An Evening With An Orange and Leftover Milk

 We're going out of town for eight days later this week and I had half of a gallon of whole milk sitting in the refrigerator leftover from a baking project last week due to expire and then an orange sitting in the fruit bowl that needed to be eaten last week.  I decided to see how I could use both the milk and orange instead of throwing them out.  So a baking binge began.  I first made a double recipe of the cake layers for the gorgeous pink cake see below.  The cake is a yellow butter cake with whole milk as the liquid in the batter.  I super wrapped the four layers and froze them.  When I'm ready to serve the cake, I'll defrost and ice with the killer pink colored butter cream.  This is a cake we sampled at Amy's Bread in NYC and it was amazing.  I have both of her cook books and three of the four recipes I made today were from her book The Sweeter Side of Amy's Bread.

I next made 100% whole wheat biscuits; again with whole milk for the liquid in the batter.  I had intended to roll out the dough and cut the biscuits but decided to drop them in greased muffin tins, sprinkle on grated cheese and bake.  Wheaty, buttery and tender.  I wrapped all these up as well and they'll stay frozen until we need them to accompany soup.

The biscuit dough was made in the food processor where you pulse all the dry ingredients, cut in your butter, and then add the milk and pulse just until it starts to come together.   

Finished biscuits

While the biscuits were baking, I used the rest of the whole milk for a decadently rich chocolate pudding from Smitten Kitchen's blog.  This is an incredible chocolate pudding.  You don't use eggs in it; just cornstarch, sugar, salt, milk, unsweetened and bitter sweet chocolate and vanilla.  I could have eaten the entire pan full but I settled for a few spoonsful.   I don't know if I can freeze pudding to thaw and eat later.  I have to investigate that.  I know you can with egg based pastry cream and I could certainly make pudding pops.  I made a batch and a half which I know we won't eat in two days so I'll do some research.  

When the pudding was finished and cooling, I used the orange to make a batch of Orange Sugar Cookies.  It's a rich butter cookie dough flavored with the zest of one orange; you roll the dough in balls, flatten with three fingers, sprinkle with sugar, and bake.  I found the flavor good but a bit bland for my taste so I melted bittersweet chocolate and dipped in the bottoms.  When Dan came home from some meetings tonight, his eyes lit up as he looked at the baking mess all over the kitchen and the island covered with all my delicious work and he asked what I was up to.  I replied that I needed to use the leftover milk and orange before our trip and he laughed and said "so instead or throwing away two dollars worth of milk, you decided to use it for many dollars worth of baked goods".  Ha!  Good point.  And good food!  

 I adore the combination of orange and chocolate!

Unrelated to my baking, this morning I potted up some paperwhite bulbs to look forward to as I get ready to say good-bye to the amaryllis that is on its way out after weeks of generous blooms.