Friday, June 24, 2011

If I had my little way I'd eat peaches everyday/Sun soakin' bulges in the shade - Peach summer cake

I'm kind of a dolt. I bought some ripe peaches yesterday and wanted to make a cake or a cobbler or something with them but I could decide what. I did a bunch of web searches and finally settled on a recipe I found on Chowhound (a site that I generally dislike, but I'll get to that in a minute), here. I made the batter, added the fruit, washed the dishes, baked the cake and took it out of the oven. It wasn't until I was walking out of the kitchen after it was done that it dawned on me I had made the EXACT same recipe as the summer strawberry cake. I mean exactly. Both of them even said they were adapted from a Martha Stewart recipe. D'oh! I must say that the Smitten Kitchen blog made the recipe seem more prissy and fussy than it really is which is possibly why I didn't recognize it as the same on Chowhound immediately. Regardless of the source of the recipe (and I firmly expect to someday stumble across the original Martha recipe and not recognize it yet again), I think I will like the peach version better.
As for Chowhound, I really don't know that much about it, except that the recipes I've stumbled across are always in (or linked in) the forum boards portion of the website. I'm not sure that there are recipes elsewhere or not. The forums are full of chatty discourse among people who clearly spend a LOT of time there with one another. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, but it reminds me of nothing less than the blathering on adult sex chat sites. (If you have read back in the archives of this blog, you might know that I once spent a fair amount of time on one of those. Take my word for it, there's a lot less sex being chatted than you might imagine.) I suppose that all internet forums about anything eventually descend into the morass of a couple queen bees and king rats holding court with their minions kissing their asses at every opportunity. And you can guess that I want nothing to do with that nonsense. I get the same squicky feeling when I happen upon one of the myriad crafty/cooky/decoratory blogs run by a housewife with 2+ adorable children and hundreds of followers (and no less than five badges proclaiming them part of this or that network or best of the ladyblogs or 'click here to kiss my ass') who exclaim that every word the blogger has written is pure manna from the gods. "Oh my GOD, your cupcakes with multicolored spinkles are the CUTEST THINGS I HAVE EVER SEEN! You are so inspiring!" Oh, fuck me.

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