cake

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Carrot Cake

I made neither a carrot cake nor a coconut cake for Easter dessert. My daughter declared that she hates carrot cake AND coconut cake, and my husband – who had requested those specific cakes in the first place – revealed that his suggestions hadn’t been serious, since no one likes carrot or coconut cake except him.

Instead, I made a strawberry cake.

Slightly wonky but you can’t *really* tell it was a diaster.

It was an utter failure. I severely underbaked the cake layers, so that there was a circle of nearly raw cake in the center of each. Fortunately, I’d made six cupcakes with the extra batter, so I removed the raw cake using a glass, and filled the cavity in the bottom cake with an upside-down cupcake. Then I filled the hole in the top layer with extra frosting. No one seemed to notice and the cake was quite delicious: light and fluffy and strawberry-y.

Hot tip: Macerated strawberries can hide a multitude of sins.

I did not take photos of how raw the layers were, or of the cupcake plug; I was trying to hurry to “fix” things before my husband noticed. He tends to execute things perfectly the first time, so he never needs to come up with creative fixes, and my fear was that he would say my cupcake repair job wouldn’t work, or that he would recommend I throw the whole thing out, and I wanted to try my solution without any anti-problem-solving vibes.

While we ate the strawberry cake, I noted that it was a second choice after carrot cake, which was when I discovered that both of my parents LOVE carrot cake. Okay then.

So I made a carrot cake for their birthdays. Their birthdays are a day apart, and we took them the cake on the day in between so we could give them presents and celebrate with them.

In advance of the baking, I did a LOT of research on carrot cakes. I read a TON of carrot cake recipes. My husband and parents both felt strongly that a carrot cake should have raisins and nuts; my parents were not a huge fan of the idea of pineapple; my dad was the sole “meh” on including coconut in the carrot cake while my mom and husband were solidly “pro coconut,” except in the frosting.

Might as well throw some bananas and tomatoes in there too, is how I feel about carrot cake.

It was surprisingly difficult to find a recipe that included all the things they wanted while excluding all the things they didn’t. I ended up mashing several recipes together to make a carrot cake. Cake hubris at its finest, no? Yet somehow, against all odds, the cake turned out perfectly. My husband liked it so much, he requested that I write down the recipe I used so I can make it again. The recipe is at the bottom of this post.

If you are a person who dislikes recipe blogs because they blather about not-the-recipe for several paragraphs before posting the recipe, and prefer pithy gets-to-the-point recipe posts, well, we’re already 400+ words in at this point and perhaps you’ve already realized you’re reading the wrong blog.

(Possibly you come here because you enjoy or are at least tolerant of my tendency to blather. And blather I shall.)

Cake Expectations

Cake, it seems, has become one of my love languages. Anyone who has read this blog in the past dozen years is well aware of my annual angst over baking a birthday cake for my child. In addition to baking for her, I have now had several opportunities to make cakes for my husband and parents as well.

The thing is, I’m not very good at it. Just reread the bit above about the raw cake centers for a glaring yet all-too-typical example of how not very good at it I am. Something always goes wrong.

  • There was the year I ran out of baking powder and had to switch recipes midstream, at which point I realized I didn’t have the right flour, and once I’d used math to sort that, I ended up needing extra batter and had to make a third batch.
  • This year, in addition to the raw cake layers from Easter, I also managed to somehow split the cream cheese frosting for the carrot cake, which required some tinkering to fix.

I think, over the years, I’ve mellowed a bit. I have more than a decade of cake-baking experience under my belt, and that makes me more confident that I can handle issues should they arise. (Over-confident, some might say.) Of course, I can simply start over if I need to.

But even with the mellowness of age and experience, there is usually that moment when something goes wrong, and I’m trying to come up with a solution, and I’m conscious of the time ticking down to the point at which I will require a complete and edible cake to serve to guests, and the kitchen is over-hot and I still have to shower or dry my hair or get dressed or finish wrapping gifts. THIS is the point when I begin to panic, erasing any and all confidence I began with.

