the Broken Oven bakery.

also known as, My Kitchen.

we have hit a bit of a monetary crisis in my household, the old scientist and i. he does not pay me rent until halfway through the month, so if he eats too much food too fast, we go without unless one or both of our significant others breaks down and buys us food. i also have a meal plan at school, so i often hoard foods (or at least fruit) from the dining commons as frequently as possible. i've been known to take bags full of apples at a time, and even to leave in the middle of a paleontology exam in order to bring the remaining six of us numerous chicken patties.

anyway, the long and short of it is, i have run out of substantial meal-making foods for the time being. so, having an abundance of flour sugar and eggs, i did nothing more than go into crazy baking mode.

it all began back in early october when william and i started going on weekly weekend visits to the local apple orchard when he was up from northampton. with these apples i made many a pint of fresh apple juice, small, manageable amounts apple sauce, and finally my new (someday)famous apple crisp.

then, there was the weekend that i went with my family up to our lakehouse in maine and on our way home, before we left town for the winter, we hit up the local orchard, which has grown substantially since the last time i was there - two or three years ago. anyway, my parents decided it was a good idea to get this HUGE bag of apples for us to split between the three of us, which ended up being the downfall of us all. i still have a basketfull of these apples in my kitchen, a month later, waiting patiently to be sliced and left for a night in the dehidrator, or cut up and stewed into sauce.

after the apple spree, i was a bit apple-ed out.
next thing i new, i had a few very brown mushy bananas hanging around in my fruit basket, so i decided to try my hand at banana bread. this was a success, so i repeated it for a second week in a row and this time brought it to william [who, up until now, did not believe that i could bake, due to a number of exceptional failures that he was witness to].

today, wanting to wait on my remaining bananas until they are mooshy enough to be delicious, i decided to dredge out some old organic carrots from the bottom drawer of my refridgerater. these carrots have been in my fridge probably for the last month and a half, if not a solid two months. nevertheless, i was in luck to find that they were not at all limp or brown (with the exception of the greens) like i had expected them to be! i went to town pureeing them in my mini cuisine art and found a nice carrot cake recipe to alter and make my own. i added wheat germ and yogurt and raisins and pecans and [my jack-of-all-trades] allspice and put my oven to work.*
the verdict is that it is pretty delicious. except that i think since i like making things moist and dense this was less like cake and more like a wide, flat loaf. i have decided that it is best sliced warm, elongated and thin and spread generously with butter [it has just enough nuts and raisins to be interesting but not overwhelming].
i am going to make it for thanksgiving to be eaten with dinner [in place of a bread roll or croissant] instead of as a dessert.


*
the thing with my oven is,
it has this tendancy where,
even if i bake at a lower degree,
it overcooks the outside
and just barely cooks through the center.
nonetheless, it still tastes good!