The focus for December's Cooking Class was high altitude baking. We started the class by sampling a Chocolate Pound Cake.....very rich and yummy. It has some odd ingredients....potato starch, turbinado sugar, vanilla powder, brandy......but it was delicious.
We then made a Pineapple Upside-Down Cornmeal Cake....also delicious. We made a cake from scratch and worked on our ratios...flour and eggs for structure, fat and sugar for tenderness. Too much structure equals tough and dry. Too much moisture equals too tender and falling apart. I have lots of notes and hopefully I will be able to adjust a recipe for our higher altitude.
We have a new car! I traded in my Mazda for a 2010 Volkswagon Touareg. It only has 17,000 miles on it and is in excellent condition. We found it on CarMax....had it brought to the valley from Las Vegas. CarMax made it easy....we were out the door with the new car in 2 hours. It has more "bells and whistles" than we have ever had on a car but we are enjoying the "luxury."
We have started to work on our side yard. Matt, the builder, (and Cooper) are laying out new irrigation lines. This area will be part pavers and artificial grass.
Matt will be building an arbor and privacy screen so we don't have to look at the garden, which can be ugly depending on the time of year. We had to move one flower bed down to the garden area and will be filling in areas with more granite. We will use this area for lounging and may include a fire pit. I'll keep you posted!
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