Night #2 in the kitchen

Tonight I baked one of Aunt Ruby's pound cakes. That is the one I usually make, but I had been looking for a recipe that doesn't have shortening in it. Once I got the hang of this one, it is pretty reliable, and it is a delicious pound cake. I will commit family blasphemy though, and say that I think the recipe for the one I made Monday night makes a better cake overall. Aunt Ruby's is the one I have always taken to work though, and the girls just love it. Since many of them apparently don't cook, this is one of the few scratch cakes they get. Also, since I didn't make a cake the last food day we had (I just took doughnuts) there could well have been a riot if I hadn't brought a cake today. But it was yet another cake to add to the agenda this week. This food day couldn't really have been planned at a more inconvenient time. I just hate to disappoint though. When I pulled this one out of the oven, it was a bit fragile. I should have left it in longer. I broke the crust on it when I turned it out, which pissed me off. So it isn't as pretty as usual, but I'm sure it will taste fine. And since it usually lasts about 2 hours anyway, it doesn't really matter. I'll be baking pound cake number three tomorrow night. That will be the official one to take to the camp out, so that's the one I want to turn out the best. I'll be using the new recipe again, and altering the cooking time and temp, since everything else seemed fine.

I decided I couldn't use the scorched pound cake for the trifle. I always try to do my very best cooking for LOCK. So I baked the lemonade cake tonight for the trifle. It has been a while since I made that cake, and I kind of remembered I had a sticking problem with it, so I lined my pans with wax paper. I'm so glad I did!! Since it has more sugar in the batter from the lemonade, it is a really sticky cake. Even buttering the pans heavily didn't make it come out smoothly. But it's mostly OK, and since it's going in trifle anyway, it's not like it has to be a beautiful cake. I also made another batch of marshmallow cream topping for the trifle. I have one in the fridge, but didn't think one batch would be enough. This should turn out well. The cake is lemony and quite tart, and the topping is very sweet, so it should be a good balance. Also, I decided to do a layer of lemon curd within the cake, since I'm not putting any fruit in this. So it will just be trifle-esque. It also won't have any alchohol in it.

After all that, and cleaning up the kitchen, I was pretty whooped. But I finished up by about 9:30.

Tomorow night it's another pound cake, and the chocolate eclair pie. I decided I can't do Jell-O pudding, so I'll be making pastry cream and Mom's chocolate buttercream icing for that. I'm using packaged graham cracker crumbs though. I figured that would be OK.

So back to the store tomorrow. I'm going to end up using almost four pounds of butter this week, but 3/4 of a pound went into the scorched pound cake, so I guess that doesn't count.

I also couldn't find my #$^%#!! lemon flavoring that I know I bought. I'm out of my old flavoring, and know I bought another bottle, but can't find it. That is so aggravating! I even took all my spices out, cleaned my spice rack, and put them all back. No dice. Dammit.