Healthy cake, about to pop, come get yer lik's!

This weekend was quite lovely, both in weather and activities. It was nice to have a weekend that we neither had company nor were company, a couple of days to just do what we felt like doing and enjoying ourselves (with some errands etc. mixed in, of course). We sat in the backyard in the warm shade and read books; we completely restocked our liquor supply (were out of EVERYTHING); we spent way too much money on plants for our garden (mostly vegetables, a few flowering annuals) and put the garden in, finally.

On Friday, I asked our friend Julie what kind of cake she wanted for her birthday. We threw around ideas, and, knowing she's on some sort of fancy diet, I wanted to make sure I made something that would a) taste good, and b) not make her feel extraordinarily guilty for eating it. She asked for chocolate, zucchini, and booze to be involved in the production of the cake. I went to allrecipes and typed in those ingredients (plus cake) and came up with this recipe. However, I knew it needed to be modified to be made healthier. Here's what I came up with.

MLE's awesome Chocolate Zucchini Rum Cake, now with Less Guilt!
3/4 cup butter
1 1/3 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups grated zucchini
1/3 cup Sailor Jerry's rum (that's the kind we buy, I'm sure it would be fine with any rum)
1 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 plus a little bit wheat flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts and pecans
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 dark unsweetened cocoa powder (I use this stuff, it is terrific)
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 cup powdered sugar
2 oz Sailor Jerry's rum

I accidentally omitted the milk from the original recipe but discovered it wasn't necessary (the batter was plenty moist) and probably could have even left out some of the butter. I used a 9x13 pan rather than a bundt pan because we don't have a bundt pan, plus I knew there would be a lot of people at the party and it's easier to divide up a sheet cake into lots of pieces.

We got all gussied up for the party, which was held at a swanky local establishment (so swanky the drinks were $8-9 EACH, good thing I had planned to only have two) and walked the 8 short blocks and 4 long blocks, me tottering in four-inch heels and carrying the cake in arms, Dan carrying my wrap and his jacket. A great time was had by all, but, best of all, the cake was a huge hit. Julie cut it up into about 28 pieces so everyone could have some and everybody who tried it must have complimented me. Seriously, it turned out SOOO GOOD, and you couldn't tell at all that it had zucchini in it (or that it was made with partly wheat flour, or that I'd cut the sugar nearly in half, etc.) I plan to make this cake again, only this time I'll use parchment paper in the bottom of the pan (it was so moist that a few bits stuck to the pan rather than holding cohesively, but since I iced it in drizzles and the venue was dark, it didn't matter).

I love going to events that are Julie-centric, because she has a lot of friends who I like very much, some of whom I have known almost as long as I've known Julie (about 5 years now), so it's fun to catch up with people. Like Chu, the Brazillian goddess who just got back from 6 months traveling around the world, who also plays Capoeira. I enjoyed the company for a couple of hours, but at one point the place got really loud because they were showing some sort of fight on the television and it was a little overwhelming. Luckily, things quieted back down once the fight was over. I started to feel like I wanted to leave at one point, until I learned that Julie's cousin and his wife were on their way, so we decided to stay and say hi to them (having met them at Julie events through their engagement and wedding and decision to become Orthodox over the last few years). The female half of the couple was exceedingly pregnant, having been told by her midwife that she'd probably have the baby over the weekend. Yet she and her husband made it to two social events in one night. Go, them! She looked great and I am really excited to find out what flavor of baby they have and what his or her name will be.

Because we were up so late Saturday night, we slept in on Sunday and didn't finish with our breakfast of waffles-from-scratch, strawberries, and turkey bacon until nearly 11 AM. We had decided to experiment with a new sweetener, maple syrup being prohibitively expensive these days and regular syrup being rife with HFCS, so we bought Agave Nectar at the grocery store on Saturday. Turns out I like it better than maple syrup, plus it's marginally healthier (has a lower glycemic index) and far less expensive. Hooray! We bought our plants and other necessities (bags of poop and bark and dirt) and spent the afternoon planting everything. I have high hopes for the zucchini plant I put in, since now I have a great food processor that grates in like 2 seconds and a fabulous new zucchini recipe.

We never ate lunch, opting instead for a early (for us) dinner of homemade hummus, falafel, veggies, and pita, and then we walked to our neighborhood ice cream store. It turned out that everyone else in a 3-mile radius had the exact same idea, so we waited in line for a half hour for our child-size chai tea and billionaires (me) and chocolate peanut butter in a sugar cone (Dan). It was nearly full dark by the time we got home, enjoying a leisurely stroll in the warm June evening.

I couldn't have asked for a better weekend.

Wednesday Wedding Day: Almost finished!

