Matt and the Communist Party are thrilled to have cake!
This week has been a crazy one. Not so much crazy, more like time consuming. But that ends now that the rest of the week and weekend is mine, not works. There has not been much time to experiment with recipes, but Saturday did leave room for the first attempt at a scrumptious wintery flavored cake. It was not a total success, but was definitely not a total failure either. We were craving cake, so that night I pulled out one of my favorite recipes (chocolate mint) and started pouring the ingredients in a bowl. Then there was one disappointment after another. We had only 1/4 cup of sugar and only 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. Sigh. So the improvising happened. There was brown sugar, so in went 1 cup and a 1/2. I made due with the amount of cocoa powder and decided it would be a light chocolate cake. Then last minute decided to add in some spice flavors - cinnamon, cardamom, all spice, nutmeg - why not. The layers were baked and sampled. It was a bit on the heavy side which probably had something to do with the amount of brown sugar used, but it wasn't unpleasant. There wasn't enough powdered sugar to make frosting for in between the layers, so I whipped up a combination of molasses, maple syrup, and some arrowroot to thicken. It was kind of thick, but ended up sinking into the bottom cake (not bad if you are as in love with molasses as I am). The cake was frosted with a maple buttercream, sprinkled with brown sugar and drizzled with more of the molasses combo. My favorite part was the molasses flavor mixed with the buttercream frosting. The cake recipe will need some tweaking as it was not light enough, but It felt so good to come up with a recipe even if it wasn't perfect. I am excited to try it again and figure this one out!
On another note, look at this beautiful lettuce! Tuesday morning I had some time to use up some of the produce from our CSA. The lettuce was washed for my dinner break at work. I washed the kale, cut the up the melon (from the farmer's market), and made some mint tea.
One of my good friends introduced me to Mint Tea. It's an easy thing to make and is so refreshing! All you do is wash up some fresh mint (stalks and leaves), put them in a soup pot with some water and bring to a boil, let simmer for about 15 minutes, lift out the mint, and sweeten with sugar or sweetener of choice. I used some raw honey. 
If you would like to make it, I would suggest 1/2 to 3/4 cup of packed mint to 4 cups of water depending on how strong you would like it. Feel free to use more mint as you can always add more water later (the mintier the better in my mind). Sweeten with 4 to 6 tablespoons of sugar, or less. I used about 2 tablespoons of honey, so mine is not that sweet. Enjoy!
It was quite good. The cake that is.
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