Did anyone know that there was a Latin American festival going on downtown this weekend? I didn’t. Coincidentally though, I had tacos last night for dinner and am making enchiladas tonight.

I’ve never made enchiladas before that didn’t involve a pre-blended packet of McCormick seasoning (y’know the kind where you just add water and simmer, and sauce magically happens)… but seeing as how enchiladas are like one of my top 10 favorite foods, I figure I should learn a from-scratch sauce recipe sooner or later. I picked up a recipe from allrecipes.com that seems promising… I’m going to test it tonight for dinner and then maybe start tweaking.

Also, the quest for the perfect flan continues. Emeril’s recipe involved 2 tablespoons of Kahlua, and that flan was pretty damn good. Last iteration I swapped that for 2 tbsp of Frangelico, because I loves me some hazelnut. That was even more awesome. Tonight I think I may go with Bacardi O, because (a) rum rocks and (b) orange rum rocks harder. (Why is the rum always gone?)

I like making flan. It’s almost as easy as making meringue cookies.

In other news, I have two cakes to do this week: one for Friday, and one for Sunday. The Friday (Thursday night’s work) cake will be layers of german chocolate and strawberry cake, provided I can find a good working recipe for strawberry cake. If not, then it’ll be straight german chocolate with hazelnut buttercream. I hope. Sunday (really Saturday night) will be actually banana bread cooked in a cake pan. And hoping my knifework is good enough to cobble together a piano shape from two big squares of banana bread. Then the whole thing’s getting drowned in chocolate ganache. And since I almost always make too much icing, I can probably use some of the buttercream to pipe on keys and some writing on the body of the piano itself. At least, that’s the plan so far.

Also for Saturday night will be a tray of my most awesome salmon hors deuvres. And maybe some stuffed mushrooms. And I’d really like to do a brie and apples platter too, but with how fast apple oxidizes I’d really be saving that for Sunday morning.

… Now if only I was getting paid for any of this. Sigh.

Random last thing (promise.): There’s a new Food Network show called Ace of Cakes and it’s AWESOME. Man, I would love to be a cake decorator for a living.
But that’s neither here nor there.

… and that’s all I got. Man, I’m hungry.