I COMPLETELY missed last week – no recipe, no comments, no browsing, no nothing.  Just one of those weeks.  I still hope to get to the Chestnut Cake…but I didn’t even get this one done until Monday night (aaahhh…night photography…jealous?).

I subbed in a little almond for the coconut and cut down on the sugar in the filling.  Truthfully, as I was making this, one thought kept occurring to me.  What can you really say about a crisp?  Not much new, I think.  So, I will just say that this was supremely satisfying and leave it at that.

Next week:  Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies.  I am looking forward to these.  The recipe for this week is at The Repressed Pastry Chef  by Em.

I am trying to get this one posted before it really gets cold.  I don’t know about you, but we had the coolest summer in a long time.  If the trend holds, winter could be brutal.  I, of course, am happy to eat ice cream any time of year but I realize that not everyone likes a big cold double dip in January.

This is a great ice cream that requires no custard.  I love custard based ice creams but, frankly, the ice cream hits your mouth a little quicker  if you don’t have to mess with that step.  This is sweet and tangy and wonderful.

Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Ice Cream

Ingredients

• 8 oz. cream cheese, softened
• 1 c. sugar
• 1 c. milk
• 2 c. heavy cream
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 c. or more chocolate chips or chunks, if using store bought I like to chop them a little more. Regular chips suddenly seem huge in a spoonful of ice cream.

Put the cream cheese, sugar and milk in a blender.  Blend until smooth.  Slowly add the cream and vanilla.  Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker.  When it is close to finished add the chocolate chips.

This is my baby (he was a peanut for Halloween):

This is that baby turning FIVE!

This is that baby celebrating his FIFTH birthday:

These are the cupcakes from his pool party.  When you are honest with yourself and know your decorating can’t possibly match what is in your head, you choose something like this.  Cute – no artistic skill required.  What more could you ask for?

These are both of my babies starting school.  Wasn’t I just burping them over my shoulder?  What happened to Elmo and Thomas the Train?  I feel like I will wake up tomorrow and one of them will be asking me for the car keys (the answer is no).

Still here.  Still baking.  Went on vacation.  I have made last week’s and this week’s.  I am hoping to get them posted sometime today (tomorrow at the latest…).  Hope everyone is having a great summer!

Why must the container for Quick Cooking oats look just like the one for Old Fashioned?  Can’t we get some kind of color coding?  When I am at the store I am either in a hurry because I have promised my family I am “only picking up a few things” or I have one or two young boys with me which is the very definition of distraction.  Trips to the grocery store sometimes cause me to regret that the older one now reads.  “Mom, this bowl-o-sugar cereal says it has vitamins.  Can we get it?  These fruit roll-ups are a foot long and it says they are made with fruit.  Can we get it?”  and on and on…

So, you can see why I might get discombobulated and grab the Quick Cooking oats.  And let’s face it, Oliver Twist would never have gotten thrown out of the workhouse if he had been served quick cooking oats.  No asking for seconds of those.   Fortunately, I have discovered that these do have other uses.  They are, apparently, well-suited for certain baked goods because of the amount of liquid they absorb.

I was watching America’s Test Kitchen recently and they made a very simple snack cake with, you guessed it, Quick Cooking Oats.  The recipe is from memory and is not entirely true to the original.  I decided to serve it for breakfast so I skipped the broiled coconut/walnut icing.  Didn’t sound good to us anyway.  It was very moist (a little fragile) and just right for breakfast.

Oatmeal Snack Cake

• 1 c. Quick cooking oats
• 3/4c. room temperature water
• ¾ c. whole wheat pastry flour
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• ½ tsp. baking powder
• ¼ tsp. salt
• ½ tsp. cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp. ground ginger
• ¼ tsp. ground nutmeg
• 4 oz. butter
• ½ c. sugar
• ½ c. brown sugar
• 1 egg

Preheat the oven to 350 and line an 8 inch square pan with foil.  Spray with cooking spray.   In a small bowl, mix the oatmeal and water together.  Set aside.  Whisk the dry ingredients together and set aside.  In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugars together until they look like wet sand.  Add the egg and mix to incorporate.  On low speed, add the dry ingredients in two batches.  Stir in the oats.  Pour into the prepared pan and bake for about 30 minutes.

I have been out of the city all day so I haven’t had a chance to see the tarts.  My guess is that they don’t look quite like this.  Why is my tart ten feet tall?  My mother is involved and we’ll get to the details in a minute.

