use real butter

Recipe: pumpkin cake with chocolate ganache and salted caramel cream cheese frosting

Last Friday, I cleared everything off the calendar to spend the day with my good friend, Kat. We don’t get to see one another very often, but when we do, it’s always special. Special, not because we have a lot in common (which we do and we don’t), but because we cherish many of the same things in life. And when I say things, I mean non-things like time, relationships, qualities, experiences, moments. Whenever I spend time with Kat, I learn something about her which in turn makes me learn about myself. Sometimes it’s an “ah-ha!” moment and other times it’s an idea that has been simmering in my head when she comes along and moves it to the front burner.

obligatory shoe shot at ya ya farm & orchard

two very sweet donkeys

and there was lunch at pizzeria locale

nom nom pizzas

It was a lovely start to the weekend, which was spent mostly working rather than going out to a number of social events. Social is fine. Social can be good. But sometimes I need to shut all of that down and have a weekend with no obligations to anyone but Jeremy and Kaweah. We are catching up with fall and preparing for winter in the mountains.

kaweah under freshly laundered dog towels just out of the dryer

Jeremy trimmed dead and mistletoe-infested branches around the property while I dragged them away to the slash pile. Kaweah watched us work from the front porch until I took the last bunch of dead branches down. She came bounding after me, gently closing her teeth on a nice branch. She wanted to play. It’s been a while since Kaweah has been frisky enough to play, so I let her have the branch. She followed me to the slash pile, parading with her branch in her mouth. I said “drop” and she put the stick down. I chucked it into the pile. She dove in after it. Repeat. Kaweah will be 14 years old in two months, so I tend to let her do whatever she wants these days. I let her keep the stick. But she wanted more than that. So I took the stick and threw it a short distance into the yard. And she ran after it, her stiff hind legs stumbling a little, but she didn’t seem to mind at all she was having so much fun. She brought it back to me. We did this a dozen times – more than she has EVER fetched (usually she would run to the object, pick it up and continue running away) until the sun went down behind the Continental Divide.

I guess I too am feeling recharged and energized. Energized and enthusiastic enough to attempt a cake. There are cakes and then there are cakes. I personally prefer easy cakes which you serve immediately after turning it out of a pan with minimal futzing. That is a level 1 cake in my book. This is not that kind of cake. This is considered a level 2 cake which involves layers of cake and other components and some sort of decoration. [Level 3 cakes are works of art with multiple tiers and I refuse to even think about them.]

yes, now we can do pumpkin (eggs, milk, spices, brown sugar, vegetable oil, pumpkin purée, flour, leavenings)

butter and flour the pans

mix the dry ingredients

The idea of a pumpkin layer cake has floated every autumn, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I finally implemented it. Making any new cake recipe always runs the risk of a major failure around here because I never know how stable the cake will be at my altitude. This pumpkin cake turned out well for me with a slight reduction in the leavenings (baking soda and baking powder).

mixing the wet ingredients

alternate adding dry ingredients with the milk

pour the batter into your prepared pans

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: peach upside down cake

It would seem that everyone on the flats got word of the leaves turning and came in droves to the mountains over the weekend. Either that or they were looking for their final summer jaunt before the autumnal equinox arrives this Saturday. Bluebird skies and gold stands mark the start of my favorite season. We lose our daylight hours fastest this time of year.

cottonwoods gone yellow

sunsets don’t linger as long

We drove in the opposite direction from most of the traffic and joined my parents for dinner at our favorite sushi bar in Boulder. Fall is when they leave Colorado, because they aren’t big fans of winter. I think they had a nice summer here though, with all of the happy hours, exploring, dinners, lunches, visits, bottles of wine consumed, and Kaweah-time.

hamachili special

And the farmers market was abuzz with activity. People were looking to get their summer loving on, but it started to look like the season was winding down. At the northern end of the market, there was a sign where I normally bought my peaches, “Sold out! See you next year!” That was like a little knife in my gut.

greens, peppers, eggplants, onions…

and still some tomatoes

I promised if you came back today, I’d have something other than tomatoes. I did manage a few pounds of late season peaches from Colorado’s western slope. Sweet, juicy, almost buttery. Panic sets in when you realize these sunshiny orbs are on their way out for the year and a sudden urge to make yet another batch of jam overrides all reason. I did just that and still had a few pounds left over. It’s been a while since I’ve baked a cake…

peaches, butter, sugars, flour, milk, vanilla, eggs, baking soda, salt

There is an ever-growing list of recipes I want to make. I should say lists, because they reside on sticky notes – both virtual and physical, scraps of paper, notes on my iPhone, emails to myself. Fruity upside down cakes surfaced recently. They have great appeal because I’m more of a fruit girl than a cake girl and then there is that whole business of caramelized goodness. Why not use some of the last peaches?

