Birthday Cake

When my mom grew up in Nigeria she lived most months at a boarding school. The cooks would make cake (any kind of cake) for the whole school whenever one of the children had a birthday, and since there were about 300 students... that was most days, (sometimes two or three flavors a day), and chocolate cakes were frequent. For decades afterwards my mom had never tasted a chocolate cake that really tasted chocolate-y and good like the chocolate cakes she had in Nigeria, until she happened to try this recipe from the side of a baking chocolate box. It has two eggs, a stick of butter, and sour cream in it, but oh, it is good, and to my mom and to me, it tastes like home.

Quick and Easy Chocolate Cake by Hershey’s

4 bars (4 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate, broken into pieces) (I substitute 3/4 c. cocoa & 4 Tbsp. additional butter)
1/4 c. butter
1 2/3 c. boiling water
2 1/3 c. all-purpose flour
2 c. sugar
1/2 c. dairy sour cream
2 eggs
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Heat oven to 350 F. Grease and flour 13x9x2-inch baking pan.

In large bowl, place chocolate, butter and boiling water, with spoon, stir until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth. Add flour, sugar, sour cream, eggs, baking soda, salt and vanilla; beat on low speed of electric mixer until smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake 35 to 40 min. or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely in pan on wire rack. Frost as desired. We always have it just with whipped cream. Maybe strawberries.

Owen and I are moving to the Netherlands soon, where I hear birthdays are extremely important. I hope to have lots of opportunity to make this cake, and see what I can do to gluten and egg replace so that my husband can eat it.

Purple tastes delicious.

So we decided that it would be a great idea to make a dinner of all purple ingredients. Because purple is a fantastic color. Because purple foods are often the cooler versions of normal foods (like cabbage or potatoes, even onions.) And because doing it sounded like a really fun plan. So here is how we did it, so you can make your own purple meal if you like.

We diced up three little purple potatoes and three big beets. Peeled the beets, washed the potatoes, coated them with olive oil and roasted them at 400 degrees, stirring every 10-15 minutes until they were tender.

We browned some ground beef (not purple, we know), drained it, sauteed a purple onion (also diced and then added the beef, some salsa (also not purple, but delicious) and a drained, rinsed can of black beans, (sort of purple) and a can of refried black beans (more purple), with some little shavings of beet, to make everything look more purple. Add cayenne and cumin to taste. We stirred that up til everything was hot and well mixed and vaguely purple.

We cooked half of a purple cabbage just in water in a pan until it was softer, very dark purple, and still a little bit crunchy.

Then we mixed the roasted root vegetables, the taco-y stuff and the cabbage in bowls together and ate it with blue corn chips. And it was beautiful and amazingly delicious. We thought about finishing off with a mixed berry smoothie, but none of us felt like it after all the deliciousness.
 
We're already scheming for our next color meal. Green? Perhaps with a spinach pasta, a salad with avocado, a fruit salad with kiwi fruit, green grapes and granny smith apples? Or orange with butternut squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, oranges, and perhaps a pumpkin pie or something for dessert? Wouldn't this be great to do with kids? I know of a lot of kids who only like white foods. Like Bread. Or Rice. Or mashed potatoes. Wouldn't it be great to start them early and cook lots of colorful foods? Have a week of color meals? Or every once in a while just have a purple meal?

At Labyrinth we sell a lot of beautiful cookbooks, many of which seem to be as much about the photography as they are about the food. One in particular is arranged by color and is called "Ripe" and goes through fruits and vegetables at their peak of ripeness, and gives one recipe for each ingredient. It's sort of a funny book, self-indulgently beautiful, and more expensive than I think is necessary, but it is nice to look at, and makes me want to cook more intensely colorful meals.