Things I am cooking this week

Baked pears with blue cheese and walnuts (I've been wondering what I should do with the leftover blue cheese from our pizza making...picture!)

Spinach and Parmesan quiche, for my secretary's work baby shower brunch. Except I'm wondering if people at the office eat vegetables. Srsly.

Triple layer vanilla buttermilk cake filled with bavarian cream and strawberries, and covered in whipped cream, also for the baby shower brunch, but as doubling as wedding cake trial #1.

I made aloo gobi today. It took me forever to chop all the different ingredients (cilantro, onions, potatoes, cauliflower, garlic, ginger, etc.) and add all the billions of spices. I think HummusBoyfriend needs to find himself an Indian girlfriend who is a more efficient cook.

Okay bye.

Back to food...

I don't cook nearly as much as I did in college, which is a shame because I am brimming with ideas of crazy things to make, but there aren't that many people to feed.

Anyway, my big project for the next year or so will be the three-tier wedding cake that I am making for my friends Jenny and Dave. Thankfully, I have an entire year to practice. I'm pretty excited (am I ready to be a grandma or what?) and researching recipes and reading about how to assemble wedding cakes during my GRE study breaks. Right now we're thinking 3 round tiers with 3 cake layers in each tier. The bottom tier will probably be some kind of vanilla buttermilk or vanilla sponge cake with bavarian cream/custard filling, and the top will be something similar. The middle layer will be chocolate with chocolate ganache and brown sugar meringue buttercream. And then white buttercream over the entire thing.

So step one of my year of experimenting...what is bavarian cream? I don't really know, other than the cheap stuff that comes in donuts that probably isn't real bavarian cream. According to google, real bavarian cream has gelatin in it, so you can mold it if you want to.

(source)

The downside is bavarian cream isn't really something that can be left unrefrigerated for extended periods of time, so this would be a challenge to the assemble-wedding-cake-hours-before-the-reception. I would either have to assemble and stash it in a big fridge somewhere (but that is one really tall cake...and does cake taste good when it's cold? depends on the type of cake, I guess) . Or maybe if the room is pretty air conditioned it can survive for a few hours. ......yeah. Who knew wedding cakes were so complicated?

So this weekend's project I think will be making bavarian cream. Stay tuned!

Positive thought of the day: I'm happy I have my own office to hide in. Because sometimes people can be scary.

Unpositive thought of the day: Between hitting the snooze button and getting up, I had a scary dream where someone broke into my apartment and left scary symbols scrawled all over everything (the comical part is, in my dream I had a pan of brownies out and they scrawled weird symbols all over that too). I was really freaked out and tried to call someone, but both my computer and phone were infected with scary viruses and I couldn't do anything and I was about to be late for work (though in reality if this kind of creepy takeover was happening, being late for work probably wouldn't be on my top list of priorities). So I woke up stressed out, and was stressed out for the rest of the day. It was really strange, I can't recall ever having a dream that did that to me before.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Keep Moving Forward

Except for me it's more like keep moving backward. I'm moving back to Ann Arbor today. I'm excited for my last summer here before I move out to Seattle.

Hoping I will see you guys a lot this summer :)

Today my supervisor and a co worker were having a discussion in the hall outside my office door. Then I guess they thought they might be distracting me, so my supervisor closed my office door, accidentally locking me in. For some reason, I thought that story was worth sharing.

With an open heart and empty stomach...

I'm watching Iron Chef. I've only ever seen a few episodes, but the two I saw where people were allowed to choose their opponent, both chose Morimoto. Does everyone choose him?? What's wrong with the others?

Also, I'm thankful H made it home through the rain :)

Edit: I have no idea why I watch this show. I'm totally full up on pizza and cake and my mouth is watering for everything in Kitchen Stadium right now.

Whenever I'm away from Ann Arbor, I miss...

the Indian take out counter in the Indian store. They've expanded to a full menu, and you can actually have them make it spicy now. Their saag is so good. I don't even like saag normally. And despite the giant Indian population in Cincy, I have yet to find a place that has naan anywhere as good as the naan here. Indian takeout counter, why can't you move to Cincinnati with me? I promise to love and cherish you aways.