Mutant Garden

Some of you may remember the crazy zucchini we had from our garden from last year. This we've done the garden again but bigger and better!

We always have tomatoes and basil. We again have zucchini, added yellow squash, red leaf and romaine lettuces, red bell and banana peppers, regular and Japanese cucumber and Japanese eggplant. Last year we planted regular eggplant and they were destroyed by these eggplant loving itty bitty beetles. So far the Japanese eggplant looks great with no holey leaves.

The yellow squash. The yellow squash is thriving and we're going to be knee deep in this stuff.

This here is our very first tomato. 

Finally the lettuce and basil (and you can see a pepper plant).

The thing is we've probably only had this garden for about three weeks and we already have baby versions of a lot of the vegetables. It's really unbelievable how quickly we have baby veggies as I didn't expect anything until late July but I think we'll be eating things before the end of June from the garden (obviously some yellow squash).

What did you make... Jessica Tandy cake?

My husband couldn't remember the name of this cake and kept calling it Jessica Tandy cake.

Saturday was my sister-in-law's birthday party, her actual birthday is today. I offered to make her cake and having found out she was having a margarita theme (pizzas and drinks) I decided I had to do something by making her a cake. I played 20 questions to make sure she likes the cake and found out she wanted peanut butter tandy cake. My first thought was WTF?! So I googled it. I found the Betty Crocker recipe and figured I couldn't go wrong with Betty, she's been doing this a lot longer than I have.

I started out by baking the yellow cake and splitting them into two 9x9 pans. One with a little more batter than the other. 

To carry out the margarita theme I had to be a bit creative and it turned out pretty darn awesome. I started with Bakerella's basic cake pop recipe to get me going. I wanted to maintain the peanut butter tandy cake flavor so I compromised on the look of the margarita theme. Bakerella's cake pops usually use a light icing but I needed peanut butter flavor instead. I crumbled the cake and poked around the internet and found an easy way to make peanut butter icing on Epicurious. The I mixed some frosting in with the crumbled cake until it was dough-like and could be formed into shapes.

Peanut Butter Frosting

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter (do not use old-fashioned or freshly ground)
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 teaspoons (about) whipping cream (optional)

Put powdered sugar and next 3 ingredients in medium bowl. Using electric mixer, beat until mixture is smooth, adding whipping cream by teaspoonfuls if frosting is too thick to spread.

After creating the mixture I began to shape the pops. I had to make a cookie cutter out of a small plastic container that I cut the bottom of (I need to get me some cookie/shape cutters). Then use the candy melt that will coat the outside as a glue on the pop sticks before pushing them into the formed dough.

Now pop those babies in the freezer to set the candy melt glue and harden the cake mixture before dipping. Melt the rest of the candy melts in the microwave and then it's time to dip!

After the candy melt dipping I spun the margarita glass in light blue and purple sugar sprinkles to create the margarita salt. The "fruit" was made of Jolly Rancher jelly beans that I had lying around. I cut a little wedge out of each so they'd sit on the rim of the glass.

And voila the finished cake...