The following originally appeared on 7/14/08 at Exit 51.
I Am
My own worst enemy. There I’ve said it.
In anticipation of a crazy week, and because the line at the deli had twenty people ahead of me, I tried to cram several cooking projects into one short Sunday. By the time the lower fat, vegan friendly, deep chocolate cake came out of the oven, I was well into pasta sauce for baked pasta, and had yet to begin the chicken or mushroom cream sauce for a casserole (think chicken and cream of mushroom soup bake with rice…only WAY better). Somewhere between assembling the baked pasta and furiously trying to reduce the creamy mushroon sauce, I lost all enthusiasm and most of my patience. And the cake had yet to be dressed.
The end result was a baked pasta that didn’t wow me enough to justify making it a regular dish (really, why do I continue to try and do sauce from scratch when I’m never happy with the final product?), chicken casserole that’s ready to go into a 350 degree oven till hot and bubbly, and low fat vegan chocolate cake covered with an entire jar of Trader Joe’s Chocolate Fudge Icing.
Hmmm, sadly that TJ’s icing probably renders the low fat and vegan parts null and void doesn’t it? The cake itself tastes a little too much of almond extract. So if you are so inclined to try it at your house, I’d say to skip the almond extract and just add more vanilla. Also, I baked it in two 9″ round pans instead of the bundt pan specified in the recipe. I adjusted my baking time down…set the timer for 30 minutes and I think I pulled them out around 24 minutes.
Somehow I did manage to squeeze in a quick game of cards with The Mistah while that durn tomato sauce was splattering along. I won the best three out of five hands of Kings in the Corner. Yeah me!
Bon Appetit Hon 
Quite the multi-tasker there, aren’t you? Whew!
Kitch, the Mistah tells me stories about his Granny and how she would spend an entire day fixing meals for the farm hands and I swear, I would have made the worst farm wife ever. Because I do not have the stamina to spend all day fussing with food.
this sounds like one of my crazy weekends in the kitchen!
Beth, I try and limit these kitchen binges. They do me in.
I am exactly the same way. Its not baking or cooking if five things are going on simultaneously! Why do we do this to ourselves??? we must be nuts! And yeah I generally dislike almond extract heavy baked goods also…