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Crack Bread and Christmas Coffee Giveaway

December 19, 2011 by 51 Comments
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(Subtitle: The post where I talk about a really unhealthy desert and then randomly segue into giving away pounds of coffee)

I realized I should stop calling my blog a quase food blog and just call it a running, life, and baking blog. Because pretty much all of my recipes are desserts. And that’s how it should be.

Yesterday I posted about Funfetti Cake Cookies and today I’m still on a Pillsbury kick apparently. Normally I go for unprocessed everything but I figured I’d knock these two out of the park together.

The following recipe is very near and dear to me and came via my beautiful friend Tiffany. It has four ingredients, is awesome to bring to parties, and as Tiffany warned, it may cause “excessive subconscious eating.” You’ve been warned.

Crack Bread Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup vanilla ice cream
  • ½ cup butter
  • 1 tube Pillsbury biscuits (the original—not the flaky layers or super butter tasting kinds)

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To make:

Melt the brown sugar, ice cream, and butter in a saucepan until it becomes uniform in color and consistency.

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Pour into a baking dish (disposable ones work great if you’re bringing it to a party, like I have been)

Put the biscuits into the caramel mixture, cut into little triangles.

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Bake at 350 degrees until golden brown (12-15 minutes).

Enjoy. Preferably hot and with ice cream.

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Obviously NOTHING about this is healthy but it takes minutes to make and is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Try it one day when you’re feeling lazy and thank me later. It seriously melts in your mouth. #twss

In other news… I have a bunch of coffee to give away. Godiva sponsored the Foodbuzz Festival so for a few weeks I’ve had a bunch of coffee sitting around my apartment, but I just don’t drink it. I like the ritual of coffee, but I’d rather have hot chocolate (way better for you, I may add… not) and coffee just isn’t a part of my life because caffeine does not affect me in any tangible way, so I usually just drink tea instead.

However, I know there are a lot of coffee lovers out there so for Christmas, I am giving away the following Godiva products:

  • 12 oz Chocolate Truffle ground coffee
  • 12 oz Hazelnut Crème ground coffee
  • Small bags of French Vanilla, Pumpkin Spice, and Peppermint Mocha coffees
  • Godiva chocolates
  • Godiva apron (I have one of these and use it all the time!

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    To enter, simply leave a comment on this post. Tell me how you can’t function without coffee, or how you like the taste, or an inane utterance that has absolutely nothing to do with the task at hand. Whatever, just leave a comment.

    If you tweet a link to the coffee giveaway and tag me (@CourtPancakes) it’s an extra entry—just leave another comment and tell me you tweeted.

    I’ll leave the Christmas giveaway open til Christmas and then pick a winner via Random.org.

    Thank you in advance for getting these pounds of coffee off my hands. ;) It’s almost Christmas! WOO HOO!

    Courtney

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    There’s Something About Funfetti (Cookies)

    December 18, 2011 by 14 Comments
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    I’ve spent the last few days surrounded by entirely too many cookies. It’s funny, I feel like I have a limitless sweet tooth, but when I get to the point that eating another cookie sounds disgusting, I know I probably passed my limit. Well, it’s been a weekend of holiday parties and more than a few delicious sweets have been showing up.

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    I’ve also been spending my fair share of time in the kitchen in the last week, whipping up a variety of tasty treats that in no way could be considered healthy but hey—can’t desserts be sacred?

    Anyways, I wanted to share a VERY EASY recipe on the blog:

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    Funfetti Cake Cookies

    • 1 box Funfetti cake mix
    • 2 eggs
    • 1/3 cup oil (could do a healthier substitution if you want to, but the liquid is important for mixing)
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      Mix. Roll into balls. Flatten. Bake at 375 until edges are golden brown, around 9 minutes. Frost with buttercream frosting and gold sprinkles (or really any color of sprinkle…)
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    I love funfetti and kind of want my wedding cake to be made from it. I know I can be a food snob at times, but honestly, I would probably choose a Funfetti cake over some delectable, gourmet, ridiculously expensive chocolate cake any day. Call me crazy but there’s something about Funfetti that just grabs me and pulls me in. I’m all for desserts made with unprocessed ingredients and completely from scratch but sometimes happiness really does come from a box.

