Sonja's Birthday, Pride, and Picnic!

This is the beginning of Sonja's 17th birthday cake.  Last year I made he a tiered cake of the same flavor.  It was way to big though. This one is only about 1/3 of the size.

Chocolate Coconut Cake with Coffee Buttercream and Chocolate Ganache (from VCTOTW)

This cake also didn't cooperate as well for frosting.  I didn't have time to put on a base coat and let it set for several hours, so I just smeared it right on, and that made it crumble-y. 

The ganache is not originally a part of the recipe, but I like to add it for a little decoration and yumminess.  It is really simple.  I made the rich chocolate ganache from VCTOTW.  I let it cool a little bit.  When I was frosting the cake, I made sure to have a thick ridge around the edges, so the ganache would spill over (it is best if you can pipe on a ridge, but I didn't have enough frosting).  Then I carefully poured the ganache onto the top of the cake.  I didn't even have to spread it! And there was a little left over ganache for mochas!

I made homemade ice cream with the left over coconut milk from making the cake.  It was the best homemade ice cream I have ever made.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups coconut milk

1.5 cups soy milk

1/3 cup agave nectar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Whisk together.

2. Chill.

3. Pour into ice cream maker and follow the manufacturers instructions.

After devouring tempeh Reuben's, cake, and ice cream, we dropped my little brother off at a concert and went to uptown.  We went shopping at Urban Outfitter, and then went to the Bryant Lake Bowl Block Party.  It was packed!  We were there for maybe an hour, then went across the street to Dunn Bros Coffee for an iced chai and mocha.  Mmm.  They have hemp milk as an option too, but we both just got soy.  They also have vegan cookies. 

It was 11:30 when we got my brother, and 12:30 by the time I got home.  I had to get up for race volunteering at 5 in the morning.  I still feel like I am recovering.  I don't normally sleep a lot, maybe 7-8 hours, but 4 hours was really rough!

Saturday and Sunday was TC Pride.  On Sunday, I went to the parade and took a lot of pictures.  It was really fun.  Apparently it is the biggest parade in  Minnesota, and one of the biggest in the Midwest!  After the parade I headed over to Loring Park to see what was going on there.  I walked around for maybe and hour to an hour and a half.  I am not sure I got to see everything.  It was super huge!  There was some really good live music going on, but I had the EarthSave picnic to go to, so I went home and my mom drove us there. 

Strawberry Rhubarb Coffee Cake

This is what I made for the picnic.  It was yummy and moist.  The recipe is from VWAV, but I used pecans instead of walnuts and strawberry and rhubarb instead of blueberry.  Mmm, one of my favorites.  I like it better in a 9 x 13 pan though, because I think it cooks better.

Rosemary Balsamic Fig Foccacia

Ciao! Come stai?

After several attempts to upload another picture, I finally gave up.  Annoying!  

Anyway, I have been daydreaming about going back to Italy lately, and starting to teach myself a little Italian.  So of course I had to make some Italian food! 

I've been fairly bored with your typical Americanized Italian foods.  You know, spaghetti with red sauce, foccacia sprinkled with pizza seasons.  Blah. 

So I combined some of my favorite Italian foods and made a some nice rustic looking foccacia bread.  To be honest though, this isn't without its Americanization.  I was lazy, and just used some frozen bread dough I found in the back of my freezer.  Oh well.  It was easy!

Rosemary Balsamic Fig Foccacia

Ingredients:

1 loaf frozen bread dough

1/3 cup dried figs, sliced

Balsamic Vinegar

1 teaspoon dried rosemary

1 teaspoon coarse salt

Olive oil

Pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 175 degrees. Turn it off.  Meanwhile, boil some water, and pour it into a pan and place that in the bottom of you oven.

2.  Drizzle a pizza pan with olive oil, put you frozen bread dough on the pan.  Stick that on the top shelf of your oven and let rise for 4 hours. Meanwhile, pour some hot water on top of you figs, add a splash of balsamic vinegar. Let soak.

3. Remove everything from your oven, preheat to 400 degrees.  Drain figs.

4. Stretch the dough out a little so it is about the size of your pizza sheet.  Brush with some more olive oil. Top with crushed rosemary, sea salt, and black pepper.  Arrange the figs nice on top.

5. Bake for 10 minutes.  I turned it on broil at the end for a nice golden crust.  Please please please be careful and don't dump your bread on the bottom of the oven like I did. I was able to salvage it, but I lost some figs in the process.  And it might taste totally nasty because it was baked in an oven filled with smoke.  Ha.

If you have a wood fire oven, use it!  It would be absolutely ideal if we all had those.

I have the rest of my summer fairly planned out.  Today is dear Sonja's birthday, so tomorrow we are celebrating with coffee chocolate coconut cake, and tempeh rubens .  Then I am volunteering at a race on Saturday morning.  Sunday I am going to the pride parade in downtown Minneapolis, and then concerts and other festivities afterwords. There is an EarthSave picnic Sunday night.  

