A Baking Date

Overall, I think I really do quite well when cooking in Hong Kong. Everything I have baked in my oversized toaster oven has turned out satisfactory, if not perfect. And, even with limited burners, I have made some tasty meals. However, it is still nice to cook when I go home to a full kitchen with fun gadgets like the KitchenAid stand mixer and real ovens, etc.

The most interesting dish I made while at home this past June was called Sticky Toffee Date Cake. It was a request from my mother, who had tasted an apparently wonderful dessert of the same name at a restaurant in San Antonio, and she wanted to see if home baking could produce a similar delicacy. This is not the most common of foods, so there were not as many recipes to choose from as usual. All of the ones I saw were quite similar, anyway, so I chose this one from the typically reliable Food Network.

In the end, the cake recipe was fairly easy to put together, but it filled 24 muffin tins, not 20, as well as one additional 8-inch round cake pan. I'm not sure why, but I'm glad we had enough containers to go around. As a final step, the recipe says to pour the sauce over the cake while hot, which I did, but then I also made additional sauce to pour on top just before serving. This helped to warm up the dessert for even more of the melt-in-your-mouth effect, plus it made it just a little bit richer and tastier.

And in case you were wondering, the other things I cooked while at home were banana bread, to use up very ripe bananas, and roasted vegetable spaghetti sauce. Yum yum!