put frosting outside to cool to the right texture…
went to get it and there's a possum sampling it.
— Lyn Thorne-Alder (@lynthornealder) December 18, 2016
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There was a possum eating my chocolate frosting.
— Sam T.C. (@samttc) December 18, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSo yep. That was my weekend: possum frosting.
(Turns out, if you google possum and chocolate, what you get isn’t a whole lot of good information on if possums are able to eat chocolate. You get mostly possum recipes. Oops.)
We were testing vegan frosting to go on a vegan cake for a vegan Christmas present for my vegan father (help I can’t vegan stop). The cake turned out great, actually — a Depression-era “crazy cake” recipe with no eggs and no butter or milk (“no eggs no butter, no flour no sugar” says the woman on the bus whose parents probably remembered the Depression). And the frosting — once we scraped off the top where the possum had gotten his nose into it — that turned out surprisingly tasty.
This week is all the vegan food-testing and making: soups for mom, cake for dad, and the bread might not be vegan but it’ll be tasty too. It’s the time of year where I’m making a lot of bread, trying new recipes or just throwing stuff in the mixer and seeing what happens (“either not enough molasses or too much” last week; this week turned out pretty good). Bonus of all the baking: it heats up the far end of the house, where the wood stove’s heat doesn’t really reach. Bonus of making soup in the winter: cooking it on the wood stove and making the whole house smell like soup.
The weather outside is frightful — by turns freezing and raining, snowing and blowing — but the fire is burning hot and the candles are lit in the windows. I’ve got silk poinsettias for my vases and bandanna-patterned wrapping paper for my presents, cookies for the baking and fresh bread hiding in the microwave (Otherwise the cat eats it).
Happy Holidays, my friends. It’s a wonderful life here in West Nowhere, NY.
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Cats and possums appreciate the good things! I grew up calling that confection “cockeyed cake”. That was a chocolate (cocoa) cake; I’ve also made it as a spice cake. Presumably it wants the stronger flavors to compensate for lack of the subtle ones like butter, but I’ve never tried it without, and am now a little tempted. This does not seem like a wise plan.
The recipe I used had spice and vanilla variations, too. I can try it and let you know~
Or we could trade recipes. 🙂 1 1/2 c flour 3 tbsp cocoa (I usually use a bit more) 1 c sugar 1 tsp baking soda 1/1 tsp salt 5 tbsp oil 1 tbsp vinegar 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup cold water Mix-in-the-pan instructions: Sift the dry ingredients into a 9×9 pan. Put three grooves in the dry ingredients; pour oil in one, vanilla in one, vinegar in one. Pour the water over everything. Mix until smooth. Bake at 350F for 1/2 hour. Mixing in a bowl, I usually sift & stir together the dry ingredients, then mix all the wet ingredients in the measuring cup with the water, pour them into the dry, and mix. It makes a fairly fluid batter. No need to grease the pan unless you want to extract the cake from it whole.