Because I am aware that I’m not very good at baking, I tend to angst about the cake baking quite a bit in advance. I scour recipes. I ask probing, clarifying questions. I research and buy additional tools (in past years, I’ve added a cake leveler and a cake turntable to my collection for this reason).  Over the years, many people have offered up gentle and reasonable suggestions, like… Maybe just BUY A CAKE. That would lift all the stress and anxiety off of my shoulders. It would absolve me of any guilt should the cake not taste utterly delicious. It would free up my time to be more present with my family (and less fretful) or to do any number of things I eschew when I’m in a baking frenzy (showering, exercising, eating meals). And yet I stubbornly persist in making (subpar) cakes.

What kind of cake related character flaw IS this? Some sort of narcissism? Martyr complex?

In my head, it is love. I love these people so much, I want to mark their birthdays in a special way. I love them so much, I want to give them the exact cake they want – no generic yellow cake from a box, no over-sweet chemical-flavored frosting from the grocery store, no overpriced but not-quite-right cake from a bakery.

(I promise you, this is not some belief that MY cakes are better than perfectly serviceable store-bought cakes. For many years, my husband’s birthday request was for a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, and if that’s what he wanted, that’s what he got. My mother-in-law LOVES the frosting a local bakery uses for their cakes, even though I find it tasteless and greasy, so we have gotten her cakes from that bakery for her birthday. If you have a specific treat in mind, you should have it, especially on your birthday!)

It also feels meaningful, to me, to spend several hours thinking about a loved one while I’m baking their Ideal Cake. It’s a personal way to honor them, to think about all the birthdays we’ve been lucky enough to celebrate together, to cherish their presence in my life. This sounds really goopy and kind of stupid, but these are the thoughts that go through my mind while I plan the cake and make my grocery list and do the shopping and measure out the ingredients. I hum and smile to myself.

When they cut into the cake, put that first bite into their mouth, I can finally relax. I have done all I can.

I know – I know – it is Just A Cake, one cake, one moment in a whole long lifetime of moments big and small.

I also know this: The last bit of frosting will melt onto a tongue, the dishes will be rinsed and tucked into the dishwasher, the final crumbs will be swept into the sink and the gift wrap will lie crumpled in the trash. The celebration and the cake will soon join the blur of day-to-day. But I have tried, in my small, ordinary, imperfect way, to make my loved one’s wishes come true, to make them feel seen, and cared for, and understood. Maybe that’s too much to expect from a cake, but it’s why I keep baking.

Carrot Cake

Note on the recipe: This is a mashup of three recipes: “Bill’s big carrot cake” from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking cookbook;  “Mother Thomas’s carrot cake” from Jelly Jules; and Sam’s “Best carrot cake recipe” from SugarSpunRun. The resulting cake is what my mother calls “dense and heavy,” which is exactly what she wanted from a carrot cake. The frosting started out as a pretty standard cream cheese frosting recipe, but I ended up adding a little of this and that to get it to work the way I wanted to.

Note on the serving size: This carrot cake recipe produced enough batter to fill two-and-a-half 6-inch cake pans with enough leftover for six standard cupcakes. The frosting recipe produced enough frosting to cover a mid-size sedan.

Cake Ingredients:

Dry
2 ½ cups (315 g) all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 ½ tsp baking soda
2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp salt

Filling
3 cups (340 g) grated peeled carrots see Note 1
1 cup (125 g) coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)
1 cup shredded coconut (optional)
½ cup golden raisins (optional)

Wet
1 cup (200 g) white sugar
1 cup (200 g) brown sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature see Note 2
1 cup canola or vegetable oil
½ cup buttermilk see Note 3

Frosting Ingredients:

4 oz unsalted butter, at room temperature
12 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup sour cream, at room temperature
4 cups (500 g) powdered sugar

