bakefest

Last week was the week of baking.  Well, not the whole week.  But two days of baking is a lot for me, considering I really only bake around the holidays or when I have to.  On a whim, I decided to make coconut macaroons.  I had never had them before (I know, your mouth is agape), and wanted to try them out after stumbling upon them while looking for some coco-nutty girl scout cookie my cousin and I were attempting to identify via the internet.  I found this recipe on All Recipes dot com (yea, I just did that).  It had 676 reviews and had a 4.5-star rating.  Also, the creator mentioned that these cookies had won first place ribbons at the state fair.

Not even registering what the recipe called for, I added the ingredients to my grocery list.  The night I chose to make them, I had no idea what I was getting myself into and blindly decided to prepare them after dinner came out of the oven.  Well, thank my lucky stars, I had not created a disaster for myself.  These cookies were by far the easiest cookie I had ever made.  The recipe consisted of a whopping five ingredients: flour, coconut, salt, sweetened condensed milk, and vanilla extract.  Everything went into a big bowl, was mixed by hand (literally), and then dropped onto a cookie sheet with an ice-cream scoop.  The recipe said it would make 12, but it really made 16, and they were each about the size of a golf ball....Which is apparently pretty large for a macaroon.  I popped the cookies into the oven and plated dinner, which was still hot.  AMAZING.

dinner was also a recipe found on all recipes.com.
It's rigatoni with cheese, spinach, zucchini, and mushrooms.
Also amazing.
I've made it twice, and I really am not known for repeating recipes.

I also baked an AMAZING carrot cake on Friday.  I found the recipe on Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy.  The cake was for my aunt's birthday.  It turned out amazing.  It was a layer cake, which I love, because then there are more places to put the cream cheese icing, which I can never get enough of.  There was crushed pineapple in it, which was new to me as far as carrot cakes go, but it was a lovely compliment to the slightly citrusy cream cheese icing, which had orange extract as well as vanilla...the icing was pretty much identical to an orange cream-cicle, but oh so much more refined in taste.  I used toasted walnuts instead of pecans, which just appealed to me more at the time, but I'm sure pecans would have been equally delicious.  My only regret was adding the gel "happy birthday" after making the icing all pretty and peaked.  It would have been perfect, but I had to go that one step further.  I had intended on drawing a carrot on it, but then my husband says to me, why don't you just right "happy b-day"?  Well, that happy birthday idea completely overwrote my carrot idea (completely by accident) and I didn't catch what I was doing until I was half way done and all the way disappointed in the text.  Really, I know it looked fine, but remember I am a perfectionist, so fine is not good enough.  But anyway, the cake was a hit, and really, all that matters is that it tasted DELICIOUS.  Oh, by the way, did I mention I forgot to photograph it? TOO BAD.