NC Holidays (a birthday party!)

Since we don't get to see our niece & nephews very often

it was great to be in NC for one of our nephew's 4th birthday party.

Birthday candles are pretty exciting.

But apparently our rendition of "Happy Birthday" was lacking.

4 year olds are pretty silly.

Horses!

A Slinky!

A harmonica!

Play time with Uncle Z

Then time to sample the Spiderman cake 

(complete with multiple rings)

Brothers!

In the kitchen...

I haven't posted much about food lately, 

but rest assured that I've still been

busy with culinary creativity!

Here are two of my recent favorites.

Challah (braided egg bread) is so pretty

that you almost don't want to eat it, 

almost.

It has the best sweet aroma when baking, 

making the whole house smell divine.

I also recently had a wild & crazy time teaching 

six kids (aged 4-8 years old)

how to make challah & homemade grape juice.

It was a mess, but really fun!

Oooh, just look at that orange zest!

This beauty is a citrus zest & blueberry olive oil cake.

I used oranges for the zest & fresh juice, 

a meyer lemon olive oil that we picked up on our wine country trip,

 and finally some fresh blueberries from the farmer's market.

The result is the perfect summer cake!

Would you like me to post the recipe? I'm happy to share!

The Cake!

Z couldn't make up his mind

about what kind of cake he wanted,

so I decided to surprise him.

The week before his birthday

I saw a link to a

salted caramel chocolate cake on

another blog that I follow,

EXPRESS-O.

Sea salt caramels are a favorite treat of ours,

so I decided to try it.

The recipe she linked to is from Sweet Paul Magazine.

I made the following changes:

I halved the chocolate frosting (& still had some leftover)

In the salted caramel I reduced the fleur de sel

from 1/2 teaspoon to 1/4 tsp.

This should be plenty of salt, especially if you

sprinkle a little on the top of the cake before serving!

Unfortunately I don't have any small cake pans,

so I baked it as a sheet cake and then cut it

in half. This resulted in a slightly lopsided cake.

While it wasn't the prettiest cake ever,

it is definitely one of the tastiest I've had.

This cake is salty, sweet, rich and decadent goodness.

Definitely a keeper.

Guess it's time for me to go buy a couple of

round cake pans!