Turkey Cook-Off with Your Morning Coffee?

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, don’t forget to pick up a copy of this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. In the Food Section, you’ll see a certain single guy food blogger taking part in the section’s “Turkey Cook Off.”

And if you’re too lazy to break away from this screen, then you can read it online here.

Check back tomorrow when I post my “behind-the-scenes” look at this turkey competition. It was a whole lot of fun—and a lot of work! But I can’t say any more or I’ll risk having a 20-pound frozen turkey land on me the next time I’m walking anywhere near Fifth and Mission streets.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, this past weekend I was excited to try out a recipe I saw in Food and Wine Magazine’s Thanksgiving special. I love pumpkin, and they had this recipe for a pumpkin cake with caramel butter cream frosting. Thinking I could do something different instead of a pumpkin pie this year, I thought I’d test the recipe. (Most of you know I don’t bake so I don’t usually come up with my own baking recipes.)

Here’s how it turned out:So you’re probably thinking, “aww, so pretty.” Yeah, me too. And it was super easy to make, although time consuming because you have to make the frosting early and let it set in the refrigerator and then I had to run to Williams-Sonoma because I found out the Longs Drugs across the street from me didn’t have two 8-inch cake pans.

Anywho, the cake tasted awful! It wasn’t really the taste as much as the texture. It was very dense and not light and fluffy. I’m thinking something was needed in the recipe to keep it light with the pumpkin puree added to it. Just looking at the picture below, you might be able to tell how the texture almost made the pieces look like plastic. Blech. So much for falling for the pretty pictures in Food and Wine. (Although I did like the caramel butter-cream frosting. I still have a bit leftover in my frig.)

My recommendation is not to try this recipe at home. I’m sticking with pumpkin pie.