Lo these many months ago did I promise makani and greywings a book of recipes for their wedding. The wedding is past. The book is yet in the future.

In the interest of bringing past and future a little closer together, I'm compiling a list of good recipes. Unfortunately, it's a little short:

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Does anyone have suggestions?

Cadbury Egg Cake

Experiment:

Replace ordinary eggs in cake recipe with Cadbury Creme Eggs and observe results.

Hypothesis:

THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME


It's transcendent... and vegan!

I have the terrible urge to get a pan that makes cakes shaped like little roses, and a pound of icing sugar, and then spend the evening recombining them in interesting and instructive ways.

And then I'd have to make fearsome Viking raids on the houses up the hill, only with rose cakes instead of gold, and I'd leave the loot instead of taking it. So maybe not much like Viking raids. Except that it offends my machisma to make rose-cake fairy raids. And I would be coming lateish at night, which is a Viking thing, rather than midnight, which is a fairy thing.

Unless the Vikings had fairies. They might have had huldrefolk, but those tend more toward oatcakes, and I prefer Betty Crocker's Doublemoist White Cake Mix.

Am, very possibly, so bored at work that dementia is setting in.

Also, does anyone know how much batter to put in a one-cup mold? It's not one cup. And does anyone know how much batter is in a standard cake mix? I'm trying to do culinary algebra with multiple unknown variables, and dammit, making cake in nonstandard pans is not the way of my people. We're more of a "dump half in a little pan, or all in a big pan, or spoon it out at random and then even up afterward if you're dealing with cupcake pans, and just assume that Duncan Hines knows how much batter you need" sort of culture. This rose pan business has me forging new pathways. I go ahead that others may see the way and follow. The way is fraught with extra batter and missed ingredients, but I fear not, for lo, anything fearsome is scared away by the nasal whine of my bitching.

But none of that helps me figure out if I need one or two pans per batch of batter.

Must return to work. Don't want to. Just want to watch FMA make rose cakes all day.


EDIT: Gah! I put too much batter in each cup and wound up with rose weeble-wobbles.

So horrible. Will have to eat the evidence myself before anyone sees.

I spent much of last evening making pie--pumpkin pot pie, to be precise, with a pear-and-apple pie thrown in because I had the time.

Man, that's a lotta work. The pumpkin pot pie involved over an hour of labor on top of the baking time, even with canned vegetables and storebought crust. The end result was more than worth it, though. It's no mere vegetable pastry. It is a PIE MOUNTAIN. Do you feel the succulent vastness of the caps? PIE MOUNTAIN! Peas, corn, carrots, potatoes, piles and piles of pumpkin, and mushroom gravy, all towering high over the other viands like a fortress dedicated to the preservation of pumpkiny goodness. RAR! COWER IN TERROR BEFORE THE LORDS AND LADIES OF PIE!

And then grab a fork and take a huge bite, because damn, it's good.

Admittedly, it's underseasoned. I cut back on the salt because I thought the extra salt in the boullion would be enough, and omitted the celery salt altogether because WTF? Celery what? I also had to replace the black pepper with a smidge of a peppery steak seasoning and a bit of white pepper, and use ginger juice instead of powdered ginger. Next time, more salt and spices and more gravy.

The pear-and-apple pie came out well, too. It was supposed to be just a pear pie, but the pears were so overripe that they turned themselves into soup as I chopped them, and they didn't quite fill the crust. I grabbed some spare baking apples and extemporized with random sweet spices. (Nutmeg and cinnamon, right? Apple pie is New Englandy. That means nutmeg and cinnamon.) The rather dry apples soaked up the pear juice nicely, and the entire thing turned out nice and juicy.

Mmm, pie.