The Almond Cake Recipe from Eye on Life Magazine as Cupcakes

Recently, my friend Michelle Richardson came up with a very special recipe at my request. Michelle is an excellent cook with a creative way of mixing choice ingredients into beautiful and tasty new combinations. She is also the Editor-in-Chief at Eye on Life Magazine.

Here is the recipe I followed:

https://eyeonlifemagazine.com/food-drink/cake-project-creating-a-high-fat-almond-flour-cake

The cake's ingredients, when I followed the recipe using a cupcake mold, included full fat whipping cream, the yolks of eggs, almond flour, baking soda, high fat butter, honey and beef gelatin as a thickener.

I found blending the ingredients using a hand held mixer especially challenging.

I myself am a rank amateur at cooking and baking. But I had Michelle's help in learning to master this recipe. My friend Julia Hanna is a vegan, and so she tried her hand at non-animal based ingredient list. Together all three of us got together in a livestream to talk through the recipe.

My cupcakes came out brown and crusty at the top, but very moist and delicious on the inside.

CAVEAT: This recipe is not for people with nut allergies, and it is not really low carb, because of the honey. Also, the recipe is not recommended for those on a no-fiber or carnivore diet, because the Almond Flour contains fiber and is not an animal product.

Guest Post: Oven "Stir-Fried" Cabbage And Tofu

Oven "Stir-Fried" Cabbage And Tofu

By Guest Blogger, Julia Hanna

Today I made an "oven stir-fry" cabbage and tofu that also included chopped onions, tomatoes, and diced jalapeno pepper. Vegans such as myself often make stir-fries with tofu, but people who prefer meat could use beef or chicken in this cabbage stir-fry. This was an impromptu recipe that I created with ingredients that were in my fridge rather than having to go out and buy special supplies. Actually, stir-fries are ideal because these are tasty when you use up veggies, tofu, or meats you already have.

I started out by chopping up the cabbage and put it in a large bowl.

Next, I added chopped tomatoes and onions to the bowl.

I drained the water from a package of organic firm tofu before opening it. 

I cut the tofu into cubes the best I could, but some of the pieces crumbled, which is fine with me.

I allowed the cabbage, tofu, tomatoes, onions, and chopped jalapeno to cook down a bit in the roaster oven before adding some nutritional yeast, salt, and oil to stir-fry oven style. Rather than buying soy sauce for this stir-fry, I just used the nutritional yeast because it gives every dish a savory flavor without having to buy a new sauce. For this oven "stir-fry" I would open the lid of the roaster oven every five minutes to stir the vegetables and the tofu.

 

After "stir-frying" the cabbage and tofu in the roaster oven for about forty minutes I took the pan out of the oven and allowed it to cool it off.

After the cabbage stir-fry cooled off, I plated up a portion to eat. The nutritional yeast was an interesting way to create a sauce for my cabbage dish without using soy sauce. 

The Carnivore Diet: It isn't Just Meat

Yesterday, I told my friend Julia Hanna about the Carnivore Diet I am on.

I like this diet because it allows me to limit myself to food that does not need to be fermented into sugar in my gut. This diet is not for everyone, but it works for me. I eat animal products, which can include meat, fish, other seafood, cheese, butter, cream, eggs and coffee. I know, coffee is not an animal product. But it's an exception I allow myself to have.

You might think that this diet would get boring if all I ever ate was burgers or steak or even seafood. You might also expect it would be super expensive and involve no culinary creativity. But it does not have to be that way at all. Bacon, eggs, cream cheese, coffee and cream were the ingredients for today's lunch, pictured above.

The blintz was made of three egg yolks fried on butter in the pan like an omelette, with cream cheese added on top, then rolled up and fried some more.  The cream cheese melted beautifully, and even though no sugar or flour were added, it tasted quite a lot like the blintzes I remember from my childhood. The bacon on the side was nice and crispy, and it gave a needed contrast in texture to the soft blintz.

The iced coffee contained ice cubes also made of coffee, together with real cream and whipped cream on top. The meal disappeared pretty fast, but I was not hungry for seconds. It was plenty good enough as is!

Meanwhile, Bow enjoyed his high carb meal, consisting of a bagel with cream cheese, an apple, a banana and a soft drink. To each his own!

Homemade Apple Pie

Apple pie is not something that was made from scratch in my house -- up till now. The idea of apple pie is so uniquely American that I always bought it at the store before. It's not an ancestral recipe with me. But I really admired Julia's rustic cinnamon apple pie, as described here:

http://eyeonlifemagazine.com/food-drink/julias-rustic-cinnamon-apple-pie-recipe

For years, I intended to try to bake this apple pie, according to the directions described in the link above, but I never quite got around to it. And then finally I did -- yesterday afternoon.

