ice cream cake

birthday cakes need to be special, ya'll. it's a requirement in the world of birthdays and it's doubly important when you're celebrating your birthday in Mongolia.

in the week that was Hol's birthday celebration, we had a lot of cake. Kind of a ridiculous amount in fact. But this was my favorite one to make (and I didn't make all of them, thank goodness).

I tried to keep it a secret, but I'm not a good secret keeper and Hol is a very good secret guesser. So with a combination like that, she had it figured out pretty early on that I was making an ice cream cake.

It was my first attempt at an ice cream cake, so I was a bit nervous. Thankfully it was actually super easy- I made a basic vanilla cake, sliced it and put ice cream in between the layers. Then I frosted it with chocolate icing and added crumbled cookies on top. I was originally going to put cookie in between the layers as well, but it didn't end up happening as I had already frozen the cake again.

The end result? Not quite DQ, but a good summer birthday cake if I do say so myself.

homemade granola

I've been intimidated at the idea of making granola for years- opting to buy it instead of make it. For whatever reason I was convinced that it would be complicated, hard or something that I would inevitably mess up.

In Mongolia the only place that attitude gets you is missing favorite foods that you can't buy here.

Enter an easy stovetop granola recipe from AllRecipes and my determination to try it.

It took all of maybe 15 minutes and turned out way better than I had hoped. I doubled the recipe and added an extra tablespoon of honey or two...and it was incredibly easy to make.



I added cashews and raisins (no almonds or dried cranberries in these parts- not unless I want to pay an arm and a leg) and then enjoyed some with milk and then took the rest with me to Khonghor for our ger building festivities. My friends here had no idea what it was but they loved it just the same :-)

concoctions

My parents love chili. Growing up they'd frequently make a big pot of it for dinner and I'd make some alternate meal for myself. I didn't like beans, had never liked beans and so chili was not my meal of choice.

Then I moved to Texas, the land of Tex-Mex and black beans and I discovered that I do actually really like black beans. Which led to me discovering a recipe for vegetarian black bean and corn chili and falling in love with chili for the first time.

Black bean love led to liking other beans and now chili is one of my favorite recipes to experiment with. There aren't a lot of beans available here in Mongolia, but you can get cans of kidney beans and tomato sauce.

So when I was craving chili a few weeks ago, I took what was in our pantry/fridge and created perhaps one of the strangest versions of chili yet:

The original recipe calls for no beans, lots of beef, crushed tomatoes and red wine vinegar.

I used a can of kidney beans, a bunch of leftover lentils, a can of stewed tomatoes, a little bit of leftover ground beef, onions, garlic and balsamic vinaigrette instead of vinegar (we didn't have any).


It was admittedly a pretty bizarre combination and not particularly chili-like, but it ended up being exactly what my veggie-loving self was craving.

swirls

vanilla cake waiting for its swirly partner

adding the chocolate batter

all of the swirled deliciousness

there were some sprinkles and frosting eventually as well, but I didn't get a picture before the Naadam eating frenzy began:-)

this recipe is pretty basic, but Hol made an incredible version of marble cake a few weeks ago that included brown sugar cinnamon almond crumble topping. Best cake I've ever, ever eaten.

churros

Churros in all of their cinnamon goodness.

The recipe calls for a fancy piping thing and long thin churros, but this is Mongolia and we make do with what we have. Which means circular churros that went perfectly with our Mexican themed June birthday dinner.

Posting these pictures (way over a month after the fact) makes me want to make some more as soon as possible.

Cinnamon, sugar and fried dough. Yes, please.