Shortcut to Mushrooms' Second Birthday!

Last year, I celebrated my blogaversary with a cake. This year, I'm moving in four days and the only food in my house is two pre-packaged salads, a wrapped spanikopita for the road, a rootbeer, two slices of bread, half a jar of peanut butter, a few jars of jam, and some organic cherry pops. I think I may, nonetheless, go to the co-op and get a cake slice to have with my root beer :-)

So here are some of my favourite cake recipes:

Coconut Angel Food Cake
Ginger-Ginger Cake
Grapefruit Yoghurt Cake
Red Velvet Cake

Looking forward to another, more productive year!

Some Good Things and an Update

I've been trying not to update without pictures, since that's what a foodblog is about, but I feel like at least letting my readers know that yes, I'm still alive, that if you still have me on your RSS feeds please don't give up on me, and to give you an idea of what's going on with me. I'm moving to Baltimore next week, at which point I'll finally get a chance to decompress and live life at a semi normal pace. It's not that I haven't had time to blog lately, but actually more that I haven't thought about it because I haven't been cooking. The combination of needing to pack up my pans and appliances and food and the fact that it's been warm enough not to want to use a stove have led me to a lot of simple things like salads. I do have a few things I'd like to recommend, though, while you wait for me to return for real:

1) Larabars. I might have just spent $77 on a very large supply of them at Amazon (so worth it).

2) Cascadian Farms jam. It's organic, and it's really, really tasty. I've tried strawberry and raspberry but I'm saving the even more appealing apricot and blueberry for later.

3) Tofurky kielbasa. It's kind of surprising, but if you fry them they're really tasty and spicy and sausage-like.

I may not be cooking much over the next few weeks, either, since I'm trying not to unpack much when I'm in a sublet for three weeks, but I am definitely excited about being back to Baltimore restaurants - Sofi's! XS! Golden West! Cazbar! Liquid Earth! - and I'll also try to get up some of the dessert recipes I made a little while back and didn't post.

Cooking for Our Rights: Nyponsoppa

Long ago I posted about a package I receieved full of Scandinavian goodies, most remarkable being that fabulous Danish Sortie Sara cheese. Well, I've recently had an opportunity to try something else in that pacakage, a powdered soup mix called nyponsoppa (rosehip soup) and the accompanying Mandelbiskvier (almond cookies). The sender informed me that the key to this soup is to dunk the cookies in it, and a friend also suggested that I add vanilla ice cream. The verdict? Well, I like cold fruit soups, and I really like almond, so the cookies were fantastic (they're quite hard but the soup helps that). The taste of the soup itself is very strong. I followed instructions and mixed with a liter of water, but if I were to try it again I might dilute it more. I ended up letting the ice cream melt a bit, though, and when I swirled them together it cut the taste of the soup so it made quite a nice dinner. Yes, I had ice cream and cookies for dinner. This also means that I can cross Sweeden off the Cooking for Our Rights challenge list!

Follow me on Twitter!

In a few weeks, I'll be leaving Iowa City and all my residual law school busy-ness behind. What this means for the blog is regular posting once again, hurrah! I started this blog when I started law school, and I admit that I've been really slack in the last semester, but I'm going to be assessing my blogging priorities, assigning a certain amount of time each week to work on posts for each blog, and get back on the posting train. Until then, if you're on Twitter I encourage you to follow me @shroomshortcut. I'm using Twitpic to update more regularly with little things, pictures of what I'm eating when the recipe isn't worth sharing or I've posted it here before, or sometimes food I had in restaurants and don't have time to review. I've noticed that my harddrive tends to fill up with these pictures, and I can't think of much to say about the food for a real post, but that makes a Twitter tie-in for the blog perfect! If you're following my personal Twitter, feel free to continue to do so; I'm just switching to follow all foodie Twitters from the new one to keep things organized. Happy summer eating, everyone!

Happy Anniversary, Coconut & Lime!

So I know I've been away for almost two months, but I hope you won't take my blog off your read-list. I'm only a few weeks away from being DONE with law school, and back to regular posting. I did want to show you some of the massive supply of desserts I baked for a going-away party, and the first recipe is brought to us by Rachel, blogger over at Coconut & Lime, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary! I thought this was particularly appropriate for my going-away party, since where I'm going is back to Baltimore, where Rachel lives. This recipe is for Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies, and it was very much up to the C&L standard. You may remember me mentioning this blog before on the site - Rachel's recipes are all original, and I'm constantly impressed. They're not all super fancy, but they're always delicious. This one is a great comfort dessert. The cookies are soft and crumbly, but still with a little bit of crisp. Though crumbly, they don't fall apart too badly, and I love the peanut butter flavor. They were one of the most popular desserts on the table.

Cookbook Spotlight: Fried Matzoh from Gale Gand's Brunch

This month, Stephanie invited me to join an event called Cookbook Spotlight, where foodbloggers get a review copy of a new cookbook and are asked to make and review one recipe from the book. This round the book was Gale Gand's Brunch, and I was thrilled because brunch is certainly a meal I love. I've been getting more into breakfast foods lately, and this book has plenty of them, from pancakes to eggs to more ambitious offerings. Most of the recipes are fairly simple, and the one I chose especially so. From the photo here, you can see why she didn't include one with the recipe - matzoh brei is quite tasty when it's Passover and you have to eat matzoh, but it isn't all that visually appealing. It's also not a recipe that can be varied all that much, but Gand's version was perfectly tasty. I didn't have the maple syrup she suggests, so I used some organic cherry applesauce as an accompaniment. If you're not familiar with matzoh brei, it's like a combination between omlette and pancakes, but not too eggy. Salt it well and serve it with something sweet. You can find the recipe on page seventy two.

Mocha Coffee Cake for a Sunday Breakfast

Joy the Baker recently asked her readers to make breakfast on a particular weekend. That Sunday, I made her mocha coffee cake. One thing I love about Joy is that she blogs as if she is a friend of every one of her readers, so when she says "hey, why don't we all make breakfast?" I say "okay!" And it did make my weekend happier, if a little more hectic for the time it took to put the coffee cake together. It's not what I normally think of when I think of coffee cake - no crumble topping, for example. I like the three marbled flavours (espresso, chocolate, and vanilla). I was a little impatient with the glaze, though, and didn't wait for the espresso I was using to fully cool before whisking in the sugar, which make it a little thinner than it necessarily should have been. Nonetheless, I liked to effect that came from soaking the dense cake in a coffee-flavoured glaze. One warning is that this should probably be served right away. It's a fairly big cake for one person, and it dries out quickly. If you want to make it and are worried about this problem, you could always have a little extra glaze to add for later portions.