In the Beginning...

This has all started from a magazine subscription.  For Christmas my brother and SIL got me a subscribtion to The Food Network Magazine.  And since I didn't want to spend the whole year looking at pretty pictures of foods while making the same 10 meals with slight variations, I told myself I would make at least 2 recipes a month from the magazine.  And this I find allows me to buy ingredients that I have never had in my kitchen before.  And it makes me feel brave.  It will likely make my kids turn up their noses but what do they know?  Their adult taste buds haven't come in yet.   I decided to blog about it because I get dreadfully bored with Winter and need something new to keep me occupied.

Let me start by saying that, though I enjoy cooking, I am no chef.  I will go so far as to say I have slightly above average kitchen skills, however, my kitchen, due to size and equipment, is slightly below average, so I think it's a wash.
This is my mixer.  Her name is Helga.  She does not have a paddle attachment or any attachment for that matter, other than what you see.  She was my Grandmothers.  And much like the hardy German stock of my Grandparents, she is lasting longer than she rightly should.  I guess I wouldn't mind a new shiny fancy mixer but why?  Helga is not broken, she does her job and she makes me feel attached in some small way to the past...ok that last bit is a little over the top but seriously, I don't have a few hundred $$ to spend on a mixer just now so this will do quite nicely.

Today I made a cake following this recipe. The real challenge will be tonight when I will experiment with fondant for the first time.  It is prepackaged so I am already a little disappointed in myself for not daring to make it from scratch but I will point out that I have 3 smallish kids and time is not always a luxury I can count on.

Update:2/1/10

The cake was delicious, but the reviews were correct, you  need to mix each stage a long time.  I doubled the recipe and felt I underbaked it, but only by a few minutes.  Fondant...lovely.  I really enjoyed my first forray into this medium.  I found the prepackaged (Wilton I think, found at Walmart) to be very easy to work with.  I prepped my table with shortening and cornstarch, took out a little bit for the decorations and let the kids start to work at kneading the color into it, and started rolling it out.  The first thing I noticed was the texture.  Soft and smooth like satin.  I kept running my hands over it, amazed at the feel.  It was more flexible and sturdy than pie crust and fell gracefully into place when I went to lay it over the buttercream frosting I had prepped the cake with. In the future I will decorate on a unlipped plate as the lip on the plate I used got somewhat in my way.  Also, it makes a rather large mess.    But I do love, love, love working with it and will try it again with a homemade recipe later this month.  And perhaps up the degree of difficulty in the decorations.  I feel like if you have successfully rolled out a pie crust, you can totally handle fondant.  Hopefully the home made recipe will have more flavor than the storebought one.