Thursday, August 28, 2008

Where does zucchini go when it dies?

In to my kitchen for Berry Upside-Down Cake! It's zucchini heaven. I thought I'd post a recent recipe I made on here since the majority of my spare time at home is cooking. Sometimes when people come over I find myself standing behind my kitchen counter talking to them even if I'm not cooking because that's where I'm most comfortable. This is a recipe I posted on a friends food blog. Let me just preface this with the fact that I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't put food where it doesn't belong. Pepper shouldn't be in cookies, cinnamon and sweet things don't belong in stew and raisins don't belong anywhere. That being my opinion I don't eat zucchini bread... ever. My mom sent me a recipe to use all my yellow zucchini I have in my garden, a CAKE recipe! Gross! But I tried it because it was either cake or the compost bin for a few of those things. One girl can only eat so much yellow zucchinis. It originally called for yellow squash but I didn't grow any this year. I made it and then I tweaked it and made it a few more times and loved it more each time. The last time I made it I was attempting to find a way to get the jam to stay on the inside of the cake. I assembled each of the two cakes differently to see which would work better. Then, when I dropped the experiment version of the cake, the one I had the highest hope for, on the hot open oven door and watched batter and jam run into the bottom of the oven, all over the door and through the hinge onto my kitchen floor I thought, "Forget it, let them conduct their own experiments! I'm done!" I renamed the recipe and updated it with all my tweaks. It is the moistest, tastiest amazing yellow cake I've ever had. I love it! I've eaten 3 of them almost entirely on my own justifying it each time by saying out loud to myself, "It's ok, it has zucchini in it!"

Berry Upside-Down Cake

1 Box Yellow Cake Mix 1 C. Pureed Summer Yellow Squash or Yellow Zucchini 1/2 C. Water 2 T. Vegetable Oil 3 Large Eggs 3/4 C. Sour Cream Boysenberry Spreadable Fruit Jam 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 2. Cut up squash or zucchini into chunks and puree in a food processor. It can be a little more than a cup. Mine always is. Add the water and puree some more. 3. In a mixer, combine the cake mix, squash puree, oil, eggs, and sour cream. Beat on low till combined. Beat in Medium for 1-2 minutes. 4. Spray 2 round 8 or 9 inch cake pans with cooking spray. Spray it thicker than you normally do. (Or one pan and 12 cupcakes. An 8 inch pan makes a thicker moister cake) 5. Add half the batter to the pan, then drop the jam all over the entire cake in small spoonfuls. The more spread out it is the more consistent looking it will be when you turn it out. I used about 2/3 of a smaller jar of jam. 6. Cover with the rest of the batter and bake at 350. 20-25 minutes for cupcakes and 25-30 for round cake or till the top is light brown and springs back when you touch it. 7. Let it cool in the pan for about 15-25 minutes. Run a knife around the outside of the pan and turn it upside down onto a plate. Don't try to force it out or the jam will stick to the pan. Let it sit there upside-down till it drops out. Keep it covered or it dries out fast and gets really hard.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Berry Picking with the Tolls

Every year I try to get up to Idaho to go huckleberry picking with my sister and her family. This year I made it up and we picked for a whole day and that night Jailynn made us a pie. It was so good we couldn't even wait for it to cool down before we ate it. Then the next day we picked currants and raspberries in the back yard and ate them with cream. The whole weekend made for some tasty food, fun pictures, sore backs, and purple fingers...
There were so many berries we couldn't even stop to eat lunch and ended up with huckleberries all over our bagels. Yum! Evidence of a hard days work! Hmmm...both the fingers and the pie!

Even Sugar helped with the raspberries.