Success and Disaster

On Monday evening I made a scrumptious pound cake. The recipe tasted as good as it looked. Moist and slightly crumbly it was a great pound cake. I added a lemon glaze, which topped it off wonderfully. Easy to make recipe and was warm for the eating after dinner...

Yum!

With an added drizzle of lemon glaze :)

Pound Cake (adapted from William Sonoma Dessert):

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temp.

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

2 large eggs, at room temp.

1/2 cup sour cream, at room temp.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees and lightly grease and flour a loaf pan. Wisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. Cream together butter, sugar, and extracts. Add eggs and beat well after each addition. Add half of the flour mixture and stir until just incorporated. Add sour cream and remaining flour mixture, again mixing until just combined. Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for about 60 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Let cool for 15 minutes, and invert onto rack. Drizzle with lemon glaze.

Lemon Glaze:

1 cup confectioners sugar

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (will take about 1 1/2 lemons)

2 tablespoons melted butter

Wisk together and drizzle over pound cake. 

Now that dinner I was talking about? Well, that was the disaster. I had bought my mom a new pasta cookbook for Christmas to go with her Kitchenaid pasta attachment (which was sold out in every store in our area so is being ordered and we are waiting delivery). While we were eagerly waiting for the pasta attachment to arrive we decided it would be fun (and delicious) to try the gnocchi recipe, for which we had all the tools on hand. It was fun! We kneading the dough with our hands per the recipes advice that this is important because you must feel the dough to produce good gnocchi. We let it rest for the two minutes instructed (when the finished product was presented my boyfriend thoughtfully added that perhaps the gnocchi was still too tired...haha) We then rolled it into the one-inch logs, cut it up, placed it in the boiling water, and eagerly waiting for the results. What we got was a watery potato mush. Slightly resembling mashed potatoes in taste but with an added two cups of water instead of milk to make it creamy. Gross! I did a little searching online and saw that most recipes called for 3 pounds of potatoes and 2 cups of flour, while ours only called for 1 cup of flour with the same amount of potatoes. Any successful gnocchi chefs out there who can share words of wisdom?

So, we ordered pizza and finished it all off with pound cake.