A Late Start

    

I has been so cold for so long that I didn't even try to start the garden.  I don't grow a lot of things, but I love to grow zucchini, yellow squash, herbs and tomatoes and then I can make some fried green tomatoes.  I rarely find green tomatoes in the market.  Hmmm.  I wonder if you could make BAKED green tomatoes.  Gotta look into that.

Any way, I decided to spend some time in the garden.  Lee had some other things to do, so I didn't have the usual help.  He generally gets giant scoop from the compost pile with the tractor and dumps it in the garden for me to work in and refresh the soil.

   

The fruit "orchard" (Is 8 trees an orchard?  Yes, I decided.) is on the way to the fenced garden, so I had to get a bucket of bleach water to take with me.  Last year I had a bout with fire blight on the apple trees.  Fire blight kills the leaves and branches and they look dark brown and burned.    I didn't spray for it this year and now another tree has it.  You have to spray just when the blossoms are out and at no other time, or it doesn't work.  You don't even know if you have it then.  We weren't here when the blossoms first developed, so no spraying.  But now one apple tree is badly infected.  Fortunately, the Granny Smith apple trees seem to be OK this year.

     

I discovered ( I love Google) that you can cut off the infected branches, but you have to use a mix of bleach and water to disinfect the blades in between each cut. You don't want to spread the disease.  Sadly, some of the largest branches of the tree were the most affected.  I had to make some pretty severe cuts and I hope the tree can recover.  We may not live long enough to have a decent crop from our fruit trees.  Every year is some new disaster.  At least this year the spraying I did over the winter kept the peach leaf curl at bay.
 
   

After butchering my apple tree, I went to the compost pile and filled the back of the Mule.  There was still some remnants of the black weed cloth I had used in the garden from two years ago.  Last year I just added a huge pile of hay on top of the existing weed cloth as a mulch, and it worked all right.  But now the weed cloth has broken down and I have to start fresh.

   

After clearing all the dead debris and weed cloth, the hard part began.

       

The Mule is great for moving things around, but it is too wide to fit into the garden.  I had to scoop and fling to cover the entire area with an inch or two of compost.  I do this every season to add nutrients back to the soil that the plants removed.  I hesitate to call compost made mostly from horse manure, nutrients, but there you have it.  Plant nutrients.

When we moved here about 5 years ago, the soil was pretty bad and rock hard.  We have been working in amendments every season and now the shovel just slides in.  But it is still a chore to work in the new compost each year.  I spread it all over the raised beds and then did some digging. 

   

Essentially you just take a big bite with the shovel and turn it over in place.  If the soil clumps a bit, I chop at it with the shovel, move over and do it again. 

   

I do this every foot or so .  It isn't a big garden, but it feels that way when I am digging in it or weeding it.  I am actually pretty good about getting a garden ready.  It is the follow through where I fall down.  I hate the constant weeding.  That is where the weed cloth comes in.  It lets water through and allows the plants to breathe, but keeps the weeds out.  The only bad part is that it doesn't last for more than a season or two.

I raked everything smooth and decided to finish another day.  Maybe a day when I start the work at 7 AM rather than 10.  It is hard to imagine it was freezing just a few days ago and now it is in the 90's.   Plus I got a boo-boo. 

   

This is not indicative of all my hard work.  It is indicative of my NOT working and keeping up my calluses.  So I bought a lottery ticket in the hopes of hiring out the physical labor around here.  It would be my own personal effort in job creation.  And that would be good for the country and I am nothing if not a patriot.

I guess I better not say that too loud.  Wouldn't want to attract the attention of the IRS.

I Love Google

I wrote a post for my blog yesterday and then I couldn't add my pictures.  There was no BROWSE button to allow me to access the pictures just waiting in my camera.

I tried logging out and back in.  I tried turning off the computer and turning it back on..A huge, giant process given the issues with our computer.  So I thought it was our computer.

Today it still wouldn't come up.   I figured I would have to reconfigure something in the computer and asked Google ( the all knowing and all powerful OZ) for assistance.

This is when I found out that WHOLE BUNCHES of people have lost the BROWSE button.  AND someone was kind enough to tell me how to circumvent the issue.  Thank you, Google.  And Blogger top contributor Katney!

Magic Chocolate Flan Cake

   
   

In a previous post I made an Orange Flan.  My search engine on this site is wonky, so if you want to see it, Google Orange Flan Shenandoah and it will come up.

While researching flan recipes, I found a lot of references about flan cake.  I didn't see how flan, which is a type of custard worked with cake. My daughter, Trista, lived in Mexico for a year and she said it was one of her favorite things.