Instructions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 325 F/163 C. (see Note 4)
  2. Line your baking pans (see Note 5) with parchment paper.
  3. In a medium bowl, whisk the dry ingredients (2 ½ cups/315 g all-purpose flour, 1 ½ tsp baking powder, 1 ½ tsp baking soda, 2 tsp ground cinnamon, 1 tsp ground nutmeg, 1 tsp salt) together.
  4. In a medium bowl, mix the filling ingredients (3 cups/340 g grated peeled carrots, 1 cup/125 g coarsely chopped pecans/walnuts, 1 cup shredded coconut, ½ cup golden raisins) together.
  5. In a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the sugars (1 cup/200 g white sugar, 1 cup/200 g brown sugar) and the oil (1 cup canola or vegetable oil) on medium speed until well-mixed.
  6. With the mixer still running, add the eggs, one at a time, until incorporated.
  7. Scrape down the sides of the mixer, then add the buttermilk and mix until incorporated.
  8. After scraping down the sides of the mixer again, add the dry ingredients to the mixer. On low speed, mix until a few streaks of flour remain.
  9. Using a spatula, gently fold in the filling ingredients.
  10. Divide the batter among the baking pans and bake them for 30-50 minutes, rotating them at the halfway point. (see Note 6) Check for doneness by inserting a toothpick in the center of each cake; the toothpick should come out clean or with a few crumbs.
  11. Allow the cakes to cool for five minutes in their pans, then, using a knife to release the edges of the cake from the pans, remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.
  12. While the cakes are cooling, combine the cream cheese and butter in your mixer on medium speed until smooth.
  13. With the mixer running, add the salt and sour cream and mix until incorporated.
  14. Scrape down the bowl of the mixer, then add powdered sugar, one cup at a time, and mix until smooth.
  15. Wait until your cake is completely cool before frosting.
  16. Store frosted cake in the fridge for 3ish days, or wrap tightly in plastic wrap to freeze.

Notes:

  1. I grated my own carrots because I’d read that using pre-grated carrots didn’t add enough moisture to the cake. But I haven’t tried pre-shredded carrots my self, so maybe they are a fine and useful shortcut.
  2. I often forget to remove the eggs from the fridge early enough to bring them to room temperature, so I have found that submerging them in a small bowl of warm water does the trick in about 5-10 minutes.
  3. I did not have buttermilk on hand, so I added ½ tablespoon of white vinegar to a measuring cup, then filled it up to the ½-cup mark with whole milk, and let the mixture sit for about 5ish minutes.
  4. Depending on the size of your cake pans, you may want to set a cookie sheet on the oven rack while you pre-heat the oven. When you are ready to bake your cake, set the filled cake pans on the hot cookie sheet. This enables easier rotating.
  5. My inspiration recipes called for a variety of pans (8-inch round cake pans, a 10-x15-inch rectangular cake pan, or 9-inch round cake pans). I used 6-inch round cake pans, but then I was able to make another 6-inch round that wasn’t quite as tall plus 6 cupcakes with the remaining batter.
  6. The baking time will vary based on your oven’s temperament, the size of your baking pans, and on other mysterious factors I cannot identify. For my 6-inch baking pans, I started with about 15 minutes, rotated the pans, then baked them for an additional ten minutes before testing the centers with a toothpick. Then I rotated them again and continued to bake them, checking them at 5-minute intervals (and rotating them each time) until they were done. For my cupcakes, the initial bake was 10 minutes, then I checked them at 5-minute intervals after rotating them until they were done.
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Ten!

My daughter is a decade old. A whole decade. It’s astonishing, how quickly the past ten years have swooped by. 

This was the first year… ever??? at least since her birth???? that we had both sets of grandparents on hand for Carla’s birthday. We all went out to dinner at Carla’s favorite restaurant and then came back to our house for presents and cake. After many months of highly specific requests, Carla asked for a simple birthday cake: vanilla cake with raspberry filling and vanilla buttercream. Because I like to make things difficult on myself pretty, and because Carla didn’t have any specific color scheme in mind, I bought a lot of turquoise decorations and then decorated the cake to match. (I did a kind of watercolor effect with the frosting.) 

For her friends birthday party, we went with a succulents theme. I ordered adorable fondant succulent cupcake toppers and – per her request – made a variety of cupcakes (vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream, vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream, chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream, and chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream) so that no one had to eat chocolate if they didn’t want to.

I took ZERO photos of the party favors, which were mini succulents, or of the décor, which included succulent-printed tablecloths, paper plates, and paper napkins, and color-coordinated balloons. The party itself was pretty meh from my perspective (the entertainment was very mediocre, especially compared to parties we’ve had in the past, but it was still QUITE expensive; the venue itself was dirty to the point of disgusting, and I am so glad I still keep Lysol wipes in my vehicle; and the staff pretty much ignored us except during the “entertainment” portion of the day and except at the end when they came into the sweltering, filthy party room to tell us we had five minutes to get out; one kid’s parents hadn’t even arrived yet, and she seemed a little worried that we would LEAVE HER there omg. I think it was a poor enough experience that I may leave a google review.), but the kids seemed to have fun, so that’s really all that matters.