    This simple recipe can be adopted with most any cake mix, or you can also experiment with add-ins, like my red vevet cookies w/ white chocolate and almond. Yum.

    Funny piece of blog history: my 24th birthday (In Africa), I received a package from my family that SAME DAY (impressive considering it takes about a month to get packages) with a box of funfetti cake mix in it. I made it and ate that for dinner. Ironically that post and its title (regarding eating cake for dinner) is one of my most viewed posts, as apparently there are a lot of people out there googling “Can I eat cake for dinner on my birthday?” and my personal favorite, “How many calories are there in eating all the leftover icing?” Girl after my own heart.

    Hope you all had a great weekend!

    Courtney

    Do you like funfetti? Or any dessert mixes? Or do you stick with the real thing?

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    Don’t judge my banana bread bites by their beauty!

    July 8, 2011 by 9 Comments
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    Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! Okay, that’s all I’ll allow myself.

    This weekend has TWO super exciting events! The first is a 6-hour “distance classic” I somehow ended up signing up for. It’s a mile loop around Crissy Field put on by Dolphin South End Runners (a running club in SF) and you run as many as you can or want. It’s really cheap and at each mile there’s an “aid station” with water, sports drink, and snacks. AND a bathroom. AND ten bloggers I just met are going! #win. I’m going to try to run 18 miles.

     

    Aaaand, the second, equally exciting, also involving a bunch of potential new friends, is #Fitbloggin Local!

    I’m really looking forward to meeting a bunch of Bay Area bloggers. Making new friends is one of the most exciting things about moving to a new city–especially new friends with common interests. I can’t wait.

    I decided to bake something. Despite that I love cooking and baking, today was only the second time I’ve used my oven since I’ve moved in.

    WTF?

    **silly story begins here**

    Let me explain. A couple weeks after I moved into my hobbit hole, I decided to cook a nice dinner. For me… and a dude I was seeing. I spent $30+ on ingredients, came home, prepared a veggie/rice dish, and marinated salmon which I was going to bake. I preheat the oven--which has no light to indicate if it’s on or off, weird–and then stick the salmon in, expecting it to be about twenty minutes.Three minutes later I open the oven door, just to make sure that the fish is cooking.

    The smoke monster from LOST flies out of the oven into my face. Then it dissipates, rapidly filling my very small partly-underground apartment with a dark haze, setting the smoke alarm wailing. I can’t turn it off, so I end up literally ripping the alarm out of the wall. I’m coughing and can barely see in my apartment, and my windows only open a few inches. Now I have two raw pieces of salmon on some charred wax paper. (There was crumbs etc. in the bottom of the oven that must have set on fire.)

    Being resourceful, I end up cooking the fish in the microwave (yes, the microwave) while doing my absolute best to air out my complete fire hazard of an apartment. With little success. My guest gets there, I’m sweating, heart still racing from almost burning down my building, and all I want to do is open a bottle of wine. But I don’t have a bottle opener! We try a knife. And then we try to just push it INTO the bottle. Nothing works. So we ate microwaved salmon, paired with water. Shockingly, it was actually quite good, and I got a funny story out of it.

    **silly story over!**

    But basically, I’ve been scared to use my oven ever since. I use the stovetop every day, but didn’t want to set another fire. But I realized it was time. I had some very, very brown bananas that called for banana bread muffins. And I hda a mini muffin pan begging to be used. Enter banana bread mini muffins!

    Banana Bread Bites with Nutella Topping (aka Banana Bread Mini-Muffins)

    I made adapted nutella banana bread while living in my hut in Africa (blog post here) and wanted to replicate something similar in mini-muffin form. I based my recipe off of this one for Nutella Swirled Banana Bread from RecipeGirl.


