Y for yogurt cups.

I made this back in the summer. I realized if I was going to finish this book I really needed to get on the ball and get going. I kept telling myself I was ready to make these then would forget to buy yogurt when I was shopping, and I didn’t particularly want to go into a store just for yogurt.

Turns out it was for the best when I did finally remember to buy the yogurt, our blueberry bush was in all its glory, loaded down with berries. This is the first year we have gotten to eat more than a few berries off the bushes usually the birds come by and enjoy them before we get a chance. This year though we decided to put a stop to that and netted the bushes. Don’t worry about the birds there is plenty of other food out there for them to eat including lots and lots of blackberries.

I can’t believe we never made yogurt cups before they were so easy. Though I did make a tiny mistake and added a teaspoon to much water. I wasn’t paying very good attention, and thought the recipe called for tablespoons when in reality it called for teaspoons; I did however realize this before adding in all the water. An extra teaspoon didn’t seem to affect it negatively at all but I am sure if I had added in two extra tablespoons the recipe would not have worked at all. this is why reading and re-reading a recipe before actually making it is so important.

The crusts were delicate and flakey with a nice flavor. They look really blonde in the pictures but I do believe they are supposed to be that way as they are made with powdered sugar and that always seems to make a blonder crust. They held up well to being filled with the yogurt. The recipe called for any flavor of yogurt I chose vanilla simply because it pairs well with the fresh berries.

I have already made the crust recipe again, when one day I was getting a hankering for a kiwi tart, and happened to have all ingredients. So this recipe is definitely a keeper the crust is versatile enough it can be used for any type of tart.

X for Xtra-special celebration cake

This cake turned out to be a lot more extra special than I realized it was going to be. I made this for my last big outing before the world came to a standstill. So yeah, I made it months ago.

I have wanted to make this cake, ever since I can remember I wanted this cake, but this cake was not meant to exist in my childhood. My mom had a favorite chocolate cake recipe which she insisted on using anytime she made a chocolate cake, and while it was a perfectly delicious chocolate cake it was not this cake and I longed for this cake. I longed for a large double layer with lollipops standing at attention showing me how bright and happy a chocolate cake could be.

W for Wonderful waffles.

I put off blogging too long and now don’t really remember much about these waffles.

They were Waffles I do remember that, and I had them with fresh blueberries, which the pictures reminded me of that. and also, real maple syrup, but I always eat waffles with real maple syrup I am a syrup snob so that was not hard to recall.

It seems I should have more to say about these then I do, as when I made them it was the first time in my life I have ever made waffles. I have eaten plenty of waffles, but I never had to make them. When I was a kid my mom used to make them from scratch all the time. We never had store bought waffles. But she didn’t make these waffles.

She made a simpler recipe. This one has you separate the eggs and beat whites till stiff then fold them into the batter at the end. whatever recipe she used was more just throw everything in, and truthfully it seems about the same result to me. I didn’t notice these being any fluffier than what we had as kids or even what my mom makes now, so I am wondering if the stiffened eggs are really worth the extra work.

I should try it without separating eggs and see. Now before you go telling me I probably over mixed while folding in the egg whites I will say I was very careful not to do that. And I have done the stiffened egg whites in cakes and seen a difference. It may just be this recipe, but I didn’t see it made much of a difference.

I will say these turned out well, but they were just a basic waffle, nothing to rave about. I think if I make them again, I will double the recipe, as this made a total of four rather small waffles.

My waffle maker is not very big and is supposed to turn out heart shaped waffles, but I didn’t fill it quite full enough to get the heart shapes. If I had it would have made only three waffles, which now that I am looking back in the book it says it only makes three 8” waffles, so maybe the fact I got four waffles at all is good enough.

Once I finish the book, I think I will go ahead and try them again without separating the egg see if it makes a difference. If it does, I will make sure to do a quick edit and put a note at the end of this post.
These wonderful waffles were good, but a lot of effort for very little payout so I do believe doubling the recipe is a good idea.

V for veggie Bites.

Well I am officially so behind in blogging it’s funny. I should have gotten to blogging about this as soon as I found the pictures for the upside-down pineapple cake, but I put it off. I wish I could say I was doing something terribly productive, but I wasn’t. I am going to try to catch up though. Let’s see how that goes.

Ok so these are really good, and I have no idea why we never had them as children. It’s basically breaded vegetables maybe we would have eaten our veggies better if they were breaded. Of course, the key word in that sentence is maybe.

Like so many children my favorite food was not vegetables. They were something I only ate because I had too. When I was a kid the vegetables, I did like were Cheesy cauliflower, steamed spinach, potatoes, carrots and lettuce. So, I guess I did like some veggies, but if we had, had this I probably would have loved it.

It’s fairly simple to make, put the veggies in a egg, water mixture then bread the veggies in flour and salt then pour melted butter over them and bake. It turns out a crispy coated veggie of deliciousness.

Looking at the pictures I am realizing I didn’t picture the egg, or maybe its hiding behind something I have no idea but really there is an egg In this recipe.

The first time I had this recipe was only a few years ago my sister and niece made it one day and I was duly impressed. Thiers actually turned out better than mine, but mine was still good, and I will make this again. So far this book is everything I remember. The recipes are really good, and easy. There are the select few that are a tad more difficult but nothing too hard at all.

