Sunday Sundry - 9-8-13

It feels like a good time for a rambly, Sunday Sundry post.  It’s been one of those days.  I am bothered recently again by my stupid burning mouth syndrome, which mostly affects the front part of my tongue.  You know the part that tastes everything?  It waxes and wanes, this annoying malady, but today it’s parked like a hoopty on blocks in the front yard, and I just want to make it go away.  Eating sounds like a good idea (constantly is not good, though), but it doesn’t really work except as a temporary signal disruption.  Thankfully, when I do eat, things taste normal.  It’s just all those other hours without distraction that are annoying.

Okay, rant over.

How about I tell you about a Pinterest recipe fail.  Friends, I had such high hopes for a little single-serving “healthy” red velvet cake idea, made with beet puree.  Oh yeah, I know you’re craving it already at the mere mention of beets, right?  Well, we eat things like zucchini cake and carrot cake and banana bread, so why not a little puree of beet, just to make life interesting?  

(Roasted beets from Dad's garden)

Hint:  It wasn’t the beets that made this a flop.

I have already deleted the pin, and I won't be linking to the recipe page.  I’m sure its creator is probably a very nice, culinarily accomplished person, and it isn’t her fault the recipe bombed. 

 

However, I’m not ready to say it’s entirely my bad either.  I mean, I had all the ingredients and followed directions.  It looked good on paper (aside from leaving me to wonder in which universe the carb count was considered healthy, but I digress).  

I might have taken a clue from the recipe’s emphasis on being “egg-free, sugar-free, and low fat.”  As it turns out, it would have benefitted from precisely every single one of those deficiencies.  Also, one teaspoon of baking powder?  In a single serving?  I should have known better. 

This next photo was taken pre-taste test.  A foodie photographer I am not (obviously), but I gave it the old college try.  And apparently chose the most unappetizing plate we had in the house.  Oh, the irony.

And then I tried the cake.  It tasted like…baking powder.  Dry, cardboard-y, somewhat chocolate flavored baking powder with a hint of beet.  Mm-mm-UGH.

Honestly, the best thing about it was the melted square of Ghiradelli that I drizzled on top, the runoff of which I dragged each morsel through in desperation.  I so very much wanted this cake to taste good, and hoped with every disconcerting mouthful (and there were far too many) that it might—what?—grow on me? 

Not a chance.  Thus was the fate of this failure.  Destiny: Dustbin.  

If I need a veggie cake fix, I’ll be sticking with this one, which I have made an embarrassingly frequent number of times and can recommend wholeheartedly.  Caveat:  I do add one egg and halve the sugar.

In other news, I quilted and bound the improv baby quilt yesterday.  Photos tomorrow, weather cooperating.  I’m listening, while I sew, to the audiobook version of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Macguire.  Kevin the Quilter recommended it, and so far it is proving to be quite entertaining!  Maybe one day I will see the stage production, but for now I'm glad to be discovering the back story.

That’s about it for today, my pretties!