Sunday, December 2, 2012

Happy Birthday, Dennis

In keeping with our family's tradition of multiple-day birthdays, on Wednesday I took Dennis out for lunch at the Old Trieste in San Diego and then we went on our annual shopping trip for new clothes for my frugal and anti-shopping husband. We went to Fashion Valley, headed to Nordstrom's, but the cars and crowds were too intimidating. We went around the other side and found plenty of parking spaces. We did some aimless window shopping to warm up and wandered into what we thought was the Apple Store. But, no, it was a store just exactly like the Apple Store, down to the 20-something greeter, but it was a Windows Store. Huh. I guess they decided to copy Apple once again and show off their new Surface notepad in a store exactly like Apple's. Makes my head hurt.

On Friday, I mentally and physically stretched to make him a cake from scratch. I ran a few cake recipes from the internet by him and we decided on the Orange-Scented Olive Oil Cake from Saveur.com. The recipe was just complicated enough to please Dennis and not too difficult to make me go to Von's for a store-bought cake.

I wish I could say all the time I spend was worth it, but I think there was something terribly wrong with the recipe. I was supposed to mix up the whole thing using a food processor, but half way through the processor stopped processing--just gave up. So I transferred the gooey mess to the cake mixer and finished it there. It was less like a batter and more like sticky dough. I transferred most of it to the cake pan and stuck it in the oven hoping it would somehow all work out.

Well, it cooked, but when I took it out it looked like a giant muffin top. Heavy, hard, immovable muffin top. I glazed it. Still looked like a muffin top, but with sticky orange glaze on top.

Later on, we took it to my Mom's to share (get rid of) it with her and my sister and brother-in-law. They all dutifully ate their pieces and I ate mine. It tasted ok, but not like a birthday cake. I left the remainder at Mom's.

To top it all off, I forgot to take a picture of it. Dang.


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