herbs and spices
Feb. 5th, 2008 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aryanhwyToday is Joel's birthday so in keeping with ILLC custom where people bring in cakes or pastries to the office on their birthday, I baked a cake this morning for him to bring out. Part of the fun, for me, in contributing to this custom is making something which is complete bog-standard and rather boring from my point of view and having it be totally new and foreign to everyone else. I made a basic spice cake -- the generic type of cake which in the US you can get out of a box mix and which is the kind that I have had for EVERY SINGLE BIRTHDAY (except for the last two) (though when I was young, it was chocolate, because that was mom's favorite, and when I was older it was always a toss-up between the spice cake mix and the funfetti cake mix). There are boxed cake mixes here, but they aren't anything like the kind you can get the States, which is why I tried making a cake from scratch a few months ago. I used the same recipe this time, but doubled the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves (and omitted the ground ginger because I didn't realize until after I'd already run to the store that the recipe called for it and we didn't have any), and it turned out to be sufficiently spice-y. In any case, it got rave reviews from the other people on our floor, as they'd never had cake of this type before. It was still hot from the oven when I brought it out, which is also always appreciated.
We recently found at the local hardware store planters and brackets for hanging over patio ledges, so we'd talked about starting some herbs. We really enjoy growing fresh herbs, but we can't grow them indoors unless we have a cage built for them, or hang them from the ceiling, because the cats won't leave them alone. But the winters are so mild here that most herbs can winter over outside. So for Joel's birthday present I bought him a rosemary plant and a thyme plant and we'll go out this weekend to buy the planter and bracket for it, and also maybe an oregano if we can. Just the other day we finally finished the last of the dried oregano that we had harvested from the oregano plant we grew in Madison -- I'm not sure what ended up happening to the plant (either it died or we gave it away), but we'd culled and dried so much from in in the two years we'd had it that it took us two and a half years to go through all of it (and oregano is a standard herb in both pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce for us). So we'd love to get another oregano plant if we can find one.
We recently found at the local hardware store planters and brackets for hanging over patio ledges, so we'd talked about starting some herbs. We really enjoy growing fresh herbs, but we can't grow them indoors unless we have a cage built for them, or hang them from the ceiling, because the cats won't leave them alone. But the winters are so mild here that most herbs can winter over outside. So for Joel's birthday present I bought him a rosemary plant and a thyme plant and we'll go out this weekend to buy the planter and bracket for it, and also maybe an oregano if we can. Just the other day we finally finished the last of the dried oregano that we had harvested from the oregano plant we grew in Madison -- I'm not sure what ended up happening to the plant (either it died or we gave it away), but we'd culled and dried so much from in in the two years we'd had it that it took us two and a half years to go through all of it (and oregano is a standard herb in both pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce for us). So we'd love to get another oregano plant if we can find one.