I am not into New Age mysticism and you won’t see any crystals, horoscopes or the like around my house.  But I have come to believe in the Cake Dome Vortex.  Not familiar with it?  Surely, you have heard of the Bermuda Triangle.  The Cake Dome Vortex functions in much the same way, substituting innocent cake plates for planes.  It also happens to be located in my house.

Once upon a time, I had a lovely domed cake plate from Williams Sonoma.  I used it for seven lovely years without incident.  Then my younger son turned one and my older one decided he would “sample” the cake before it was served.  The plate and the dome both cracked and shattered.  (my father – ever the frugal one – asked if we could still serve it.  i told him that he might not mind glass shards in the icing but i was pretty sure my 3 yr old would never forgive me for shearing his intestines).

My birthday was two weeks later and my father showed up with a replacement domed cake plate.  It lasted four months before the three year old struck again.  This time he only managed to drop the dome.  I took a cake plate break for awhile and years later purchased a large plastic dome cover.  What could go wrong?

Several months into its tenure, my mother managed to simultaneously break off a kitchen cabinet door and shatter the dome.  two for one!  This time, I didn’t even bother to replace it.  A year later a lovely cake plate and dome showed up as an unexpected gift from a family friend.  This was two months ago.

I don’t even have to tell you where this is going.  If you are guessing that my mother broke this one, too, you are paying attention.  Last night.  Right after she remarked on how fragile it was.  Right before she left my tart out to rise to skyscraper like heights.

Sorry, it was laaaate by the time it came out of the oven.

She was watching Colin while I took Will to swim lessons.  Despite my better judgment, I asked her to help with tart.  It was on the last rise before being baked.  I set the timer and asked her to put it in the (already preheated) oven when it went off.  It should have been out of the oven by the time I got home.  It, of course, hadn’t even gone in.

She stopped cooking about the time I started high school and it is like she has never seen a kitchen before.  She did stay over to try the “tart” which we both agreed was a little too bready for us.  If it was supposed to be 837 inches high, than this is not my cup of tea.  oh well, at least it was only half a recipe.

To see of others fared well, check out TWD. The full recipe is on Chez Us by Denise.

Two questions that have been swirling in my brain for the last few days:  1) Why was Gene Kelly in the movie version of Xanadu?; and, more importantly, 2) Why did I spend valuable time watching it last weekend?

The answer to 2 is easy but I don’t know about 1.  I don’t recall hearing about any addictions, bankruptcies or other tawdry scandals involving Gene Kelly that would explain his participation.  You know the story, he lost his house to that little gambling issue and now has to scramble to pay Tiny and the gang before they break his feet.  I guess it will remain a mystery.

The answer to 2 is nostalgia plain and simple.  And it sucked over an hour of my life last weekend (thank god for the DVR or it would have been even longer).  I can’t even tell you how bad this movie is and that is saying a lot.  I have a high tolerance for musicals and deep affection for Olivia Newton-John.  I saw Grease four times at the theater and wrote my first love letter to John Travolta (which I addressed simply to “John Travolta” and popped in the mailbox).  Olivia Newton-John was my first concert at age 11 and, if you think it didn’t involve a headband and leg warmers on my part, you would be wrong.  Have I mentioned how thankful I am that my embarrassing years pre-date camera phones and the digital world in general?  Let me just sum up the movie by saying that there are a lot of goofy special effects, ONJ gets lots of costume changes and Gene Kelly rollerskates.  Any more detail would cause me to spork my eye out.

BUT I saw this at the theater and worshipped the soundtrack.  One of the songs is even on my Ipod.  I memorized all of the lyrics with my childhood best friend Wendy.  She lived next door.  Neither of our mothers was particularly known for her cooking but, on special occasions, Wendy’s mom would whip out a Sara Lee coffee cake.  And we LOVED it.  We knew we were special.  I had no idea for years that people could or would make homemade coffee cake.

Years later, as a full fledged adult, I bought one and baked it.  And it wasn’t the same.  Funny how that works.  The cake we made this week reminded me of those “special” coffee cake days only this one kicks it’s a**.

I decided to go for the muffins.  I made half blueberry/lemon and half cranberry/lime.  Spouse and I both slightly preferred the cranberry while Will opted for the blueberry.  I think my frozen blueberries were too bland.  I tried to cram as much batter into my twelve muffin tin so I didn’t have nearly enough surface to hold all of the crumb topping.  I used maybe half and we still liked it.  I wasn’t successful in getting all of the batter in so I ended up throwing the rest into a small springform.

Thanks to Sihan of Befuddlement for choosing this one.  I thought it was a great coffee cake alternative.  And, for the record, it easily could have been breakfast.

Next week:  coconut and macadamia nuts.  I am still working on this one…