Baked …

You are invited to partake … and I have a pot of fresh coffee, too … come on over!

I always make a pie when Snarl is  in the house. But something about Spring said “No, do something different.”

Not a recipe queen by any means and having no desire to thumb through my Joy of Cooking (1975 edition), I cheated. I hightailed it to the store, counting on some quick solution or epiphany.

Betty Crocker hailed me from the grocery aisle shelf, the baking section of course, and suggested I go for a French Vanilla cake mix.
“But that sounds like something I myself would like to eat,” I said.
“Precisely,” she answered, and the cake mix box, illustrating a gorgeous double layer cake in French vanilla colors, white, yet creamy, tumbled into my basket. Snarl does, after all, favor a yellow cake, and this was nearly yellow.

“But that’s cheating,” I said. “I should make something from ‘scratch.'”

“From ‘scratch’? ahahahaha. But if you insist on putting some effort into this little endeavor, I suggest you make the icing.  My cake, your icing. A match made in gourmet heaven!” said old Betty C.

“Right! Excellent,” I said and thought about what I needed next as I trolleyed down the aisle to the confectioner’s sugar, cocoa powder, then off to the dairy section for real butter. I had already decided I’d do cupcakes. With chocolate butter cream icing.

College kids like cupcakes – they’re personal, easy, neat, fun, and if topped with thick icing, they’re nearly perfect.

I made this up about college kids; those are all reasons that I like cupcakes. 

 Snarl loves cake. He loves cake with or without icing. That works out because the way I piled on the icing, three cupcakes went un-iced. 

Book Selection … (ya’ didn’t think I was going to skip doing something about writing/reading, did ya’?)

JULIE AND JULIA by Julie Powell.  A nice little book. A young married woman (in NYC!, well, Long Island City, really, which in Queens, I believe) decides to write a blog as she cooks her way through Julia Childs’ masterwork on French cooking. Julie will accomplish this in one year, or will she? And along the way, she creates quite a blog following. You might enjoy it, a bit of foodie fluff and fiction. BTW, they’re making a movie out of it. It could be better than the book, simply for its visuals, fun in the kitchen and the antics of Amy Adams and Meryl Streep (as Julia, Herself)!