite feeling up to being eaten, so the hummus bravely offered up itself. The result was so delicious I couldn't do anything else while I ate but taste.

Spread a generous layer of hummus on a (whole wheat, what else?) tortilla, then cover with lots of (red leaf) lettuce, tomato slices, carrot slivers (when this guy isn't busy trying to kill me, it does a great job with the carrots), and hunks of sharp cheddar. You gently fold it in half and microwave until the cheese is quite melty.

Devour distractionless. :)

Grand Canyon Cake

It's Grand Canyon Cake Timeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

This was the best cake I have ever had in my entire life. The trans fat (store-bought) frosting had a lot do to with it, but the colorfulness had even more to do with it, and getting to watch the canyon be split open definitely didn't hurt! (Email me for the video.)

Every white layer was dyed a different color, as was every layer of frosting. And at 8 layers of frosting, that's a lot of color:

The chocolate layers were of course the Hershey's holiday cake recipe. The outside was frosted my favorite combination, swirly yellow and green. We left some windows (not enough imo) just to be silly.

More, please, and hurry!!!

Tomato Basil Soup

All the tomato basil soup recipes I found online involved more complication than I felt like dealing with, so I did what I always do and made it up. It ended up being sauted garlic, boiled tomatoes, lots and lots of fresh basil leaves, and 1/2-3/4 c (I didn't measure) half and half.

I ate it with a piece of Italian bread at the bottom of the bowl, soggified and tomato-basilified by the soup. Delizoso!