My newly minted ten-year-old is everything I had ever hoped, in my wildest dreams, a ten-year-old would be. 

This past year – fourth grade – was the best school year Carla has had so far. She loved her teachers, she loved math, she went to school happy each and every day. Some prior years, she’d balk at school or complain of morning stomachaches. Almost none of that this year. 

I text my husband every morning after I drop Carla off at school (this habit originated in her infancy, when I was convinced I would forget her in my car, and has endured for ten years), and my texts from this past school year are mostly some variation on “Carla was in a great mood this morning!” or “Our unapologetically late child is very cheerful this morning!” While getting out the door on time was still sometimes a challenge, I found that our mornings together were some of my favorite hours in the day. Carla likes to chat about all manner of interesting things on our short drive to school. How words were invented, what puberty is like, how difficult it is to imagine herself driving a car. She went through a phase where she stuck her head out the window during our drive and pretended to be a dog. She went through a phase where she would give me the “weather report” by opening her window and smelling the air. She wore all black almost every day (which, to be fair, makes a lot of things very easy), and then at the very end of the school year – no warning at all – started dressing in color again and announced that her favorite color was no longer black but turquoise.

Current Carla is extremely independent. She likes to ride her bike around the neighborhood, visiting neighbors (and their dogs). She loves to swing on the swingset, singing at the top of her lungs. She still loves to craft, making elaborate scenarios for her Barbies and dinosaurs and Calico Critters (all of which she still plays with). She sometimes declines a parent reading to her at bedtime, in favor of reading to herself. (She loves to read! Her favorite books are graphic novels, and she loves books that feature animals as the main characters.) 

And yet she is also such a cuddly, loving kiddo who loves to spend time with her parents. She enjoys playing video games or practicing the guitar with her dad. She loves snuggling with me on the couch, watching TV or a movie or letting me read to her. She still likes to play pretend, she still adores stuffed animals. When we walk together, she still voluntarily holds my hand. 

She is extremely capable. Sometimes she will unload the dishwasher without my asking. She can make tacos and scrambled eggs with little supervision. She picks up the mail for our neighbors when they are out of town.

She is more and more interested in her appearance. She has Very Specific Ideas about what she wants to wear, and when. She has become newly dedicated to keeping her hair nice, and has begun blow drying it with a blow dryer she wheedled her grandmother into buying her. She has begun applying a swipe or two of my mascara and a little blush while I am distracted. She is interested in grown-up undergarments and deodorant, although she doesn’t yet need either. 

She loves to be busy – and thank goodness, because this was our busiest year so far. She had activities every single day of the week – sometimes two a day! She is so musical and can now play two instruments (three, if you count the recorder which I emphatically do not) AND pick out songs on the piano. She has been in two plays. She loves to sing and sings all the time: when she wakes up, in the shower, while she’s supposed to be eating breakfast, in the car, in the backyard, while she’s riding her bike. She loves math (bless her fabulous math teachers) and science and computational thinking. She is agreeable and cheerful and delightful 99% of the time. The other time, she is pure sassafras – but that’s expected and normal. 

During my end-of-year conference with her primary teacher, I learned that all the kids gave each other end-of-year compliments on the last day. Carla’s peers said that she was supportive and enthusiastic and fun to be around. Her teacher said she is a light. And she is a light. She makes everything glow. 

She makes my life so bright. I cannot wait to see what she does next. 

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Five for Friday

Friday already, and looking down the barrel of another long weekend! So here are five topics I’ve been thinking about, beginning with MORE CAKE TALK!

A No-Cake Defense (TL/DR: This Is a Me Issue): I loved everyone’s comments on yesterday’s post about choosing my birthday dessert. One thing I additionally loved was how some readers took issue with my husband’s anti-cake stance. I just want to say: I love you. Thank you for defending my cakely honor. You are a treasure and a joy and I feel so cozy and loved. 

While not knowing his exact reasons for not wanting to bake a cake, I can speculate. And so I do want to defend my husband a teeny bit. You do not have to accept these reasons! You can still glare in his general direction! 

