Going Domestic

One More Present

Chris, Madeline, and I arrived home from a trip to Edmonton last night, and unloaded three days worth of mail from the box. In amongst the junk mail and the mobile phone bill was the updated report the results of our most recent energy audit, the one where ATCO came back to evaluate how much impact the changes we've made have had on our home's energy efficiency.  I was keeping my fingers crossed for a ten-point improvement, but the report said that our score  increased from 57 to 70! Wow! That means that we can expect an EnerGuide rebate of $800 - enough to buy us another new window :)

It's a Marshmallow World ...

I think I've settled on either this recipe or this other one for Christmas Day dessert.  I don't think that Chris is really pleased about it - he really wants sticky toffee pudding. He did agree that if he got to order a turducken (which apparently has inspired a song), I got to pick what to make for dessert. Unfortunately, I've scoped out a couple of sticky toffee pudding recipes and they seem to be too closely related to fruitcake to sound appealing to me.  Hopefully, we'll all survive a Christmas dinner that does not include eating dates or other dried or candied fruits.

I've started my holiday baking, having made one pan of the yummy no-bake chocolate graham wafer squares that my mom used to make when I was little. My other project is a pan of caramel shortbread squares.  I got this idea from my sister, who I think uses a Company's Coming recipe. I'm going to try out Roxanne's Millionaire Shortbread from my Nigella book, maybe without the layer of chocolate. We'll see. There is a very tasty variation of this at A Finger in Every Pie, but I'll leave that one for another time as I don't know where to get blood oranges at the last minute!

Am really tempted to head out the mall tomorrow and get a Merry Mandarin from Jugo Juice. It's tradition!

Foiled Again!

I discovered a few days ago that my recipe for the Brulee Patisserie chocolate souffle cake is missing! Ack! Will I never get to make a Diable Cake?

Anyway, need a new dessert plan for Christmas. Maybe a bread pudding.

Kind of like the Caramilk Secret

The recipe for my fave cake of all time as been evading me for at least three years.  I've posted about my quest to figure out the Diablo Cake from the Brulee Patisserie for years (evidence here and here and here and here, and who knows how many others there were before I moved to Typepad).  My first big breakthrough was scoring the chocolate souffle cake recipe directly from Brulee's Rosemary Harbrecht at a cooking class. That was a few years ago. But I've had another breakthrough, from an unlikely source. Chris and I bought a container of "chocolate cinnamon dip" at the market at the Currie Barracks last weekend, and it tastes just how I remember the filling in the Diablo Cake. The ingredients were cocoa, whipping cream, cream cheese, and cinnamon. The texture was firmer than mousse, but more pliable than ganache. I think I might be trying it out with the chocolate souffle recipe in the next few weeks ...