Monthly Archives: March 2012

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake — or, grinning and bearing it

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

When you:

  • Feel a little ground down from life
  • Are questioning whether you are a big hypocrite
  • Just want to curl up in your bed, under the covers, and never leave
  • Count down the days until the weekend, starting Monday morning
  • Are frustrated with some of your co-workers and wonder if the workplace isn’t actually just the setting of a passive aggressive war in which there are many weapons and tactics at your disposal
  • Hate the slavish bi-partisanship of your Supreme Court and the batshit, corrupt, the malevolent insanity of your Congress, and the crushing disappointment of your president
  • Have a sore tastebud on the tip of your tongue, making everything you eat torturous
  • Are totally running out of healthy meal-like food but don’t have time or the energy to make a grocery store run (so you totally just eat peanut butter frosting instead)
  • Find the charm of cakes to lie in their presentation, not their taste
  • (Okay, maybe you also like their taste too)

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Vegetable Quiche (with Yeasted Whole Wheat Crust)

Vegetable Quiche

Well, okay, I am generally unafraid to tackle just about any recipe, no matter how complex, how insane the ingredients, and how difficult the technique. I like to go to great lengths to bake and cook for others. Part of it is just to see if I can and part of it is, I admit, vanity.

But let me tell you about the other 99% of the time when, in the necessity of having to feed myself…continuously…until I die…my cooking techniques, discerning tastes, and effort extends only as far as whatever in my refrigerator that is about to expire.

It’s embarrassing. I will never share with you what I eat on a day-to-day basis when the only person I need to impress is myself.

(Except lots and lots of eggs, that is).

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Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

Corn Cookies

It’s taken me a few weeks to really soak in just one of the many amazing cookbooks I recently purchased. First up: Momofuku Milk Bar, which is a super attractive book on a purely aesthetic level, but the story behind Momofuku Milk Bar‘s origins and Christina Tosi’s voice throughout is wry, evocative, and sheer engaging. There’s something delightfully appealing about all the trashy/delicious eats unapologetically served up here. Recipes like Compost Cookies and Crack Pie, with their reliance on things like potato chips, chocolate chips, and pretzels, are practically a stoner’s wet dream.

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Black Tea Grapefruit Muffins

Black Tea Grapefruit Muffins

Grapefruit is not for everyone, sure. But, it really, really does it for me.

This recipe started as me wanting to get more use out of grapefruit, a fruit which I adore. Since I am pretty much convinced that grapefruits can only be eaten in the morning (I don’t know why I think this), I thought, why not muffins? Muffins, too, make a delightful breakfast item. Coincidentally, I can only eat muffins in the morning as well. It was clearly meant to be.

I was thinking of adding a nutmeg milk infusion when I happened to have an amazing drink of black iced tea infused with grapefruit. Suddenly, it was really, really important just then to add black tea to my working muffin recipe, because then it would be like all the best things of breakfast in one muffin. Woah.

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The nuclear option.

Naturally, when I’m not baking or working, I’m usually drinking with my best gal, J. It starts, as it usually does, with one making an overture to the other. “Care for a drink?”

One drink. We could do this! We are totally committed. It is a work night, after all, and we are industrious little ants.

And maybe it was the heavy use of figurative language a client had used in a survey I was reporting on, because suddenly I was feeling poetic, which, led to us breaking the number #2 cardinal rule after Do Not Drink and Drive: Do Not Drink and Go on Facebook.

Old fashions

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On being sick

I’m overdue for a post. I know, I know.

Unfortunately, life has other plans, and those plans have taken shape in a big fat head cold that has knocked me on my ass. Runny nose, stuffy head, and sinus pressure so intense, it was literally making my eyes water endlessly.

I went home early yesterday and stayed home today. I thought maybe I could use my convalescence to experiment with a muffin recipe, but instead spent the day in bed amidst a sea of crumpled tissues, zoned out on Nyquil because Dayquil stuffed my head up so much it was impossible to breathe through my nose, mainlining season 2 of Downton Abbey, Captain America, Young Adult (identifying too strongly with main character…) and Winter’s Bone through a soporific haze.

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