bakeoff roundup!

i didn’t want to go into work yesterday.
but when i did, i was really glad i had, largely because of these:


lemon bars and chocolate cake. TWO desserts for a crazy monday. delicious.

weekend dessert roundup

after a so-so mini pumpkin pie at my favorite mock seafood restaurant (i ordered it only because it was tagged as “personal sized”), i experienced dessert happiness at joe’s noodle house on sunday night, with sweet glutinous rice dusted in sweet peanut powder.

admittedly, that isn’t so great a description. i didn’t get a picture, either, because it didn’t look that appetizing – just a pile of what looked like melted rice covered in a beige powder.

but oh my goodness – it was deliciousness. warm and sweet and chewy, like a pudding gone right. mmmm.

best of all? it was only $1.95. yum. even if you hate it, you can’t go wrong!

check it out at joe’s noodle house.

two things to make you lose your appetite:

first of all, heads up on the recall of football bobblehead cake decorations. ugh. imagine putting lead-containing products on top of a cake. these types of decorations are ridiculous, anyway. with the exception of candles, no one should be putting non-edible decorations on top of cake. with the advances in chocolate and marizpan technology, there’s no reason we can’t have delicious icing-based bobbleheads.

virigina woman is runner-up in cake decorating competition….

and she prefers PIE.

article here.

but here’s the important part:

The funny thing is, Lewis doesn’t really like cake.

“I love pie,” said Lewis. “But if I have to pick one cake I like the best, that would be carrot. I don’t bake at home. My children are disappointed with that because they love cake.”

daily pie roundup

good article in new hampshire’s concord monitor about the ridiculousness of williams sonoma prices for apple pie mix. mimi’s already written about her experiences with $14 cake mix, and now to read that there’s an apple pie mix that’s as equally as expensive? the hell?

“Just add butter and water for a flaky, tender crust,” the copy beneath the Perfect Piecrust Mix crows. Excuse me, Williams-Sonoma, but the expensive part of pie crust is the butter. Okay, on the website, they say the mix also has buttermilk (powdered, I presume) in it, and a bit of vanilla, and I’m guessing there’s a wee bit of salt in there. But basically, they’re asking people to pay $10.00 for flour! The apple pie filling is just as bad. $16.50 for 29 ounces of apples cooked in cider. Yikes.

exactly. the article then proceeds to give a nice looking pie recipe, which i haven’t tried out, but might (once i finish my quest for a vegan angel food cake recipe.)

plea to readers

um, anyone have a vegan angel food cake recipe?
anyone?
anyone?
(dead noise)
and please don’t forward the one on the internet that someone posted without even trying out. i mean, really!

i don’t want to be an astronaut

you know, being an astronaut seems like it would be a fun job, what with the zero gravity and the tang and the great view from space, but really? it’s all apparently a giant nasa manipulation game.

according to abc news, before every launch, astronauts pose for a photo with cake. then the cake gets taken away. no one eats it. no one enjoys it. just a tease of a good-looking cake, and then it’s gone.

“It is a very nice cake, but we don’t get to eat it,” Zamka said. “We just look at it and celebrate with it, but we don’t get to eat it. I think they store them in a room somewhere, so somewhere there is 30-plus years of cake.”

then again, maybe nasa has the right idea. given how much of a disappointment a good looking cake often is, the agency is likely just making sure that no one heads into space wishing they had some milk to wash down a piece of dry tasteless cake.

what do you eat if you’re a sXe dc resident?

ian macpie, of course!

i was puttering around the kitchen this weekend making dessert with all the leftovers i had, and ended up making a bunch of little cherry pies. because i didn’t have enough crust to cover them all, and had trouble latticing them because they were so tiny, i ended up just making a bunch of straightedge desserts. hardcore!

what makes the day better?

yesterday was a craptacular marathon of a day.
and only one thing made it better:
PIE

specifically:

the first pumpkin pie of the season, which was delicious.

and also this blueberry cream pie:

mmmmm.
recipe information after the jump.

Muffin tops: the fallout

Muffin tops. To steal or not to steal? Where do you stand?

I’m in the camp of cutting the muffin in half, length-wise. Decapitating muffins at company meetings (or anywhere) seems wrong. Or are muffin bottoms unfairly stigmatized? Any and all comments on this incendiary topic welcome!

At work, we recently made a web video where a woman gets caught stealing muffin tops. We did at least 15 takes of this scene. Here are the muffins that got sacrificed in the process.