This weekend and the last few days:

Finished bridesmaid dress #3 and started #4
Finished a bunch of Huge Craft Project (I can't wait to get my new camera so I can take pictures)
Cut down one of our readings to manageable size, then sent it and the other two to our readers for their perusal pre-wedding
Worked on the ceremony, still not finished
Got RSVP from the last people we were waiting on (my flaky uncle and his SO, who are coming, yay!)
Found a possible source of lemons (for lemonade) and flowers
Started to get really excited
Had work shower, received thoroughly unexpected large check from one coworker (and some other stuff, too. Also, I got to eat carrot cake which is one of my favorites and something I almost never get to eat because Dan doesn't like desserts featuring cream cheese, so if I made a carrot cake I would have to eat it all myself.)
Called wholesale flower place to find out what flowers will be available, in case my mom's yard and our other hookup don't pan out
Mailed off 3 finished bridesmaid dresses and worked on #4, which is giving me fits. I'm all finished except the stupid zipper.


So what's left to do before we leave for CA?
Complete Huge Craft Project (one more piece!)
Printing thankyou notes (Dan is doing this at school)
Design and print program (Dan again)
Finish playlist for eating and dancing
Rent music equipment
Rent kilts/etc.
Send off checks to everyone who needs checks
Give final numbers to caterer
Figure out final seating arrangement (we're doing escort cards and assigned tables but not assigned seats to minimize family awkwardness)
Table name cards and stickers for escort cards (Dan again)
Print escort cards
Finish ceremony
Send email to photographer re: shots we want (formals)
Finish zipper on the last dress and mail it off to QIR
Make a list of everything we need to bring to CA (our car is going to be stuffed to the gills!)

Also, I had a dermatologist appointment today that I'd made weeks ago for what I thought was a skin infection on my face that I had for months. It cleared up when I took the antibiotics for my sinus/ear infections (so I think I'm right about what it was) but then as I mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I ended up breaking out in hives on my face that spread all over, and they've gotten a little better but not much. I've switched shampoo, body wash, face wash, moisturizer, lotion, changed the sheets on the bed, analyzed my diet to determine whether I've started eating anything new or too much of any one thing, and taken Benadryl at night (can't take it during the day because it makes me sleepy). Still hivey. My insurance is through Kaiser, which notoriously makes you wait weeks and weeks for appointments, so my dermatologist appointment was made in January. I opted to keep the appointment and pay the stupid $50 fee, and left with a prescription for doxycycline (the derm thinks it's stress-induced weird acne and not hives, even though they itch and benadryl seems to help). Oh well, at least it will keep any other stress-induced zits away.

And what will we be doing in CA for the week before the wedding?

Getting the marriage license
Getting our cake(s) (and possibly pies)
Picking, buying, and arranging flowers
Making a huge costco run for afterparty supplies
Find a pin or brooch for the front of my dress - I've exhausted Denver's possibilities and so I hope to find one at a sparkly store in SF
Final dress fitting
Possibly purchasing longline strapless bra to minimize appearance of belly button (you can see it through my dress!)
Finding sari fabric to make myself a shrug (possibly)
Enjoying a night of debauchery in the city (seperately)

And, I'm sure, a million other things that I am forgetting. But it'll all get done. I'm feeling very zen at the moment; the stress of a few weeks ago is slowly ebbing. All things considered, we're in great shape (both literally and figuratively) - I mean, the people who got married last fall whose wedding we were in didn't even find a caterer until 3 weeks before their wedding, so I'm feeling pretty good about where we stand.

Fall = Domesticity

I did two hours worth of workout yesterday and came home about to pass out, so I promised Dan I'd just do a yoga class today (I took Vinyasa Yoga at lunch; it was a good class). I had the chance to take a new class after work (Yoga for Athletes) but decided I'd rather walk home while there was still some semblance of daylight and work on some projects.

The first thing I did was to pull out some yarn for a project, but then I realized what a horrible mess my knitting bag was (I had about 15 different yarns in various stages of knottedness, all tangled up and with some needles poked in here and there). The cats watched in fascination as I spent nearly an hour untangling everything. Now I have a pile of a variety of yarns used in a plethora of projects over the past year, and I went through the rest of my yarn stash and mentally started checking planned projects off the list as I inventoried. I proceeded to plop down on the couch in front of a movie I've seen many, many times and start working on one of said projects - even though there are wedding things to be worked on and a sweater for Dan that needs some TLC (and only has a couple of inches so far - it's going to take a while, I think).

For dinner tonight I made a soup from scratch (it was a butternut squash soup with shrimp, ingredients: butternut squash, vegetable broth, crushed red pepper. Cook squash/pepper in broth until squash is tender; puree. Return to pot, add peeled uncooked shrimp and cook on low until shrimp is done. Add some grated fresh parmesan; eat with crusty bread). The fall always has me feeling more domestic - knitting projects because the weather's getting colder and I still haven't replaced all my scarves/hats etc. from last year's storage debacle, cooking soups and stews, baking. On Sunday I baked pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from my own made-up recipe (takes very little butter because the pumpkin is so moist, so the cookies aren't terribly bad for you as cookies go) and I bought another sugar pumpkin to process and use in pie for Thanksgiving. Dan and I are cooking the bulk of Thanksgiving dinner for his family and we've already started discussing recipes and logistics and prepwork and it just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside to think about cooking and baking projects. I'm not ready for Christmas yet (certainly not; we haven't finished planning our Italy trip, the invitations aren't done and I have about 3908409384 knitting projects to do before that) but the deeper we get into autumn the more domestic I seem to feel.