I have made three different things this week. First, my mom mentioned that she saw a Mardi Gras special on the Today Show and they made a special Mardi Gras cake called a king cake. It's kind of like a coffee cake that gets rather garishly decorated with green, gold and purple (the Mardi Gras colors). Inside the cake, you bake a little plastic baby Jesus, and whoever gets the Jesus in their slice gets good luck for the year (or something). I was intrigued by this cake and decided to give it a try.
Pre-decorating, this braided cake is sooo pretty! |
Scary attempt at making a baby Jesus... |
Decorating the beautiful braided yeast cake was wonderful, because this is one time when it is supposed to look bad! I am an expert in that. The frosting's secret ingredient was evaporated milk, and came out great... I was a little afraid since I have had numerous bad frosting experiences lately. Then I frosted the cake, and shook the colored sugars on top. Like I said, I was supposed to use green, purple and gold. I had green, so that was no problem, but we do not regularly use purple or gold sugar! I improvised with yellow, and a mixture of blue and pink. Perfect? No. But it wasn't supposed to look great, so I'd have to say I did the king cake justice! I love the end result. Tacky and ugly, but absolutely delicious.
Post-decorating, and ugly but delicious! |
The cake called for a ton of egg yolks, so I was left with my usual problem of tons of leftover whites! I wanted to try something different than my go-to pavlova, so I found a recipe for meringue cookies. You may notice that there are no pictures of these... and that is because they look like mushroom caps and I hate them! I followed the recipe to a T - I did the mix-in flavors of vanilla and rum - and I think the recipe is definitely wrong. With what I already know about meringues and pavlovas, I know that it's pretty uncommon to see the oven at 300 degrees, and then to bake for two hours! It's usually a much lower temperature, and not that long in the oven. I had my doubts but I tried it anyway. The house smelled great for a while, and then started to smell like burning. I took them right out, and while the consistency was right for meringue, the taste was a little burned. Luckily I took this in stride and didn't do my usual meltdown because I can definitely say this was no mistake of mine; do not try this at home!
I also made my family's favorite dinner of the lettuce wraps this week. These absolutely delicious little babies came courtesy of Laura and when I made them last time, Kenzie, Mom and I devoured them. The sauce is so good, I could practically drink it. I was excited to let Mark try them this time, and was slightly (very) disappointed to find that he wasn't a huge fan. He claims he hates ground chicken. I claim that he went into the dinner planning on not liking them! Regardless, Mom and I still scarfed them down and think they were great :)
Be ready for another update, hopefully tonight; I have a new brownie recipe I am going to try!
Recipes:
King cake
Meringue cookies
Lettuce Wraps
I think that baby Jesus was BEAUTIFUL!!!
ReplyDelete1. That is not how I pictured Baby Jesus
ReplyDelete2. Baby Jesus is not a shell
3. You might be going to hell
4. I'm telling Gram on you