10/8/16

Babysitting Weekend

It's been quite a crazy week or so.  I was able to spend Friday and Saturday watching Drew's kids while He and Cassie competed in a Spartan Race at Tahoe.  Woot!  It was quite enjoyable playing with the kids and I was very pleasantly surprised with the happy attitude of Dieter THE ENTIRE TIME!!!  Bennett is getting very big, and Nolie was a great helper.  She also kept great notes the entire two sessions of General Conference on Saturday.  Go Nolie!!! Conrad was also busy playing with friends.  I was SOOOOOOOO happy to have Katy down helping me babysit.  She was so helpful!!!  

playing games with the kids

Our failure that turned into something okay was chocolate Zucchini bread.  We requested the recipe from Sister Marks because we LOVE her recipe.  She emailed Sam this recipe: 

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

½ cup butter

½ cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

½ cup sour milk (put a teaspoon or so of vinegar in the milk and stir)

2 cups peeled and shredded zucchini

½ cups flour

4 Tbsp. Cocoa powder

1 tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. salt

(Some people put in ½ tsp. cinnamon.)

Cream butter and oil and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk. Mix in zucchini.

Makes 3 loaves or 2 large layers. Top with topping and bake 325 for 40-45 minutes.

Topping

¼ cup chocolate chips

¼ brown sugar

¼ cup chopped nuts

As you can see, the recipe appears like a standard recipe, but if you look closely, you see that there is no sugar mentioned in the recipe, and there is only 1/4 cup flour!!!  I should have trusted my food scientist intuition, but I figured that Linda has some secret up her sleeve to make such a good bread.  (I ended up adding a whole other cup of flour and a cup of sugar just to be safe.)

The results were a disaster.  There was no structure to the loaf, so the toppin ended up the foundation as it fell through the loaf.  We ended up making a homemade chocolate pudding and whipping some cream to make a layered chocolate trifle.  It turned out pretty good :)

P.S. Cassie also helped me patch my roommates pants.  Mom went through a whole skype lesson with me, but it's so much easier to pretend to sew with your finger than to actually do it with a sewing machine, just saying :)