Flying saucers! or.. flying.. prep bowls.. fail

After a long day of some not so fun activities and getting sun burned I decided that I was going to make a streusel coffee cake with coconut. If you're lucky enough to be local, it's my version of the terribly addictive cake that they serve at the Dodo. I really didn't want to bake (..my desire for a tasty treat won) but I made my way through it and turned out 2 lovely bundt cakes. One for my work and a smaller one for Mike and I.

If you've had the cake at the Dodo you know that you have to get it with ice cream because it comes warm with caramel sauce and the ice cream is just the perfect companion. I was in the middle of making caramel sauce and reached for a prep bowl to fill with water to wash down the sugar crystals and wouldn't you know it.. it started raining prep bowls. I can testify that pyrex does in fact break and makes a very loud sound and a very large mess. As if cleaning a kitchen full of glass shards wasn't bad enough, the cakes were surrounded by broken glass so they had to be thrown away. I think today is just one of those days to sit in front of the tv until it's time to go to bed as an insurance policy against anything else going wrong.

a mild nutty failure

Why: I used another game night as an excuse to bake. Little secret about me, I love love LOVE 2 things; donuts and marzipan. Almond paste, marzipan .. I'll take what I can get, however I can get it. I've made the terrible mistake of finding a local bakery that makes a HUGE marzipan danish and I have day dreamed about it every single day. With my almond paste craving running at full speed I decided to make an almond pear torte. How fancy.

What: I made this recipe, almost exactly as is (slight change in baking times) except I added a tiny bit of almond extract to the almond paste. I also poached the pears with a vanilla bean but you couldn't tell the difference. Isn't it a little surprising that mine isn't as lovely as the picture on the recipe? Ha! The verdict? Flop! I wanted a super sweet almond flavor with a flakey pastry crust. What I ended up with was a mild flavored filling on a shortbread crust. It wasn't disgusting or even horrible but it wasn't what I was craving. One person at the game night claimed to like it but then quickly refused to take some home, aha!, the easiest tell of someone who is trying to be nice. Back to the drawing board for this idea.