A Whole Lot of Baking Going On

This has been a busy week for baking things.  First we had to celebrate the one-year-anniversary of getting Mocha, our rabbit.  He got a carrot.  We got carrot cake.  Brasilian Carrot Cake, to be exact.  Here's the recipe, so I'll have it digitally in addition to on a little scrap of paper.

Brasilian Carrot Cake

3 large or 5 medium carrots

1 cup oil

4 eggs

2 cups sugar

2 cups flour

dash of salt

1.5 tsp. baking powder

Blend the carrots, oil and eggs in a blender until smooth.  Mix in the rest of the ingredients and pour into a greased 9x13 pan.  Bake at 350 for 35 minutes or so until done.  Poke holes in the cake with a fork.

Topping:

4 T. cocoa

2 T. butter

2 T. milk

2 T. sugar

Cook this together for a few minutes and then pour over the cake while it is cooling.  The glaze should ooze into the holes you made with the fork.

We ate the cake while he sat on his chair and stared at us.  I think he was feeling rather full from his carrot.

Then, 2 nights later, the 11 year old had a birthday party.  I take requests, of course, and this one was a chocolate cake with raspberry filling and milk chocolate ganache.  Voila!

By the time 14 people (2 adults and 12 children) got to it, this is all that was left.

Yesterday morning for breakfast, I made blueberry kumquat muffins.  I made standard muffins and threw in 1 cup of wild blueberries and about 1 T. chopped candied kumquats.  Each muffin the got a kumquat half on top before they baked.  Even the 8 year old ate 3 muffins.  I never cease to be surprised at what gets eaten and what doesn't...

No baking today.  We went to the Edward Gorey Museum in Yarmouthport, MA.  The rest of the afternoon was spent elaborating upon the Gashleycrumb Tinies.

Whey Good!

This morning my parents were coming to visit and I wanted to make something special for them with that ricotta I made yesterday.  I had 12 ounces of ricotta and found a recipe for a ricotta cake in The North End Italian Cookbook.  12 ounces is 1/4 of the ricotta the recipe calls for so I scaled the recipe down and made 3 tiny heart shaped cheesecakes.  It's ricotta, sugar, eggs, flour (just a little), lemon, vanilla and a tiny bit of cream.  The recommended crust is graham cracker crumbs but my box of those was really old and smelled funny, and I didn't have any other graham crackers, so I used some shortbread type cookies I had instead.  They are baked at 425 for 10 minutes and then 350 for another 40, then I turned the oven off and let them cool in the oven.  They are supposed to be served chilled but I didn't have time so they were a little warm.  Not a problem.

We ate the cheesecakes topped with canned peaches, lemon curd, or candied kumquats.  They were terrific!

Springtime at the Whole Foods

And they have my favorite grapes!

We've already established that I have an attraction to foods that are only in the stores for limited times, right?  One of those foods happens to be Muscat grapes, which are just so amazingly tasty and beautiful I have to buy lots of them when I see them.  Which is now.  I bought about 6.5 pounds yesterday and at least 2/3 of that have been eaten!  (Not entirely by me...)

Another thing I finally got brave enough to buy was a package of kumquats.  I see them all the time and decided that I should not be so timid.  My Brasilian friend says that the ones she used to have in Brasil were much sweeter than these, though.  So, after struggling through a few I decided I would candy the rest.  I cut them all in half and simmered them for 20 minutes in a simple syrup (1 cup water, 1 cup sugar) and then put them in a jar.  I did not process it, but it sealed anyway from the cooling of the syrup.  It'll go in the fridge, along with another jar of just the syrup, in case we want to make creamsicle sundaes or something.