the fish

Dad picked up 5 filets of tilapia fish from Whole Foods, and was thinking about making parchment paper fish with lemons. I told him that it works very well with halibut, but tilapia cooks extremely fast…and I wanted something sweet and spicy. He did some googling and we eventually landed on a quick and simple recipe.

For 5-6 filets (rinsed in cold water and patted semi-dry), just mix 1 c (minus 1 Tbs) of brown sugar, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, 1 tsp cumin, 2 pinches of salt and 2 pinches of garlic powder. Coat filets with it, put into a buttered dish (greased, to be precise) and bake at 375º F for 12-15 minutes or until it falls apart easily when a fork tries to pry a filet apart (should be white inside).

the chicken

Chicken is so awesome. My mom saw Tyler Florence cook this recipe on tv while she was at the gym and decided to make it. It turned out very good, but she should have let the crust sit on the chicken for 40 minutes before she baked it so the crust stayed on tighter. We also didn’t have enough panko, so we mixed whatever we had left with some crushed crackers.

the cake

This cake was pretty rockstar. If you remember the brand of cake flour I used for the angel food cake, on the back of the box was a recipe for ‘Moist Chocolate Cake’. *We made 1/2 the recommended recipe because we wanted to see how it would turn out…and we wanted a thinner cake since we were doing an upside-down twist. Below are the measurements we used (aside from the upsidedown-ness, you could double all the measurements for a normal chocolate cake):