Vacuum County & eight Jonathan apples plus a stick of unsalted butter

I set aside the apples and allowed the butter to stay out at room temperature, right to next to a copy of Vacuum County, and then I made the dough, rolled it into two balls and refrigerated them.

The dough was made of 4 cups of flour, one cup of milk, one teaspoon each of sugar and cinnamon

Then I started cutting up the apples.

I also cut the stick of butter up into individual pats of butter and let them get even softer by standing a while at room temperature.

Can you see that butter almost melting?

Then I started to mix the ingredients for the pie filling.

I used two tablespoons of coconut flour on top of the apples

The flour I used for the dough had been regular flour, but I decided on coconut flour for the filling.

I added the pats of butter

After the flour, I added the butter. 

I then added one teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg and half a cup of sugar

I used sugar in the raw along with the nutmeg and cinnamon.

After mixing all the ingredients for the filling, I rolled out the bottom half of the dough with a rolling pin between two sheets of wax paper.

I then put the bottom layer of dough in the pie pan.

Bottom layer of dough in pie pan

Next, the filling went into the pan.

The filling in the pan

Then I flattened the other ball of dough and covered the pie. 

I sprinkled some sugar and cinnamon on the top.

I made a few slits in the top layer of dough and then baked.

It was not as beautiful and perfect as Julia's pie, but I was happy with it.

Cuttting a generous slice

The slice of pie crumbled a little more than I would have liked, but when I served it to Bow, he did not complain.

Bow really enjoyed his slice of pie and so did I.

In twenty-four hours, between us, Bow and I managed to consume half the pie.

I had better not eat any more, or I will not be able to fit into my Vacuum County T-Shirt!

The last piece of pie

RELATED

http://mystories.sweetbeariesart.com/2012/10/31/making-apple-pie/#comment-37466

Marzipan Strawberry Pie

During the great flood of 2017, Bow and I felt very cooped up. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, and we got a little tired of the same music and the same sights and sounds. But luckily we had at home the makings of marzipan strawberry pie. Miniature marzipan strawberry pie, that is.

The Finished Product

My mother and I had been talking about marzipan lately. It is one of my favorite sweets. During my childhood, when we didn't have  chocolate doled out as a special treat, we got marzipan. It is one of my favorites and evokes good memories. But here in the U.S., you can't find marzipan along with chocolate in the candy aisle at WalMart. "I haven't seen it in years," I said to my mother. "Maybe they call it something else."

And then one day I found it, in the baking section, on a very high shelf next to the poppy seed filling. Sure enough, it was not called marzipan. It was just plain old "almond paste."  That made it sound very unromantic, I must say. Can it possibly taste the same if you call it almond paste?

In addition to the almonds, sugar is the major ingredient, That's why when I was a little girl, it was doled out after a meal in very small doses, just like chocolate.

Americans, apparently, don't indulge in marzipan as a sweet, but they use almond paste -- which looks and tastes exactly the same -- in baking macaroons and other pastries . For Bow, during those rainy days, I decided to use ready made graham cracker pie crusts and strawberries to add more substance to the marzipan.

The marzipan can be made into any shape 

I always have fresh strawberries on hand.

I just cut them into small bits and added them on top of the marzipan. Marzipan is sticky, so they were firmly in place.

Now all I had to do was serve this confection to Bow. He was happy. He did not care at all whether it was called marzipan or almond paste. It was all the same to him.

Thanksgiving Table 2016: Pumpkin Pie and Cranberry Sauce

This year, I baked the pumpkin pie and made the cranberry sauce.

I didn't have all the spices called for in the recipe, so I only added cinnamon, nutmeg and went very easy on the cloves.

As for the cranberry sauce, I prepared it just as suggested on the package of fresh cranberries, one cup water, one cup sugar per 12 ounce package of cranberries. Only this time, I prepared two packages worth of cranberries, because cranberry sauce is the thing that always runs out first. 

Cranberry sauce always goes fast!

Rice Balls with Black Sesame Filling

The first Chinese New Year that I spent in Taiwan, the head of our English department gifted each of the new professors in his department with a bowl of rice balls with black sesame filling inside. I loved them! I still had not identified the substance in the middle, nor did I realize it was related to my favorite breakfast food, but I knew it felt familiar and was a comfort food. It tasted and smelled like childhood and being safe and loved.

I have never made these, but this is a great video about how to make them. Someday, I will give it a try.