Despite not having gone on a substantial grocery run in the last little while, I’ve somehow managed to keep up a good supply of fresh veggies. I have to say that this salad is just about one of the summeriest things going.
Don’t worry, it was based off this cake on Cake Wrecks, it was purposefully made to look silly
I was trying to figure out what kind of cake to make Mike for his birthday and one of my lab mate’s suggested an ice cream cake. She then went on to say that I should make it out of ice cream sandwiches because you can just assemble it and it looks all fancy but it’s pretty much the easiest thing ever.
It was. I didn’t so much have to make the cake as I had to assemble the cake. It vaguely reminds me of old ladies and potlucks, but it’s darned tasty and I’m ok with that association. I mean, I watch Sunday Morning, so I already know that I’m old (I’m judging based solely on the cholesterol lowering drug ads and how the show is sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Society).
This recipe is based off a Kraft one, but I’ve taken out all of the blatant Kraft references because you really don’t need the brand name products.
If you want to decorate it like I did, I just put it back in the freezer to make the icing solid and then went to town with little tubes of gel icing. The store only had two colours, and it turns out those tubes are hard to wield, but I feel that added to the cake.
It was Mike’s birthday yesterday and what better way to start the day than with a fancy breakfast. I made a spicy tomato sauce, poached an egg and then layered some Hungarian salami, sauce, egg and then some vlaskas (a type of gouda). The hashbrowns are also homemade, nothing but a little onion and some salt and pepper on those.
Oh, and I’m hardcore and poached the eggs in a saucepan, no fancy poaching apparati here.
Mike and I decided to fashion a fancy pizza yesterday night. It turned out pretty darned good, though the crust was much more focaccia-like than regular pizza crust. We determined that that just made it more gourmet.
It was pesto with cherry tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, artichoke hearts and goat cheese. Can’t go wrong there.
So it turns out that it’s quite obvious when an exam is drawing near since the frequency of my posting shoots up dramatically (I’m an efficient procrastinator). I figure this sort of kind of counts as studying though, since it does involve what I’m supposed to be studying: genetics, embryology, and reproduction.
Except it’s in cake form, which makes it so, so much better.
(Yes, I do love Cake Wrecks, I think it is one of my favourite blogs out there)
My very wonderful vet (Atlantic Cat Hospital) was having a birthday celebration yesterday for one of its resident cats, Patrick. As part of the birthday festivities, they held a baking competition and the winner would receive a free annual check up. I figured this was worth a shot.
The cupcakes are a variation of my white cake recipe. I doubled the recipe and used 1/2 cup of pumpkin mixed with a teaspoon of baking powder in place of the 2 extra eggs. This was mostly because I only had two eggs and it also technically makes the recipe a wee bit healthier. I baked them for 20 minutes at 350 F. They turned out great with just a hint of pumpkin.
I know the decorating isn’t spectacular, but piping with a sandwich bag is hard.
I just wanted to wish everyone a very happy Pi Day (March 14 - 3/14).
Mike and I will be baking a pi(e) later today to celebrate, so I’ll post pictures later on.
We were both pretty proud of our lemon meringue pi, even though it was in a cake pan and not a proper pie plate. Unfortunately we didn’t get to taste it since it needed a long time to “set”, but I’m sure the people who came into the Family Room Monday morning enjoyed it!
The recipe we used was from a Canadian Living cookbook, the crust recipe along with the filling recipe are all out of it. Yup, that’s right we made our own crust and filling!
Mike and I were craving curry for a while, so after a big trip to the market we finally made some. We used the recipe from here. It actually tastes a little like chili now, but we think that’s the general meat plus tomato taste. It’s still very tasty.
In addition to the lamb, we added some fresh carrots, cauliflower and sweet potato. Not really traditional, but we figured that we should throw in some vegetables to make us feel better about ourselves.
As a celebratory gesture for our last class of anatomy, I baked a cake for my tutorial group and what better shape to make it in than that of the kidney (we were doing kidneys this past week). Since one of the members of my group is celiac, I made sure that it was safe for her to eat. Because I wanted to carve out the cake and because, as I’ve already said, I watch too much Cake Boss, I knew that the cake of choice would be pound cake (it’s real good for carving). So I looked up a recipe for gluten-free pound cake, even though I have never made regular pound cake before. The recipe I found was organic, but my variation is plain old not-organic. To make it organic again, simply buy organic versions of all of the ingredients.
Ingredients
Directions
Cake coming out of oven (it’s HUGE)
Rough cuts
Mostly final shape (minus ureter and adrenal gland)
Dirty icing
Final cake (with ureter and adrenal gland)
It probably would have looked really cool with fondant, but that’s still a bit out of my cake making expertise. Mike really wants to try though, so really all we need is an excuse to make another cake. For the frosting I used the same buttercream recipe as before.
Anatomy has almost consumed my life, but it will all be over soon. In the meantime, I decided to make some pumpkin muffins. Nothing says fall like pumpkin. Moo (the cat) likes pumpkin too.
Ingredients
Directions
