Homemade cake mix?

First of all, there's this highly underrated cookbook I have.  It isn't food pornography, it's not hawked by an American TV personality, and it's definitely not glossy.  It's written by Norene Gilletz, and it's called "The Food Processor Bible."  My mom has the old copy, which is liberally stained on many, many pages.  I'm sure I've eaten more things from it than I realize.  

Anyway, one of the standbys from when I was a kid and my mom would make my brother and me birthday cakes - towering, multilayered, very homemade, jam-and-icing laden, delicious confections - she'd use this one recipe for chocolate cake.  In the book, it's called "cockeyed cake."  Two posts previously, I mentioned it as the healthiest chocolate cake could ever hope to be.  It happens to be vegan, and I could see it being a homemade cake mix.  The dry ingredients could be mixed up weeks or months is advance, and then after measuring out a certain quantity, water, oil, vinegar and vanilla could be added.  Baking time is 30 minutes.  Not bad.  

The recipe is as follows:

1.5 c flour

1 c sugar

1/3 c cocoa

1 tsp baking soda

0.5 tsp salt

5 tblsp oil

1 tblsp vinegar

1 tsp vanilla

1 c cold water

- Food processor the dry ingredients 10 seconds until blended.

- Add wet ingredients and process 6-8 seconds until just blended.

- Bake in a greased 8 inch square pan for 30 min at 350 F.

A couple things... the recipe suggests using peppermint as a substitute for vanilla extract.  I'm sure orange or almond would taste excellent too.  Also, remember that baking soda/vinegar experiment from back in the day in science class?  It's a simple acid-base reaction that forms carbon dioxide gas (and water).  This carbon dioxide is where the leavening for the cake comes from, so once you add the vinegar, don't continue food processing too long, and try to have your oven preheated so you can throw the cake right in.  Also, the recipe said a greased pan.  I would consider greasing and flouring, because of the 2 cakes I made in a greased-only pan, one came out ok and the other kind of got messed up when I took it out of the pan.  It might have been my fault, but mreh... :)

If you wanted to store things, I could see measuring the dry ingredients into a ziplock bag, labeling it, maybe writing necessary amounts of wet ingredients + baking time and temp. on it so you don't forget, and storing it in a cabinet until you want chocolate cake and you want it NOW.  

Also, this cookbook is really nice... it has a nice balance of meat based recipes, vegetable ones, starch, and dessert.  It goes from more traditional recipes to recipes for Cantonese short ribs.  There are recipes specific to the Jewish tradition (like Passover things, etc.), but cookbooks containing pork recipes never stopped me, so the reverse should be true for any non-Jews.  Besides, haroset is really tasty.  (It's a paste of walnuts, apples, honey, cinnamon, sweet red wine (Manishewitz, represent!), and maybe some ginger.  Or if you're from the Middle East, you do a banana and date-based one.)  This cookbook doesn't have quite the amount of veggie recipes I'd like, but this is a quality cookbook for anyone who says "fuck it" to knife skills.  Because the food processor does the work for you.  

But I digress... anyway, that's my cake recipe!  

Put some cherries between 2 of those babies, whip some cream and cover the whole deal, and you have yourself some very respectable layer cake for dessert.  Just make sure you have people coming over, so that you don't end up eating the whole thing yourself.  

Holy working week, Batman!

This is going to be a slightly scatterbrained post.

I have not been doing anything particularly awesome in the culinary sense this week. I did satisfy a craving for black forest cake by making my own. I made 2 rounds of the simplest and almost healthy chocolate cake in the world (coincidentally and completely by accident, it's vegan). Then, I got cherries from TJ's in light syrup, which I put between the two layers, and then I covered the whole deal in whipped cream (good-bye, vegan).

That was probably on the whole cheaper than buying a slice of cake somewhere which would have likely tasted of additives and other crap and would have left me feeling sad and unfulfilled. However, the downside is that I have half a black forest cake sitting in my fridge pleading with me to be eaten every time I open the fridge.

Bad planning, HungryGrad. Very bad. Must make massive cake construction coincide with a dinner party or something.

In other news, I have decided to limit the amount of pasta that Danny and I cook in one week to 1 pound, tops. Danny is a hardcore starch hound, but I think after this week even he is tired of pasta. We made lemon dill pasta salad, lime cilantro pasta salad, and a parsley pesto on pasta. I don't want anymore bloody pasta.

Happily, tonight is going to be pan seared fish, papaya salsa, and rutabaga latkes. I can't wait. I'm so tired of pasta that I engineered a sardine salad for lunch today. 1 can of sardines, 1 can of kippers, a glob of yogurt, some capers, mustard, and I think I should have squeezed some lemon in, but I didn't. I chopped up a ton of dill, sliced some cukes, and put it all in a tupperware with a few slivers of Jarlsberg. Ate it with a spoon, because I didn't even want bread.

People, I actively miss beans.

I made a vat of curried chicken a couple weeks ago, sans the chicken. I doubled the recipe (because I love it so much) and in lieu of chicken, I threw in 3 cans of beans - kidney, garbanzo, and some weird whitish ones. It was gone very rapidly, and is definitely in the running for something to make for the week, especially since it goes very well with lima bean and dill rice (a Persian thing) which is good because we have a huge bouquet of dill that needs to get eaten. Another possibility for this weekend's cooking activities is a lentil soup of epically hearty proportions, as well as a minestrone. I am so back on the bean. I want the minestrone to be vegetarian, but I haven't decided if I want to include hotdogs in the lentil soup. Need some input from Danny. There's also half a head of red cabbage that's going to get cooked down with an apple and an onion and some vinegar and sugar into sweet and sour cabbage.

This is odd, but i'm craving spinach. The frozen-in-a-block kind. I want to put it in the microwave, thaw and warm it, drain it, and then put the entire package on a steaming hot baked potato with a touch of sour cream, and some sauteed/roasted garlic. And some salt and pepper. That would make me incredibly happy.

Hm. Yet another meal possibility for the week...