The Return of Wednesday Treat Day with a nutty cake...

After procrasting to get the PCs set up, I finally got them put back together with the desks setup down stairs. I was not sure when I would be able to start baking again, but we broke the oven in today! Since tomorrow is Wednesday, I figured it's time to get going so we can start a new weekly Wednesday Treat Day at Jeff's new office! Still no sign of the camera and most of the boxes are unpacked, so we had to pick up another camera - it will take some time to get accustomed to and tweaked so the pictures come out how we want them to. Please bear with us while we work on that!

To start things off, I went with a Pecan Sour Cream Coffee Cake with Cinnamon Glaze. I was intrigued by the recipe because you don't start off by creaming the butter and sugar. Because very soft butter is added to the dry ingredients with half the wet, the butter coats the flour and helps make the cake dense, but not dry. Using sour cream in the recipe as a main portion of the wet ingredients also keeps the cake quite miost.

Each piece of this rich and nutty cake has a sweet surprise swirl inside from ground toasted pecans, dark brown sugar, flour and cinnamon. To add another dimension of nutty flavor, ground toasted pecans are also added into the cake batter. Even though this cake is delicious on its own, I wanted to add a finished look so I drizzled a sweet cinnamon glaze on top. I don't often make glazes, so I probably should have made this one a bit thicker, but I didn't want to add too much sweetness. I hope Jeff's new co-workers enjoy this tomorrow!

We are a day behind on dinners since I was not able to post yesterday. Let's start there and we will try to catch up during the week - last night I made Chickpea Burgers and Tahini Sauce. I was a bit nervous since Jeff is not convinced he likes them yet, but he was quite happy with the results! These thick burgers are a mixture of chickpeas, fresh green onions, oregano and smoky cumin with an egg and flour acting as the binders. They are pan-fried in olive oil until they achieve a golden brown crust - these held together surprisingly well while they were flipped. The use of Tahini in the tangy sauce was a first for us and will be seeking out recipes that use it now! There is a generous amount of sauce that matched the large burgers perfectly, but for the picture I only added a small amount. My pitas were also on the small size - we couldn't find the ones we used to get when we made the trek to Trader Joe's. We had the rest for lunch today and they reheated very well!

Recipes
Chickpea Burgers with Tahini Sauce
Pecan Sour Cream Coffee Cake with Cinnamon Glaze

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