By the Way...

If you're wondering whether I'd dropped off the radar a bit, I did. I had the blog running on autopilot a bit, and also...got married, went on a honeymoon to Italy, had Thanksgiving with my family in Virginia, and then made my way back to Salt Lake City! Whew!

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, and I have so much to write about. Hopefully I get to even a third of it. There were wedding DIY projects, parties after parties, all gluten-free, gluten-free restaurants, and sightseeing, and more. I came back from Italy wanting to make everything I couldn't eat there gluten-free, and I'm currently swimming in Italian cookbooks working to make that happen. Plus, I'm happy as a clam playing with every single new kitchen toy we got as wedding presents. Now I realize why newlyweds always complain about gaining weight!

Despite all the fun new toys and growing list of dishes to try, after all our eating in Italy and again at Thanksgiving, I'm ready for some lighter fare. Since winter is quickly approaching, that doesn't necessarily mean salads, although we are enjoying some with our meals. Right now, lighter fare means smaller portions and more vegetables. So here's a simple roasted cauliflower recipe:

Wash a head of cauliflower, then remove leaves and stem. Slice the head into 1/2 inch slices, then cut each slice into smaller pieces at the base of the stems. Spread evenly in a single layer on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, then pop into a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes. Turn the cauliflower pieces over, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt again, and roast another 10 minutes. You can cook them a little shorter or longer, depending on how browned you like them.

Makes an excellent veggie side, or you can let the roasted cauliflower cool, then pulverize it in a food processor to make "rice." OR you could use the pulverized cauliflower for a pizza or quiche crust - just mix in an egg, then spread in the bottom of a pan and bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes or until the crust is firm. I find this works better than the recipe I've seen floating around Pinterest, since roasting takes care of some of the excess moisture and brings out all those delicious sugars!

Never Perfect the First Try

It's hard to remember sometimes, but nothing's ever perfect the first time. You have a vision of what you want something to look like, you know more or less how you're going to execute it, and then it flops.

It happens in cooking.

It happens in knitting.

More Bloody Cake

Remember how you have to ask? Well, some of my questions got me absolutely wrong answers. One guy just washes his dishes, and he was sort of rude about my questions. Scratch him right off the list. Even though his cakes are gorgeous, I need a cake that won't get me sick, preferable without an attitude.

The second cake baker was absolutely sweet and wonderful. She gets food allergies, and explained the exact layout of her kitchen and why she couldn't guarantee gluten-free, even if she bought all new equipment. Basically, even if she bought new equipment, she wouldn't have anywhere to keep it safe from all that gluten-y flour dust. I absolutely appreciated her candor, but I was still no closer to a wedding cake.

Cue the emotional breakdown. Over cake. Yes, I know. So trivial, so ridiculous.

To make a long story short, the groom has now assumed all cake responsibilities - at least until we find a baker to meet my needs, that is. Then little miss design nut over here will jump right in. But finding a baker from across the country is not easy at all. Luckily, Mike is really good at asking all the right questions, and he's not one to get emotional over a friggin cake.

He's found at least one dedicated bakery that can do it, and we're ordering some cupcakes to test it out.  Until those arrive, we'll have to make do with this:

This cake with a blood-orange buttercream frosting and a blood orange sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and nutmeg, then broiled and cut up to top the cake. Not too shabby.

Nuts

I know enough of life by now to know that if I say, "I can do ten of these a week and get it done well before the deadline," there will be quite a few weeks of me doing absolutely nothing until the eleventh hour.  It's something I try to work on, this procrastination thing, but in the end it usually gets the better of me.

Well this time it just can't. Get the better of me, that is. It's just too big a deal. There's a roll of twenty yards of linen (twenty!) waiting for me to get to work, and get to work I'd better.

Here's the latest:

I happen to really like the way this little guy looks, and luckily it doesn't take nearly as long as some of the other ones I'd been doing. It's a start at least.

You Gotta Ask

When asked, "What is jazz?" Louis Armstrong reportedly answered, "If you gotta ask, you'll never know."

Now, there is something to be said for intuition, for just knowing something at the core of your being. And those sorts of things are often so difficult to put into words because they're based on pure emotion. You know it or you don't. That's what art, music, and dance are for - expressing things were words are just inadequate.

Unfortunately, I seem to have let this quote influence me a little too much. I just don't ask. I'm afraid to ask. And when you (and I) don't ask, you (and I) often miss out.

Recently, I've been stressing out about my wedding cake being gluten-free. So I decided to suck it up and ask. I researched gluten-free bakeries in the area where the wedding will be, and came up with this list of possibilities some of which aren't dedicated gluten-free, and some of which are, but I'm not sure if they do wedding cakes because I haven't asked:

• AnnaB's Gluten-Free
• Apple Tree Cake Company
• Carolina Cupcakery
• Flour Child
• Three Fellers Bakery

There's just one thing. None of them are on the "approved vendors" list for my venue. I haven't asked the venue yet...but I thought I'd check with the approved vendors and see whether they can do gluten-free.

