Whole Lotta Bakin' Goin' On

What fun! Baking on the new kitchen island from Ikea (see previous post- baseball in Pittsburgh)

Resourcefulness is called for with no cookbooks here. WOBs left almost all 400+ of them in DC. No fear - Marcy Goldman's www.BetterBaking.com is totally trustworthy!

First - I baked a birthday cake for Ken's birthday party tonight, having been told by his wife Marcie that yellow cake with chocolate frosting is his favorite, I found BetterBaking.com"s Perfect Birthday Cake and a recipe for Pure Fudge Icing attached to a recipe for Brown Sugar Sour Cream Chocolate Cake (sounds good, doesn't it?) that I will have to try another time.

Going to DC tomorrow for WOBSOD's (my Older Daughter) baby baby shower (that's a shower for twins) so I baked two kinds of biscotti - also from BetterBaking:

Dulce de leche - with a thin layer of the stuff in the middle,

and Chocolate Cinnamon Sheet Biscotti.

Please remember that WOBs lives in a log cabin (doesn't start with a B - but it is the middle letter) and the oven is old and inconsistent. I'd never made the chocolate cinnamon biscotti before and the first baking ended up so underdone that the middle was still somewhat batter-y. More resourcefulness got them onto the cookie sheet, baked longer than instructed for the second baking. They may look misshapen, but I have been assured by Mr. WOBs that the taste is just fine.

Also books:
Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow on my iPod is a wonderful book to bake to ( WOBs wants to know if you listen to audiobooks while you bake), and The Unlikely Voyage of JackDeCrow by AJ Mackinnon gave me something to read while the oven did its work. I would have never heard of this book without a recommendation from someone I spoke with at a political fundraiser. It's a memoir of a Mirror boat trip from North Wales to the Black Sea, written gently and intelligently and with a huge appreciation for the surrounding world.

My ball of yarn, Baby Bunny, is being used to knit the subject of a future post. Since I'm not giving it away in advance you'll just have to check back here sometime soon.