8 recipes down, 261 days to go
Updated: Mar 13, 2021
(head over to the Join In page if you want to make this recipe — there is one for this on her blog!)
This week was one insane mash-up of rapidly changing emotions, I can't even begin to put words to them. Teenager Alert!
My plan was to order groceries every Sunday at 12 noon for this challenge. I’m pretty sure any plan I make is cursed to go awry, and this one was no exception. Being reliant on parent involvement resulted in a missed ordering deadline and stressful days ahead.
I ended up spending Wednesday morning, before school, loading my online grocery cart, and ordering my groceries to cook the recipes I had planned in the half a week still left.
Funny Side Bit:
I had arranged to have my groceries delivered from the 6-8pm window Wednesday night. They hadn’t come when I had gotten home from softball practice at 6:30, and I completely forgot about them… I was absorbed in annotating Great Expectations for English class at 8:15pm, when my mom came in and told me my groceries had arrived. I was like “what groceries?!“ AHHHH! If my mom hadn’t told me, I would have left my precious groceries sitting outside all night, and then the cooking challenge for this week would have been ruined. My mom deserves a thank you for that. Thank you, mom!
This recipe made me so glad I persevered...
Friday, September 4th
- Vanilla Corn Cake with Roasted Strawberries + Whipped Coconut Cream -
Friday afternoon I made the MOST DELICIOUS thing I have ever eaten. Okay… so I know I have described almost all of the recipes I have made as delicious. Maybe I should work on using a wider descriptive vocabulary? This delicious, however, got a most in front of it and all caps for emphasis. I hope you get the idea of what I thought of it :).
There was nothing extraordinary about baking it, it was the normal procedure of mixing the wet and dry ingredients separately, then GENTLY folding them together, making sure not to overmix. The recipe instructions had me make a well in the dry mixture to pour in the wet mixture (see picture).
This was my first time roasting any fruit! I guess I had always wondered how fruit got that jammy texture I had seen sometimes served at a restaurant. It couldn’t be simpler…
It involved cutting up the strawberries and sliding them on a parchment-lined baking sheet into the oven at 400 degrees F to roast for 20 minutes. It was kind of a pain having to cut ALL of the strawberries one at a time, but SOO worth it. They were literally oozing juice, and gave a wonderful sweetness to the corn cake.
I had made pumpkin cornbread a while back, which to be honest, was terrible. This has changed my whole idea of corn-based desserts! Laura Wright (the author of this cookbook) shares how her love-affair with corn-based desserts started… from a trip to New York and a corn-based cookie she had at a bakery there. I didn’t need to travel anywhere (which is good because I can’t anyways), all I needed was this cookbook to start my own love-affair.
Oh! I can’t believe I haven't even mentioned the Whipped Coconut Cream yet! I made this (recipe) to top the cake with. It was incredibly easy to make, although I did almost forget to refrigerate the can of coconut milk overnight… that would have sucked! All I can say is that I will most definitely NOT be forgetting this cream to top future desserts. OMG! It was AMAZING! Be gone with the old-fashioned whipped cream; better make way for the new vegan dessert craze… whipped coconut cream!
The corn-cake crumbled disastrously for the picture, even though I tried my best to make it stay together :). I was just too hungry to wait for it to cool longer to firm-up better. I considered this healthy enough to pass for my afternoon snack!
Future slices stayed together perfectly though, in case you’re wondering.
Oh and I’ve got to also share what my taste testers (mom, sister, and brother--kinda) thought of it:
My mom said it was delicious, though not as enthusiastically as I had proclaimed it.
My sister gave it a 9 out of 10 and ate most of the slice I gave her (except for the strawberries). She said she would never give a 10 out of 10 to a dessert that had fruit on it :).
My brother, our acknowledged family fruit despiser, had a slice also removed of the strawberries. He said it was okay.
Too bad for them—the strawberries made the cake!
To be completely honest, I was a bit hesitant about my choice of making this recipe. I couldn't be more glad I did!