    Ingredients assembled.

    Orange bowl: four so-ripe-they-were-soggy bananas, 1/2 cup of plain yogurt, and a bunch of vanilla extract, plus a tiny bit of cinnamon. Blue blow: one half stick of butter plus one cup sugar. Yellow bowl: 2 cups flower, 1/2t of salt, 1t of baking powder, plus 1/2t of baking soda. I tend to never know which one of those two to use so I often use both. Awesome.

    Then I mixed them all together, with two eggs beat into the egg and sugar mixture.

    Separated some of the batter and stirred in about 1/3 jar of Nutella. (I ate the first 2/3 of the jar while watching Sex and the City and dipping popcorn and/or my finger into the jar. Don’t worry, it wasn’t on one night. It was over, like, two nights.)

    I busted out the “Made in USA!” Sur La Table mini muffin/cupcake tin that my daddy got me. I put 1T of batter in each one topped by about 1/2T of nutella batter. I thought they were cute and spotted when they went into the oven. Oh, and I realized why the fire happened. There’s a little oven gauge inside my oven, and when it was set to 350, it was actually 525!  This would explain the fire because if it was set to 400 on the dial it was probably pushing 600 degrees in there. Oops.

    LOOK HOW HIDEOUS THESE CAME OUT!!! I needed to swirl the batter around first. They had slightly different textures so they didn’t mix. #fail

    They were still totally delicious though. SO good. Like banana bread cupcakes almost. Really light and fluffy. I hope my #fitbloggin friends still eat them. Because they aren’t pretty. Oh well… worst thing that happens is more for me!

     

    I highly recommend this recipe though. Just swirl the batters better and they will be pretty. They are SO good.

    Happy Friday, everybody!

    Made anything lately that came out ugly? What do you eat that you’d never want to take a picture of? Any fun plans for the weekend? :)

     

     

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    Your New Go-To Chocolate Cake Recipe

    May 24, 2011 by 8 Comments
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    I don’t really like chocolate cake.

    So sue me. But I LOVE chocolate itself, chocolate brownies, chocolate chips, hot chocolate… but chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream, I could normally take or leave. But everything changed this weekend.

    You remember Talia and Julia that I introduced in my last blog post about book club. (Still time to enter my giveaway for supplements–just leave a comment–or to join my bay area foodie book club, email me at pancakesandpostcards at gmail dot com!).

    Well, Sunday Funday started out with a day at the races…

    And ended with this.

    The girls love to bake, so we set out to make a delicious layered chocolate cake, recipe hailing from somewhere out there via Julia’s baking class that she took recently. (Who else would die to take a real baking class? *points thumbs to chest* THIS girl!) We were at Julia’s house in Oakland, and the view from the kitchen wasn’t so bad.

    We prepared snacks for baking.

    We divyed up responsibilities. Talia got the cake.

    I got the buttercream frosting. And I’ve never really made buttercream before, so this was exciting.

    Julia prepared the caramel sauce. No pictures because making caramel is stressful.

    My sister helped frost the masterpiece.

    It wasn’t the most beautiful cake you’ve ever seen. But this recipe creates THE fudgiest, moistest cake EVER. I hate dry cakes so much, this was more like the love child of a devil’s food cake and a fudgy brownie. With the frosting and the caramel drizzle it was almost too good. The buttercream from scratch can take a while, but the cake recipe itself is SO easy. There’s coffee in the mix, which you do NOT taste, but which perhaps adds a distinct richness to the flavor. And the fleur de sel on top and in the caramel creates the best tiny hint of salt that balances the intense chocolate perfectly.

