Photographic Evidence: Zebra Chocolate Raspberry Country Zombie Cake

Made from ye olde mix in a jar

Zebralicious!

Gooey!

My Weekend in Food: Jan 8-9, 2011

My lovely friend Michelle called me and asked me to join her at a local free cooking class again. We went almost every week last fall and learned lots of great things, but that was not the case on Saturday. That’s a whole other post, but generally, there are a couple of tips we learn and we have a good time. This week was about stir fry, and we got through 1 of the 3 recipes on deck. It was tasty and I’ll be excited to try it at home. Afterward, we went to the Old Town Farmers Market for breakfast and it was quite tasty. We got crepes and while it was a little hard to eat, I’ll definitely try them again. Then we wandered around getting various tastes and groceries. Definitely a success in that I got some Tangelo Honey-belles which I had been ogling in my Harry and David catalog earlier that morning.

Once we got back to the house (husbands were gathering for a music practice), I got my bread machine going on a loaf of the Home-style White. It is one of three breads in the beginning of the killer bread machine recipe book Brendan got for me (along with the epic breadmachine) for my birthday. The book is neat in that it teaches you how to use the machine through a few simple recipes. I am trying each a few times to get the hang of the machina before advancing to crazy awesome breads. It’s still ridiculously tasty. I love it. Anyhow, once the ingredients for that were situated, I decided to make a cake from a mix I had in jar. When my friend Lauren got married (she loves zombies) I found a jar cake mix online and made dry mixes for all the girls at her shower, calling it Lauren’s Country Zombie Cake. In rereading the recipe I was totally scandalized by it not needing eggs. I should have know it would produce a flat cake. Oh well. Once that was baking, I wanted to make Orange Biscochitos, which I had bought the ingredients for for my Christmas baking, but hadn’t gotten around to making them.

I had no idea what I was getting into. The state cookie of Nuevo Mexico is not so easy. I was SO thankful Michelle was there to help me mix, and then dunk the cookies into the sugar-cinnamon coating because the 5 dozen the recipe mentioned as the bounty was spot on. It was my first time rolling out dough with cookie cutters. It took way longer than I thought it would. The cookies themselves were cutout with a star, which was fun, and they tasted pretty good. They had flour, lard, anise, orange juice, sugar, cinnamon, and triple sec. They tasted really mild despite all the crazy ingredients.

At that point it was like 4:30 or something, and we started to frost the cake. The frosting recipe we tried said unsweetened chocolate. I made the mistake of thinking that cocoa powder would work. Not so much. So then I had to add more water (didn’t work)…so then we added butter (tasted better, but the consistency was still junky). In the end, we just didn’t like the taste of the cake or the frosting, so we decided to layer it with raspberry jam to make it better. We cut the cake into three even pieces and then filleted them into 6 thin pieces. We layered jam and liquidy frosting alternating, and then Michelle artfully poured frosting over the top, getting a nice drip effect. At this point we decided that even if it didn’t taste good, it would look good. We tried to chill the frosting with the hopes it would set, and eventually it set enough that it changed colors. Michelle poured another layer on the top, making it zebralicious and it looked amazing. I busted out my fancy cake platter I received for our wedding and it looked killer.

It was maybe 5, 6′o clock and we were getting hungry so I decided to transition straight into enchiladas. I threw the green chiles I had purchased at the farmers market under the broiler and asked Michelle to peel some garlic and grate some cheese. About an hour later, we had neat stacked red chile enchiladas (both chicken and cheese) and I hadn’t burned myself during the dutiful dip in oil, dip in sauce routine needed for the tortillas. Mixed with a little green onion and cilantro – they were definitely a success.

As we sat around with Michael and Michelle and Mack, eating cake and cookies, and drinking tea, only then did I begin to feel tired from being on my feel almost all day. Cooking weekend #1 = success.