Coconut Lime Cake

This cake is not very photogenic. Its best features are:

a) a lovely crumb, and

b) green frosting, courtesy of some food coloring.

I hope you can at least see the texture. The green doesn't show up so well in the picture.

There's no great story about it, either, except that I was looking to use up some zucchini and some limes, and once I had this idea I just had to make it!

I started off thinking I could make zucchini brownies. I'd noticed I still had some coconut flour in my cabinet, and I remembered that the recipe I just linked to uses both coconut flour and zucchini. So that might be a good option to make. Then I thought the brownies would be good with frosting, and since the recipe uses coconut flour, it reminded me that I'd recently seen a cupcake recipe for coconut lime cupcakes. And I had some limes to use up, too! I bought them and then couldn't remember what they were for. (I think they were a mistake.) But coconut + lime + chocolate seemed like too many different flavors, so I subbed out the chocolate and made some other substitutions to give it a stronger coconut flavor. Eventually it got to be different enough to count as its own recipe, so I am sharing it.

One thing you need to know in advance is that for this recipe you'll need to buy canned coconut milk and then leave it - open - in the fridge overnight. The fatty part will sink to the bottom, so you'll have coconut water on top and something almost as thick as butter on the bottom. You'll use both parts in the recipe.

Ingredients

Cake

1/2 cup zucchini, shredded
1/3 cup thick coconut milk (the part that sunk to the bottom)
1 cup coconut water
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
3 tbsp flaxmeal (i.e., ground flax seed)
1/2 cup canola oil (you can use coconut oil, but it's higher in calories, and this has enough coconut flavor without it)
3/4 cup white flour
1 cup coconut flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup sugar

Frosting

1/2 cup earth balance (can also use thick coconut milk)
2 cups confectioner's sugar
2 Tbsp lime juice (about 1 lime)
lime zest from 1 lime
1/2 tsp vanilla
green food coloring

Preheat oven to 350, spray an 8" brownie pan.

Mix first six ingredients (through oil) in a medium bowl. Let sit for at least 5 minutes.
Mix dry ingredients very well, in a larger bowl. Pour wet into dry and stir well.

It should be thick but still pretty wet. Thin enough to pour into the pan, and you should be able to spread it easily, but it won't spread by itself. You can adjust the consistency with water or flour if it's not right. Pour into greased brownie pan and bake at 350 for 20 minutes, or until the top is just starting to brown. Let cool well before frosting.

For the frosting, mix the earth balance (or butter) with a hand mixer until creamy, then add the other ingredients, minus the food coloring. Add sugar until it is thick enough to stand in peaks. Then add the food coloring. When the cake has fully cooled, spread the frosting on it.

Coming Home

It is Saturday night, and I am happy to be home baking. I'm trying a yeast dough, which never quite works for me the way it is supposed to, but is never all that bad, either.  I don't know enough to say which part I'm getting wrong. The yeast is supposed to be room temperature and the water lukewarm, so it's possible I'm usually not letting my yeast warm up enough after taking it out of the fridge, but often the problem is just that the yeast is old. Anyway, I will tell you how it turns out.

Being in the kitchen often feels to me like returning to or reconnecting with myself, and I definitely was not myself today. A co-worker had encouraged me to come to an event with the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I thought it would be a cool thing to try. She lent me an outfit of medieval clothing, which was fun. It was all linen, and involved a lace-up front and an apron. Luckily it wasn't hot out today, as there were a lot of layers!

We'll pretend I'm incognito in the scarf and safety goggles, since this is supposed to be an anonymous blog.

There were a few things that surprised me. One is that it did not feel like people were reenacting the Middle Ages. It was more like modern people enjoying learning about the Middle Ages. Despite the period-appropriate names (which were mostly things like Elizabeth, Alison, and Michael anyway) and clothing, nobody walked around saying G'day or pretended they didn't know what a phone was or anything like that. There were plastic buckets, blow torches, Tupperware and many other modern tools. It felt more like a high school fair where people could demonstrate what they'd learned.

The second surprise was just how mellow the event was. I don't know what I expected: more of a crowd, maybe, or more jousting and ceremony. It felt more like people who liked weaving were sitting with their friends and weaving, and people who enjoyed glass beading were sitting with their friends making glass beads. I think it's the sort of thing I'd find fun if I were friends with the people or were more serious about any of the activities. But nobody seemed to be having the kind of conversations you have with close friends. It felt very quiet, except for the people who were explaining their crafts to me.