    I most highly recommend this recipe for a very decadent, moist, fudgy chocolate cake that is sure to please pretty much any chocolate fanatic. And I think if you’re in a pinch, a can of Betty Crocker icing would do just fine. : )

    ***

    Layered Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Frosting & Caramel Sauce

    Cake:

    • 1 ¾ cups flour
    • 2 cups sugar
    • ¾ cup good quality cocoa powder
    • 2 teaspoons baking soda
    • 1 teaspoon baking powder
    • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
    • 1 cup buttermilk, well shaken
    • ½ cup vegetable oil
    • 2 eggs, room temp
    • 1 teaspoon vanilla
    • 1 cup freshly brewed hot coffee

    Frosting:

    • 6 ounces good quality semi-sweet or bitter-
    • sweet chocolate, finely chopped
    • 2 sticks butter, room temperature
    • 1 egg yolk, room temp
    • 1 tsp vanilla
    • 1 1/4 cups sifted powdered sugar
    • 1 tablespoon instant espresso, dissolved in 2
    • teaspoons hot water

    1 teaspoon fleur de sel (to sprinkle on top of the frosted cake)

    Caramel Sauce:

    • 1 ½ cups sugar
    • 1/3 cup water
    • 1 cup heavy cream
    • 6 tablespoons butter
    • ½ teaspoon fleur de sel

    Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 8-inch round cake pans, then line them each with a circle of buttered parchment paper.

    For the cake, sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. In another bowl, combine the buttermilk, oil, eggs, and vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Take the bowl off the mixer and stir in the coffee just to combine, using a rubber spatula to scrape any dry bits from the bottom of the bowl. Divide the batter between the two pans and bake for 35-40 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out without any wet crumbs. Cool the cakes, on a rack, for 30 minutes in their pans then turn then out onto the rack and cool completely.

    Meanwhile, make the frosting. Place the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pot w/ 1-inch of barely simmering water. Stir gently until the chocolate melts and remove it from the heat. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium high speed until it is light and fluffy, 3-4 minutes. Add the egg yolk (if using) and vanilla and beat 3 minutes more. Turn the mixer to low and gradually add the powdered sugar. When all the sugar is in, increase the heat to medium, scraping down the bowl as needed, until the mixture is light and fluffy. At low speed add the chocolate and coffee and mix just until combined.

    To make the caramel sauce, combine the sugar and water in a medium saucepan. If any of the mixture is on the sides of the pan, brush it down with a pastry brush dipped in cold water. Cook the sugar over medium-high heat until the sugar has dissolved, without stirring.. Continue cooking, without stirring, until the syrup is a dark golden color. Remove pan from heat and slowly add cream and butter. The mixture will bubble up quickly at this point so be sure your pan is big enough. Stir to combine and let sit for a few minutes to thicken.

    Frost the top of one cake, spreading about 1/2-inch layer of frosting all over the top, leaving about 1/4-inch border around the edge. Top the cake with the second cake and use the remaining frosting to cover the sides and the top. Sprinkle the cake with the fleur de sel, cut, and serve with a drizzle of caramel sauce.

    ***

    MAKE THIS CAKE! You will not regret it. And enter the giveaway if you want some free superfoods. : )

    Have a great Tuesday, everybody!

    What’s your go-to dessert?

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    Foodie BOOK CLUB and Superfood Giveaway!

    May 20, 2011 by 11 Comments
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    Dear P&P readers…

    Meet Talia.

    Talia is a rad, fun-loving San Francisco dweller who enjoys baking, exercising, Disney movies, and hanging out with her awesome cat.

    Now meet Julia.


    Julia is an adorable East Bay resident who recently traded in the exotic life of PR for a new exotic life of law student come fall. She loves hiking, baking, and wine.

    You know me already. I’m old news.

    Talia, Julia, and I met at Gracias Madre, a Mexican vegan restaurant in SF’s Mission district, for food, gossip, weak margaritas, and to kick off a new exciting event in our lives.

    Book club!

    Sure, we all like to read, but what else are book clubs for? Making time for cool people to do cool things, or just to hang out. We all love food and cooking. So we are going to be alternating our monthly (ish) meetings with either 1. Going out to a cool SF (or even east bay… WOAH!) restaurant we haven’t tried yet, or 2. Meeting at one of our places to cook and bake. I think next up is molten chocolate lava cake. Who doesn’t like that?

