<lazy>ME</lazy>

So, I've been really bad about keeping up with this blog. A bunch of stuff has happened since the Babas au Rhum. I started work at The Bent Spoon, which is awesome, and discovered a couple amazing cookbooks that are now on my wishlist, but the most important, of course, was my trip up to Rhode Island to see my boyfriend Matchstick for our one month! That was lots of fun, and very tiring...and we got to have a few culinary adventures :) He bought me Martha Stewart's cookie cookbook, which is absolutely amazing, so we took it for a spin, and made her Thin and Crisp Chocolate Chip Cookies, which turned out marvellously. They were a hit with his family, too. The recipe in the book calls for unsalted butter, but I found that you can use salted butter if you reduce the amount of salt you add later by half. We also attempted to make a banana cake...but forgot half the leavening, so it didn't cook in the centre. That didn't really phase anyone, though--we just cut off the good bits and ate them. I also made an American buttercream with mashed bananas in place of all but a few tablespoons of milk, which was quite good, although the sugar tended to overwhelm the banana.

For Fathers' Day I made an Italian almond cake. The recipe is rather interesting. It's essentially a sponge cake made with ground almonds in place of flour. The recipe is flourless, and so my mother likes to make it on Passover. I was lucky enough to get some egg whites from Gab (at work we almost always use the yolks only), and so my cake was made with some very spiffy organic, free-range eggs from Runnin' Free Farm! With any luck I'm going to have opportunity to make this cake again with the same lovely eggs.

Matchstick is coming down this Thursday for a week, and there are definitely going to be some culinary capers happening! Well, if we aren't too tired out from sight seeing (yes, that is possible in NJ). But on the docket is definitely Aloo Gobi, which is part of the menu for the party I'm throwing on Friday, and also cheese cake with lemon curd! So stay tuned!!