White Cake

Blessings Darlings!

The car is dead AGAIN.  Died Saturn's Day, as the Chubby Hubby and I were in the next town over to buy cartridges for the printer and fax and an upgrade of Adobe paraplegic Acrobat for his new laptop.  Just suddenly DEAD. Battery would crank, but engine wouldn't catch.  He thinks bad fuel when I filled earlier that day, tho' I only got 4 gallons.

At any rate, the car is at the towing company, which is very close to the repair shop.  The repair place isn't open weekends, so we couldn't really take it directly there.  Spawn took a cab back from work today, and he'll try to get rides and only take cabs when needed to work tomorrow (and may call out Monday, since he isn't scheduled for many hours and the damn cab is $25 plus tip each way!).

I was going to do grocery shopping while we were out, too, so I'm low on a few things.  Like eggs.  Which is sad since I wanted eggs for Mothers Day breakfast.  And I want to make some cupcakes.

I WILL make the cupcakes, but instead of making yellow cake ones I'll be using a White Cake recipe and using all those egg whites we have in the freezer.  We accumulate those because the Spawn uses mostly egg yolks in many of the things he cooks - like the quiches and ,,,, well, something else he cooks that is escaping my memory now.  I have probably 5 egg whites in the freezer, and I'll use them all in the cake recipe tho' it only calls for 4.

Being a Prepper, of course, I have lots of dried eggs in #10 cans and a few smaller cans of dried egg whites around.  But once those are open you  have to use them, so I'd rather not open them unless TSHTF (the shit hits the fan).  I've cooked with them before - when I worked in the shelter in Central Illinois we got a lot of surplus dried eggs.  They were fine, but they are not my first choice in cooking with.

So, Monday I'll be making bialys AND cupcakes.  We have lots of strawberries, so those will go with the cupcakes, sort of using them instead of biscuits for Strawberry Shortcake. 

And depending on the diagnosis on the car, I might be biking to the store this week instead of having the Spawn pick up groceries on his way back from work.  Because I have eggs listed on the menu for dinner on Thursday.  And we'll run out of milk by Wednesday, and my husband is not thrilled with reconstituted dry milk. 

Mind you, if he had to drink it, he would.  If we had to eat dried eggs, we would and we'd enjoy them in omelettes and such.  Which is why all this is a 1st world problem, except for the problem with the Spawn getting to and from work. 

Frondly, Fern

Cupcakes

Blessings, Darlings!

Being broke is one thing - feeling deprived is another.  The Chubby Hubby is happy that I'm making sure he doesn't feel like he's broke AND on a diet.  Instead, I'm 'medicating' our stress by baking nummies.  Lots of nummies.  From scratch.

But now that we're several weeks into Even Harder Times, my recipes are changing.  Last week I had to decide if I was going to buy butter or shortening for baking with.  I went with shortening.  In recipes that call for butter I'm now using half butter and half shortening.  For recipes that call for shortening, I'm using shortening.

The shortening container (all vegetable shortening, BTW) does creative measuring, using a serving size just small enough that they don't have to say it has trans fats in it.  I'm not falling for that trick, but I'm still buying the stuff.  Even if I wasn't using it in the baking now, I'd still use it in pie crusts, because having been raised Jewish I just can't do leaf lard crusts.

Back to the baking at hand:  the first cupcakes I baked to perk him up was from a recipe, probably from America's Test Kitchen.  It called for four eggs and two sticks of butter, among the other ingredients.  The Chubby Hubby LOVED them.  The spawn and I found the distinct egg flavor and stiff - even rubbery - texture off-putting.

To keep the baked goods going, and keep all of us happy, I'm switching cookbooks.  Farewell, America's Test Kitchen, hello Betty Crocker!

The Betty Crocker cookbook is probably the oldest cookbook we own.  The Chubby Hubby bought it when he was still single (along with some Sunset Cookbooks). We still use it heavily.  It contains the duct tape of cooking - the standard recipes that hold a kitchen together.

From Betty, I decided to do the One Egg Cake recipe, in cupcake form.  Only one egg, not four eggs, only 1/3 cup of 'soft shortening' (that means regular vegetable shortening to you and me), not two sticks of butter.  The recipe DID make 3 less cupcakes than the other recipe, but the taste and texture made the Spawn and me happier, and the Chubby Hubby was content if not ecstatic.

Neither recipes cupcakes needed any frosting, BTW.  They rocked standing alone.

Oh, the Spawn has made his first yeast dough baking - soft pretzels - and he did a WONDERFUL job.  He followed Alton Brown's recipe.

Next, we will either bake brownies (both America's Test Kitchen and Betty Crocker have easy cheap ingredient recipes) or I'll add chopped semisweet chocolate to the one egg cupcake recipe.

On a TOTALLY unrelated note - I've dropped 3 pounds since moving.  I think it's all the stairs. It's certainly not my diet....

Frondly, Fern