What I eat, apparently

I greatly appreciate it when the occasion arises where a cake is a highly appropriate item to donate to said occasion. I don’t make cakes all that often, as when one lives in a household of two people, cake is a complicated affair. Either it’s not as good as it could be and it goes stale before it’s all eaten, or the cake is entirely too good and it gets eaten within the next 24 hours, causing lack-of-nutrients headaches and ‘Dunlap disease’. Well, and the fact that, for me at least, I need a good motivator to make an exciting cake that’s all festooned with decorative bits. Ordinary days just do not require extraordinary cakes. How convenient, then, that people have birthdays every single year!

Thus, the penguin cake for my Dad’s birthday:

There’s red velvet box cake in the middle. I just used a 13″ x 9″ pan, and hacked out a penguin shape from that, sticking extra cake bits on for the beak and tail. I slapped together the white icing from some powdered sugar, shortening, milk, and vanilla, it worked well on the belly.

Added orange for that proper glowing beak and feet feel. Made the mistake of trying to spread it on with a knife. This never works for me. Inevitably there will be little cake bits spread all throughout the icing. No good at all! Luckily I had lots of orange, so I just slabbed it on rather heavily to cover up the mistake there.

Chocolate frosting is tricky. I didn’t have a recipe I planned on using, so I found this recipe for icing plus cake and just made the icing, plus some black food coloring. Dumped it on, and it promptly oozed everywhere. It did ooze deliciously, however, which worked well. It occurred to me after the fact that I could use white frosting to shape a wing, and then dump chocolate icing on top. Which I did, but since that was chocolate icing layer #2, it looks a bit lumpy.

I believe lumpiness (as well as most visual defaults on cakes) are forgivable as long as the cake is delicious. Mmm…cake.

Sometimes, you just have too many bananas. This predicament can be more common then one might think. Bananas, as compared to many other produce items, are generally dirt cheap. And so, it happened that I bought a bunch of bananas during a shopping stint, and then proceeded to buy another bunch of bananas just a day or two later, having completely forgotten about the first bunch.

In any case, there ended up being two spotty and sad bananas left over, a bit too far gone for anyone in their right mind to want to eat. But not all was lost, banana bread came to the rescue!

I did a google search for banana bread recipes with cinnamon, and ended up finding a recipe which also called for chocolate chips, which of course was a bonus. Here’s the delicious virgin terrain:

Anyhow, I grabbed the recipe from here. The only alterations I made were using 1/2 wheat flour and 1/2 white, and a wee bit of nutmeg wandered in there as well.

Now what I find fascinating about all of this is that I altered a recipe that I’d janked from someone, who’d janked and altered that recipe from someone else who had done the same. It’s like playing Telephone, except with food. So apparently someone needs to post a recipe for, say, chocolate cake, and see where it ends up in 6 months time or so. Either there will be approximately 2378429437 variations of chocolate cake, or it will have mutated completely into crab bisque. I’m rooting for the latter, it makes the world seem much more interesting.

In any case, the banana bread was quite tasty. Especially when microwaved for maximum gooeyness!

I love macaroons so bad. They are like magical lumps of coconut and joy. I recently had the joy of eating one, made in the mini-mountains of Southwest Virginia, that was approximately the size of my fist and appeared to a have a stingray composed entirely of chocolate and yes, more joy, affixed to the bottom of it. It slid down my gullet quite nicely. Such delights will naturally cause the mind to wander to the possibility of producing such things in mass quantities. So I tried making macaroons.

They ended up being round and rather average as such things go.

Admittedly, I didn’t follow the recipe very well. I had this bag of uber-shredded coconut from a local Mediterranean grocery store, and it definitely came up about a cup short. So I just added more flour. Then, rather then dumping the vanilla in with the milk first, I dumped it straight onto the flour/coconut mixture, meaning about 3 of these babies taste like Super Vanilla, and the rest are, well, a bit blander then necessary.

Chocolate helps, though!

A bit more chocolate would have helped more. I can’t give up yet, though. I have to believe that delicious homemade macaroons exist, even if achieving them actually requires following a recipe!

