Novel Eats

Do you remember those dark or milk chocolate oranges from your childhood? They would come wrapped tightly in bright orange foil, and when you’d open one of them up you would see something like a dozen pieces of chocolate in the shape of orange wedges. Taking a bite, the taste of orange and chocolate would [...]

When we moved into our new apartment we gained a display case for knick knacks, so for the first time in my marriage or our relationship, I broke out The Collection. I’d never really had a good way to display my various rabbits until now – sure I had placed a few pieces here and there. But my husband really had no idea that I was “one of those” until a few weeks ago. You know, like the guy with hubcaps all over his yard or that lady with the zillion Christmas trees all over her house. I’m in the beginning stages, but I think that I’m young enough that in thirty years Channel 5 will be over at my house asking me, “So what got you started collecting rabbits?” and I’ll reply, with a contented sigh, while holding up a very worn out looking bunny, “I don’t know. I just love them.”

A few years ago I worked as a receptionist at a fine stringed instruments dealer. It was a very interesting cultural experience, because we sold extremely expensive violins, violas and cellos to people with a good deal of money. It was, and has been so far, my only true exposure to this slice of the music industry. It was also a very interesting and enjoyable foray into fine chocolates, desserts and other culinary delights. This was prior to my swearing off of cheese, milk and other dairy items, so I’ll confess that I had quite a few non-vegan experiences (and one non-vegetarian one, which I didn’t realize until later – um yeah, imitation crab is still real fish, FYI).

I have a confession to make.

If it’s not already pretty evident, I’ve been fairly distracted these last few weeks. I’ve tried to post on a regular basis as much as possible, but sometimes life gets in the way. Unfortunately for me, the blog and you, my faithful readers, moving boxes have gotten in the way.

As an average baker, it was a little overwhelming to see The Daring Bakers‘ latest challenge. As a vegan, it was absolutely frightening. Two words: Opera Cake. Don’t know what an Opera Cake is? Well, essentially it is a lot of layers of cake and cream and sugar topped off with a glaze. If you’re lucky it will take approximately four hours to construct, and if you’re good it will look perfect when cut.

And why was this frightening for me as a vegan? Well, aside from the necessary endurance factor, it had around 14 eggs in the original recipe (six of those are egg whites, so if you want to get really technical…). It was pretty clear that this cake depends heavily upon our fine feathered friends. But what is a challenge if it is not challenging?!