Week 14 - Food in Disguise

It's been some time since we've posted anything, and a big part of that is probably because I've been doing hours and hours of uploading and organizing our photo collection in preparation for Google killing off Picasa. But while that is preserving some of our memories in some fashion, not writing is probably causing others to fade. So, since it's a new month, it's time to get back to writing again. We've got lots of catching up to do.

While I enjoy looking for ideas for the 52 week cooking challenge, some of the weeks I have the hardest time with are the creative concepts. The Week 14 challenge (for April fools week) was food in disguise, making food look like something else other than what it is. I had no clue what to do, but luckily A is pretty good with these creative weeks. His idea was to make a cake out of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Sounded good to me!

I really liked the meatloaf I made back in the Week 24 challenge in 2014, so I made that again for this challenge. It helped that it was glazed in ketchup, so it was like a layer of red cake. For the mashed potatoes, I just made pretty standard mashed potatoes with butter and milk and added in some chives. Instead of sprinkles on top of the cake, I went with chopped up chives. To build the cake, I cut a slice of meatloaf in half and put a layer of potatoes between the halves, and then also potato frosting on top, topped off with the chives.

I don't know why I envisioned a layer cake for this challenge the entire time instead of a single cake layer "frosted" with mashed potatoes. I just thought I could make us "slices" of layer cake. I probably needed to build the meatloaf into a bit of a taller loaf to make it really look like a cake slice, but it sort of worked. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes are always a good match, so as far as taste, this was a great dinner. The meatloaf was just as good as last time. Definitely our favorite meatloaf recipe at the moment.

Apparently A's idea to combine meatloaf and mashed potatoes was pretty popular for that challenge week as it turned up in a lot of people's dishes. Most people however made meatloaf cupcakes frosted with mashed potatoes, which I thought of but thought sounded a little too similar to the stuffins I made last year. I wish the cake had come out a little more looking like a giant cake slice, but since the components themselves tasted good and I care more about that than their appearance, it was still a very satisfying dinner.