Hummingbird Cake

Since I am beginning to feel human again, I decided today would be a good day for my next installment of Cooking the Books. I decided that this time I was going to make a Southern classic - Hummingbird cake.
This cake was mentioned in The Caster Chronicles, and The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen. Allen is, like me, from North Carolina and sets all of her books here. They are fun, quick reads, and all figure food prominently. She has all of the recipes from her books available on her website. I had planned to use her cake recipe, but since I am still feeling puny, I went with the Cake Mix Doctor's recipe instead.
Most of the recipes I looked at called for pecans, this one did not, so I added them to the cream cheese frosting. It made it a little hard to get on the cake, but the texture is great, so I don't care that it got a little ugly.
Overall, it is a good cake, and I might make it again, next time I have a potluck to go to.

Cooking the Books

No, this isn't about some hinky accounting, it's about actual cooking.
I like to cook. A lot. I also like to read. A lot. I have found that a lot of authors of fiction make references to food in their books.
Three years ago I saw Julie and Julia. While I didn't love the movie, I did love the idea of a year long cooking project. After several weeks of planning and plotting and research, I launched the Global Cook-Along Project. I and some friends on Livejournal and Facebook spent a full year exploring the globe from our kitchens.  With the exception of a month I missed due to major surgery, it went really well. It's been almost two years since the project ended and there are dishes from that project that are still on my family's monthly rotation.
Recently I have been reading Kami Garcia's Caster Chronicles.

Throughout the first book, there is a lot of mention of food and its importance to the small South Carolina town that is the book's setting. Buttermilk pie is the pride and joy of Gatlin, SC - I had never heard of buttermilk pie, so I started doing some looking around online and the recipe looked pretty easy. I had all of the ingredients on hand, so today, the Cooking the Books project was born!

I used the recipe at Allrecipes.com - you can check it out here. It was super easy and the prep took no time at all. Now when it comes to desserts and the great Cake VS Pie debate, I am firmly in the cake camp. I don't even need frosting - it's all about the cake. I like the component parts of pie just fine. I love a nice, flaky pie crust; and fruit is perfectly tasty. There's just something about the texture of pie - especially a custard pie. Mama's not down with soggy food, you know?
That piece of pie you see in the photo there? It sacrificed itself for my taste test. It was both photogenic and delicious.