a trend

Do you sense a trend with the blog these days? Nahhhh...

I made the cauliflower soup and whiskey-glazed carrots from Pioneer Woman's blog tonight! No, I'm not systematically working my way through all her recipes, but I am planning to feature these two dishes in a cooking class later this month, so I figured it would be best to have some direct experience with the pots and pans and white sauce (which took longer than I'd imagined to thicken).

Also, the cold has been making itself felt more than ever, and it's a good motivator. Since summer I just haven't felt like cooking or baking anything, so everything I do make is an accomplishment of sorts.

I am just hoping, with regard to the soup, that the supermarket has enough good heads of cauliflower when we go to buy the ingredients. I stopped there on Saturday, and the four saran-wrapped parts of cauliflower they had were a bit too mushy for my peace of mind. The other night, though, they had more and fresher vegetables, though it was the middle of the week. Anyone know why they would leave the broccoli out in the open air, but saran-wrap the cauliflower?

.....

A big, big thank you to my wonderful family and my awesome aunt and uncle for sending me, the chocolate monster, sweet sweet chocolate for my birthday! :) It won't be long in this world, I say!

sweet chocolate

Chocolate. Cake.

Mwahahahahahaha! As a matter of fact, it's the sheet cake recipe from Pioneer Woman's blog. Just the cake recipe, though, because I improvised my own frosting. The original called for something like a pound of powdered sugar, and anybody in these parts knows that the stores only sell about 1/2 cup, little, fancy packages of powdered sugar for, I don't know, decoratively sprinkling on some fancy little cake. I'm not really sure what you'd call the frosting I made (I call it delicious), but here's how I made it...

I decided to go for a caramel-like base, so I melted about half a stick of butter and added a few generous tablespoons of brown sugar when it was bubbling, then I kept stirring that until the sugar was all melted down. Then I added maybe a tablespoon of cream and kept stirring the lightening, bubbling, frothy mixture. When I thought things had gone far enough, I dropped in some squares of baking chocolate and stirred them around until they'd melted. For some extra flava, I added a few spoonfuls of hazelnut liqueur (the syrup you add to lattes and such) and a wee bit of vanilla. Finally, I stirred in my little 1/2 cup package of powdered sugar until it reached a smooth, albeit thick, consistency.

The recipe said to frost the cake while it was still warm, so that's what I did. The taste was amazing, and still was a couple of days later. The frosting cooled and though it didn't get hard, it firmed up to a nice, fudgey consistency.

So what would you call this frosting?