Strawberry, Banana & Nutella Crepes
SWEETS
Chocolate Ice Cream with Sea Salt & Olive Oil
Alright, this combo - discovered at an ice cream truck in San Francisco with Morgan - is really good.
And when you serve it to guests they will give you strange looks - ice cream with salt, maybe, but ice cream with salt and olive oil? Weird - and then they will eat it all, because it is amazing.
One caveat: while I'm usually in favor of corner-cutting in terms of ingredient fanciness, this is not the place to break out the bargain-bin ice cream or Costco olive oil. Go for the good stuff (including excellent-quality, large-flake sea salt); it's worth it.
Mom’s Banana Bread
My mother's banana bread is my default Thing To Make whenever I throw a party or find myself in need of a hostess gift. It's quick, it's easy, and - best part - it can be personalized with the addition of things like nuts and Nutella. My mom has had this recipe for years - decades, I think; it's written down on a little index card in a box that she's had since high school - and it's never failed me (other than once, when I accidentally undercooked it and ended up with banana bread on the outside and banana soup on the inside; don't do that).
What you need:
1/2 cup softened butter
Homemade Raspberry Jam
We have raspberry bushes in our front yard!
This is incredible news.
The city kid in me didn't actually believe that they could possibly be for-real raspberries and had to google "poisonous berries that look like raspberries" before I'd eat a single one, but nope: as it turns out, they're real. And great.
On Saturday, Kendrick spent awhile walking up and down our street picking as many as he could find, and we ended up with enough that my Aunt Jo-Anne suggested we try making jam.
Lemon Angel Food Layer Cake
I am about to blow your mind, because I BAKED SOMETHING and it was GORGEOUS and DIDN'T FALL APART IN THE OVEN and did not taste bad AT ALL.
That's a whole lot of caps and a whole lot of self-congratulation, but really: given my baking history, I'm allowed a little back-patting, I think.
OK, so maybe this recipe was adapted from a "semi-homemade" one courtesy of Sandra Lee (via People), which vastly limited my opportunities to screw up. And maybe I actually did end up screwing it up anyway, just a little bit. I mean, obviously. See, I realized too late that a cake topped with whipped cream might not enjoy hanging out in my kitchen on a hundred-degree day with thousand-percent humidity and no air conditioning (our house is ancient and has small windows and low-voltage sockets and I haven't yet found an air conditioner that works downstairs, and I don't want to talk about it because it is so hot). And there were still about twelve hours to go before I could serve the cake to our guests, and that very pretty plate that you see in these photos does not fit anywhere in our refrigerator. So I tried to sort of slide it onto a smaller plate, and discovered that angel food cakes do not slide; they collapse. Sigh.
Anyway, I fixed the patchy spots with more frosting, propped up the slightly collapsed side with a few lemon slices, and solved the melting-in-my-kitchen problem by magically rearranging our freezer in a way that enabled me to slide in the cake, plate and all. It was actually even better cold (angel food cake also, apparently, does not freeze - perhaps because it's plastic? possible, but let's hope not - so it ended up being just chilled cake with an ice-cream like frosting and frozen lemon slices, yum). Let's look at some photos, because I'm proud.
