Walking by the river to collect our maple sap
![](https://www.rushworth.us/lisa/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IMG_20240319_190552.jpg)
This year, Anya wanted an orange cake decorated with pieces of orange … but she also wanted chocolate. So we made an orange chocolate cake with orange chocolate buttercream. Very tasty!
Chocolate Orange Cake
Preheat oven to 325F. Butter and flour two 8″ cake pans.
Whisk all dry ingredients (including orange zest) together.
Whisk all wet ingredients together.
Slowly stir wet ingredients into dry ingredients.
Pour batter into pans and bake for 35-40 minutes.
Remove from oven, allow pans to cool for approx 15 minutes, then turn cakes onto cooling rack to cool completely.
Chocolate Orange Buttercream Frosting
Whip the butter in the blender until light and fluffy. Add orange emulsion and salt.
Heat the whipping cream, remove from heat, and stir in chocolate chips to melt.
Slowly sift powdered sugar into butter while continuing to blend on lowest speed.
Once powdered sugar has been incorporated, add melted chocolate a scoop at a time and continue to blend on lowest speed until it has all been incorporated.
Anya wanted to do an Easter egg hunt this year — so I designed a bracelet for her & made little bags with the components. The components were put into some of the eggs (candy was put into other eggs)
And we hid the eggs all around the property —
But I stood near each of the hiding places and marked a point on OSMAnd+ … then she took my cell phone & used the map to search for her eggs.
Important lessons learned — {1} bits to assemble a bracelet are a cool gift, but three green spheres in an egg? Not so awesome (and Anya’s gotten old enough to say “ugh, beads?” when she’s not thrilled with the contents of the egg) and {2} she should delete the marker once she gets the egg. She had ten eggs when she was done searching, but we don’t actually know which ten of the twelve that are hidden she’s found. So we’ve got to do the whole search again to mark off the “done” spots!
Anya said I have too much “computer stuff” on my website again — not enough kittens and pie and fun stuff. So I am not allowed to post anything about computers for ALL OF FEBRUARY! And, if I do post about it, I get March added on. And another month for the next infraction, and so on. So … umm … pie!
Anya made a peach pie — I had extra pie crust dough from making a quiche a few nights ago, and we had frozen sliced peaches over the summer when we picked up a big pile of fresh peaches. I made a maple sugar crumble (maple sugar instead of brown sugar in a crumble recipe) for the topping. Anya used cookie cutters to decorate the pie with maple leaves and a snowflake. It was very tasty!
Ingredients:
Method:
Ingredients:
Method:
Place frozen strawberries in a large pot, sprinkle with salt and drizzle with lemon juice.
Over medium heat, heat until strawberries begin to break down (stirring frequently).
Lower heat to simmer and cook until volume is reduced by about half.
Cool and refrigerate to store overnight.
12
servings1
hour40
minutes14 oz all-purpose Flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
226 g unsalted butter, room temperature
284 g sugar
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
170 g egg whites, room temperature
125 g strawberry reduction, room temperature
170 g heavy whipping cream
Because I made two not-permitted posts since Anya started the challenge, she’s extended it by ten days! October 7th is the last day of Anya’s rule about what I can post on my own website … the one I set up for myself, on my server, so I would have somewhere to store my stuff. Yeah.
Anya has made us a scavenger hunt complete with clues — clues that are encrypted! While working out a ROT-1 or ROT-2 decryption isn’t terribly difficult, it was getting a little time consuming [especially when what was advertised as ROT-1 was actually ROT-(25) and I had to do it all over again!], so I made a quick spreadsheet to decrypt strings. The letter pairs are in the first two columns, then VLOOKUP is used to convert the printed character to the actual one. I found a trick card!