If I am understanding correctly, his first objection is the time. He fears it will take all day to bake a cake, and he doesn’t want to waste a big chunk of my birthday in the kitchen, when we could be doing something else. While perhaps baking a cake should not take several hours, it does always seem to work out that way. At least, it does for me. But then again, I always end up making some silly mistake that requires me remaking some aspect of the recipe.

Also, and this may be projecting, but he might be a little nervous about making a cake. He is not the cake baker in the family; I am. And I am in no way a good role model for The Ease of Cake Baking, in large part because I am always doing something that makes the whole process more difficult (cough cough leopard spots, cough cough rainbow layers). But my husband has never made a cake. I have no doubt he COULD make a cake (he is generally a better direction follower than I am), but for your first cake to be the Replacement Cake for your wife’s birthday, after her previous birthday cake was such a disappointing experience… well. That seems like a recipe (see what I did there) for failure.

However, these perfectly reasonable reasons aside, after I read the umpteenth comment suggesting that maybe my husband should just suck it up and make me the cake I want (I am paraphrasing; everyone reading this is much more tactful), I started to agree. If he has volunteered to make me a birthday dessert, why shouldn’t I ask for the dessert I really want? And I am sure that if I said, “honey, this is what I REALLY want,” he might grumble a bit, but he would make it for me.

So I spent some time looking online for The Perfect Cake Recipe to send him.  But the process looking for a recipe to send him made me realize that there is a secret third reason he may be unwilling to make me a cake.

As you may already know, from reading all my food and cake related posts, lo these many years, I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t necessarily stick to a recipe. I might pair a cake from one recipe with a frosting from another recipe. Or I might make a smaller cake than the recipe recommended. Or I might take a cupcake recipe and turn it into a cake. Or I might choose a recipe that calls for poppy seeds in the icing, but I would exclude the poppy seeds. I am comfortable with this, both because I now have some experience in messing around with recipes and because I am comfortable with the idea that it might not turn out. My husband is NOT comfortable with either of these things. He doesn’t have the cake baking experience to draw on, for one thing. But he is also a Supreme Instruction Follower and would find it blasphemous to deviate from a recipe’s explicit directions. 

And the thing is, when I search for My Perfect Cake… I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist. Okay, it DOES exist, and Kate found it (thank you!) but it is too large and too expensive for just the three of us. BUT, it’s very nice to know it’s there, if I need it! What I’m saying is the recipe for My Perfect Cake doesn’t exist. There is this perfectly lovely sounding cake, but it calls for lemon extract and I am a lemon purist. But I can’t ask my husband to just… exclude the extract. I mean, you probably can’t just DO that anyway, you’d need to track down other lemon cake recipes and compare various amounts of lemon juice and lemon zest and choose an amount that seems appropriately lemony for this specific cake. I can imagine how overwhelming it would feel if I suggested my husband do that. Even if I did the research, and wrote on top of the recipe, “omit lemon extract; use X tbsp of lemon juice,” he would feel worried that it wouldn’t turn out, and that if it didn’t, it would be HIS fault. 

This recipe looks very close to my ideal… but there are so few reviews, and of the reviewers who seem to have actually tried the recipe, it sounds like the cake comes out too dense for what I would prefer. 

I do love Sally’s Baking Addiction, and this recipe sounds similar to what I’m looking for and I trust her recipes, although sometimes the cake is a bit more dense than I prefer. But… there’s no lemon curd in this recipe. I want lemon curd. But I don’t think I could just say, “spread some lemon curd in between the layers” to my husband without him feeling like he needed additional, very specific directions to follow. (I actually used this recipe to make my daughter’s seventh birthday cake, and did put lemon curd between the layers.)

Are you beginning to understand that this is not really a problem with my husband trying to deny me the cake of my heart? That it is, instead, an issue of me being too picky?

Like I said, feel free to continue to feel irritated with my husband. But perhaps you can also spare some irritation for me, as well. I am hard to please. 

