Our Oscar Feast

The thing is I'd love to have an Oscar party, but I'm an old lady. I don't know if you know this but the Oscars tend to go a little long. Like at least 20 minutes. Which means that I watch the end of the show from bed in my PJs. So instead of a party menu Craig & I made an Oscar feast for two.

Making dessert first, here are some cupcake shots:



Craig doing what Craig does best, making sure I don't cry.



So here is our final menu.

"Benjamin Button" Stuffed Mushrooms


"Milk"shakes
Okay, this is admittedly the weakest of all. We made sausages and mustard for "The Reader", because it's German... and really, what are you going to do for a movie like that? Also, I would have liked to have big German-like sausages, but the only turkey option was this:


"Slumdog Millionaire" Samosas


These things were a little ridiculous, each samosa was one teaspoon of filling and an entire pastry sheet. So we ended up with this on the plate.


Last but certainly not least "Frost"ed "Nixon" cupcakes. Though there's nothing Nixon about them.



The full spread, now off to finish watching the hours of coverage.

Vanilla Pound Cake

So, first recipe and first baking item I don't own.



Alright, 10" tube pan - check. Still no stand mixer, so it was a little difficult with my little hand mixer, but I made do. $12 for the tube pan is one thing, I can't be shelling out $500 so that it's a little more comfortable to "add the sugar in a steady stream".

Now speaking of sugar. I was going to do this challenge trying to buy my supplies from Culinarium my local "local" store. But then I started reading the recipes and realized there was no way I could get something like sugar there. Nor do I believe they will carry candied orange peel or tomatoes in March. So I'm going to get what I can there for each recipe. This time that amounts to the milk, butter and eggs. All organic, all local, all yummy.

I barely had enough hands to add the sugar, hold the beater and try not to end up covered head to toe in batter when my bowl goes flying off the counter, so no pictures of the creating. Here it is going into the oven:

Here is me staring at the cake rising, rising, rising. Little bit terrified that it's going to spill over onto the bottom of my already disgustingly dirty oven.

Hmmm, maybe I should look into why you can totally see my bra through this shirt. And here it is freshly out of the oven:

Seriously, look how high that got, you can see my cause for concern.

I baked it for the low end of the recommended baking time. 55 minutes only, the recipe recommended up to 65 minutes. I'm not particularly familiar with what pound cake should look and taste like. This seems to be a little overdone on the outside. But it's quite moist and cakey on the inside, and I kind of like the hardness of the crust on this one. I'm going to have to pick up some toothpicks... my chopstick came out clean though!

My first comment was "Mmmm, tastes like sugar".

Picked up the book

Just picked up the book from the library. It's a little banged up, but Chapters is sending me my own copy as we speak.



I must admit after a quick glance through the book I don't know about this. I may be a little in over my head. I don't even know what some of the equipment is that they refer to. I had to Google jelly roll pan. Turns out I have one of those. This is going to be interesting.

So I'm not really a baker....

But one of my closest friends has asked me to join this challenge so here's my blog to go along with it.
I've put the book on hold at the library and while I think it's kind of cruel for Tina to ask me to do this a mere 4 days before my first wedding dress fitting I'll play along ;)