Bad Cakes, Tiny Carrot
Tiny Carrot!
All the kale is gone from the garden; it got eaten by bugs. And now the apartment is filled with ladybugs--where were you a few weeks ago? I also pulled up some tiny beets; clearly the root veggies need more time underground.
Cookies will get you far in life. I made all the pizzelles last weekend, then in the last few days I made a batch of coconut chocolate chip cookies and regular VGF chocolate chip cookies for neighbours as well.
Those cookies all turned out well (fortunately), as did this chocolate chip banana bread.
I think my new go-to banana bread is no longer the lower-fat banana bread from Veganomicon; it's Laurie Sadowski's banana bread from The Allergy-Free Cook Bakes Bread.
I have been working mad amounts of overtime in the last few weeks, which while I get paid time and a half, it throws off my routine (by the way, I get my work done on time and under budget, so this glut of OT is not a reflection on my work habits). Two Amy's Veggie Loaf meals constituted a special dinner after one such occasion.
So appetizing, right? They take forever to heat up and I make way better veggie loaf.
There's no recipe in this post, if you haven't figured it out by now. Excepting the cookies, nothing has turned out right this week.
Sourdough chocolate waffles fell apart. I made these before TWICE just fine. Grr.
Amount of liquid and temperature are suspects, but at high and low heats, nothing worked.
Then there's this Babycakes cake from Babycakes Covers the Classics. Like most recipes in the book, as one reader put on Goodreads, it's an expensive fail. I'm glad it's not just Ownie Mom and me who think the Babycakes books are full of poorly-written recipes delivering shitty results 87 percent of the time. And I mean shitty.
Just look at my marginalia.
Two cups of sugar AND one cup of agave, half a cup of vanilla extract?!...the list goes on of WTFBBQ?! ingredients for this recipe. Granted, it supposedly made three 9-inch layers, but I got two dense bricks, despite using a shit tonne of coconut oil and applesauce.
Looks promising...
Instead, it's a trap (and a waste of berry jam filling).
Oh well, it's off to tiramisu country for this coconutty chocolate cake.
Other things I've been eating:
Kim & Jake's peasant loaf. It's a pleasantly tangy, crusty, properly risen VGF loaf, OMG! Like the instructions say on the back of the bag, I could cry for eating such tasty "real bread." It's from Boulder, too (no, you can't taste the smugness).
Nota bene that it heats up in 20 minutes at 400 degrees, not 10 minutes as the bag suggests. No frozen centres here.
Wowbutter Soynut Butter. I had a coupon, otherwise I would have steered clear of this salted and sweetened nut butter. A spoonful makes a great immediate post-workout snack.
The stickers...I'm just shaking my head. "This is not peanut butter!" I feel bad for people who have nut allergies.
One of my goals this year was to not let supernatural enthusiasms rule my life. After all, what you give power to has power over you. I'm sure there's a more elegant way of saying that, but I'm too tired to look for it right now. So, in the past I would have read way more into things not baking correctly: cake looks promising (like moving to Colorado seemed reasonable for a young corporate wellness professional), but cake is dense and not very tasty (Colorado sucks the life out of me; high altitude is difficult for me; since I haven't been able to get a job here, I telecommute, so I don't get out and make friends; I won't drive anymore because I've gotten bogus traffic tickets I can't afford to fight; husband is triggered by almost everything in this section of the Front Range since he grew up here...). See how destructive that kind of correlation is? Correlation is not causation. Bad cookery is not a manifestation of negative energy, the Divine pointing out through the very food I eat that things are out of whack...or is it?
It's a very entrapping train of thought that I don't want to ride.
All the kale is gone from the garden; it got eaten by bugs. And now the apartment is filled with ladybugs--where were you a few weeks ago? I also pulled up some tiny beets; clearly the root veggies need more time underground.
Cookies will get you far in life. I made all the pizzelles last weekend, then in the last few days I made a batch of coconut chocolate chip cookies and regular VGF chocolate chip cookies for neighbours as well.
Those cookies all turned out well (fortunately), as did this chocolate chip banana bread.
I think my new go-to banana bread is no longer the lower-fat banana bread from Veganomicon; it's Laurie Sadowski's banana bread from The Allergy-Free Cook Bakes Bread.
I have been working mad amounts of overtime in the last few weeks, which while I get paid time and a half, it throws off my routine (by the way, I get my work done on time and under budget, so this glut of OT is not a reflection on my work habits). Two Amy's Veggie Loaf meals constituted a special dinner after one such occasion.
So appetizing, right? They take forever to heat up and I make way better veggie loaf.
There's no recipe in this post, if you haven't figured it out by now. Excepting the cookies, nothing has turned out right this week.
Sourdough chocolate waffles fell apart. I made these before TWICE just fine. Grr.
Amount of liquid and temperature are suspects, but at high and low heats, nothing worked.
Then there's this Babycakes cake from Babycakes Covers the Classics. Like most recipes in the book, as one reader put on Goodreads, it's an expensive fail. I'm glad it's not just Ownie Mom and me who think the Babycakes books are full of poorly-written recipes delivering shitty results 87 percent of the time. And I mean shitty.
Just look at my marginalia.
Two cups of sugar AND one cup of agave, half a cup of vanilla extract?!...the list goes on of WTFBBQ?! ingredients for this recipe. Granted, it supposedly made three 9-inch layers, but I got two dense bricks, despite using a shit tonne of coconut oil and applesauce.
Looks promising...
Instead, it's a trap (and a waste of berry jam filling).
Oh well, it's off to tiramisu country for this coconutty chocolate cake.
Other things I've been eating:
Kim & Jake's peasant loaf. It's a pleasantly tangy, crusty, properly risen VGF loaf, OMG! Like the instructions say on the back of the bag, I could cry for eating such tasty "real bread." It's from Boulder, too (no, you can't taste the smugness).
Nota bene that it heats up in 20 minutes at 400 degrees, not 10 minutes as the bag suggests. No frozen centres here.
Wowbutter Soynut Butter. I had a coupon, otherwise I would have steered clear of this salted and sweetened nut butter. A spoonful makes a great immediate post-workout snack.
The stickers...I'm just shaking my head. "This is not peanut butter!" I feel bad for people who have nut allergies.
One of my goals this year was to not let supernatural enthusiasms rule my life. After all, what you give power to has power over you. I'm sure there's a more elegant way of saying that, but I'm too tired to look for it right now. So, in the past I would have read way more into things not baking correctly: cake looks promising (like moving to Colorado seemed reasonable for a young corporate wellness professional), but cake is dense and not very tasty (Colorado sucks the life out of me; high altitude is difficult for me; since I haven't been able to get a job here, I telecommute, so I don't get out and make friends; I won't drive anymore because I've gotten bogus traffic tickets I can't afford to fight; husband is triggered by almost everything in this section of the Front Range since he grew up here...). See how destructive that kind of correlation is? Correlation is not causation. Bad cookery is not a manifestation of negative energy, the Divine pointing out through the very food I eat that things are out of whack...or is it?
It's a very entrapping train of thought that I don't want to ride.
The bunnies are cute, the bread looks delicious, and if cooking were directly correlated with life satisfaction, I'd be a miserable wretch! So, I'm not, and cooking is just cooking.
ReplyDeleteAmen to that!
ReplyDelete