Things I'm not good at, part 1 section 1: Baking. Case in point, for Adia's birthday she asked for a carrot cake. I hadn't really thought this through, but I thought "we have carrots, eggs, flour, etc". I looked up a recipe online, and came across several issues. I realized recently that'd stopped consuming eggs in our apartment, I enjoy eggs every once in a while but if I were to make a list of things I am OK but not great at, cooking eggs would be one of them. For a while Adia had eggs every day with her breakfast, but this has teetered off, so this carton of eggs had been sitting in our fridge since October and had past it's sell by date sometime in that month. Earlier this month though when we went grocery shopping, I knew I would be making crab cakes, a recipe that involves eggs, so even though it's less economical I bought a half dozen pack of eggs (this is starting to sound awfully long winded bear with me). A few days before the carrot cake incident, we were sort of celebrating early, so I thought I'd try making merengues again, which I had attempted several months ago to mixed results (I didn't really bake them long enough, or properly integrate the sugar into the egg whites, or something, they kind of collapsed). This time it did go better, so I guess I'm not awful at baking. I can separate egg whites, beat them to stiff peaks, add sugar and vanilla and sort of bake them in 250 degree oven. And they came out OK!
When it comes to baking, I have problems with patience. With the previous merengue attempt, and also with the more recent one, I probably should have let them bake a little longer. In general in the past when not baking from a box, I tend to get impatient and pull things out before they are done (this was not the case with the carrot cake we'll get to that later). I guess I was impatient with the carrot cake incident, in that I looked up a recipe, and it required 4 eggs of which I had 3. Mistake number one. This is the reason for the long egg related preamble. If I'd realized I'd be making crab cakes, meringues, and baking a cake, I'd have bought the dozen fucking eggs. CEST LA VIE! Rather then I don't know, cutting the recipe in half or something I just soldiered on with 3 eggs instead of 4. Another issue, like many cake recipes, it called for baking soda and baking powder. We had baking powder, but no baking soda. I looked up how to switch out one for the other, and a guy said if you just want to use baking powder, just put in a shit load of it, more or less (his ratio was 1:3 baking soda/baking powder). This maybe would have worked better if I was just subbing the baking soda, but I used the amount of baking powder called for and then a shit load more of it on top of that. Also, rather than use regular sugar I used confectioners sugar because I have his confectioners sugar from when I made merengues and I can't put that shit in coffee or whatever so I wanted to use it up. I think this is doable, but it requires another conversion since confectioners sugar is much less dense then regular sugar and has less sweetening power per capita. Then again who likes super sweet deserts anyway? So I do all this, dump in the two tea spoons of cinnamon, mix it all up, oh and add the carrot which I chopped up in the food processor because who owns a grater? Yeesh.
My other mistake probably was not really knowing my oven. The recipe called for it to be at 350 degrees for like an hour, so I did that. At a certain point it started to smell really good like maybe it was done, I don't know, but I was trying to curtail my usual impatience and not open the oven letting all the heat out, and just wait the allotted time. At the end of which... my cake was burned. The middle collapsed. The resulting product... tasted like feces. Seriously it was inedible. And to top it off, before I even took it out my girl friend asked about frosting, wasn't I going to make frosting? Having no eggs or whipping cream or any of those things, but having butter and confectioners sugar I figured I could improvise a butter cream, how hard could that be? Butter and sugar, right? Well the butter should really be room temperature, mine was not it was cold. A recipe I briefly considered said something about adding milk so I added some milk and let's just my attempts to whip it together with my powered hand whisk thing were a fiasco...
I don't know I had to write this blog post. I guess I thought my adventures in baking were entertaining and blog worthy. Hopefully the result speaks for it self, because I'm not doing any editing on it. It's also fun to catalog our failures, so we can look back when we've surpassed them. Someday I may try again baking carrot cake from scratch, or any kind of cake, and hopefully what I've learned will make more successful.
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