When I was growing up in Hawaii, I loved to eat the orange chiffon cake at Zippy's.  I always wondered if someday I'd know how to make the fluffy fruity cake.  Having done a souffle, chiffon seemed like it would be similar.  Also, I found a fun Bundt pan online that I've been looking forward to using.  So I found the recipe for orange chiffon cake in my Maui cookbook that I had been eyeing for a while and I decided to give it a try.

Here's the result (powdered sugar used for effect):



At first I couldn't tell whether it was burnt or not, so I had to cut a slice to really try it out, since all the chiffon goodness is on the inside.



Though now that I realize how much work goes into this, I wish we had a Zippy's out here even more.

Made spinach noodles from scratch for the first time last night.


Though it was a bit rough in the beginning -- I had initially intended to make flat noodles, but the plate for flat noodles was really thin, so it didn't seem like the best way for a first try after a couple of unsuccessful attempts (the pasta would stick together right after coming out).  After switching to the thick spaghetti plate, I realized that my dough was super wet, and I remembered the horror stories of wet noodles and a flour-covered kitchen from bad reviews for the Kitchenaid food grinder pasta attachment.  However, there was a large bowl of pasta dough waiting for me, so I decided to press on.

After a couple more tries I figured out a trick to get it running more smoothly.  I covered the little balls of dough I was feeding into the contraption with as much flour as I could, and I fed it at more even intervals since the noodles seemed to come out most right after the dough balls were fed in.  The extra flour did the trick, and the noodles that came out were more solid and separable.

I saved the failed attempts and separations for dinner.

I finished my crochet afghan the beginning of this week, but have been procrastinating on weaving in the ends (I'm about 1/3 through and will post pictures when it's all weaved in).  In the meantime, I decided to use the same Lace Ripple pattern to make a scarf using some fun multi-color yarn I bought.  After the scarf, it seemed like a matching hat was fitting, so I found this pattern: http://www.yarncat.com/Roseburg.html.  Sadly the hat doesn't quite look like the one in the picture - I probably should have paid more attention to the gauge, but it looks like a hat nevertheless, just without much of a rim.

Here's the Bailey doll modeling the scarf and hat set.



And here's me (since the hat is probably best modeled on an actual person) -- as a side-note, this picture is unseasonable, since it's actually 80+ degrees (it was 96 yesterday)