***UPDATE***: I wrote all of the above last night, before my husband got home from work. After sending him the link to Kate’s cake, and deciding that it was really too expensive, and explaining to him that I have been thinking about this particular cake for more than a year, I thought we finally settled on him making me cupcakes. That would be great! Lemon curd filled cupcakes. I explained how to do the filling part, and my husband listened attentively and asked if I would object to him putting pink food coloring in the frosting which strikes me as very adorable. And then thirty or so minutes later, cake clearly on the brain, my husband asked me, “Should I just make you the cake you want?” and I said, “but I thought making a cake was too much?” and he said, “but if I’m going to make cupcakes, I might as well make a cake,” and I said, “yes, please.” And then there was some discussion about my favorite cream cheese frosting and whether I would be amenable to him adding some lemon zest to the frosting (yes) and whether I need homemade curd (no). So I think it is happening????? If there is cake in the offing, I will certainly share all the details with you. (Although cupcakes would also be excellent.)

Surely This Is Not Right: I went to the dentist and noticed this poster hanging prominently on the wall. I do not object to the sentiment, which is lovely. But it raises the question: how do you pronounce “hygienist”? 

After spending far too much time listening to online pronunciations of the word, I believe that in British English, the pronunciation is “hy-JEEN-ist.” But in American English, it’s “hy-JEN-ist,” is it not? 

In no way is the first syllable “hahy.” Not that I would even know how to pronounce “hahy.” Hah-hee? Hah-high? (My husband thinks this is a way of representing the diphthong of “hy,” but I think there are better ways to represent it than “hahy.”

I suppose this could be one of those words that you have only ever experienced in print and have not yet heard aloud, and when you do finally hear it spoken, the pronunciation is a shock. (Do you have a word like this? Mine is ravine.) But I don’t think that this is one of those cases. 

Okay, I still apparently have more to say about this. If you were the person buying wall art for a dental office, a dental office in the United States specifically, wouldn’t you be uniquely aware of the correct pronunciation of dental terms? And wouldn’t you find this EXTREMELY ODD?

Freelance Does Not Mean Free: One of the most… shall we say interesting aspects of freelancing is the money aspect. Some clients are very on top of it, saying things from the get go like, “This is our budget,” or “We typically pay this for this type of project.” Other clients seemingly would never raise the topic if I didn’t broach it first. When it comes to invoicing, some clients are very clear to say, “This looks good, send me your invoice” while others drag out projects for months and would probably never even consider that I should be paid for work completed until I finally say something like, “Great, I’ve included an invoice.” (And I realize that I have a unique privilege of allowing projects to sometimes drag on without pay – and do so only with clients I have had for years and whom I know will pay eventually; it’s not something I would advocate when you are just starting out. And also, for big projects, it is important to ask for a portion [I do half] up front before you begin.) It’s just so fascinating to me that some clients seem completely oblivious to the fact that the work a freelancer does has a price tag.

Aspirations Mini-Update: I have been working toward all my aspirations. Well maybe not all, but many. (I have made progress on all but one of my Personal/Self Improvement aspirations, for instance.) One thing I did was start a very simplistic Excel spreadsheet where I could track the things I wanted to do regularly, if not necessarily daily. Playing the piano and writing and exercising and walking outside. That kind of thing. And what I have noticed is that I cannot do every single thing I want to do daily in a single day. There are just not enough hours in the day. I mean, I suppose I could break up my day in such a way that I could get to everything… but that seems overly rigid and also, to be honest, exhausting. There needs to be some flexibility. For one thing, if I walk outside for 30 minutes then it seems like overkill to also walk on the treadmill. For another thing, if I am really on a roll with, say, writing, I don’t want to STOP just because it’s time to play the piano for fifteen minutes, you know? So I am still trying to feel my way through what is a reasonable way to achieve these goals without achieving them simply for the sake of putting a check mark in my spreadsheet. Perhaps I do need to find a way to create some sort of a schedule, though. 

Unusual Snack Foods: One of my all-time favorite snacks is a half a green bell pepper filled with cottage cheese and sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. (We called it “carrot salt” when I was growing up, probably because my mother also sprinkled it on carrots.) (Carrots are also delicious dipped in carrot-salted cottage cheese.) 

Neither my husband nor my daughter would touch this snack with a ten-foot pole, but it is delicious and crunchy and full of protein and SO GOOD. I cannot be the only person in the universe (besides my mother) who enjoys it. Have you ever tried this amazing combo? If not, would you be willing to try it? (You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no; I am still very iffy on the chicken thighs situation, so I fully understand New Food Resistance.)

Are there unusual combinations of foods that you like to snack on? 

That’s all I have for you today, Internet! I hope you have a fabulous weekend full of cake and weird snacks and reasonable pronunciations!