I was very excited to see Bill’s Big Carrot Cake as this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie pick. I love carrot cake, but until now I didn’t have a go-to recipe. The carrot cakes I’ve made before have been just a little lacking. But this recipe has it all. Tons of shredded carrot, walnuts, and coconut, plus raisins (which I omitted). It was everything I was looking for. Plus, since it has carrots in it, I can rationalize eating a piece for breakfast. Two days in a row.
Sadly, I am marshmallow-less today. Believe me, I will not be missing out on this recipe, because marshmallows are one of my favorite things ever. But school is getting in the way of life big time right now, and anything that doesn’t assist me in passing my Stats test on Thursday is basically getting ignored. Thankfully, this is my last week from hell until finals week. So check back this weekend for my marshmallows!
Once upon a time, I made the world’s worst cupcakes. In fact, every time I look at my cupcake tin I am reminded of those obscenely bad cupcakes, because it has some pretty serious gouges on it from scraping the cupcake overflow off. Not only did the cupcakes overflow, despite being filled to the recipe-perscribed two-thirds of the pan, they tasted horrendous. I ate a few just because I felt terrible throwing an entire pan of cupcakes away. I haven’t made cupcakes since then because they were such an embarrassing flop. But John’s birthday was this week, and he loves cupcakes. While I made him an actual birthday cake as well (more on that soon), I felt like this was my time to step up and try cupcakes one more time.
Growing up, grocery store bread was a banned product in my house. My mom baked wonderful bread every week. At the time I thought that was terribly unfair and I wanted my sandwich bread to look the same as everyone else’s at lunch time. There’s no accounting for taste in children! When I moved out on my own, I bought bread from the grocery store because I had never bothered to learn how to make it myself. But after a year or so of that, I’m trying to eliminate our need to buy grocery store bread. It all started after I found half a loaf of bread that had gotten lost on top of the fridge for at least a month. When I found it, it hadn’t molded one little bit. Gross! Food should go bad. So my occasional loaf of Cook’s Illustrated American Sandwich Bread has turned into weekly bread baking.
I didn’t used to be a big fan of chocolate desserts. I mean, I liked them okay, but I wouldn’t seek them out. Brownies always go over well, but given the choice between a chocolate and, say, a banana cake, chocolate never won. But since I’ve started baking with Dorie, something has changed in a major way. I am head over heels for chocolate desserts. That is especially true for this week’s recipe, Gooey Chocolate Cakes. Obviously, they were going to be good. I mean, they’re gooey. chocolate. cakes. There’s nothing bad about that. But I didn’t expect them to be as heavenly as they were.
