The Fruits of Idle Hands - Part One

After a full day yesterday of serving at a local homeless drop-in center and catching up with the housework & laundry we'd fallen behind on, Steve and I decided to lay-low today and just spend some time with each other. For the most part we did (the exception being a way-too-delayed visit to my grandmother), and around 6:00 PM I was hit with a wave of being bored.

I wasn't much feeling like conversation so I didn't call anyone. I wasn't much feeling like emailing or reading (I'd already done both). Facebook just causes further boredom. There's only so much web-surfing one can do before they lose their mind.

So... what did I do?

I opened my refrigerator and pantry. I looked at what I had on-hand. And I got to work creating some tasty treats. The first thing I created was...

Apple-Cranberry Spice Cake

Ingredients:

DRY:
- 2 cups flour
- ½ tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
- ¼ tsp nutmeg
- 1 rounded tsp cinnamon
- ½ cup dried cranberries
WET:
- ½ cup unsweetened applesauce
- ⅔ cup sugar
- ½ cup butter (1 stick), melted
- ½ cup almond milk
- 1 apple, diced

Method: 

- Preheat oven to 350 & grease 8x8 baking dish

- Combine dry ingredients in medium sized bowl (I used a fork)

- Combine wet ingredients in smaller bowl (I used a spoon)

- Add wet ingredients into the dry ingredients bowl, and combine by folding with a spatula

- Pour batter into baking dish and spread evenly across the pan

- Bake for about 40 minutes (until toothpick comes out clean). 

Now... if I'm going to be honest as I was pouring the batter into the baking dish, my fear was that the cake was going to come out rather dense. This was not at all the case - it was rather a light cake considering the consistency of the batter. It was quite tasty and unfortunately for my diet quite addicting.  Steve and I had a hard time stopping ourselves for going back and forth for more starting with the initial taste test to our actual serving time. This ended up becoming our dinner - which was fine because we ate enough of it to be a meal!

I think we might have had too much cake...

Tomorrow I'll share with you the other dish that I created - my version of carrot soup!