Passover Cooking Olympics- the next round

For the improv award – chocolate spiced biscotti.

I completely faked these. I’m not even exactly sure what I put in but I think that I started out with dried fruit ground up in the food processor, I also added shredded coconut, a bunch of cocoa and some dried chilies along with a bit of matza meal and a couple of eggs.

I formed two logs, wetting my hands to form the logs, just like my mother taught me when making mandlebroit. I baked the logs until they seemed done enough, cut them on the diagonal and re baked them. they could have been a complete disaster but they surprised me by working. My son ate one and really liked it. So my thinking that this experiment was a success is not completely delusional.

Earlier in the week I was mostly making the foods that my father used to be in charge of making for Passover. Today, now that I am baking, memories of baking Passover cakes with my mother have been coming to the surface.

I made the cake that we always eat for dessert for the first night of Passover, a chocolate nut torte. it came out wonderfully, except that I did a really stupid thing as I took the cake out of the pan and the cake broke. I shoved al of the pieces back into a cake shaped thing.

I may make a chocolate custard to top the cake and further disguise the damage. As the cake broke I thought of all of the many times my mother had to remake this cake because her cake broke.

The lemon almond cake is baking right now.

We need to eat actual meals around here. I turned some of the boiled chicken from the soup into chicken salad. I faked a home made mayo. That is after several attempts at making mayo over the years while carefully following a recipe…the one time I just pretended I knew what I was doing and winged the whole thing --it worked and I ended up with actual fluffy mayo.

I also made a spicy eggplant,

and some matza rolls.

I have gone through most of my Tower O Eggs so tomorrow I go back to Costco to get more.

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