The Cake

My adventure in making a white cake with butter cream frosting. (errrrr orange/purple/white cake).





Started with sugar, eggs and butter.
Added milk and flour bit by bit while mixing in between. Should have made sure milk was at room temperature.

Added Orange food dye for the first two cakes.

and purple for the next batch.

 The three tiers! Let them cool in

fridge over night, and then cut off the edges (some of them may have been slightly burnt....) oops! But no biggie since, we're cutting them off!

Start the layering process. Added straws to help support the layers.

The left side is the crumb frosting which I did the day before the real frosting, which is to the right.

Added more milk to the last layer of frosting to help make it as smooth as possible.

Tempered chocolate and added it to a black (food coloring) butter cream frosting. Then heated the frosting on the double broiler and poured it on the cake.

 whipped frosting

 got lazy... easier to hold the bowl in my lap!

 mmmm....

 that bag of sugar was almost empty by the end...

Recipe: Cabbage Soup

So here is a quick entry for basic Cabbage soup

Chop up: 

3 Carrots

5 Stalks of Celery

1 Onion

2TBS chopped Garlic

Place veggies in a large pan or dutch oven
Add 1/4 cup chicken broth or 1-2 TBS olive oil

Saute for about 5 min.

Chop up 1 head of cabbage as shown below ( I did two as I was making  double recipe).

 Chop in half

Cut out stalks

Slice into thin strips. *Note: I did this very quickly so my cabbage was quite large in my soup. If you are looking to impress, be careful to make sure all of the strips of cabbage  are separated from one another.

Add Cabbage to your bowl.

Add 6-8 cups of Chicken Broth or water with a 2 cubes of chicken bullion

Boil/Simmer for about an hour or until the cabbage is tender enough for you to enjoy!

Blog: No Sugar makes life a lot sweeter

It's incredible. I feel so much more free without sugar and/or sweets. I thought it would be awful but I find myself so much less anxious about food.

Take for example tonight. I've been baking a cake and I cut off the edges so there was a heap of cake scraps left over. Normally, I would have helped myself to more than a few of them. I would have then eaten dinner, but been secretly craving more cake. Post dinner, I would have gone back for more cake pieces until I felt overly full and high on sugar. And even then after being sickly full,  while going to bed, I still would have been wanting more cake.

Now I haven't had sweets for 9 weeks, and I don't really see myself going back to them anytime soon. I don't really even crave goodies any more. When I want something sweet, I go for yogurt with fruit, or frozen mango. Sometimes I'll even make myself white bread for a treat. But that's way more satisfying than straight sugary treats are.

I'm not saying I'll never eat sweets again, I'm just saying, for the time being, life is sweeter without the sugar!

Recipe: No Sugar Added Banana Bread

You'll need a lot of bananas for this one, but I find that if I dig through my freezer I'm able to dig up some lost soldiers.

Sadly I don't have a picture of the finished product.... it got eaten too quickly.


But the ingredients are....

Dry:
2 Cups flour, (can be whole wheat)
1 cup oatmeal
2 TBS cinnamon
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
2 TBS Flax seed, or any other nutty addition

Wet:
6-8 Frozen Bananas
1/4cup Banana Syrup*
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup apple sauce
1 cup plain yogurt, buttermilk or milk (I had some left over half&half I needed to use... yum)


Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 and spray a 9x11 pan with oil or butter
Microwave frozen bananas. Then transfer the to a strainer over a sauce pan and let sit.
Mix the dry ingredients together
Mix the wet ingredients together except for the bananas and banana syrup

Press out as much of the juice from the bananas as possible. Transfer the sauce pan to the stove, on high heat. Bring to a boil and let boil for about 5 minutes. It should look quite frothy through all of it, just keep stirring it every so often to keep it from burning (although I'm not completely convinced it will burn as it has a lot of liquid). After about 10min it should be thick enough
Pour liquid into wet ingredients and add bananas, mix well.
Add  the wet ingredients to the dry, but don't beat, just stir until everything is wet (batter will be lumpy)

Pour  batter into prepared pan, bake 40-50 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean

Recipe: Healthy and Lite Coleslaw

This is an amazingly fresh and healthy 'coleslaw.'

I put coleslaw in quotes because with out mayonnaise it's probably not actually a coleslaw but it's the the only coleslaw I like! (I can't stand mayo)

It's super quick and easy and is really fresh.

Ingredients:
~A few apples
~1-2 tbs lemon juice
~2-4 cups shredded green cabbage
~2-4 cups shredded red cabbage
~1/2-1 cup craisins


Vinaigrette
~2 Tbs Olive Oil
~2 Tbs Red Wine or Balsamic Vinegar
~1 TBS Apple Cider Vinegar
~1-2 TBS Mustard (Spicy brown or whichever you prefer)
~ (you can also add a tbs or two of honey to sweeten it up a bit)


Directions
Chop up apples

Add lemon juice to keep them from turning brown and for flavor.

Chop up the Cabbage (I only had green and didn't do a great job as i was in a hurry!)

Mix the vinaigrette together. Whisk it until everything looks incorporated.

Add apples, vinaigrette, and Craisins to the cabbage.
Toss everything together and you're done!