Curses, Jessica Seinfeld!

I have owned the "Deceptively Delicious" cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld for a couple months now. In fact, very soon after I saw her appearance on the Oprah show I cashed in my My Points for a gift certificate to Amazon. The book is very cute, with great pictures, and I marked all the recipes I wanted to try. I spent days cooking, pureeing, bagging, and freezing veggies. And then I started cooking.


Now, a couple recipes are great. My kids loved them and the veggies were well hidden. Some recipes are nothing special--stuff we've been doing for years. Some are weird, like chocolate chip cookies with garbanzo beans. Sorry, but if I'm going to have chocolate chip cookies, I'm going to make my really good ones. And then there's the coffee cake.....

My kids love coffee cake, and since we have trouble with breakfast foods, I thought this would be perfect. So, minus the pecans, I lovingly made this recipe (the night before, mind you--how great a mom am I?). Here comes the weird part. It calls for butternut squash puree (which the kids thought was pumpkin. There's no need to ruin things for them.). But instead of mixing it in the batter, you pour half the batter in the pan, then make a layer of the puree (topped with marshmallows, as if that will soften the blow) and then the rest of the batter on top. Looking at the picture above from the book, I thought, well I don't know what I was thinking. That the puree was going to sink in and be absorbed? Yeah, that didn't happen. There was a bright orange layer right smack dab in the middle of the cake.

And how do you think the kids reacted to that? "I don't like the pumpkin part!" Me: "Well just eat the top part that has BROWN SUGAR AND CINNAMON." Kids: "But the orange is getting stuck to it!" Me: (standard response) "Then don't eat it!"

It really wasn't that bad. Glenn even ate some, but he thought it was going to taste like pumpkin bars (yeah, he doesn't know about the squash, either). Of course, I was fine with it. It involves quick bread, sour cream, brown sugar, cinnamon, and actually the puree part was nice and creamy. So most of what you see missing in the pan is due to me. As for the kids, they left plates of picked over pieces (which I should have taken pictures of, but I picked at the leftovers after they left for school). But now I am left with this pan of coffee cake and I don't know what to do with it. Oh sure, it would be eaten, but the recipe serves 10, not 1. I can't even give it away, because I know there would be raised eyebrows over the bright orange stripe. Unfortunately, it may end up in the trash. Better than in my own personal garbage disposal.

So next time, I am mixing that puree in the batter. I think it will make a nice breakfast, and we won't have a rousing chorus of "Ewwwww...." in the morning. I think I was sucked in by the celebrity of Ms. Seinfeld though. And the tendency to like everyone who appears on the Oprah stage. From now on, I'm going to trust myself and my own puree-adding abilities. Man, I should have used those points for an Old Navy gift certificate.