Tangy Lemon Cake and a little of this & that...

Tangy Lemon Cake with Glaze
(adapted from Honeyville's recipe)
1 & 1/2c fine almond flour
1tsp baking powder
1/8tsp pink salt
lemon zest of 1 lemon
2tsp lemon juice
1/2c butter, softened
4oz cream cheese
1c xylitol
5 eggs
1tsp homemade vanilla extract  
Glaze
4T butter, softened
juice of 1 lemon
1 & 1/2c powdered xylitol
1tsp cornstarch

Heat oven to 350. Mix almond flour and baking soda and salt in a bowl, set aside. Zest (I did this onto a small plate), then juice lemon (squeezed into a bowl and hand picked out the seeds) and set them aside. In another bowl, beat butter and cream cheese with xylitol. Once mixed, add eggs and extract and beat until blended. Then add in the almond flour mixture, beat, add in zest and 2tsp of juice, beat. Pour into a greased 9"pan (I used a springform pan). Bake 35mns, test for doneness, adding more time as needed. 

According to their site you should be able to make a soft frosting with the remaining lemon juice, butter and powdered xylitol. Mine did not come together. Maybe because it was xylitol rather than sugar? I don't know. But whatever the reason, I ended up adding 1tsp of cornstarch and heating this to a simmer on the stovetop until the xylitol was dissolved and it thickened slightly, maybe five minutes total. I think you could easily use a little xanthan if avoiding cornstarch. But this is an acceptable amount to me and gave a result that I expected. I set it aside to cool, alongside the cake that was cooling. Once the glaze was just barely warm, I spread it onto the cake, making sure to let plenty slide and soak along the edge - and still had about a 1/4c leftover which I refrigerated for later use. You could halve the glaze recipe and still end up with plenty enough to give an extra bit of zip and gooey-ness. 

What have you been eating recently? The first pic is of a Strawberry Pretzel Salad (no, I don't think it's really a salad, either) that I made-over by switching out strawberries with raspberries, using sugar-free jello and replacing the sugar in the cream cheese layer with xylitol and stevia. I know I should have gone further by making a nut crust. But the whole reason I made this was to use up the few pretzels left hanging around from Christmas. Do a quick internet search for Strawberry Pretzel Salad and you can create it however you would like.

The second pic is a recipe from Better Homes & Gardens. I tried to find a link on their site, but it wasn't being very user friendly for me. It's called Soy-Ginger Pot Roast and is from the March 2014 issue. It was great, though I would add more ginger next time, or go with a smaller roast than what I did - mine was huge.

Cleaning tip - Frugal recipe:
I'd come across someone's comment on another blog about how she made up a batch of homemade stain-remover. While she did not include a recipe in her post, a quick internet search yielded a simple recipe. It is simply 1 part original, blue Dawn dish soap to 2 parts hydrogen peroxide. I made up a small dish using 2T Dawn and 4T hydrogen peroxide, giving it a gentle stir to mix. I then used a small spoon to ladle it onto large stains and dribble it onto small ones. I also used an old toothbrush to give a quick scrub... to my scrub tops. (I tried it on an old one first that was going to be thrown out anyhow due to a torn snap to make sure no fading or "bleaching" would occur.) Let me tell you, it was getting downright embarrassing to wear my grease splattered scrubs to work. I've tried store-bought stain removers and I've tried various soakings already - to no avail. Unbelievably, as simple a recipe as this was, it worked. I was able to save a couple of my sweatjackets from the rag heap, too. Sadly, it did not work on the little blop of hair dye on the sweatjacket.

Pics above show the grease stain in the first pic and the "after" photo. I apparently forgot the flash for the second photo, but the grease stain was completely gone. Yay!

 These two, above, show various grease spatters. Pics below show them gone. Woot, woot!