Lazy Blogger

I’ve been a lazy blogger. I did manage to bake the chocolate covered strawberry cake, and the coconut cheesecake, but they were a bit late for the Heavenly Cake Bakers’ schedule, so I didn’t post about them, but I will now, because it’s been too long since I posted.

I loved the chocolate covered strawberry cake. We had a couple of friends over for a campfire in our backyard, and they and my husband all seemed to like the individual components, but didn’t think they worked amazingly well together. They all thought the chocolate overwhelmed the strawberry, which I guess matches what many of the rest of the baking group said.

Don’t mind the funny blotch. The condensation from the plastic wrap dripped and seems to have lightened it. I’m not a big fan of coconut, but I needed a cake the week it came up on the schedule, so I figured I might as well try it out. Why did I need a cake? Well, some of the people from our office in Virginia were up for a visit to our headquarters, and I’ve received a few complaints from one of them that no one ever breaks the build when he’s in the main office. We have a tradition that if someone checks in bad code, causing the overnight build to fail to compile, they buy doughnuts for the rest of dev. When I break the build, I bring homemade cupcakes or cake. That hasn’t happened in quite some time, but I regularly bring in the results of my cake baking escapades anyway. The Virginia guys are on the email list that I notify when I have something to share, so I figured I should bring in something just for them while they were in town. Everyone seemed to like it, and it disappeared quickly enough that I had to snag a piece and stash it in the fridge in the kitchen with a sticky note on it for the visitor who had complained, since he was in meetings all day and would have missed it otherwise!

I took one particular compliment from one of my co-workers. He’s recently moved to the other end of the building because we’re running out of space, so he didn’t quite make it to my cubicle before the cheesecake disappeared. He said “It’s ok. I really don’t like coconut, but I really like your cakes, so I thought maybe this would be the one that would change my mind about coconut.”

On a side note, I had a really hard time finding cream of coconut. Our liquor stores don’t sell anything non-alcoholic, and our grocery stores don’t sell anything alcoholic, so finding appropriate mixes for drinks is a challenge. I ended up buying coconut cream, and adding simple syrup to try to get it to something approaching what I thought cream of coconut might be like.

Today’s cake is the Génoise Rose, which I haven’t baked yet, but I might do that Wednesday afternoon, depending on available time. I hope Marie and the rest of the heavenly cake bakers will excuse my tardiness. We’re currently in the process of trying to gather up some quotes for kitchen cabinets, and we have 2 appointments on Wednesday with 2 different cabinet places, and a more detailed consultation tomorrow night with a third.

Kitchen’s back to “usable” space, now that the hole in the floor has been filled in.