“Is it right to be sampling wedding cakes when Sookie's making yours for free?” “What is right anyway, you know? Who defines right? And if eating cake is wrong, I don't want to be right.” “I'm bringing out a mocha crunch cream.” “So, ethics?” “Highly subjective and completely overrated.”
Ingredients:
1 ½ sticks of butter
10 oz dark chocolate chips
1 cup of granulated sugar
3 eggs
⅔ cup all-purpose flour
2 tbsp of instant coffee dissolved into just-boiled water
Powdered sugar to serve
Whipped cream to serve
¼ cup hazelnuts, roughly chopped
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Grease a 9 in cake tin and line with parchment paper.
Fill a large pot with water and place over high heat to bring to a boil. Once the water is boiling, place a large heatproof bowl over the water to create a double boiler.
Add the butter and the chocolate chips. Stir occasionally to prevent burning and allow to completely melt.
Either keep the same bowl you used for the double boiler if you’re hand mixing or transfer the chocolate mixture if you need to for a stand mixer.
Add in the sugar and mix to combine. Then beat in the eggs. Add in the flour and then the coffee and mix until creamy and fully combined.
Spread the mixture evenly into the prepared cake tin.
Bake at 325 degrees for about 55 minutes. The cake should be about the same consistency as a fudgy brownie.
Allow the cake to cool in the tin. Place a plate over the top of the cake then sandwich between your hands. Carefully flip the tin upside down so that the cake easily falls onto the plate.
Lightly dust the cake with powdered sugar. Serve with whipped cream and top with chopped hazelnuts.
Our first Weston’s dish! And what a good one at that. You cannot go wrong when you put coffee and chocolate together in my opinion. At first, I wasn’t quite sure about which direction to take this cake. Crunch and cream are kind of oxymorons. I decided that a fudgy mocha cake is already pretty creamy, but an optional whipped cream topping would take the cream to the nextlevel. As for the crunch, I settled on a simple hazelnut topping. I personally don't like a lot of crunchy texture in my cake, so I wanted to keep the crunch part to a minimum. And what iss better than coffee and chocolate? Coffee, chocolate, AND hazelnuts! However, if you wanted to bake the hazelnuts right into the cake, go for it! This cake is very rich and tastes similar to a brownie. If you want it to be slightly gooier, reduce your baking time by about 5-8 minutes.
This week has been CRAZY cold in Texas. Normally, February is our coldest month with temperatures going as low as the 30s. Although it can easily bounce up to the 70s the very next day. However, we plunged to the single digits several days in a row and even dropped below 0 on Tuesday. That is a record low for us. We received quite a bit of snow and won’t get above freezing until at least Friday. I know that might not seem like a lot for my northern readers,but it's really bad for Texas. On Thursday, when the temperature started to drop, there was a 130+ car pileup less than 20 minutes away from us. Our state isn't equipped to handle this kind of weather, so millions of people have lost power. Our electric provider has been doing rotating outages over the last few days. We've been very blessed to have some electricity in short spans. We are under a boil notice for our water, and we tried to boil as much as we could before losing power again. I haven't been able to make my dish for Saturday's post yet, so that will likely be delayed. In the meantime though, I've been enjoying this cake with hot coffee to accompany it. I definitely understand why Lorelai and Rory would hit up Weston’s Bakery to grab a winter treat on a brutally cold day, it just really hits the spot.
This is a big episode. We make it to Max and Lorelai’s wedding...but not quite. Throughout the entire episode, we see clues as to why they don't get married (though there were several clues before this episode as to why they were never going to make it). Max spends the weekend at the Gilmore house, and he just doesn’t fit in with their secret special clubhouse no boys allowed thing. I don’t think any man would while Rory is still living at home, even Luke. But Lorelai’s panic when she realizes she has a boy in her room tells us that they won’t make it. Part of me wonders how they would have written the show if Max and Lorelai had gotten married and got divorced later on in the season. I think it could have been an interesting plot to see Lorelai try to adjust to married life.
Our second clue to their doomed relationship is when, somehow ,Dean comes out as the better boyfriend compared to Max. He understands their unique rhythm. I love the advice Dean gives Max while the girls are getting ice cream, and he’s right, Max should know all this about them if he’s going to be marrying into their family. And then the fight that Max has with Lorelai after the double date just screams awkward. I get where Max is coming from in wanting to fit in with Lorelai and Rory, but he should see that they have a very special bond and he can’t weasel his way into it. Then there is the final fight between Max and Lorelai the morning after the bachelorette party, where he’s really rude to her. There are a lot of negative Max qualities packed into one episode that I think should have spread out over the course of the last few episodes to make their breakup more believable.
Though we don’t get a wedding, we do get a bachelorette party in this episode! I love how they sneak Rory into the club. And I think it’s perfect that they go to a drag show for Lorelai’s bachelorette party. It just seems fitting. I do miss going to drag shows. They are so much fun! The first one I ever went to was on a trip to Portland with my best friend. We actually saw the world’s oldest drag queen perform, Darcelle XV! She was 88 at the time and so fabulous. I think the only thing that would have made this scene better was if Michel had been in drag when he had to “shake his thing.”
And of course, we get the chuppah scene with Luke and Lorelai in this episode. I don’t care how many times I watch this episode or how jaded I feel about love, watching Luke unload the chuppah from his truck ALWAYS makes my heart melt into a puddle. He makes her this beautiful chuppah by hand for her wedding to another man when he is so clearly in love with her. How can you not love Luke? (I know season 6 Luke is a different Luke, I’m talking about this Luke). Even though I love their gazebo wedding in AYITL, part of me wishes they would have gotten married under the chuppah. It would have been a nice way to have things come “full freaking circle” as so many things did in the revival.
I like how this episode ends with the girls running away, but I wish we could have seen Max’s reaction to the wedding being called off. We never actually find out if and when Lorelai tells him. Obviously, it would have been heartbreaking to watch Max receive the news, but I think it would have been a powerful scene. What’s so great about the end of this episode though is just Rory’s willingness to go along with her mom’s plan to run away. Once Lorelai tells her “because I didn’t want to try on my wedding dress,” Rory doesn’t need any further explanation, she just goes into packing mode. Something I never noticed until watching this episode specifically for this blog post is that Colonel Clucker- Rory’s stuffed chicken- is in the backseat. Why is she bringing her stuffed chicken on this spontaneous road trip?
And the episode ends with one of my all-time favorite Gilmore Girl quotes, “we’re almost there and nowhere near it; all that matters is we’re going.” If it wasn’t so long, I’d get it as a tattoo. I do have a Gilmore Girls-themed tattoo, but it’s not a quote. I will share what it is someday soon! Do you have a Gilmore Girls-themed tattoo?
Happy Cooking!
If you missed what I made last week, catch up here!
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