Category: cooking

Cooking Adventure!

Diana went home to Santa Cruz this weekend, so I have had no one to hang out with and listen to my inane ramblings… I did have a recipe though and a mother who wanted to make sure I made it. The recipe is for Kitty Litter Cake.

Yummy, no? By the way that is a real cake that you can eat, a cake which I made today. I’m posting the recipe here at the end of this entry, and I’ll also tell you what I changed.

So I can’t eat cake out of a litter box, no matter how good it tastes, so that’s out as is the scooper, next I got rid of the ‘turds’, heated tootsie rolls. I want my meals to be aesthetically pleasing on some level and fake turds are not pleasing in any sense of the word, ever. On a side note, I want anything I own or look at to be aesthetically pleasing. I know this statement destroys all modern and post modern art, but such is life, this cake is ugly and so is your art. Also, the recipe called for baking two cakes separately and then crumbling them together. I am lazy, so I mixed my two boxes of cake mix and cooked them together and then crumbled them. I also don’t know how they got the cookies to look like find sand, unless I used the wrong cookies, the recipe is kinda vague. Oh, and soy milk might not be the best thing to use when making instant pudding, mine never set up quite right. So, the second picture is how mine turned out, don’t say it’s dark I used a flash! A complete visual catalog of the ingredients can be found here. All in all it took two hours to make, mostly because the cake recipe was so large and then I had to let it cool before I could crumble it. If I could do things again I’d try to get the Oreos smaller and save more for the topping, maybe a little more pudding as well. Oh, and not use 1 box of white cake and 1 box of chocolate, spice cake would have been better, too chocolaty.

All in all it was fun and I enjoyed making the cake, it doesn’t taste phenomenal but it’s largely a gag dessert anyway, so I wasn’t expecting much. It’s nice and sweet and when it comes to cake isn’t that what matters?

Here is the recipe and all the directions I got with it with my notes, I’m leaving out the lame story that comes with it:

Cake Ingredients:
1 box spice or german chocolate cake mix (I didn’t find spice or german choc cake mix at the co-op so I went with just chocolate)
1 box white cake mix
1 package white sandwich cookies (I assumed these were Oreos)
1 large package vanilla instant pudding mix (I don’t think I had enough)
A few drops green food coloring (I Skipped this, see aesthetic comments above)

Serving Dishes: (I skipped all of this, again see above
1 new cat litter box
1 new cat litter box liner
1 new pooper scooper

1) prepare and bake cake mixes, according to directions, in any size pan. Prepare pudding and chill. Crumble cookies in small batches in blender or food processor (I did this by hand). Add a few drops of green food coloring to 1 cup of cookie crumbs. Mix with a fork or shake in a jar. Set aside.

2) When cakes are at room temperature crumble them into a large bowl. Toss with half of the remaining cookie crumbs and enough pudding to make the mixture moist but not soggy. Place liner in litter box and pour in mixture

3) Unwrap 3 tootsie and heat in microwave until soft and pliable. Shape the blunt ends into slightly curved points. repeat with 3 more rolls. Bury the rolls decoratively in the cake mixture (don’t ask me what the difference between burying decoratively and just simple burying is…). Sprinkle the remaining white cookie crumbs over the mixture, then scatter green crumbs lightly over top.

4) Heat 5 more tootsie rolls until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle with crumbs from the “litter box”. Heat the remaining tootsie roll until pliable and hang it over the edge of the box. Place box on a sheet of newspaper and serve with scooper. Enjoy! (it goes without saying I did none of this, I guess it’d be a good gag at a Halloween or April Fool’s party).

On cooking

In the last month I’ve finally started to learn how to cook. So far I’ve learned that it isn’t as difficult as it looks, and that even a moron (me) can cook. It’s only a matter of collecting the ingredients and following the recipes. My mom spent the first 20 years of my life trying to get me interested in cooking and making my own meals. She failed miserably, but by no fault of her own. I was very resistant to the whole idea. Why learn to cook when your mom makes superior meals for you everyday? I failed to think long term and when I moved up here to Davis, I could only make 4 things, scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, quesadillas, and Top Ramen noodles. Those and some frozen meals pretty much got me through my first year here. You can only take so much of that kind of thing though before you go crazy. I mostly just didn’t eat. Very healthy of me I know, but that too gets tiresome. So I bought a cookbook and another one and with some encouragement (translation: a lot of encouragement and coaching) from Diana I started cooking. It turns out it’s a lot of fun and tasty! We’ve picked up an Indian and an Italian cookbook and I go through those and find recipes that I like, I show them to Diana and then we have dinner dates where I cook for her or she cooks for me. Of course this is always at her place, the kitchen in place is disgusting all the time, my roommate cooks but never cleans. The cleaning is by far the worst part, it seems the better the meal you make the more dishes it requires you to dirty. Great meals require a 30 minute dish washing session at minimum, good meals take about 15.

I’m having fun and learning a lot, the problem now is that I’m always looking for more recipes and spending way to much time scouting out the cooking section at Borders!

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