    I want to invite any cool 20-something female bay area residents who love food and meeting cool new women to join our book club! I’m serious. It’s not going to be a huge thing, but it’s going to be a fun thing and maybe there’s someone out there who thinks “hey that sounds fun!” If so, please leave me a comment or email me at pancakesandpostcards @ gmail dot com. Our first book is How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O’Neal. Read about it here.

    We are meeting on June 18th. It’s a quick read. Let me know if you want to join us. : )

    I feel like this book club of sorts will be one of many “new beginnings” for me over the next few months. But that’s for my next post!(I’m vowing to try this thing where I post more than 2x a week and the posts aren’t a bajillion pages long each. Let’s see if it works.)

    Now for a review and a giveaway!

    At the end of February, someone from Sun Chlorella USA emailed me and asked if I would do a review of their projects. I said yes, and then moving to San Francisco at the exact same time, this product along with one other were lost in the mail. But what has lost has been found! I finally got the products in my hands about two weeks ago and am finally posting a review now. (I received these items for free from the company, but everything written here is my own opinion.)

    I had never heard of Sun Chlorella before. It’s a whole food supplement derived from Chlorella pyrenoidosa, according to the company, which is a type of algae (!) that is super nutrient dense. It has potassium, B vitamins, amino acids, and chlorophyll. I for one tend to be super skeptical of supplements. I don’t know why, but I just am—I like the idea that you can get everything you need from a healthy, well-balanced diet. But I appreciated having this product to review this week, because it made me do some research.

    The company sent me a variety of products to try: tablets, granules to mix in with drink or food, and another product called Sun Eleuthero which they say gives you a boost without caffeine’s negative effects. I also received a few bags of tea and some samples of cream made with chlorophyll.

    The verdict?

    Interesting! They call it “nature’s perfect superfood,” and it definitely fits that in my mind. For one, it’s made of algae! Upon opening the bag of tablets, the first thought in my mind was “fish food.” The granules that dissolve in water are dark green and unless you love wheatgrass or green juices (notice I didn’t say green MONSTERS) you might be a bit turned off by it. But I’m sure there are smoothies and/or stir-frys or other dishes you could stir it into and be none the wiser.

    The tablets are small and easy to take, the only issue I had with those is that they recommend a minimum of 15 a day. To me, that is a bit crazy. 15 to 45 pills a day for a voluntary thing? Perhaps this is why I’ve always stuck with just a multivitamin. The lazy girl’s supplement? :)

    Supplements may not be my cup of tea, necessarily, but I think they are great for people who have trouble getting in the necessary intake of vitamins. Sure, in an IDEAL world we’d get everything we needed from our perfectly organic and unprocessed diets, but that just does not always happen as we know. This kind of supplement could be great for someone trying to beef up the nutrient value in their diet. My verdict: the jury is still out, but it definitely couldn’t hurt. And there’s always the placebo effect of feeling healthier, right? : ) I didn’t necessarily feel more energetic, but there’s probably a lot of external factors playing in as well.

    Now you be the jury! I’ve got a pack of granules, a pack of tablets, and a pack of Sun Eleuthero (the energy one), plus some cream samples (The cream is BOMB) to give away. To enter, simply leave a comment on this post by Thursday, 5.26. I’ll send it to you and you can tell me what you think!

    And I’ll also throw in some Ghiradelli chocolate from my hometown, because you know, being healthy is about moderation.

    Hope everyone had a great night. Comment below to enter the giveaway, and if you’re in the area… join my book club! : )

    Have you ever been in a book club? Have you read any foodie books that you would recommend?

    Do you take any supplements? Why or why not?

