Finally, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to try this recipe for lettuce cake, and today’s bounty of lettuce provides the means. I saw this mentioned at SeriousEats.com last year, and although it calls for iceberg, I’m going to try it with our green leaf lettuce. Sounds like an interesting variation on carrot cake. The recipe comes Nicole Weston of BakingBites.com.
I also love making a simple syrup (equal quantities sugar and water, heated until the sugar dissolves) flavored with basil. Tonight I made 4 cups of simple syrup and while it was still warm. dropped in all the basil from the box (stems, flowers and all – rinsed well, of course!). Tomorrow I’ll strain out the basil and refrigerate the syrup. I can use it to flavor iced tea, make a frozen ice or sweeten fruit salads. And since it’s not watermelon season yet, I can save my basil syrup and use it to make a modified version of Martha’s margaritas. (It’ll keep at least a month in the refrigerator.) Yum!
Ok – so then Suzanne mentioned basil cake. I found a recipe online for Lemon Basil Cake, calling for Trader Joe’s vanilla cake mix gussied up with the zest of 2 lemons and 1/2 cup chopped basil. And a lemon cake with basil syrup at Epicurious.com. And pound cake with lemon-basil-orange syrup. I can totally see the connection between lemon and basil, but chocolate? There was a chocolate basil cake on the Enlightened Cooking blog. Here’s the recipe. If I hadn’t already put all my basil into sugar syrup, I’d try this tomorrow.
I have to admit that finding new uses for the daikon radish had been stumping me. It’s so often turned into a quick pickle or used in kimchi, and that’s where I was stuck.
Then I ran into this recipe for Luo Bo Gao, a Chinese daikon cake, a mainstay at dim sum restaurants with its crisp exterior and soft interior. I can’t wait to try this, especially since I have a little bag of dried shrimp in the freezer. I was wondering what in the world I was going to do with it.