Changes

Baking and Creating has been put on hold for now. It is beginning to feel like Fall, my favorite season, and once the apples are ripe in my families orchard I'll start posting apple recipes.

Only 4 weeks to go before the baby ETA as if that wasn't exciting enough the hubby and I are starting a new business. Things are a little crazy but it is all coming together. We have been living in the mountains near Idyllwild for about a month and a half now and are enjoying our time here. Some time in the future we will be moving into our home down at the beach but for the time being I'm a mountain girl, picking apples, chasing chickens, and counting down the days.

Luscious Lemon Layer Cake

AHH!! I've been trying to load pictures onto a PC for the last 2 hours and now I give up. I made a great lemon cake and fried chicken from my mom's 1950's Better Homes Cook Book. The illustrations throughout the book are great, all of this great family unit, a house wife, a little boy and girl, the father and a dog. There is the really great section in it on menu's for meals instead of just individual dishes. Well here is the recipe, remember words like saturated fat and heart attack hadn't yet appeared in the America vocabulary when this recipe was written.

Luscious Lemon Layer Cake 350* for 30 min

1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp lemon extract (i used 2 tbs lemon juice)
2 eggs
2 cups cake flour
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 salt
1 cup butter milk

cream together shortening and sugar.
add eggs 1 at a time
add vanilla and lemon
mix dry ingredients together then slowly mix in with shorting mixture
Cut out wax paper and fit at bottom of pan then place batter in pan.

Lemon Filling (this is what makes this recipe)
Mix
1/2 cup sugar
2 TBS. Cornstarch
1/2 cup cold water
together . Add
2 tsp. grated lemon peel
and cook on low heat till thick and clear. Add
1 beat egg yolk
3 TBS lemon juice
1 TBS butter
Mix for 2 minutes then cool.

I then used a butter frosting over the whole thing and cooked it in 2 square 6 x 6 pans. I looked cute and tasted soo rich.

I'm Home

After driving 2032 miles I am happy to say we have arrived. It took us 4 days and 3 nights to make it but we have now landed in Redondo Beach. I will be resuming my regular post as soon as I find a new card reader or USB cable, mine got left somewhere between Denver and Utah.

Summer Tart

With only 3 days left until the move I have given away almost all of my kitchen stuff but for some reason I couldn't part with my tart pan. I made this Apricot Blueberry Cream Tart as the last thing I bake before we move.

Tarragon Chicken Salad and Pita bread

Cool meal for a warm summer night. I used the recipe from Pink of Perfection blog for Tarragon chicken salad and it turn out great. I use half the sour cream and mayo she called for, and twice the grapes just because and I used this Pita bread recipe and it turned out great.

Oatmeal Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies

My friend made these cookies for a picnic we had a few weeks past and I have been wanting to try them ever since. Its a recipe from the smittenkitchen.com, which is a great website if you ever want to look at pretty pictures of food. Since my husband and I are going on vacations for the 4th I thought it would be nice to bring out host a little something.

I'm working on "Y" for this weeks recipe of cooking through the alphabet and hope to have it to you soon but the vacation may slow me up a little, please forgive me.

Chocolate cupcake Meringue frosting

By far the best frosting ever!!! If you have a good chocolate cake recipe use it and send it to me because I lost the one I used for these cupcakes and I'm kicking myself because they were a bite of heaven. I do still have the frosting recipe though.

Topping Ingredients

• 2 egg whites
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
• 1/2 cup superfine sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• sprinkles to decorate

1. This is a frosting that has a kind of meringue base, by which you whisk egg whites over heat until they're stiff and gleaming. So make a double-boiler with a heatproof bowl that will fit snugly over a saucepan of barely simmering water, and put all of the ingredients for the frosting, except for the vanilla and sprinkles, into the bowl. Whisk everything with an electric beater until the icing becomes thick and holds peaks like a meringue. This will take about 5 minutes, so be patient.
2. Take the bowl off the saucepan and onto a cool surface and keep whisking while you add the vanilla. Then keep whisking until the mixture cools a little. You want a proper peaked and whipped covering here, so spoon some frosting over each bun and then dollop another spoonful over in a swirly fashion. Immediately shake over your choice of sprinkles, as the icing will set very quickly. Indeed, these look rather like stage prop buns or the fake ones that some bakeries used to keep in their windows, so plasticky and gleaming are they.