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    Weekend Update, Moz Edition: Bananas, Balance, and Fat Milk

    May 16, 2010 by 24 Comments
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    Requisite Sunday Musings

    Sunday afternoon. Doesn’t really feel like a Sunday, because instead of getting geared up for another week after a relaxing weekend, I had to work all day BOTH days, so I’ve been at the office from 8-5ish the last seven days, and am going back tomorrow. So now my body and brain are just CONFUSED. This should be a good post…

    In the latest Moz news, apparently in addition to our regular power outages, our city has decided that we won’t have electricity on Saturdays before 6PM at least until the end of the year. That means my day of rest will have no light, no internet, no movies or TV, etc. Nothing like being forced to sit in your dark hut and do nothing! It really is kind of nice, being forced to do nothing. And I feel real sexy wearing a headlamp all the time.

    We are more than halfway through May, and como o tempo voa (how the time flies)! At the beginning of the month I set some goals for myself. How am I doing? Well,  finished Great Expectations (finally) and now have moved to something even more intellectual: rereading the Twilight series. Sorry bout it. Runs: five, including one for over two hours, right on track there. Flossing: fail. Nothing else needs to be said about that. I am not making goals for June. I am goal’ed out for now. Maybe I will just recommit to flossing. Ew.

    Another thing mentioned in my goals was having a bunch of trainings for work. (I know I still haven’t talked about what I DO in Mozambique–it’s coming.) And those have been the cause of MUCH stress. There has been a lot of cocoa and cookies in my life recently, and that’s how I know I’ve been stressed. Because let’s face it, cocoa and cookies always help. (Correction: eating a pack of 15 cookies every day for a week just because you’re stressed and they cost 30 cents, doesn’t actually help anyone.) In brighter news, two weeks from this weekend I will be in Swaziland at a music fest, a month from today I will be in South Africa for the WORLD CUP, and I just bought a plane ticket to Thailand. Who can complain?

    I have been having lots of trouble with my work computer, because it is European but often reverts to a English keyboard. So all the punctuation is not where it is supposed to be. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I have a bad habit of ending lots of blog comments with a smiley face. I want to get better at this, I truly do. (Do I hear another goal coming on?) Because ” : ) ” is just not always necessary. It has become a big problem, though, with the punctuation constantly changing on my keyboard. Because I have unintentionally left a lot of comments like this:

    “I LOVE YOUR BLOG!!! >( “

    Yeah, pretty sure THAT isn’t winning me any blog friends.

    Speaking of comments, I just want to say a big THANK YOU to anyone who has been reading my blog over the last few weeks! Seriously, I get giddy every time someone leaves a comment. I created P&P to have a creative outlet for myself when I am out here in Mozambique and knowing that there is a whole audience out there with similar interests that is friendly and supportive, really helps me feel less isolated and closer to “home” than I often feel otherwise (11,000 miles will do that to you).

    But with that being said… I have only six months left in Mozambique, as of last weekend. Six months feels like nothing; it has been almost 20. And to be honest, I am so excited to go home. I can’t stop thinking about it: from all the food I’m going to eat, to all the hot showers I am going to take, to the marathon I am going to run, and a million other things that fall under the “WHEN I GO HOME” category. And this is well and good but…

    I am scared I am missing my Now.

    I have always been a planner… someone who is constantly looking ahead to the next thing, the next big change, the next step. And that’s okay, but not when it hinders my ability to fully experience my Present. And here, thinking about “after” is a coping mechanism, because lets face it: living in an African village, far, far, away from the people, places, culture, food, and so on that you know and love, can kind of suck sometimes. Sure, it’s amazing a lot of the time. But it is also REALLY HARD. And an easy way to cope with it is to keep my head in the future, when life will make more sense.

    Sure, it’s okay to imagine a world where there is electricity on Saturdays, where the toilet paper has more than one ply, where I don’t eat chicken and rice for six meals in a row, where cockroaches aren’t my bedfellows. It’s okay. But the more time I spend thinking about LATER, the less I am thinking about NOW. And tomorrow’s never guaranteed, right? No day but today?

