I'm just starting out honestly, with "breakfast cake." I know there's a fine line between bread and cake - (banana bread and carrot cake?) and this is a non-dessert cake. It's not a bread. It's also not super sweet. It's breakfast cake, but you can have it for dessert if you want.
I was looking to make applesauce cake for two reasons:
1. I had too many apples, and am not interested in things like crisps, crumbles, pies, tarts; and
2. When I was a teenager, there was this orchard/farm market by the mall and they made amazing applesauce cake.
So working off the idea that cake can be made of applesauce - and not just in the swap-the-oil-for-applesauce-in-the-Duncan-Hines-mix-way - and that I needed to use some apples, I went to work.
Except, it's hard for me with desserts. I don't like really sweet things. Also, I have no idea how that applesauce cake I grew up with was made.
But it worked. A very lightly sweet cake (dust it with powdered sugar and you get a bit more sweet in every bite) that's not really CAKE in the plan-your-other-meals-to-account-for-it way.
Sure, I try to write about using the fresh, seasonal, local produce bounty to create dinner. But sometimes, it's about upcycling.
I don't make white rice, but I do sometimes acquire white rice. Sometimes it comes along with General Tso's Tofu. And it sits in the fridge. Sometimes I have the common sense to freeze it and make fried rice with it later, other times it sits until we have to give it the old sniff-n-toss.
Let's face it, not every meal is a home-cooked treasure. But just like I add spinach or chard to my leftover Chicken Tikka Masala to stretch my takeout into a three day experience, cooked takeout white rice can be turned into a creamy dessert that pretty much comes free with your delivery meal. Recycled rice = instant dessert.