Out of five, one plainly stated on its website that it could not do gluten-free. Another I knocked out simply because I know what their kitchen is like, and didn't feel comfortable with a gluten-free cake coming out of it. A third emailed me back saying she couldn't do it safely because of cross-contamination issues. She was really nice about it, and I can totally appreciate her honesty.

To my surprise, the last two emailed me back to say they can do gluten-free! I'm still getting information from them (how they prevent cross-contamination being the big one), but if I hadn't asked, I would never have known.

Sometimes you just gotta ask.

Harebrained

First, a little rant. It drives me nuts that people don't know how to spell anymore. And that they don't care to check their spelling. In case you were wondering, the proper spelling is harebrained, not hairbrained. 

Okay, now that that's out of the way, I've had a harebrained idea. With slightly less than 40 weeks to go before the wedding, still trying to nail down a theme (travel? birds? shabby chic? Colonial sampler?), I thought, wouldn't handkerchiefs be a sweet wedding favor? They could even use them to wave us away for the departure since we're not allowed to have confetti, or rice, or sparklers at our venue. 

Now, I know I'm probably not the first to have any of these ideas. I was thinking vintage, or at least something that felt handmade. Nothing cheap-looking or mass produced. And definitely nothing that looks remotely close to machine-embroidery. (It can go very well, but more often goes horribly, horribly wrong. And the machine I have can't do too much.)

The only thing is, after looking at prices of hankies online and at local antique shops, I found them to be a little bit out of my price range. At five to ten dollars apiece, plus shipping, that could take a big old bit out of our wedding budget. 

Three hankies I found while thrifting. Gorgeous and great for inspiration, but a bit pricey.

So then I sourced linen prices and found some amazing quality linen for an amazing price. If I make them all myself, the materials will cost less than a dollar per hanky. I even came up with my own embroidery motifs, and keep having more ideas. I like cohesion in my theme, but a little bit of variety is nice too.

There are birds in a love tree:

My first border (for a man's handkerchief)

 Birds over a heart-flower motif:

And another border for a man's hanky, this one super-subtle:

Sounds brilliant, right? Right. Just factor in the fact that it takes me an hour to make each hand-rolled hem, and another hour or two to do the embroidery, and you see how harebrained the idea is.

A stack of hemmed hankies ready for embroidery.

 Of course it's nuts. It's beyond nuts. But I think I'm past the point of no return. I've already done the math, and realized that if I make ten hankies a week, I can totally do this and get it done well before the wedding.

A stack of freshly cut fabric. Something I'll be seeing a lot of this year.

 And instead of harebrained, maybe we'll go with labor of love from now on. Even though there might not be so much difference between the two.

Let Me Eat Cake

Cake has been something of an obsession for me lately. There's birthday cake, there's wedding cake, and just-because-it's-Monday cake. All those things have been on my mind, but truthfully, the wedding cake weighs the most heavily on my mind.

I want a "traditional" wedding cake - you know, the kind with great big tiers. The kind that is on display for its own sake. I do not want cupcakes. And I'm really not interested in having lots of different cakes. The only thing is, since I'm planning this wedding from the other side of the country, it's really difficult when you add in the most important part - the cake has to be gluten-free.

One caterer suggested to my mother that the top tier could be gluten free. What?! No matter how careful they are to prevent cross-contamination, no matter how much icing and cardboard and who-knows-what else is between a regular cake and a gluten-free cake, there's no way I would be comfortable with that.

Similarly, there aren't many dedicated gluten-free bakeries in the area where we're getting married. (Did you know that flour can stay in the air for 24 hours?) The closest dedicated gf bakery that I know of is about 50 miles away from where we're tying the knot. And I don't even know if they would make a wedding cake. I know I'm just getting this whole planning thing really started, and I'm sure we'll work this thing out, but it's really getting to me.

So of course, I've launched into baking cakes at every opportunity. Right now, there's no way I can think of to safely bake my wedding cake...besides the stress and construction issues, my gf kitchen is in Utah and the wedding will be in Virginia. But still.

I've made this recipe twice now, and am quite growing to love it. (Mike likes it too.) Of course, I can't help having my own twist - a tablespoon of psyllium husk instead of gums, and no Cointreau because I don't have any on hand. The first time, it worked like a dream. I made cake donuts, cupcakes, and an eight-inch cake.

Using the cake donuts, I also made some divine raspberry shortcake with the last of the raspberries in the freezer from last year's farmer's market and homemade whipped cream:

Then the cake became tiramisu:

The second time around, I made cake donuts and one nine-inch cake. I also made the lemon cream called for in the recipe. For some reason, the donuts didn't do so well...I'm suspecting that I overfilled the tins and maybe didn't bake them long enough. Anyways, those became cake pops (crumbs mixed with icing and dipped in melted chocolate):

And the cake became what we're affectionately calling "Ugly Cake." It has the lemon cream, and a layer of the chocolate. I find the lemon cream too tart on its own, but the chocolate balances it out nicely.  It's ugly because it's not exactly the most picturesque cake I've ever made: 

Am I any closer to a wedding cake? Not really. All I know is that if a caterer or baker doesn't have something that wows me, I want to request they use this recipe. Oh, and if I really am going to bake my own wedding cake, it better not look like that ugly cake. I guess I'll go back in the kitchen and keep practicing.