DIY Oatmeal Bath

Hello, everyone! It has been some time since my last post, mainly because I really haven’t had the energy or desire to cook much of anything, much less document and share. But the good news is that I’m near the end of pregnancy (28 days to go, according to the countdown widget on my phone!) and cooking may regain prominence. But then again, new moms aren’t known for having time or energy, either, so maybe not for a while.

That being said, I’m officially on maternity leave as of today. This means that you may get some more frequent posts out of me in the near future. I’m not doing any cooking to speak of, especially since I’m on modified bed rest, but I have plenty of pictures waiting to be posted about, so you may get lucky.

For me, one of the distinguishing features of being this late in the third trimester has been itching. It seems that no matter how much lotion I slather on and no matter how often, I still find myself itchy all over. I’ve taken to wearing hubby’s t-shirts and sweatshirts when I can because the restrictiveness of my own clothes seems to make it worse, especially since the temperature outside dropped and the heat came on.

Enter the oatmeal bath.

I read online that oatmeal baths are a great way to soothe itchiness that lotion doesn’t really take care of. I initially picked out an Aveeno product on Amazon, but then I rethought it based on the price. Next, I found myself googling homemade versions, and it turns out that they’re all over the internet. Even better, almost all of them seemed simple enough that a girl on modified bed rest could make them.

Of the recipes I looked at, one of my favorites was in this post by Alejandra on her blog, Always Order Dessert. I decided to copy it. I modified it a little bit, though.

First, start out by grinding up 4 cups of old fashioned oats. Most recipes specifically said to avoid quick or instant oats. Since my food processor is small, I ground up a cup at a time.

I dumped all of the ground oats into a big plastic container.

Next, measure out a cup of baking soda. According to Alejandra, this just acts as a natural, delicate cleanser in place of soap.

I just dumped it in my container with the ground oatmeal. If I had a bigger food processor, I would have mixed them together with that, but I settled for mixing by hand with a spoon.

But first, I added another ingredient. In the comments, someone had sworn by adding powdered milk to baths to increase their luxuriousness. So I did the same! I just added a full cup of it.

Here’s everything together!

Now, Alejandra had suggested adding dried lavender buds (also ground up). I couldn’t find any at the store, though I can’t say I tried too hard because I just wanted to be in and out. Regardless, I found lavender essential oil and decided to use that in conjunction with the oatmeal mixture.

I didn’t put the lavender essential oils in the container with the oatmeal mixture because I figured it’d clump. Maybe if I had a bigger food processor and could have spent some time getting it to distribute evenly, but I don’t. So I put a few drops straight into the warm bathwater. Not hot, because hot water dries out your skin (increasing itchiness), plus it’s not good for pregnant ladies, anyway.

And then I added a cupful of my oatmeal mixture.

Then I stopped taking pictures. Sorry.

First observation:

The lavender smells like heaven. I’ve always loved that scent.

Second observation:

The oatmeal, when first added to the water, looked a tiny bit like vomit. Then it dissolved, making the water milky and creamy.

Third observation:

MY SKIN IS SO SOFT!

It made for a really pleasant, luxurious bath. Really. I just soaked in it for 30 minutes, and the only thing that could have really made it better is if my bathtub was big enough for me actually submerge my big belly in it. And if I’d dimmed the lights and lit a bunch of candles. And added music. But I did read a book on my kindle and that was nice.

Final thought:

I didn’t grind the oatmeal as finely as I thought I had. Some of the courser bits ended up on the bottom of the bathtub, but they were easy to wipe up with a paper towel after I drained the water. Regardless, I’ll probably regrind everything before the next bath.

So, anyone who has been having any itchiness issues or just wants to paper themselves without spending much money, I recommend giving this a shot.

100th Post: Rich Chocolate Cake

Here it is: my one hundredth post! Hard to believe that I’ve found so many things in my kitchen to blog about over the last year, but I’ve got to say that I don’t know if I would have made it this far if it weren’t for all the positive feedback that I've received. Thank you, readers!

So here we are. One hundred posts. I thought I’d celebrate it with a cake.

Okay, honestly, the cake was really for a coworker’s birthday, but the timing worked out pretty well. Cake it is.

I’ve made this cake twice before. The first time, I was living in my little Pennsylvania apartment. My closest group of friends were the other psych/ animal behavior grad students, and of the 6 of us, 3 had April birthdays. We decided to have one dinner to celebrate. The second was hubby’s birthday, several years later, during our first year of living together.

