une expérience griller & dos leches con puré de fresas

This past Sunday I cooked A LOT!  I made 4 loaves of the outback bread to use as sandwich bread for a party I’m having next week.  I’m kind of loving this bread, but I do plan on trying something else soon.  I actually purchased “Artisan Breads Every Day” for my kindle and I’m excited about taking bread making to the next level.

Yummy outback bread

I also tested some strawberry cake recipes.  I’ll talk more about the strawberry cake next week after it’s done, but I had 2 ideas and I wanted to see which one was better.  I started with this recipe.  One half of the cake I added strawberry chunks and the other half of the cake I did “tres leches” style (well actually, dos leches because I left out the half/half and added strawberry puree.)  They were both tasty, but the fresh strawberry version won with my taste testers.  However, I really liked both so I’ve decided to actually do both - dos leches on bottom layer, fresh strawberries in top layer.  As you can see from the photo below, the strawberries sink to the bottom which was ok because it created this yummy, gooey layer.  I tried adding flour to them beforehand to prevent sinking, but the strawberries are too wet and created a paste.  I have found some other ideas online to prevent sinking, but I really liked that layer of strawberries, so I’m just going with it.  In fact, I will add even more strawberries.  :)

Not the prettiest cake, but very tasty

My husband and I also decided to grill since the weather was awesome.  I wanted a burger, but as I mentioned in my previous post, I was still hesitant about beef.  I went through a couple of options in my head... I could make a patty from ground pork (which I’ve done before and was tasty) or my husband suggested I buy pre-made patties from the grocery because they sometimes have lamb or chicken.  I went with that option because I didn’t want to deal with making them myself.  Unfortunately, when I got to the grocery, they only had beef patties.  But they were celebrating France, and one of the beef patties had blue cheese and herbs and that sounded great!  So I thought ‘why not?’  Maybe I like beef??  Let’s try it.  I also bought ciabatta rolls (because regular hamburger rolls have a ridiculous amount of bad ingredients) and supplies to make potato salad and grilled corn.

Result: I don’t like beef.  In fact, neither one of us really liked it.  At least now I know.  But the potato salad and corn was yummy!  I use this recipe for potato salad and it is fantastic!  On Sunday, instead of buying large potatoes and peeling them, I just bought a bag of little potatoes, washed them, and halved them.  They were perfect little, bites of potato.  So good.

Looks good, but alas, is not for me

Finally on Sunday, I made pastry cream.  This is also a part of the strawberry cake.  I have tried twice in the past to make pastry cream and failed miserably.  So I watched numerous videos on how to make it and finally succeeded!  It’s thick and yummy.  I think for the final version though I am going to add almond paste instead of vanilla extract.  More on that next week.  :)