U for upside-down pineapple cake

I made this several months ago but have gotten behind in blogging partly because I didn’t feel like writing but mostly because I lost the pictures. I was nearing the end of a memory card and had a big weekend planned (like I said months ago, as in pre co-vid yes it’s been that long.) I was scared the memory card would run out so I swapped out to a new card just for that weekend and put the old one back in when the weekend was over. I made this cake for the weekend but with the card swapping I forgot I had put the pictures on the new card. I tend to stay behind a bit in blogging so it was a month or so before I realized I had lost the pictures. I thought somehow I accidently deleted them. It would not be the first time I did something like that so I was trying to decide what to do, should I just post about the cake without pictures, or should I make another cake. At this point I had already made the next two recipes, so it would have been back tracking and I really wanted to do this book without back tracking, but somehow posting without at least one picture seems wrong. So I sat on it for a bit, trying to wrap my head around remaking the cake. But here’s the thing about cake, it needs to be shared and by this point Co-vid was (and still is) keeping me away from things. home and work has basically been my life for the last several months. I have not been sick and hope I don’t get sick, so right now there is no cake sharing. I finally begrudgingly decided to post without pictures. But I put it off, and put it off some more till one morning I woke up with a thought in my head. “I know where the pictures are! They’re on the other memory card!” And they were, so now with pictures and everything upside-down pineapple cake.

Pineapple upside-down cake was a favorite of mine when I was a child, we used this recipe and others and it didn’t matter the recipe it always turned out delicious but we always did it a bit different we always used crushed pineapple.

I always wanted to make it like the pictures with the pineapple rings and cherries but my mom never wanted to make it that way so we didn’t. I remember asking her about the cherries and she told me she didn’t care for them on the cake so I was a poor deprived child without maraschino cherries. Funny thing is I never really liked the taste of them in the first place, but I always liked the look. It’s such a bright cheerful thing a maraschino cherry. So taste good or not I wanted it. And I never got it.

As for using crushed pineapple as opposed to rings you get a more even flavor and more caramelization because the pineapple goes from edge to edge it’s also easier to cut and the rings don’t slide off when you cut into them. I don’t know if it’s because of growing up eating it with crushed pineapple but I actually like it better than the rings.

I wasn’t sure which way I liked better until I made this as it had been years since I even had pineapple upside-down cake.

I made this the traditional way with the rings and the cherries like one always sees in pictures. Yay I finally got my cherries!
And here is what I think on the cherries. Yum. Seriously I liked them on the cake, baking them completely changes them it makes them more like cherries, and less like… I don’t know; spongy globs of sweetness. The texture of Maraschino cherries is just weird.

This cake is done like most upside-down cakes, with brown sugar and butter being melted on the bottom then fruit placed on the sugar and cake batter poured on top before baking in the oven. Once done the cake is turned out and left to sit for a bit before removing the pan so the caramelized cake is then on top.

I thought this cake turned out really well, but in the future I am on board for the crushed pineapple, with the cherries of course, since I have some left and cannot think of anything else to do with them. I do not like them raw so it’s not as if they are not going on ice cream sundaes or anything.

Another thing I would do slightly different is cook it just a tad bit longer. It was good but I think just two minutes more would have made all the difference.

garden

My garden is going fairly well.
Every morning I go out and help the squashes out with pollenating incase the bees don’t fly that day, then in the evenings I go out to help pollenate the cucumbers.
I figured out the cucumbers don’t wake up nearly as early as the squash, and the squash goes to bed before I get home from work, so they have to be pollenated at differing times. In the evenings I also do the weeding, the deadheading and picking of the veggies.
I am eating cucumbers and squash every day and looking up recipes so I can eat them in more than one way, so as not to get bored of them.
My tomatoes however are not real happy they are getting blossom end rot. Hmm… need to try to figure out what to do about that.
The blackberries are doing really good; these are wild blackberries and come back every year. Some years are good, others not so much it depends on the weather. Last year looked as if it was going to be good but then it rained so much right before they were ready, and they molded. This year I watched and hoped but didn’t get too excited till they were ready to eat. And now they are ready and coming in nicely. The only problem with wild blackberries is they have a lot more seeds then what you purchase in the grocery store but that’s ok they still taste good. So far I have eaten them straight off the bush, and cooked a lot of things. I have made Blackberry cobbler, blackberry empanadas, blackberry muffins and blackberry barbeque sauce.
So far the hard work is paying off.

T for turtle bread.

This is a recipe I am very fond of. We used to make it quite a bit when I was a child.
The name is a bit odd but don’t worry it has no real turtles in it. Actually, when I mention turtle bread to people they automatically think of a chocolate, caramel, nut topping, but this is basically just a white bread. It’s called turtle bread because it shaped like a turtle!

I don’t know why they chose Turtle bread to represent the letter T; there are so many foods that start with T. Tomatoes, tacos, tuna, toast, etc. But they chose a bread, I guess this is one of those things that is targeted toward children. But even as I child I questioned the choice. Not that I didn’t like the bread. This bread is pretty awesome. It takes an hour from start to finish, has a great flavor and is cute. How can you go wrong with cute?


The one problem we had when I was a kid though is the head is the only part with raisons and even that only has two raisons for eyes. We all liked raisons, so we tended to argue about who got the head.

The raisons made it special and we all wanted it. Perhaps we should have decorated the shell with raisons as oh well how would siblings ever learn to get along if they had nothing to argue about.
In any case we all loved this bread, whether or not we got the head.


I hadn’t made bread in years and realized Kneading takes more arm muscle then I remember. I forgot just how long ten minutes can feel when kneading. It’s probably a really good exercise.

I didn’t quite proof this long enough, but it was still passible and tasted good. I will make it again someday, but probably not till winter. Baking bread in the summer is just too hot.
And let me just say this is nothing like the taste of fresh from the oven bread with butter on top. Yum!