    I’m in the homestretch now. Six months. Six measly months. And then Peace Corps is over, forever. And I don’t want to look back on this time and realize that I missed out by wishing it would go by faster. I have a card in my room that says “Any given moment can change your life… you just have to BE there.”

    And I want to BE there, down the homestretch. Fully experience this crazy life that I have here. Even when it is hard.

    Tales from the Crypt My Mozambican Kitchen

    In foodie news... this weekend I wanted to make Brandi’s Nutella Marbled Banana Bread. And sure, I just had Saturday evening, but it had been a rough day and I figured baking would be therapeutic. (Note to self for future reference: when you have already tried to console yourself with cookies, biscuits, and rusks on a bad day, DON’T break out the Nutella.) I had some bananas (they finally reappeared after nearly a month disappearance) rotting ripening on the table, and decided to just go for it.

    First problem: the pan. See, I don’t have a loaf pan. I have three choices: a huge bundt cake pan, a mini loaf pan the size of my hand, or six muffins the size of my face.

    I picked the bundt cake. Next problem: the ingredients. Brandi’s posted recipe is awesome, but it calls for applesauce. Which would involve 1. having apples and then 2. making applesauce from scratch. So I used real very fake butter instead. Continuing with my UNhealthy substitutions, I used vegetable oil instead (no canola on this continent). And walnuts instead of hazelnuts because, well, it’s a miracle I even HAVE walnuts. Correction: HAD walnuts. My “whole wheat” flour is super-refined white flour with wheat flakes in it. I also threw in some baking powder just in case cuz I wasn’t sure my baking soda would work. I’m not even sure if it is actual baking soda.

    And the milk! The recipe called for buttermilk. Yeah, right. I went to three stores today to find some long life milk. AKA, so chemically processed it can sit on the shelf for two years and then once you open it it goes bad in like two days. Well, I finally succeeded. But here’s the story. In the States, we have whole milk and skim milk. In Portuguese, it’s leite gordo or leite magro. Literally, FAT milk or SKINNY milk. And of course, I can only get FAT milk 95% of the time. Talk about a hit on the self esteem. My fat milk just sitting there, mocking me. “Come and get me, fatty!” And so I did.

    So I think I found my true calling as a blogger: taking other people’s great recipes and Africanizing them, making them all unhealthy again. “Read MY blog for inspiration, guys!!! I use fake butter, the wrong nuts and FATTY milk! This is the REAL DEAL!!!” I think I just found a new tagline for my blog.

    I should mention that as soon as I greased the pan, my electricity cut out, leaving me in the pitch darkness. (But it was after six…) so I did all my preparing in the dark. Well, with my headlamp, which means at any given point I had half a dozen mosquitoes buzzing around my face, in my eyes, or up my nose. Needless to say, I wasn’t taking too many pictures. In my confusion, I mixed everything together in the completely wrong order. I did get to take out some of the stress by “chopping” my nuts Mozambican style–by pulverizing them with a big stick.

    Lights came on just in time for the nutella swirl. Also just in time for me to eat my day’s worth of calories straight from the jar. Does anyone else have this problem with nutella? It may be the death of me. Oh, and I only burned myself about three times trying to dig around in our oven for this stupid pan. Nothing like the smell of burning flesh to ruin the smell of fresh banana bread. Looked done after 20 minutes…

    But wasn’t. (Don’t ask me at what temp I cooked it, my stove has no gauge.) 7 more minutes and it was definitely done. A couple of bites one slice two slices three slices later and I was thoroughly convinced that this is one of the best things I have ever cooked… ever. Which as anyone knows who has seen this blog, is not saying much of anything.

    Despite the unhealthiness (or maybe because of it… can I get an amen for fat milk?), the power outage, moldy bananas, and the general confusion of the whole process. We’ll call it a success. And at least for this whole baking process… I was living in the moment. :) And right now, that’s exactly where I need to be.

    Are you a live-in-the-moment person, or are you often looking to the future? How do you live in the present moment? Any advice?

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