melt the butter and brown sugar

cook until it bubbles

Something I learned about the peaches this summer was that different varieties marched through the markets. When I first got my grubby little hands on peaches for jamming in July, they were clingstone peaches. Good thing I was jamming them because it was like a peach murder scene trying to get those buggers off the pits. Thankfully, this late season batch was of the freestone variety – which easily releases from the pit and makes for pretty slices.

wonderful

arrange in the pan

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: passion fruit mochi

Before I forget, I wanted to share my composite of the eclipse so you could get a feel for the whole progression. It’s kinda cool and especially great to show and explain to kids, big and small.

starting at 6:31 pm (MDT) and ending 8:13pm (MDT)

Last month, I got a super sweet email from Viva Singer, a reader who told me that her office in Montreal loves to check out the recipes on use real butter and that everyone at work thinks Kaweah is adorable. As a thanks for sharing recipes, she wanted to send me a dog collar for Kaweah, because that’s what her business, Hot Dogs All Dressed, makes – beautiful, hand-crafted collars for dogs and cats. I said it wasn’t necessary to send Kaweah anything because she’s such a hillbilly dog, but that I’d love to donate one to a dog at my local shelter and perhaps arrange for a giveaway on the blog.

what viva sent me: the waterproof hydro (red with daisies) and the leather (black with hearts)

Viva mailed two durable, quality collars for Kaweah to model and said if she really liked one, she could keep one and give the other to a shelter pup. Kaweah is as fashion-ignorant as I am. She would only want a collar if it were made of meat, cheese, apples, peanut butter, well… food. But we took her for a walk wearing the nice black leather collar studded with shiny red hearts. She looked so hip!

love

i… i… i wanna go swimming

Once we arrived at the lake, it was obvious that Kaweah intended to go for a dip. I had anticipated this (she’s a lab, of course she’s going to want to go swimming) and brought the hydro collar along.

jeremy fastens the hydro collar while kaweah patiently waits

so pretty!

she fetched sticks

and she kept going back

These are lovely collars that can be custom-made to order and Viva was kind enough to offer me five dog or cat collars to give away to five of my readers. I, in turn, will ask each winner to name a local animal shelter to which I shall donate $20. Hot Dogs All Dressed works a good bit with their local rescues, so they thought this was a terrific idea. Kaweah agrees.

The Rules:
1) To enter, please leave a comment sharing why you love your pet by 11:59pm (MDT), Friday, June 1, 2012.
2) One entry per person (multiple entries will be disqualified).
3) Anyone can enter, but the animal shelter selected to receive a donation must be in the US or Canada.
4) Winners will be selected at random (by Kaweah) and announced next week.
5) Good luck!

Full disclosure: Hot Dogs All Dressed donated seven collars to me to donate and give away with no obligation and no compensation. All opinions expressed here are my own.

not too shabby!

I had blogged a chocolate mochi cake in April, but during my search for a recipe, I came across another recipe that caught my fancy. It was for a guava mochi and the recipe was even more simple than the chocolate mochi cake! A footnote at the bottom stated you could substitute passion fruit juice for the guava juice to make passion fruit or liliko’i mochi. So, you know where this is going…

four cups of passion fruit pulp, glutinous rice flour, and sugar

the cause of much unnecessary controversy

Now, this needs to be said, because some gluten-free people completely freak out when they see glutinous rice flour and assume it has gluten in it: GLUTINOUS RICE FLOUR CONTAINS NO GLUTEN. It’s an unfortunate naming convention to describe how damn sticky this stuff gets. Glutinous rice is sticky rice.

The passion fruit juice isn’t something that I come by easily around here. Most of the time I have to make it from frozen passion fruit concentrate that I find in California and hoard in my freezer. But I happened to have four cups of real passion fruit pulp in my freezer which I ran through my food mill to end up with about 2.5 cups of precious liquid gold.

keep at it and squeeze every drop out

the power of the sun in a pyrex glass

**Jump for more butter**