I’m pretty sure that I had only made two layers both of these times, pouring the batter into two round cake pans, and I can’t quite remember why. This time around, I planned to do three layers, as the recipe calls for. Even better, I found this nonstick cake pan in my cupboards, leftover from the people who own this place and moved out in a hurry, so I could count on at least one layer coming out nicely.

A sure sign that I’ve had this recipe a long time is having actually handwritten the recipe on a piece of paper, even though it is readily available on allrecipes.com. This was before the days of smart phones/ tablet computers! Also apparently before the days when I could afford ink for my printer.

Start off with some flour. Add baking soda, baking powder, and salt, and set it aside.

Here’s where the “rich chocolate” part of the title comes in: a whole cup of unsweetened baking cocoa.

And pour two cups of boiling water into it.

Whisk it until it’s smooth and let it cool completely.

If you’re impatient like me, pull some of those frozen lunch box blocks out of the freezer and use them to speed the process up a little bit.

Hokay, time for the next part. Cream together butter and sugar, as so many other recipes also begin with.

Then beat in four eggs, one at a time, beating after each one.

And mix until well-blended. Add some vanilla.

Then alternate between the flour mixture and the chocolate mixture, adding both in small increments.

Until it looks like this!

Pour it into your three cake pans. I’ve seen people tap the pans on the counter to get the air bubbles out. I don’t know if that’s necessary or not, but I did it.

And then bake at 350 degrees. Piece of cake.

I let them cool on wire racks for about 10 minutes to give them a chance to set.

And then I used a scraper and gravity to turn them all out to finish cooling. Luckily, no major catastrophes. I had greased those pans pretty thoroughly.

Pretty!

After they cooled entirely, I whipped up a tiramisu filling simply because we had marscapone cheese in the fridge and I had no idea what else to do with it. Thanks, google. Used my really ugly yellow bowl because I wasn’t thinking of how ugly it would make the filling look in pictures.

And then I made some regular frosting with confectioner’s sugar, butter, vanilla, milk, and cocoa powder.

I just let the mixer go on and on and on, since I discovered while making Christmas cookies that a little extra time of whipping frosting makes a big difference.

Okay, time to start assembling.

Step one: slather half of the tiramisu filling all over one of the cakes. The cake had cooled entirely by this point, but it was still soft and crumbly, so this actually took me a really long time. I really wanted to avoid having crumbs in the frosting and filling, so I was trying really hard to be gentle.

Plop on your next layer, then realize that your cakes are uneven. Perhaps from batter shifting as I put them in the oven?

In retrospect, I could have gotten creative with a large serrated knife to even them out, but I didn’t think of that until afterward, so here I am committing to a lopsided cake by putting on the rest of the tiramisu filling.

Put that third layer on and giggled a little bit. I put all three layers on bottom-up, but that didn’t really fix the problem of them rising in the center, did it? Definitely should have used a large knife. Oops.

And then I started in with the frosting. Again, the cake was super delicate so this was a long process. I started with the top layer and worked my way down, filling in cracks between layers as I went.

Not too bad. Right? Don’t laugh at me.

Okay, story time.

That first time I made this cake, I made it the day before our dinner gathering at my apartment. I wanted to cover it, but I wasn’t sure how. I had plastic wrap, but of course I knew that that would be pretty messy when it came time to remove the plastic. Toothpicks would have been a great idea to hold the plastic up off the frosting, but what grad student living on a stipend has toothpicks in her cupboard? Not me. Then a flash of (what seemed at the time to be) brilliance hit: Uncooked spaghetti looks an awful lot like toothpicks. It felt silly to be sticking spaghetti in my cake, but I didn’t have any better ideas. I figured I could just pull the pieces back out when I was ready to serve. I didn’t count on the fact that the moisture of the cake would soften the spaghetti pieces, leading them to break off. I didn’t even realize it until I was actually eating the cake with my friends, when I found a piece of uncooked spaghetti in my piece. I laughed and owned up to it, which turned out to be a good thing, because one friend looked really relieved as he said, “Oh, that explains it. I was afraid to ask.”

This time around, I had purchased a plastic cake platter with a cover, and this was way better.

And then I brought it to work. I was tempted to steal a piece first just so I could get a nice picture of it, but I settled for waiting for my coworker with the birthday to discover the cake whole. I ended up using my phone to take a picture of a slice served on a fancy-dancy paper plate afterward. This is how I roll.

It was pretty yummy, not gonna lie.

Oh goodness, will I have to do this for every coworker’s birthday now?