Apparently I’m obligated to make a post about brownies once every 2 weeks or so. I called them mayflies, recently, based on their tendency to not live more then one day. Brownies are a bit like mosquitoes as well, hovering about on a regular basis. Except they’re the sort of mosquitoes that you really want to divebomb into your mouth and down your throat, soon to be followed by a milk mosquito, or something like that. Mmmm milk mosquito.

In any case, this is a horrible picture of a delicious item:

I promise that I will a.) start actually setting these pictures up to be more photogenic and b.) start seriously considering getting a camera that does closeups better. But more a then b, as I’m poor. Unless you want to give me money. Or perhaps a decent camera. I’m flexible on that, really.

In any case, these brownies were awesome. Not just because they were brownies, though. They’re awesome because I hacked a cake mix to achieve them. Note: this is a tangent quite similar to my not long ago discovery that cake mix can be used to make cookies.

So, cake mix is sold in stores for rather cheap. And for some reason, brownie mixes are generally at least 150% the cost of cake mixes, and for no good reason. Well here’s the way around that: Just get a cake mix (used here is a triple chocolate cake mix), add 1/2 cup oil and 2 eggs, and mix. Then gradually add milk until it’s about the consistency of brownie mix. 1/3 cup or something like that, I was all lazy and didn’t measure. Then bake for 30 minutes or so, cool and devour. As good as any brownies I’ve paid too much for!

Strategic chocolate chips, sprinkles, and nuts are also highly recommended.

I have returned from a long hard journey, the sort of quest where peeing in the middle of the night is an ordeal and mattresses are a far away fantasy. Indeed, this is the joy of camping. What’s really joyous about camping, however, is the fact that when you’re dead tired from hiking all day and finally getting your fire started, you can eat just about anything with something vaguely resembling nutritional content and it will be the Most Delicious Thing Ever.

First, the traditional. Indeed, the wieners.

There is a black hole in the mountains of North Carolina where Oscar Mayer will not venture, apparently. At the tiny gas station/food mart we where we picked up our evening’s feast, their selection of dogs consisted of small bright red things, large bright red things, and polish sausage. So, polish sausage it was!

Due to the tragic mistake of packing the same day we left, there were small yet essential items that got left behind. For example, condiments. Luckily, I had a small arsenal of sauce packets stuffed away in my glove compartment from god knows how long ago. See the color of that mustard? That is a Chick-fil-a packet, once bright yellow I’m sure, that had gone tragically dark ochre. Not that this stopped me from eating it, mind you. Few things can come in the way of a girl and her mustard. Besides, I figured the painful retching from food poisoning could only make the trip more memorable. In the end, it was safe, a fact that was strongly appreciated, I am sure, by Drew, who is most definitely a fan of not getting vomited upon in the middle of the night.

And, well, that’s it for the real food. Frankly, canned soup and pbjs do not exciting pictures make. Dessert, on the other hand, is glorious. A prime example being smores. These babies are another requirement of fireside cooking, and are quite glorious when thrust into your drooling gaping maw.

Now here’s a secret: I make lazy smores. I don’t bother with that whole mess of graham crackers + chocolate bar. Far easier is to instead use chocolate covered graham crackers, conveniently nestled away in the cookie aisle of your local grocery store.

The one on the left is mine. See, a smore just isn’t proper unless it’s completely charred. See, I need to get a healthy dose of carcinogenic carbon every once in awhile. it’s all part of my secret plan to someday mutate into Coal Woman. I will terrorize households the world over by getting ashes on white carpets. Propane salesmen will quiver before me in fear and awe. Or I’ll die. But I suspect that’s gonna happen at some point anyhow.

Finally, I have a treat that was curled up waiting just for me at the grocery store when we stocked up for the trip. Cream Horns! Serious quantities of cream horns! All for $1.25!

It was like the Sugar Gods were smiling upon me that day. Like the heavens had opened up and these glorious tubes of sugar had blissfully sailed into my life.

It’s like you can almost smell the chorus of angels singing in the background.

I ate as many of these wee bastards as I was able, rammed them deep into the gullets of eager victims nearby, yet the cream horns still persist. Indeed, they are mana from heaven.