Continuing on with foods I’ve made but never posted. There are so many! (I think I’ve already mentioned that before, but still, it bears repeating.)

I kind of like this little series. I work on it when my brain is empty, when I can’t summon the energy to spout off on important, life-changing topics like, like, like… Oh never mind. Like I said, I work on this when my brain is empty. I wasn’t kidding.

These posts are kind of therapeutic. They make me feel like I was once, a long time ago, productive. It’s a resting-on-my-laurels-type post. Not that anybody gave me any laurels when I first cooked these dishes. But still.

Enough of the empty chatter. Let’s get on with the food.

Oh, and one more thing. There is nothing healthy in this post, and almost everything was a flop. If you want to go hang out at some other place in bloggyland, I’ll understand.

Okay, now where is that “unposted food” folder? Ah-ha, here it is.

Nectarine Coffee Cake. Too sweet, too gooey, too bland, too yuck.

I can’t quite tell from where I’m sitting, but I think this is a Sour Cream Nectarine Pie. Or maybe it’s peaches instead of nectarines. In either case, it was no good. Perhaps the sour cream curdled, but I’m not sure about that.

Peaches in White Wine, with a couple red raspberries thrown in for color and Just Because. I liked it, but not too much. I enjoyed it more when I added a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Then it was like a fruity-wine-y ice cream float. Come to think of it, I really did like that combination. Maybe I’ll try it again next summer.

What do you think these are? I’ll give you three guesses.

Taffy? Nope.

Pickle Spice Taffy? Nope.

Snot Balls? NO! (That is so gross.)

Before you go any lower, I’ll tell you what it is: Vinegar Candy. I think it came about after the pickled taffy event. Yo-Yo was repulsed by the sinus-cleansing vinegar smell that infiltrated the whole house, so I informed him that there is a candy that’s made out of vinegar. Of course he wanted to try it. He made it twice; the first time we undercooked it. He ate a bunch, but the majority went to the compost.

Peanut Butter Banana Pie. Just all around totally disgusting. Period. If you want a peanut butter pie, make this instead.

Glorified Gingerbread. I made this when I was floundering around trying to discover my shoofly cake recipe. It was certainly no shoofly cake, but it was a very fine gingerbread, better than the one I already posted. But wouldn’t you know, I returned the cookbook from whence it came to the library before I copied the recipe down. Shame!

Ah, now this. This is a Red Wine Pear Tartin, and it was lovely all around. It was lovely to prepare (a reduced cinnamon-spiked and buttery red wine sauce, oh my) and lovely to eat. In fact, we ate all but one piece in one sitting. There was plate-licking involved.

Date-Nut Loaf. I first ate this at a friend’s house and loved it, but I changed it up a bit (too much so?) when I made it myself and as a result didn’t appreciate it as much. Instead of dates, I used some of these that I had made and didn’t like (perhaps this is a bad starting place—using something I already don’t like as the foundation to another recipe?) and it just wasn’t the same. I don’t know how I could’ve expected it to be, under the circumstances.

Date Nut Balls, from a recipe that MAC gave me. These were good. Mr. Handsome adored them, actually. They are addictive—crunchy, chewy, caramelly, coconutty, yum-yum-yummy-yum-yummy.

Once again, it’s hard to tell what this is exactly, but I think it just might be a Caramelized-Nectarine Pie. I can tell because of the black boot lying there on the deck. I don’t think we liked this. There was too much crust and too little fruit and the fruit there was was bland.

Sour Cream Rum-Raisin Pie. This was a recent creation. We didn’t like it. The rum was too rummy, the raisins too raisiny, the meringue too meringue-y. But the concept was really neat so I have plans to play around with it. I have twenty-some quarts of raisins in the freezer, so I kind of have to find a good pie recipe. Any suggestions?

These are the Mini Pavlovas that I told you about. They were delicious.

Lemon Tea Cookies. I used to make these when I was a kid. Lemon-y and buttery and thin and crispy, these are very good. The dough is shaped into logs and then sliced, and each slice is topped with a sprinkling of sugar-lemon zest mixture before baking. They’re addictive.

Joy Cupcakes. These come from Joy the Baker. Overall, I haven’t been impressed with her recipes (though the honey-whole wheat cake I got from her has justified all the time I’ve spend skimming her posts), but this one, though a bit too time-consuming, was tasty. The process is simple: make a thin layer of gooey brownie in the bottom of a lined muffin tin (do not over-bake), freeze it, top with ice cream of your choosing (I used mint chocolate chip and butterscotch), freeze, and then top with a creamy ganache and freeze again.

Chocolate Truffles. I made several kinds, but in this picture you’re looking at rum-coconut. I wasn’t sold.

Shoofly Pie. This recipe came from The Pie and Pastry Bible and it involved coffee, cinnamon, and nutmeg, as well as molasses. It was quite exotic, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

And that wraps it up for today. If you’re the type of person who puts on weight via your eyeballs, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry that you wasted valuable calories on such unspectacular food. Well, except for the pear tartin. That was worth every single calorie.

Next time I’ll post something with green in it. Maybe.

About one year ago: Reverse Cleaning.

I made this cake.

I call it “girl cake” because only the female half of the family liked it. The male half turned up their noses and pushed their plates away. (Not really—Mr. Handsome finished his piece like a real man before thumbing his nose in the cake’s general direction.)

I wasn’t too surprised that they didn’t like the cake. “It’s kind of complex,” I admitted. (Please note: it’s highly unusual for me to sympathize with family members over their food hang-ups.)

“And nutty,” Mr. Handsome added.

“Like women, huh,” I said with a snicker. (Please note: I do not condone sexist comments. That said, I occasionally make them.)