Next weekend is the forth already, so my dad might be coming, though I have to work a lot.  Then two weeks after that I am going to Vermont to spend the week and do more race volunteering.  Then it is  NIPPON NI IKU! (going to Japan).  Then I should probably be writing scholarship essays and applying to colleges for the rest of the summer. Woo.

Piacere di conoscerti! Ciao!

Done!

I doubt that I will have anything really interesting to say today.  I have been very busy and my food has mainly consisted of leftovers and PB&J. Nothing to exciting.  (actually, I did make this only with edamame and no cucumbers and agave for the honey).

Well on friday I drove a friend around in the senior parade which was fun. I wore the class color and decorated my car to disguise myself.  

Now I am official done with Junior year! (if you don't count my homeschooling stuff I am continuing).

I have dance recital on Friday and Saturday of this week, which is always a ton of fun. It's probably not going to be as fun as last year though.  It would be really hard to top Thriller. It was excellent.

Tomorrow night I am going to a birthday party for a friend, I don't know how old he is turning though because he refuses to disclose his age. I am baking a carrot cake and we are ordering vegan pizza.  

I have ACTs on Saturday morning!  Not really looking forward to that.  I have to go get the old man at the airport the night before after dance too.  It is going to be late. 

Japan trip is starting to come together!  I have probably already told about this 5 times.  Oh well, it's exciting!

Hopefully I will do some sort of cooking this weekend when my father is here, maybe something blog worthy. I also have some grad parties this weekend, so the chance that this will actually happen are quite slim. Also the sun is supposed to come out for once.  So that may also deter me from my dark windowless kitchen.

Blahblahblah. I think I am done now.  Saiyonara!

Thai Green Curry and Minneapolis Marathon

I ran the Minneapolis Half Marathon this weekend and it was kind of glorious! Despite the fact that I was sick, and had to get up at 5 am I did better than last weekend!  I ran this one in 2:05, 5 minutes faster than Madison.  Not too close to my PR of 1:55, but I am still pretty happy with it.  The weather was great and the course was beautiful.  My only complaint is they didn't have water bottles for you at the end, you had to fill up little cups, and the food and water was not very close to the finish line.

After that, we met some friends and went to breakfast at Seward Cafe.  I had 1/2 a fruit smoothie, 1/2 a piece of warm banana bread, tofu scramble with broccoli and hashbrowns, and coffee.  Good for recovery!

After a lazy day today of magazine reading, napping, and a little math, japanese, and photo, I made some yummy Thai curry. It was hearty and sustaining and most importantly quick and easy!

 

Thai Green Curry

Ingredients

1 can coconut milk

1 can beans, drained

Mixed frozen vegetables

Onion, chopped

Garlic

Coconut oil

Green Curry Paste, to taste

Jasmine Rice

Spinach

Peanuts

Directions:

1. Cook rice.

2. Heat coconut oil, saute onion and garlic. Add coconut milk, beans, frozen veggies and curry paste.  Cook until rice is done, and everything is well heated.

3.  Put some rice on your plate, top with raw spinach, top that with curry, top that with peanuts.  

Wooooo. Easy.

Rainbows

I made this cake for our GSA picnic last night.  It was beautiful outside (ha).  49 degrees and raining!

I really should have trimmed the sides of the cake, because it looked a little lumpy covered in ganache. I also should have just done a base the size of the cake, not 2-inches thicker, because it just ended up getting ganache-y.

Everyone kept asking "how did you make it?"  and really, it wasn't too hard.  I mixed up a batch of vanilla cake batter (from vctow).  I divided the cake batter into three small bowls, using about a cup of batter each.  I dyed them each a different color, and poured them each in to separate 8-in pans. I cook them for 15 minutes at 350.   Then I repeated that process with another three colors. 

I layered them with fluffy butter cream in-between each layer.  I made some ganache, put down a base coat, and stuck it in the fridge overnight.  The next day I made more ganache, and just poured it over the top, using a knife to spread the ganache over the edges of a cake.

So, as I was uploading these pictures, I started wondering, why do rainbows represent gay pride/rights? 

I wiki-ed it and I learned that the rainbow flag was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978 for San Francisco City Supervisor, Harvey Milk.

The original flag was hand dyed by Baker.  It flew in the June 25, 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade.  It consisted of 8 colors, each with its own meaning...

 

hot pink: sexuality

red: life

orange: healing

yellow: sunlight

green: nature

turquoise: magic/art

indigo: serenity/harmony

violet: spirit

Thirty volunteers dyed and stitched the first two flags for the parade.

When Milk was assassinated in November of that year, demand for the flag went up. He dropped the pink stripe from the design because of unavailability of hot pink fabric.

In 1979 the flag was changed again, because the center stripe was hidden by flag poles when hung vertically. The turquoise stripe was removed, and indigo was changed to blue.

In 2003, for the 25 anniversary of the flag, Baker restored the flag back to its original 8 stripes, and has since advocated for other to do the same (wish I would have known!).

Okay, now go one-up me and go make a 8-layer rainbow cake.  Plus trim the edges.  Feed it to your GLBT friends and their allies.