Food and Drink update

I don't drink caffeinated drinks at all anymore, since I started having trouble sleeping. So I'm always up for good decaf drinks. Today, at Target, I found a Celestial Seasonings Tea that I had never seen before. It's called "Sweet coconut thai chai" (decaf.) It is so yummy! I can actually taste the coconut a little bit. I love chai, but unless you get a chai tea latte from a cafe, I've found that the regular tea bags can be a disappointment. The lattes are always all frothy, honey-y, full fat milky, and super yummy. But this stuff is quite good. I must add, however, that I did add honey and cream. Still, I jut saved $3.20 for a grande, right? I got some for my bedrest friend too, because she also doesn't do caffeine. And she's still on bedrest.

A few days ago, my family went to a cafe for breakfast. Hubby and I had chesse, egg, potato, (and for him, bacon,) breakfast burritos. As I was chatting with my Phd friend who came along, hubby bought the boys lemon cake. I was thinking, oh well, as Bill Cosby would say, it has milk, eggs, and flour. Lemon too, that's a fruit right? Got to justify cake for breakfast. That's what I get for not paying attention.

This didn't look like a normal slice of lemon cake from a coffee shop either. It looked most delicious. It had really thick lemon frosting on it. The cake was very artificial yummy looking yellow. I wanted some. But it was gone in a flash. That's what you get when you give 2 boys cake for breakfast, right? So when we came home, I looked in my trusty Betty Crocker cookbook, which is the most fabulous cookbook I have, for lemon cake. The closest thing I found was "Lemon Chiffon Cake." I had the ingredients, so with the 3 year old's help, we went to work.

This cake turned out delicious also, but it looked different than the cafe cake. It wasn't very yellow, just sort of light colored with a touch of yellow. But I was quite proud because I separated the eggs. I beat the egg whites with some cream of tartar to make fluffy white peaks. I think the 3 year old thought this looked like heaven in a bowl and wanted a taste. I told him, "I don't think it will taste like much". He didn't care. When he tried it though, he almost spit it back into the bowl. I think it's a bad surprise when you excpect fluffy white-ness to taste sweetly and instead, tasted worse than nothing! We also grated the lemon peel which smelled really wonderful. The 3 year old liked that. The whole kitchen seemed sunnier. I should grate lemon peel all the time! The 3 year old poured, mixed, and licked. (He got the spatula when we were done with the cake part.) We also made the frosting with butter, powdered sugar, lemon peel, and lemon juice. I kept squirting the lemon juice in to make it a little more smooth, but I got fearful that it would be too lemon juic-y. When the 3 year old had a taste, he said, "Wuck!" I thought I overdid it for sure. But once it was on the cake, it was very good. Even the 3 year old liked it. Hubby called the cake a "paradox cake" because it was fluffy and sweet, but also a little heavy and tart. I was most pleased.