Solar Chicken and Cupcakes

I don't know how it happened, but I totally forgot to update my blog yesterday. I baked the cupcakes, took the pictures, even thought about what I was going to say, but after a night out I went straight to bed because I had to get up early this morning.

Yesterday was a pretty non eventful day solar cooking-wise. I had planned on making chicken, but then I remembered we wouldn't be home for dinner, so I baked vanilla cupcakes - from a mix - instead. I spent most of the morning debating whether to go to the store for some apple sauce or just go ahead and use the full stick of butter the directions on the box called for. I finally decided to go with the butter. While it was melting in the Sun Oven I got the brilliant idea to substitute half the butter with a mashed banana, which I had on hand. The next step was to determine how many cupcakes the mix would yield. As a cake it was supposed to come out to nine servings, so I figured twelve cupcakes would be plenty. I was wrong. As you can see from the picture I had to get a little creative, using custard cups for the excess batter, and even then the muffin tins were overfilled. Hopefully the next time I use the mix - it's from Trader Joe's and it's pretty good - I'll remember that I can get twelve cupcakes out of it. I like to make cupcakes because they freeze well. Not that polishing of an entire cake would be a problem for the two of us.

I'm actually pretty proud of today's solar cooking project. Not because it's a complicated recipe, but because it took a little planing. I had to go out early today, leaving Martin in charge of setting up the Sun Oven. So I did most of the work yesterday. I took four chicken thighs, trimmed the excess fat, put some garlic and rosemary under the skin, rubbed them with some salt and pepper, covered them with some lemon slices and refrigerated them overnight. Martin put them in the Sun Oven in the afternoon and when I got home I made a nice risotto to go with them. And although the risotto was not solar cooked it is worth mentioning that it was made with zucchini flowers from our garden.