Bonus: The Duck’s Caramel Popping Corn

You may recall in the recent past, I talked about a caramel dobos torte we made.  While we didn’t end up being particularly thrilled with this cake, we did learn how to make caramel in the process.  With this newfound skill, we decided it was time to put it to good use and make some homemade, caramel-y treats.  But first, we needed to replicate our caramel.  This proved to be more difficult than we expected, as caramel is still a rather tricky process despite having done it before.  After three attempts, we finally had a brand new batch of caramel.

Fun and Confusion with Caramel

From time to time, Mother Duck and I enjoy baking new things.  Well, to be more accurate, we don’t always enjoy the process of baking, but we certainly enjoy the results.  One recent recipe we decided to try was a caramel dobos torte, a twelve-layered cake with caramel buttercream, the recipe for which came from British baker Mary Berry.  Now there’s a nice name if there ever was one.

First of all, I’ll just tell you guys now that we had no intention of actually making twelve layers.  That’s a bit too fancy for us.  Though we had actually halved the recipe, no, we did not plan on making six layers, either.  Rather, we were perfectly content with two layers because cake is cake, no matter how many layers it has.  And yet, even now, we were getting ahead of ourselves because the first step of the recipe was creating homemade caramel.  This is something we had never done before, and it felt like a monumental task indeed!

The Duck’s Disneyland Dessert Tour 2017

While the best part of Disneyland is undeniably the rides, to be sure (and the scenery and the shows!), a trip to this fair kingdom of happiness would not be complete without some delicious morsels (the calories of which have the added benefit of being burned away thanks to the great distances we walked over the course of those two delightful days).  I’ve already discussed the meals we had during our time at Disneyland, but let’s not forget the most important part, the desserts, which shall be listed below for your reading enjoyment, from least best to most best!

The Duck’s Disneyland Food Tour 2017

Three months before my mom and I spent a delightful weekend at Disneyland, our trip was still but a distant dream.  All we could do was wait and prepare.  Our preparations included one thing we take very seriously, food.  Considering Disneyland is not a place we can go every day, it is rather important that we don’t miss out on any scrumptious morsel.  By the end of the very busy week during which we bought our tickets (both to Disneyland itself and the Disneyland Resort Express bus), set up our flights, and booked a hotel room, we were already pretty familiar with the meals and treats most people ranked pretty high on their lists, in addition to having hunted these places down on the Disneyland app to get an idea of where they could be found.  Maybe this kills all notions of spontaneity, but with food, you can never be too careful.  Below the Duck shall rank the food we tried at Disneyland, from least best to most best!  For this post, let’s start with what many people like to call “real food”.

The One Whoopie Pie That Could

It’s kind of funny because, for the longest time, I’ve wanted to try a good whoopie pie.  They aren’t really the most exciting treat in the world.  I just wanted to try one for myself.  Problem is, they don’t usually sell them in stores, and the store-bought mix I once tried, specifically made for whoopie pies, mind you, didn’t turn out very good.  I can’t remember why.  I just didn’t like it.  Recently, a day came when I said enough was enough.  I was going to eat a whoopie pie, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop me.

The Best Treats Are Hard to Pronounce

I hope everyone had a fun and delightful Thanksgiving!  Like usual, I stuffed my face with many tasty things, but the most special thing of all was this year’s dessert, a unique pastry that I have never made before.  The dessert I made is called a povitica, and it is a European bread/pastry similar to babka.  It is prepared by spreading dough out very thin, covering it in a chocolate and walnut filling, rolling it up, and folding it up into the pan.  If done correctly, you will end up with swirls when you cut it open.  And I did.  Mission accomplished.

The Duck’s Quest for Tea-Gear

As you might have noticed, I have had a strange obsession lately with afternoon teas.  After visiting the tea room an hour from my abode, I wanted very badly to get more dainty plates like they had, and so I went on a hunt.  I already had tea cups, but I still wanted to get delightful plates and one of those tiered trays.  The problem was, when I started looking online, the items I desired were so darn expensive.  Thirty dollars per plate!  I think not!  You offend me, sir!

The Duck Decides to Become Posh

I’ve been trying a lot of new recipes lately, and after staring avariciously at those trays of tiny sandwiches and pastries you see people eating at tea time on shows where people seem far more posh than I am, I decided I was going to try my own hand at being posh and have my own afternoon tea.  And even though I am, mournfully, not a big fan of tea (or any warm beverage, so at least I’m consistent), I was going to have tea, darn it, because people have sent me tea from other countries in the past, and I’ve had boxes of the stuff just lying around, feeling quite neglected indeed.

I’m Thankful for Soup

Even though it’s not a meal.

Okay, so this post is late, but all my posts are late…um, lately, so whatever. I can do what I want. I’m a duck. So, Thanksgiving, a holiday where people partake in turkey, whether or not they actually enjoy consuming the flesh of the chubby and flightless bird. Well, as I just said, ducks don’t follow the rules, so I didn’t have any turkey this year. For Thanksgiving, I mean. I did have some yummy turkey sandwiches throughout the year, but I don’t think that counts. In fact, I didn’t have any meat for my Thanksgiving dinner, as I decided to do something different this year. Which is very different indeed for me, as I do so enjoy eating delicious pieces of animals.

But, alas, despite my great love of yummy critters, I just ate soups for this Thanksgiving. That’s right, soups. I had three different kinds, corn and potato chowder, my pumpkin soup from Halloween, and squash and pear curry soup, all while watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, which was quite fun. I made the corn chowder in a crock pot, while the rest was made on the stove, along with some delicious stuffed eggs and some rolls on the side. To summarize my meal, the corn chowder was awesome because the potatoes were so absurdly soft. I mean, it was ridiculous how soft they were. The pumpkin soup was the same as I remembered (psst, I added nutmeg even when it wasn’t in the recipe; don’t tell the police I broke the rules a third time), and the squash soup tasted like a sweeter version of the pumpkin, and while it smelled like curry, it wasn’t spicy. Still good, just not spicy. Which made me a tiny bit disappointed, but everything was so tasty, that made up for it quite nicely.

Then, of course, there’s the dessert. I made a pumpkin bundt cake, complete with orange frosting and green frosting leaves and vines. It actually turned out a bit tasteless, but it was all right, and I prevented it from becoming oily like the reviews said by taking their advice and using applesauce instead of oil. Here it is below:

A plump pumpkin cake

This is after it inexplicably doubled in size

And I had fun with some hardcore “Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal”, which is still just as awesome as ever.

So, how was everyone’s Thanksgivings? What kind of nifty things did you eat?

A Soupy Duck