My Easter chocolate

 

I love that today was Easter Sunday.

Just the shadow of Lent lifting ... Yesterday I said to my brother George, that is enough for me. I do not need ham nor do I need chocolate. Although today I had both!

The chocolate I had was after Mass. Actually I had two chocolate treats after Mass. One was a milk chocolate cross that my friend Susan was handing out when we were milling about the church afterwards. Susan works in an honest to goodness chocolate shop! And she was handing out chocolate crosses.

The second chocolate was quite the experience. My friend Meghan in choir turned up today unexpectedly -- she is out of town a lot -- and we went after Mass to the Public coffee house, in the Hotel Lafayette. 

At Public I asked at the counter for the most fattening coffee they had. The clerk laughed.

He said: "This must be because of Lent ending!"

I said: "Yes!"

He said other things too but masks make things hard to understand so we will have to leave the conversation at this. Long story short, he guided me in the direction of a rich latte so I got that. Then I saw these chocolate bars. One was 100 percent cacao! And no sugar. None!

I ordered that one! That is it below. It has this great brand name, Raaka.

Meghan and I were sitting on this couch and she ate a breakfast sandwich and then I invited her to sample the chocolate which she did.

We agreed that the chocolate was rather uncompromising. However I just might develop a taste for it. I told Meghan that will be a new identity of mine, chocolate connoisseur. Next time I am at Public I am going to try another bar. It was Bourbon Spiked, something like that.

The chocolate was perfect for me at this point in time because I have been flirting with the Keto diet and it does not spike your insulin, being pretty much fat, as far as I can determine. It sustained me through a long walk on the waterfront, during which I sketched the Maumee again, and then just sat on the docks, watched the geese, feasted my eyes on the water, and just enjoyed life.

Easter Sunday.

The happiest day of the year!

Hamming it up with Betty Crocker

Yesterday I made my first Chiffon Cake, for church coffee hour. It was the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake out of the classic Betty Crocker Guide to Easy Entertaining!

It is a rule I have for coffee hour: Every week I make at least one thing that is new. It keeps things exciting.

Above is a picture of the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake going into the oven. And here it is coming out:

Beautiful as the cake is, I could not help laughing about the chapter the recipe came from. It was going piously to church, yet it came from the chapter titled Stag Parties.

How many cookbooks these days will you find with a chapter called Stag Parties?

It is funny because sex is everywhere, much more than it was several decades ago, but oh, you cannot mention stag parties. But anyway.

"Most men have a weakness for chocolate cake," Betty Crocker writes in this cookbook.

And sure enough!

The guys at St. Anthony's, they loved this cake! Well, the ladies did, too. And the children. But I am not about to contradict Betty Crocker. She was right!

You know me, I am always behind, and I was making the frosting at literally the last minute -- i.e., this morning before church. So I made a frosting that Betty recommended called Chocolate Fluff. You took two cups of heavy cream and whipped it up with a cup of powdered sugar and a half cup of cocoa. The result was amazing. Like ice cream. Addictive. Amazing.

You had to sit the cake in the fridge until it was time to serve it. And so during Mass the cake sat in the fridge in the St. Anthony's social hall. It tastes good cold, I discovered. There is something very satisfying about this sweet, chilled cake.

But next time I will make the other icing Betty recommended.

It is White Mountain Icing!

My Facebook friend Janice is a professional pastry chef and she was urging me to try it. She said it was old school but it will be so worth it! Plus, what I love about it is you get to use -- shhhhh -- corn syrup.

It is just a little more complicated than I had time for this morning. In addition I should get a candy thermometer. Why does someone like me not have a candy thermometer? Yet I do not.

The cake shared the buffet with another St. Anthony's novelty -- ham.

We got a couple of hams at Albrecht Discount and heated them up in the oven! This was another first for me. We were doing this because it was the Octave of Easter. Lou, one of the gentlemen of St. Anthony's, had to help me.

We hit a snag when I realized there were no roasting pans in the kitchen. What to do? What to do??? But miraculously in a cupboard we found a beat-up cookie sheet. Wait, it was my cookie sheet! I had been wondering what had happened to it. Here it was. And right when and where I needed it!

