Domestic

Muffin of the Week

Recently Amy and I have been choosing a different muffin recipe each week to whip up on Sunday and snack on throughout the week. Well, we both decide on a recipe and Amy does the actual whipping. Though I did add struesel to the tops of one batch before it was tossed into the oven last week!

With all the berries currently in season, we've been making many berry-centric muffins and this week is no different. We decided on red-raspberry and lemon muffins.

They are awesome and have tons of big berry and lemon flavor. - S

The Bread Emerges

The bread's out of the oven. It looks great. It doesn't smell as strongly of baking bread as I thought it would. It didn't stick to the towel too horribly, as I'd expected it would. All in all, this was a very easy recipe. If it tastes as good as it looks, I'll be making it often.

No-Knead Bread

Finally, I am attempting the infamous no-knead bread from last November's New York Times. I'm taking a gamble and I'm going to make in the insert for the slow cooker. I don't think Sonia would be too thrilled if I went out and bought some enameled cast iron for this little project.

I should have watched the video first. I thought my dough looked slightly too dry (I followed the by-weight recipe exactly), so I added an extra splash of water (less than a 1/4 cup). Now I've got a pretty sticky dough in a bowl on top of my fridge.

I'll be messing around with it again at 3 pm tomorrow, and hope to have a great loaf to serve alongside chicken parmesan, for the friends we're having over for dinner.

From the project archives

As long as we'll be covering all domestic activities now, I've got tons in the archives to show off.

Like this wedding cake I made a few weeks ago.

That's right. A wedding cake. Except there wasn't a wedding.

I'm not going to go into all of the embarassing details, other than to say it was for the season finale of a tv show that a big group of us have been getting together to watch every week. The final episode was supposed to have a wedding (yes, with two brides), so we decided to turn it into a more festive tv-watching affair, with sparkling wine and cake! And I volunteered to make the cake. I've always wanted an excuse to try and whip up a wedding cake. This one was small and manageable, and not for a real wedding—so no pressure.

Frosting roses! Trips to the local cake decorating store! Frosting ropes around the cake! An excuse to buy a cake decorating book! HOT PINK frosting! It was too much fun.

And it was tasty: White cake recipe from the Joy of Cooking—which came out very spongy, in an almost dense-angelfood cake kind of way—with a lemon curd filling, and basic buttercream frosting.

It was too big for us to finish at the party, though, so I brought the rest in to work the next day. And did my best to avoid explaining that I'd made an entire wedding cake just for a tv show.