Cake

I've noticed that my love for all things cakey has grown throughout this pregnancy. From New Year's Eve when I had a migraine and a nice neighbor dropped off banana bread...it was the only thing in the whole world that tasted good at that moment...to yesterday's orange Chiffon cake with citrus cream cheese frosting, this love of mine for cake is blooming.

Yesterday for example, I woke up and my first words to Ajay were "I would like an orange cake with cream cheese frosting". And considering I love to bake things, I spent the morning going through my favorite cookbooks to find just the right recipe. I decided on a Chiffon cake because I had never made one before, and after a quick kitchen inventory, I had gathered 95% of the ingredients I needed. With a quick call to the neighbor to borrow some Cream of Tartar (what's Tartar and how does one go about creaming it?), I was up and baking.

Several hours later, I was polishing the water spots off my cake pedestal dish, and admiring my work. We invited our neighbors to join us for cake in the evening, and it was a hit. Delicious. I was right...I DID want an orange cake with sour cream frosting.

Fast forward to today. Before my a.m. shower, I got on the scale to find that I had gained 3 pounds since my last weigh-in at the doctor's last week. Not good. Then I recounted the amount of things cakey I had consumed in the past few days....let's see...Friday night we picked up a piece of my favorite chocolate mocha cake to take home for dessert after a nice dinner out, and the piece of cake was big enough to be cut into not two, but three pieces, which lasted all of 11 hours in our house (not bad considering only 8 or so hours were spent sleeping). And, oh! Let's not forget the brownie I had for dessert at lunch on Friday with my girlfriend. So that makes it a brownie and a piece of cake on Friday, another piece of cake on Saturday, and orange chiffon cake on Sunday...oh yeah, and let's count back to Thursday, shall we? I baked a whole batch of chocolate chip cookies for a nurse at Ajay's work who had done some really nice things for us when we lost our little guy...well, let's just say that the whole batch wouldn't fit in the cookie box, so I had to keep a dozen or so for us. So that makes the cakey count to cookies on Thursday, a brownie and a piece of cake on Friday, more chocolate cake on Saturday, and orange cake on Sunday. And I wonder where those 3 pounds came from? Palease! Has cake become it's own food group?

And here's the saddest dark secret part. As I was zesting and juicing oranges for the cake, and then more zest and juice for the icing, I was actually thinking "this cake has vitamin C! It's good for me!" Note to self...cake is not fruit.