lunch on the green

There is a huge patch of grass next to our building at work. It's usually taken over by flocks of geese and a family of groundhogs (I think that's what they are), but lately it has been used for games of cricket and lunchtime escapes from the office. I figured the office would be pretty empty on the Friday before a long weekend so I organized a last-minute lunch on the green outing with some of my coworkers. I brought a couple of picnic type blankets to spread out on the grass for us but alas, there was a perfectly good [empty] table waiting for us when we got outside. So we decided to hang out there instead, plus it was better for the two cakes.

Photo taken by my coworker, Tom. Yes, that's the Cambridge jail behind us.

Two cakes? Yes. Two.

My coworker (and extremely talented baker), Jeff, and I had a conversation about cake suggestions earlier this week for a party he was supposed to go to on Friday. I described (and later gave him the recipe for) a cake idea I saw in the Rachael Ray magazine where this woman baked a cake in a jelly roll pan so that it was an extremely thin cake and only took about 15 minutes in the oven. Then she cut it up into rectangles and stacked them with frosting in between. So Jeff went all out and created a beautiful and tall cake made with layers of vanilla and chocolate cake, and iced with a decadent mocha chocolate frosting. The only problem was that the party was cancelled. Errr, not so much a problem for me and my coworkers because we got to enjoy his wonderful creation.

I went ahead and made a cake similar to the one I found the recipe to (read more about it here) but I was thrown off by how she only called for 1/2 a cup of flour so I decided to use my trustworthy How to Cook Everything cookbook by Mark Bittman instead. I used the cream cheese and lemon curd recipe from the article though, and I think it turned out fantastic.

What a fun way to spend a lunch break at work with some of my favorite coworkers. :)