I started feeling a little doubtful about the cake after watching the boys turn up their snozzes. Was the cake really any good, or was I just enchanted with it because it involved unique prep methods? Were my tastebuds going all haywire on me?

But then I served it to my sister-in-law and she claimed to like it. I fed it to one of my girlfriends—she smacked her lips appreciatively and then tucked away a second piece. That settled it. This cake was clearly a girl thing.

You know how some cakes, like some girls, are all glitz and glamour? These are the easy cakes: easy on the eye with their thick, glossy swirls of frosting and easy on the tongue with their copious amounts of butter, chocolate, and sugar. These babes are fun to hang with—they know how to whoop it up good—and nearly everyone falls for them at one point or another; but, after courting them, the ones indulging begin to feel a little empty and maybe even slightly ill, off-kilter from too much sweet and too little substance. When they eventually crash and burn, the fallout can be pretty ugly and the rebound even worse.

This cake is like another type of girl all together, one that is at first glance modest and maybe even a little homely, but when gently encouraged, she reveals her true nature—complex, nuanced, and … deep. She doesn’t have gaggles of friends, but the few she does have (oh, the luckies!) will remain her friends for life. This cake is like that type of girl, my kind of girl, sweet, wholesome, and exciting in an understated sort of way.

So maybe the analogy is a little over-the-top, yes? Even illogical? Riddled with weak sentence structure? Ah, well. Seeing as I’m a little over-the-top about this cake, I guess it’s only fitting. I’m not even going to apologize.

Instead, I’ll offer you a challenge: take this girl cake for a little spin and see if you don’t end up falling in love with her yourself. I have a hunch you might.

Molly’s Marmalade Cake
Adapted from Molly Wizenberg’s blog

The only change I made was to use half whole wheat flour and, in retrospect, I think all of the white flour could be subbed out for whole wheat. And then, except for the sugar, this could be counted as a nutritious cake, what with the fruit, nuts, and olive oil.

I pulled this cake out of the oven a little too soon. I thought it was burning and got worried. I needn’t have—the edges were just fine—and it sank a little, but even so, it was still delicious and didn’t taste underdone at all. Which leads me to believe that it doesn’t require a full sixty minutes in the oven, but a bit more than the forty-five minutes I gave it. Fifty to fifty-five minutes should be perfect.

1 orange
1 lemon
6 ounces raw almonds
½ cup whole wheat pastry flour
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
4 large eggs
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups sugar
2/3 cup olive oil
confectioner’s sugar, for dusting

Spread the almonds on a cookie sheet and toast them in the oven at 300 degrees for about twenty minutes, stirring them every three minutes or so until they are dark golden brown. After the nuts have cooled a bit, put them into a food processor and pulse until they are the texture of sand. Dump them into a bowl and set aside.

Put the lemon and orange in a kettle and cover with water (they will float, but never mind that). Bring the water to a boil, reduce the heat a bit, top the pan with a lid, and simmer the fruit for thirty minutes. Drain the fruit and cool.

Cut the lemon in half, remove the pulp, and cut off the tough stem ends. Put the lemon rind into the (still-dirty) food processor bowl. Cut the orange in half, remove any seeds, chop each half into several more pieces, and dump the bits of orange in with the lemon rind. Pulse till the fruit is thoroughly chopped up. The resulting mixture will be partly pebbly and partly pasty. It doesn’t need to be completely smooth. Set aside.

Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them for a couple minutes with a handheld mixer till they are frothy. Beat in the sugar and then add the flours, salt, and baking powder. Add the olive oil, nuts, and fruit puree and beat briefly.

Pour the batter into a greased nine- or ten-inch springform pan and bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes (see above note). Cool completely. Sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar immediately before serving. (The cake improves with age, so make it a day or two ahead of when you plan to serve it.)

About one year ago: Caramel Popcorn. I’ve made this two times in the past couple weeks. We’ve taken to calling it crack. One day I even made Mr. Handsome hide it from me before he left for work.

The best part—and there are many—about going to the library is the morning after.

When I arrive home from my evening trip to town with my gigantic canvas tote brimming over with books, magazines, and videos, the kids are usually already asleep, and Mr. Handsome and I get to sort through the loot together.

The videos and educational books (ie, ones that the kids aren’t allowed to look through because I plan to read them out loud later) are stored up on a high shelf. (Not that they can’t get up there, but still.)

My reading material gets stored on a lower shelf, and we fill up the book baskets with the remaining picture books.

The next morning the children come downstairs, groggy and tousled, and I whisper, There are new library books in the baskets. It’s like I switched a magical button. They scurry wordlessly to the baskets, drag them over by the fire, switch on the lamps, grab the ratty old throw blankets, and disappear into the world of pictures and words. There is no fussing. There is no begging for breakfast. There is no bickering.

I let them lay around longer than normal, mornings after library trips, and I read to them more, too. This last time around I pulled out the stack of read-aloud books and showed them to Yo-Yo and Miss Beccaboo. They were, understandably, impatient to get started, so after our Bible reading (Joshua is a earth-shattering book for my kids; Yo-Yo has decided that the Bible is not a good book after all and that Joshua’s God is not our God) and chemistry element (nickel), I read to them about the history of ice cream, the first seeing eye dogs, how to draw faces in profile, and some prayers and rhymes. Next week we’ll delve into Greek mythology and world religions.

Tonight Yo-Yo is going out with his mentor to see a play, so I will not be able to read from our evening read-aloud, All Creatures Great and Small. Instead, I’ll be reading the library picture books, something I don’t do all that much anymore. I plan to read until my voice gives out, and then Mr. Handsome can take it from there.

If we read fast enough, I might be able to justify another trip to the library as soon as next week.