I got to learn about and experience many interesting crafts, though. I spun a small ball of yarn, made a glass bead, and poured a plaster mold that could be used to make ceramic plates. I got to watch weaving, jam-making, and calligraphy. I held a (dull) sword for about a minute.

But there's a lot up in the air in my life right now, and it wasn't quite the right time for me to spend the day around people I didn't fit in with, not fully understanding the etiquette of the group, doing a lot of tasks that I don't know how to do and wasn't very good at. The day just felt like more uncertainty, I guess.

It's hard to say why baking would help with this unmoored feeling, especially since I'm pretty sure this yeast dough is not going to turn out right. But it doesn't matter so much. I feel connected to something very basic - the flour, the big leaves of chard, all these ingredients come from the earth. And after the dough rises (or rises as much as it's going to) I will be able to immerse myself in the dish I'm preparing - the act of rolling out the dough, the smell of food in the oven, the thought processes of judging whether my dough is too wet and whether I've chopped enough onion. The task focuses a lot of my senses and also anchors me physically in my small kitchen, one of my favorite places in my home (or in any home). I am somewhere I know I belong.

 The dough rose, but not as much as it was supposed to. But it still made enough for 24 burekas.

They aren't the most photogenic food, but they taste good.

They are filled with chard, onions, walnuts, tahini, and tomato paste.

Cooking When Exhausted

I had an exhausting day on Thursday. It involved talking to a lot of people over the course of a long work day, and afterwards there has been much wondering if I said the right things, or if (when) I didn't, whether my statements were within the margin of forgivable imperfection. [edit: This post makes more sense if you know that I was at a job interview. I couldn't say that publicly at the time I wrote it.]

I got home around 6 and wanted to collapse. I tried to do so. I lay down on my bed with my eyes open for awhile, but I soon realized my mind was too active for me to be still. I was thinking that I did not want to fall asleep yet because it would mess up my sleep during the night. I was thinking I should contact my friends about our possible plans for Friday night, except I might be too tired to keep those plans. I was thinking that now might be the only time over the next few days that I'd have time to cook up my CSA vegetables into something I could eat over the next week. And that maybe I ought to have dinner. So I did.

What I made for dinner was more or less this salad, with some substitutions based on what I had in the house. The recipe is an arugula and fennel salad with quinoa and tofu, in an orange dressing. I had green lettuce, fennel, and spring onions in my CSA box, so I used the green parts of the onions in place of chives and the lettuce in place of arugula. Bingo - one recipe that uses 3 of my CSA vegetables! I also roasted the fennel, just because I thought it would taste better that way. I had to buy oranges to make the dressing. Mostly I want to avoid recipes where, in order to use up the produce I have, I need to buy just as many new items. But this only required one additional produce item, and I didn't mind having to buy tofu and quinoa. I liked having the salad turn out so high in protein.

To some extent, cooking despite being exhausted and fit to collapse is just a sign of me being restless and agitated. But I also like to think it's a suitable response to exhaustion in a way, because I'm doing something to take care of myself. The salad was healthy and nutritious, and preparing it did make me feel taken care of, which was a relief after a day spent trying to impress other people. I also think sometimes cooking (or preparing food, I should say, as parts of the salad were raw rather than cooked) helps calm my mind so I can then sleep better. It gets me focused on something, and gets my mind away from wherever it was racing to before, but now I'm thinking about something that isn't going to keep me awake. I mean, how much can you think about chopping lettuce and squeezing oranges once you're done doing it? It doesn't leave one with a lot to ponder.

Because I was in restless multitasking mode, and because I also had strawberries and rhubarb in my CSA box, I made muffins while the tofu was marinating. Look how bright those strawberries are!

 Now in addition to my nutritious salad, I have a somewhat healthy treat, for breakfast or snack.

Recipe here. I used brown rice syrup instead of brown sugar (a little healthier, but less sweet, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this substitution) and decreased the milk by 1/3 cup to account for the liquid sweetener. I left out the cardamom because I didn't have it and left out the oat topping because I was a little lazy. I had, after all, had a long and tiring day.