Then I bought a one year subscription to Cook's Country magazine.  Not only is it as magazine with recipes, but it shows how they change and develop them and gives recommendations for all things cooking related.  This month featured a Magic Chocolate Flan Cake recipe.  It went into the make-for-Christmas pile on my counter.  The magic takes place when you cook the flan cake.  You put the cake batter in a Bundt pan first and then pour the flan on top.  They switch places during the baking process.  It's is fun and delicious and a science experiment all in one.  You gotta try it!

Magic Chocolate Flan Cake


Cake

1/2 cup caramel sauce or topping
1/2 cup plus 2 Tablespoons flour
1/3 cup cocoa
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped (I had some dark chocolate chips left over and used them!)
6 Tablespoons butter
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Flan

2 (14 oz)  cans sweetened condensed milk  They recommended Eagle Brand
2 1/2 cups whole milk
6 ounces cream cheese I used Philadelphia.
6 large eggs plus 4 large egg yolks...you're gonna need 10 eggs and a whole dozen for this recipe!
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

First off you need to know that you will need to make this about 10 hours before you plan to eat it.  It takes time to bake and then chill. Twelve hours or overnight wouldn't hurt.

   

Preheat the oven to 350.  Grease a 12 cup non-stick Bundt pan.  I used wax paper and Crisco to grease the pan because the Bundt pan instructions said that I should not use Pam or any other spray and it came out so easy.

   

Buy some fancy caramel sauce, because you won't be making it and you want the best.

   

 Heat it a bit in the microwave to make it pourable and pour it evenly into the Bundt pan.

   

Put the chocolate and the butter in a large bowl and microwave just until melted.  It may look like it isn't melted, so take it out every 30 seconds or so and stir it a bit.  Whisk in the buttermilk, sugar and vanilla extract.  Then add the two eggs.  I did it this way so the heat of the melted butter and chocolate wouldn't curdle the eggs.  They are added last after everything has cooled off a bit.

   

Set a sifter on a small plate.  Place the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt in the sift into the chocolaty mixture. Stir until just combined.  Spoon on top of the caramel in the Bundt pan and smooth out the top.

   

Now for the flan part.  My blender will not hold 2 quarts, so I had to divide this into 2 parts.  If yours will hold that much, go ahead and put everything in at once.  I wanted to make sure I didn't have too much in one part and not enough in the other so I divided it equally.  This is how I did it.

   

Place one can of the sweetened condensed milk and 1 1/4 cup whole milk in the mixer.  Add 3 eggs and 2 yolks and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.  I had an 8 ounces package of Philadelphia cream cheese.  I cut it into fourths.  I put one whole section and then 1/2 of a second section in the blender.  Process until smooth.  It will take about one minute.  Pour that over the cake and then do the same thing one more time.  You will have one section of the cream cheese left over.  My cake started to float up before I finished processing the second part of the flan.  Don't worry if this happens.  It will do it in the oven in a bit anyway!

   

Just so you know, there will be a lot of dishes to do while you are waiting for the flan cake to cook!

   

Place the Bundt pan in a large roasting pan and place everything in the oven.  Pour hot water in the roasting pan until it reaches half way up,  being careful not to put any in the Bundt pan.  You should be careful not to burn yourself during this process and don't ask how I know this is an issue. : )

   

Bake in the 350 oven until a toothpick comes out clean from the cake and the flan is 180 degrees.  Mine was done at about 70 minutes, but the recipe suggested 75 to 90 minutes.  Remove the roasting pan and set on the stove.  Using mitts remove the Bundt pan.  Don't get your mitts in the water! 

   

It is cold here and I didn't start cooking as early as I should have, so I put my Bundt pan out on the table in the screen porch to spead up the cooling process. It may take you 2 hours to cool enough for it to go in the refrigerator.  Then chill 8 hours by their recommendation.  I  kept it in rigerator for 4 hours after an hour on the 40 degree porch and it worked out fine.

   

To remove the flan cake from the Bundt pan, fill the sink with hot tap water so that it will cover one third of the pan.  Set it in there for 1 minute.  Don't cheat.  Set it back up on the sink, dry the bottom and loosen the edges of the cake with a plastic knife.  Place a large serving plate over the top of the pan.  Hold the pan with one hand and the plate with the other and flip it over.  It will fall right onto the plate and the caramel sauce will ooze down the sides.

 

    

 

 

Serve big giant hunks to everyone or you will end up with  the rest to eat by yourself and you will have to put off your resolution to lose weight until next week.