Tea Bread Tuesday: David's Cake

There's nothing my son, David, likes better than a rich, moist chocolate cake.  This recipe is simplicity itself, and chocolate seemed appropriate given that a)  Valentine's Day is coming up and that puts me in the mood for chocolate, b) my husband is traveling this week, so I needed to make something that I knew David would eat, and c)  . . . well, the powdered sugar covering the cake reminded me of snow, something that's been very much on our minds lately . . .

Here's the recipe:

1 box chocolate or Devil's Food cake mix
1 cup sour cream
5 eggs, slightly beaten
1 3.4-oz. package of instant chocolate pudding
¾ water

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Grease and flour a bundt pan, or use PAM spray for baking.  Mix all ingredients with a mixer until combined and no lumps remain.  Pour into bundt pan.  Bake for one hour, or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.  Remove from oven.  Let cool in bundt pan for at least 10 minutes, invert on serving plate and let cool completely.  Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

I love this bundt pan, the arches in the mold make pretty impressions on the cake.  It reminds me a little of this other white stuff and the impressions it created last week against our garage door . . .

Tea Bread Tuesday: Cinnamon Raisin-Bran Bread

I left work at 2:25 P.M. today.  As I write this, we are in the middle of a blizzard, and are expecting the biggest snowstorm to hit Chicago since January 1967.  The wind gusts are incredible!  The snow has been falling steadily since early in the afternoon, and forecasters are telling us that we are not even in the thick of it yet! 

I got home at 5:00 P.M.  My husband hadn't made it home yet, and he normally has an even longer commute than I do.  Baking was the perfect activity to keep worry at bay, and . . . it's Tea Bread Tuesday!

This recipe came from the back of a box of Hodson Mill unprocessed wheat bran and what attracted me to it at first was the name of the bread - Cinnamon Raisin Bran Bread.  I'm very fond of every single one of those ingredients!  So, in between looking out the window, and worrying about Lee, and taking a long distance phone call from a cousin who entreated me not to drive tomorrow because she had had a "vision,"  I baked the bread.

The bread was O.K., nothing particularly special about it, but it did fill the house with wonderful, cozy smells, so when my husband walked in, he had a warm treat, and a fresh pot of coffee waiting for him.  He got home at 6:00 P.M.  Here's the recipe:

1½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1½ cups unprocessed wheat bran
1½ cups seedless raisins
¼ cup softened butter
1½ cups hot water
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¾ cup chopped nuts

Preheat oven to 375°F.  Stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon.  Combine in a separate bowl wheat bran, raisins, butter and hot water.  Mix until the butter melts.  Add egg and vanilla extract.  Beat well.  Add the mixed dry ingredients and nuts; stir until all ingredients are moistened.  Spread batter in an oiled 9x5x3 loaf pan and bake for 45-60 minutes.  Cool before slicing.  Yield 1 loaf.

Resistance is futile . . .

Sometimes Mother Nature feels like the "Borg" - the alien race from Star Trek:  The Next Generation, intent on assimilating individual intergalactic species into a single collective.  Anyone who fought was told:  "Resistance is futile."  So, unlike those fearless trekkies, I surrender:  Winter is here . . .  This was the view from my bedroom window on Saturday morning. 

Poem for Salt

The biggest snowstorm to hit Denver in twenty years.
What is the world to do, freed from the shackles
of the eight hours needed to earn its daily salary?

Only on a day such as this does salt overshadow gold.
Salt, with its lips of blue fire, common as gossip,
ordinary as sin. Like true love and gasoline,
missed only when they run out. Salt spilling
from a blue container a young girl is holding,
along with an umbrella, on the label of a blue
container of salt that the woman across the street,
under her umbrella is pouring behind her left rear wheel,
to no avail this discontented, unbuttoned December
morning.

—Leroy V. Quintana