grey cells

This weekend was full of two main things – pound cake and lots of snow. For a history on the cake and where I found the recipe. I was in Barnes and Noble a while ago and found the cake book section. (Side note – I really should not be let into B&N with any kind of payment as I seem to always walk out with a book of some kind). One book I found that I liked how it was written with a bit of sarcastic humor and not a dry recipe book is All Cakes Considered. I thought some of the recipes looked interesting and thought I would give it a try. Now the author is pretty insistent on you cooking the cakes in the order in the book as that is the way it was written. I’m not a huge fan of that, but figured I probably should so that I would understand the entire process of baking according to this author. So we set to make the first cake – a sour cream pound cake – on Saturday night. I went through all the ingredients and was pleased to see that I already had everything I needed, well sort of, that is. I didn’t have a tube pan, but that’s ok. I used a bundt pan that I have. So I set about making the recipe which took a while to cream all the butter and sugar together and my batter at the end was really thick. So I baked it (75 minutes!) and when it got out it was a nice firm cake with a hint of lemon flavor. I’ve never made pound cake and can’t even remember the last time I ate one but I was really pleased with how this cake turned out and it will definitely be a keeper.

Of a different note we finally got our first big snow of winter this weekend. I’m not sure what the total count will come to but it’s approximately 8 inches but it could be even more. Anyways, as it was continuing to come down tweak was really insistent on wanting to shovel my driveway. I told him he didn’t need to as it would just need to be done again, but he was really wanting to shovel it so I let him. When he got back in from shoveling the first time, his hair was white. It was hilarious. I couldn’t help but take a picture of it.

All and all it was a good weekend and now I need to figure out what cake I would like to make next.

I found out a little while ago that I could freeze cake batter as well as frosting. I wanted to bake the frozen batter (margarita flavored) and see how it tasted. I took it out in the morning to defrost and that night I went to it. I did underestimate how much batter I had in the container thinking I could do a two layer cake, but it was really only enough for 1 layer. I used a 9 inch round cake pan. The fumes after baking were really strong (that tequila really smelled good). I made a basic buttercream recipe but substituted lime juice for half of my water to try and give it just a little tang to match the margarita lime flavor in the cake. I frosted it quickly and didn’t really spend time making it smooth as I’m still out of Viva paper towels. I took it to work and everyone loved it. No one was able to tell that the batter had been frozen for a while. The few I did tell about that were completely shocked. So another good cake day and this next Friday will be either a new recipe or technique.

On a different note, I did get my Christmas gift already from tweak. Now, I just need to go test it out and see if it will work for me. After I use it a few times and decide if its the right model for me I’ll post here what it is that I got. It’s really cool!