And so we roasted the hams -- in foil pans, set on the cookie sheet. Lou said they would be done by the time we got out of Mass and sure enough.

Lou being a prince among men also made the glaze in a saucepan he found God knows where.

I slipped out during the sermon to apply the glaze to the ham.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, there was much rejoicing.

Ham. Is there anything better?

And 99 cents a pound at Aldi.

We will be doing this again!

Basket case

That chocolate zucchini cake for Dorothy's birthday was so gooey and good! I am not bragging. I am giving credit to the recipe.

I had a feeling it would be good. Remember when I made a chocolate zucchini cake for Howard's birthday? Fatal error! We were eating it for weeks. We put it in the fridge and every day it was as if no time had elapsed.

I think I am still working off that particular chocolate zucchini cake.

The one I just made, it uses two whole cups of zucchini, so come summer we will have to remember that. When you are surrounded by zucchini this cake is at your fingertips. SO GOOD. There it is up above occupying pride of place in the coffee hour buffet. Well, we took the picture before Mass. Later it had more competition.

The coffee hour continues to be great fun but I have to say, I do not know how the Blums did it for so long. They are the couple at St. Anthony's who did it for six years or something and I am in awe of them, I will tell you that right now. I am kneeling at Mass and all I am thinking about is did I set the Crock Pot on the right setting and what happened to those coffee cups I thought were there. The friends bringing the cups were late and I was up there in the choir loft singing the Kyrie and hyperventilating. Thinking: Did they forget we were losing the hour? No, I am the one who always forgets things like that, they always remember them. Where are they? Where are they???

Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy!

On the bright side we now have a coffee team. We have a bunch of people pitching in. My friend Lou made the coffee today and he also brought yummy banana bread. Bill and Margaret, the friends with the cups, did turn up. We were also aided by my beautiful niece and nephew Barbara and Georgie, photographed here in the quiet before the storm.

They contributed the Easter baskets visible on the table, so sweet of them. Kids can't help jumping the gun on Easter. That is all right by me. We sang happy birthday to Dorothy and it only took Dorothy two breaths to blow out the whole box full of candles.

People are already alerting me to more birthdays coming up. So that will mean more cakes in the future.

I am just getting started!

It's beginning to look a lot like Aldi

I have been Web logging kind of a lot recently so if you are a Facebook friend and it gets on your nerves, just hide me. It just feels good at the end of the day to look back and think of stuff that happened, you know? Especially good things that happened. I find myself doing that a lot.

Today it was a trip to Albrecht Discount.

It is funny, I walked in kind of stressed out. Of course Aldi has a way of de-stressing you as soon as you walk in the door. Because that is where they put the chocolate from Germany and Austria. You get Belgian and French chocolate in the center of the store but they put that high-octane stuff right by the entrance.

Oh yes. Oh yes. Yes.

So zombie-like I buy chocolate. I love the dark chocolate with chili. Then I advance to the center of the store. And I ran into my friend Mike! He is the husband of my friend Melinda. Things begin looking up. I ran into someone I like. I am ahead in the game of life. We began talking awestruck about the Aldi chocolate.

Then after he leaves I go down this aisle and a stranger points out the greatness of this moose where, you pull some cord or push some button, the moose opens his big mouth and starts biting at you and singing a Christmas carol. All of us suddenly are gathered around this sight and laughing.

Is that Buffalo or what? All of a sudden I was in a good mood.

Not only that but at Aldi they had Baker's Corner molasses at a reduced price, 99 cents for a pint. That is 16 ounces of molasses you may use for your gingerbread and molasses cookies. I also found whole wheat flour. You do not find that at Aldi every day. It was something like $2.60 for five pounds. I am a walking Aldi ad!

This morning I got up at 6 and worked on the book and then worked out on the elliptical machine while listening to Pennario playing Chopin preludes, in expectation of such baking.

The weather may feel like California but still I am ready for Christmas. Thanks to Aldi!

This is funny, a while ago I was walking into Aldi behind two women. And I heard one woman say to the other, "I love this store."

Who doesn't?