I'm just starting out honestly, with "breakfast cake." I know there's a fine line between bread and cake - (banana bread and carrot cake?) and this is a non-dessert cake. It's not a bread. It's also not super sweet. It's breakfast cake, but you can have it for dessert if you want.
I was looking to make applesauce cake for two reasons:
1. I had too many apples, and am not interested in things like crisps, crumbles, pies, tarts; and
2. When I was a teenager, there was this orchard/farm market by the mall and they made amazing applesauce cake.
So working off the idea that cake can be made of applesauce - and not just in the swap-the-oil-for-applesauce-in-the-Duncan-Hines-mix-way - and that I needed to use some apples, I went to work.
Except, it's hard for me with desserts. I don't like really sweet things. Also, I have no idea how that applesauce cake I grew up with was made.
But it worked. A very lightly sweet cake (dust it with powdered sugar and you get a bit more sweet in every bite) that's not really CAKE in the plan-your-other-meals-to-account-for-it way.
Sure, I try to write about using the fresh, seasonal, local produce bounty to create dinner. But sometimes, it's about upcycling.
I don't make white rice, but I do sometimes acquire white rice. Sometimes it comes along with General Tso's Tofu. And it sits in the fridge. Sometimes I have the common sense to freeze it and make fried rice with it later, other times it sits until we have to give it the old sniff-n-toss.
Let's face it, not every meal is a home-cooked treasure. But just like I add spinach or chard to my leftover Chicken Tikka Masala to stretch my takeout into a three day experience, cooked takeout white rice can be turned into a creamy dessert that pretty much comes free with your delivery meal. Recycled rice = instant dessert.
In my teens and twenties, I lived at Ikea. Ok, in my teens I begged my mom to stop there whenever we were anywhere near Elizabeth, New Jersey, but in my twenties I lived close enough to a different Ikea to get there fairly regularly and I did just that. I loved Ikea. I can walk into your house and name your Ikea pieces. Who doesn't have a Poang chair or a Billy bookcase floating around?
A few years ago, I moved and now there is an Ikea at the end of my street. Seriously, right there.
I make a lot of "quick breads." I try to always have banana bread or blueberry bread in the freezer for a quick breakfast. Blueberry bread is just blueberry muffins without the worry about whether they'll come out of the tins properly. I buy extra berries in the summer and keep them in the freezer for as long as I can stand it. I keep whole bananas with their skin on in the freezer (stash them just when they're too brown to eat raw). But sometimes, the season catches up with you and you're out of nanners and blueberries and you're *so over* things like pumpkin and apple. What then?
Cranberry bread. Cranberry orange bread. Seasonal but not squash.
So I make these Norwegian cookies. I told you all about them last year. Krumkake. They take over my kitchen for two weekends each December. There's smoke and fire and grease and burned fingers and spilled batter and in the end, lacy, crisp, amazing sugar cookies. Still, a huge mess.
Well, this year I figured it out. No, this doesn't prevent small kitchen fires and burned fingertips, those are going to happen either way, but oh does it save on cleanup.
Sure, you don't make krumkake. I understand. Maybe you make pancakes, or pizzelles or something else with a drippy batter?
This is a bag clip, but a standard binder clip would work too. Clip it on the edge of your bowl and your spoon won't sink down into the batter. Everything is right with the world.
