Almond Blossoms

You lucky devil's. I'm going to give you one of my favorite dessert recipes that my Auntie Jorden sent to me. She warned me to give Amanda Hesser credit because it was her recipe originally. In my mind it is a Cook family recipe, but thanks to Amanda anyway. We would have come up with it, given time.



She means it when she says don't go over the one hour mark- the key to this cake is that it is a little underdone. I checked the cake at the 55 minute mark and it seemed to be RAW on the inside, so I blasted it at 370 degrees for the last five minutes- a big mistake. Though you might not believe it, the cake will firm up as it cools and have a tender almondy texture- if you don't overcook it. If you do, it's just a regular, delicious almond cake. It lacks magic. So don't make the mistake I did!

I am sorry for the lack of posts lately. I wanted to write about Sunday, because it was nuts, but due to some family stuff I didn't feel it was right. I feel like making light of the situation today, so I will tell you.
We wanted to go wine tasting, but couldn't because everything was closed. We knew we had to do something fun to make up for the disappointment of not going tasting. It came to me in the shower that morning- Tad's Chicken and Dumplings. Tad's is an old person restaurant located on the shores of the Sandy River, and it rules. It is the kind of place where the moment you sit down they give you a platter of veggies with ranch dip and hot buns with butter. We ordered like crazy people- fried chicken, steak, halibut and extra dumplings (the size of large grapefruits) floating in gravy, and this was just lunch. Whisky poured from Kevin's flask into our iced tea, we screamed with laughter about all things inappropriate until the table next to us moved- in general, we caused a ruckus.
When we left we swore we wouldn't be able to eat for a week- so why not have a digestif at Clyde Common to take the edge off? You know where this is going. We went directly from our huge meal to another restaurant, where we ended up staying at until we felt we could eat another bite. We ended up moving from the bar to a table and eating pasta with wild boar, baby octopus with chorizo, pork rillette, and three desserts- rosemary creme brulee, chocolate and scotch icecream roulade and a meyer lemon tart. We're disgusting, horrible people.
I think it ended up being about 7 hours spent in the two restaurants- we barely saw the outdoors on Sunday. And it gets worse. Shane claimed to be driving us home but in fact he was driving us to a nearly empty strip club on Burnside. It was depressing, I won't go into detail except to say as we left a woman was getting on stage to dance to "Putting on the Ritz" by Taco. It was my friend Laura's first adventure with us since she has moved here- I can only imagine what she thinks of us.

I hope to have a fabulous staffmeal tonight- I will let you know.