May is Yellow!

Inez and I are trying a new theme. COLORS! Each month we will pick a new color, and this month the color is yellow!

[Elise] Budapest, April, 2009

[Inez] Multi-colored birthday cake

A week and a half ago my housemate, Ryan, crashed his bike and broke his face. Well actually he didn't break anything, but he did get stitches and the left side of his face did swell into a semi circle and his eye swelled shut and everything. Also, it was his birthday. So I made him a three layered, multi-colored, multi-flavored birthday cake.

Okay, so I had the plan before he crashed his bike, but isn't it nice as a "Sorry you crashed your bike on your birthday"?

Anyway, cake. Bottom later: orange. Middle layer: chocolate compost cake. Top layer: originally it was supposed to be hibiscus but then I remembered that Elise left us and moved back to Minnesota and took the hibiscus extract with her. So top layer: raspberry.

For the orange and raspberry I used a recipe for orange cake that I've used before, which calls for orange juice and orange zest. For the raspberry layer I just put pureed and strained raspberries in place of the orange juice and zest. If I did it again, I'd probably put whole raspberries in the batter as well, because it was a little lacking in raspberry oomph.

Oh yeah, and I added food coloring to the orange and raspberry layers. Just because.

For the filling between the layers I used Ruby's go-to chocolate cream cheese frosting:

1 package cream cheese, 6 T butter, 6 oz baker's chocolate, and a cup of whipping cream (whipped with a couple spoonfuls of powdered sugar. You can omit the butter, but I kept it because I wanted a nice smooth frosting.

Especially since I dyed two of the three layers, I wanted the outside to be more plain. I did a plain cream cheese-whipped cream frosting and added these silvery edible little decorative balls I got in Brazil. And star candles. Because it just seemed right.

(Recipes to come because I'm writing this from a Megabus to Philly for the weekend).

[Inez] Saturday breakfast

Saturday is easily my favorite day of the week. Saturday breakfast or brunch is probably my favorite meal of the week. Last Saturday I had a treat -- I was supposed to play a double-header all morning, but it got rained out. This is good, because my butt is out of SHAPE, something I am reminded of every time I ride up the big hill by the transfer station on my way to work. It hurts.

So anyway, instead of huffing and wheezing and hurting, I had time to make scones and have a nice Saturday breakfast.

Raspberries, an orange, scones, and one of my new(ish) favorite things (cooked in my newly seasoned cast iron pan!) - fried eggs.

A note about the scones: I put half a cup of currants and the zest of one orange in a single recipe of the adapted recipe from the New Joy (see the link above). I cannot tell you enough how delicious the orange zest is. I have always love love loved scones, but this puts them in the realm of the spectacular. Uh, if I do say so myself.

A note about seasoning cast iron: Joy the Baker, who I linked to above, says that your pan might end up a bit sticky after seasoning according to her instructions. My pan did end up a bit sticky, and it looked a bit splotchy and I was worried it hadn't really worked. But fear not! It really works.

[Elise] Walnut Cranes

While I can't take any credit for having made this table, I did refinish it, which with four detailed crane carvings, was not easy. (Not to deter you from refinishing your table, Inez. I'm sure it will be much easier, and feel free to call if you need tips!)

The table is for plants on my south-facing window. The mirror is to bring more light to the plant and into the room. Hopefully my pomegranates are happy!

[Inez] Baby blanket

Hey Elise, look what I finished!

I had to wait until after I visited Costa Rica to post it, because I didn't think Ili knew about the blog, but I wasn't sure. But anyway, here it is folks: my first baby blanket. Also my first quilting project. I know these big triangles are quilting-lite, but it was still hard. Precision, it turns out, is really important. Wait, that wasn't stressed enough. It's really important. The good news is, it was all straight lines, and the fabric wasn't as ridiculously finicky as the stuff I made curtains with.

I lined it with felt, so practically he won't be using it that much. But I figured since I'm the auntie from the north it fell on me to make him a warm blanket.

[Inez] Cherry blossoms and caipirinhas

Elise came to visit. She's only been gone a month (feels like ages longer), but she couldn't stay away from us.

Also, she came a little bit because the cherry blossoms are going HEY LOOK AT US.

We got to the tidal basin a little late, but the sky was pretty.

The cherry blossoms were okay too, I guess.

By which I mean they were stunning. As usual.

Then after our fingers got cold and we couldn't really see the blossoms that well, we (Elise, Stephen, Ranajoy, Colin, me) went to Colin's house for dinner and caipirinhas. Caipirinha is the Brazilian cocktail, made with cachaça.


First step is to cut up an entire lime. Mash it up.

Then add a teaspoon or two of sugar -- we used rapadura (the same as tapa dulce; whole sugar without the molasses taken out yet) which is why our drinks ended up brownish tinted (and delicious, for the record). Also add a shot and a half or so of cachaça, depending on your taste. In Brazil, Anna and JP had some homebrew stuff that JP's brother (?) made, which I think I preferred because it tasted more like sugar cane and less like straight alcohol. But we couldn't bring any back with us because we weren't checking any bags. Stupid TSA. Anyway, add the cachaça. Then add ice and top it off with water or seltzer, and ta-da! 

"It's like the best drink ever," says the inimitable Ella Willard-Schmoe. You heard it here first.

[Inez] Compost cake... in Brazil

Yeah.. I went to Brazil. I made a cake while I was there. I made a ganache to go on top of it, with coconut milk and chocolate. By the way, coconut milk does not interact with chocolate the same as cream. You know when you add the chocolate to the cream and as you stir it gets thick and mouth-droolingly delicious? Yeah, that doesn't happen. Well, the delicious and the drool definitely happened. Anyway, cake: