I made the most amazing carrot cake using the discard from sourdough starter. The cake is so moist. It's filled with carrots, spices like cinnamon, walnuts, coconut, crushed pineapple, and raisins. The frosting is cream cheese with pecans.
The lily of valley and iris are from the yard. It was so hot today the iris were just laying on the lawn, too weak to hold themselves up. So I cut them and took them inside and refreshed them with some cool water.
Finally seeing affordable domestic apricots in the grocer store. Love to add them to coffee cakes, muffins, and this puffy egg pancake.
Before dusting with sugar. I melt some butter in the pie plate. Then add a sprinkle of sugar and some apricots and mix eggs with milk and flour. Throw the whole thing in the over at a high temperature to bake till puffy.
I made a delicious onion bread I found in the King Arthur Flour Baking Book. I don't usually think of onions in a sweet bread. But this combination is like comfort food.
A rich dough with butter, sugar, milk, and sourdough starter. Then on the second rise, adding chopped onion and caraway sprinkled on top. Also baked on a bed of cornmeal sprinkles. This is one of my new favorite breads.
I made sweet rolls with the sourdough starter I have going. They turned out great except that the brown sugar didn't caramelize. It stayed course and if anything, got more crunchy. Not sure why. But anyway, they were still delicious.
I also painted the cut peonies you may have seen my previous post. I love these peonies because of the tinge of pink on the white petals. SO pretty. Also, it's hard to capture the fuscia pinks in oil paint. They have a transparent quality that glows and is really hard. I worked with effort to get that punch of color without overpowering the whole painting.
WIth the daylight savings change and longer days, I've been excited to get ready for spring. Here are some pussy willow branches I got at the grocers that have held up well in my room for a month. The buds have gone from tight and fuzzy to fat with yellow blossoms. Sometimes they are so heavy they fall off. Soon we will have these outside too. I made some homemade graham crackers also. They are delicious plain or with dark chocolate or lemon curd on top. They are not so sweet but have small amounts of sugar and honey and are low fat. They have whole grain flour also. I used a spelt flour. I got the recipe from...
