This week

So, it has been awhile, again...But I am determined to keep at this! I have been thinking about the blog all week, but have not really had much to blog about. So today I decided I needed to bake something. I had a recipe I wanted to use, but being out of buttermilk, and not wanting to run to the store, I did a quick google search for an easy one bowl chocolate cake recipe! I kept coming across the Hershey Chocolate Cake recipe (on their web site using their cocoa). It seemed simple enough, the proportions of ingredients seemed a little strange to me but the strangest addition was 1C of boiling water! I have seen a lot of cake recipes, but none involving adding boiling water to the batter.

I am not the type of person to tempt fate. Since I really enjoy using really good quality ingredients, I rarely embark on a project that I don't know will work...Maybe I was tempting fate, but I decided to go with it. A new (and quite foreign) recipe, Dutch processed cocoa and black cocoa instead of natural...and the last kicker...not enough milk...I don't know HOW I got this to work, but it made an amazing cake! I compensated for the lack in milk (like a 1/2C) with more boiling water....and surprisingly the change from natural to dutch process cocoa did not mess with the leavening too much...It produced a VERY moist, fudge-y, black cake....let me stress to you how black this cake was....not dark chocolate, not rich chocolate, but BLACK...Which I for one happened to REALLY enjoy...and my husband and two guests seemed to enjoy it also.

I always make my own butter cream frosting, since I dislike the cloyingly sweet (and horribly unnatural) cans at the supermarket. I thought for such a dark cake surely, as tempting as it was, a chocolate fudge frosting would have been over-kill. I thought that a nice raspberry would cut the richness of the cake and be quite good. BUT instead of doing the right thing and making a fresh raspberry frosting, I broke down and got raspberry flavoring...it was a huge FAIL. First off, raspberries are tart, and strong. This flavoring certainly didn't taste or smell like any raspberry I've ever met before. So I did my best to cover it up using a good vanilla bean crush ( think vanilla bean seeds in a thick vanilla extract) to no avail. For my tastes the frosting was overly sweet, and while it did taste like something other than vanilla, it certainly did not taste like raspberry. A big bummer. But the cake was good enough that it made the frosting sort of an after thought anyway. I should note that my husband didn't think that it was too sweet at all...but he could drink that DaVinci syrup straight. So he may just be on a different level.

In other news, I am in the midst of a cup and saucer bird feeder project. More to come on that later. And I figured I should mention that our starts for our garden are doing very well! However some of my flower starts have taken a turn for the worse, and I'm not sure why :(. Hopefully they will perk back up.

Any way, I think that's about it for me tonight! More to come later! Keep those eyes peeled!