Stuology » baking

Let them eat cake!

Mellystu — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:37:23 +0000

What have I cooked? Um…homemade pizza. I did make the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Thai butternut squash soup. I have also decided that I need to base all my meals on things that I have to clear out some groceries. I have a lot of pasta and tomato sauce. I also used one meal to take out some leftovers from the freezer. I thought it was my chicken taco meat, but it turned out the be BBQ pork. I use bowls to freeze in, and I don’t want to keep writing on them. Perhaps I should get some dry erase labels for my freezer bowls. I’m busy learning Ruby, so easy meals are a plus, and unless I get twitchy to make something new, easy meals utilizing mostly things I have on hand are on the menu. You probably won’t see me post about any new food. Except for the blabbering I’m about to post…now!

My biggest cooking feat was making an Irish Car Bomb cake. You may take offense at the name, but it is the name of the drink on which the cake is based. I made it as a birthday cake for a friend. I made two of these cakes, one for practice and one for the birthday. These are my discoveries so far:

The chocolate you use in the cake is important. Yes, that should always be the case. It isn’t always the case for some people, so I’m going to stress it. Don’t you even dare reach for the Hershey’s if you are making this cake. I used Ghirardelli for the first round. It was not good enough. The second time around, I used Lindt with a 72% cocoa content. I didn’t have any Valrhona on hand, and the local store stopped selling Valrhona, so it is now an item I have to order or find in Kansas City. If I had it, I would have used that. I plan on getting some for later experiments.
If you eat the cake the same day as you make it, you don’t really taste the Guinness. It does enhance the flavor of the cake in an good interesting way. You just wouldn’t know it was a stout that was doing it. However, if you eat the cake the next day, you taste the Guinness. It is also just as yummy, and if you are going for Car Bomb flavor, make the cake the day before.
The cream part of the buttercream frosting is provided by Baileys. It is wonderful. I’m not a big frosting person. I find that sweet overpowers flavor, however adding the Baileys made it hard to quit tasting my work. When I make something that involves butter as a primary and important ingredient, I use good butter. For this frosting, I pulled out the Plugrá. The big thing for the frosting is that you don’t taste the Baileys as much on the second day. Making the frosting should be held off until right before you plan to serve the cake.
The ganache that glued the two cakes together featured Jameson. I ran out of chocolate for this, and sent Mac to the store for more only to find they didn’t have enough for me either. I was going to use the same chocolate featured in the cake, but I had to mix. This featured both Lindt and Godiva. Next time, it will be the same. I will plan better. I didn’t taste the Jameson in the ganache, even after adding more than what was called for. Some recipes use Baileys here as well. It may be better taste-wise. It may not matter at all. This is still in experimental stage.
Back to the cake recipe: I’m convinced that the cake recipe that I had was for cupcakes. I made some cupcakes with the batter to keep the size of the 9-inch cakes down a little. The cupcakes cooked perfectly. The cake didn’t. The first time, it sunk in the middle a tad. When I doubled the recipe, it sunk in the middle a lot. This happened in the oven as it was cooking. My first thought is the cause is the vast amount of liquid in the cake provided by the stout. When you cook it in cupcake form, it cooks fast enough to not sink. If you transfer that to a 9-inch pan, it doesn’t, and the outside is done before the inside, thus the heavy inside sinks. I filled in those craters with frosting and ganache, so the final look of the cake wasn’t bad. My other thought is that there is too much baking soda. I did some searching online and while most recipes were pretty much the same as I had, there was one that had 1 tsp less baking soda. If you double that, I would have used 2 tsp less. In the baking world, that is a lot. This is something I’m determined to figure out.
One last cake note: This is a dense cake. It wasn’t one of those light and fluffy layer cakes. I don’t think this can be helped because of the liquid. Reading up on stout cakes, that seems to be the case. If people like layer cakes light and fluffy, this isn’t for you. However, if I have to cut down the liquid to stop the cake from sinking, then that will probably lighten the cake up a bit as well.

I’m going to perfect this cake, however, I do think that Car Bomb cupcakes would be, well, the bomb. Really freakin’ good. And you can keep the cake part of the recipe as is. I’d still make it the day before. Do a Google search for them. I think everyone and their dog has made it and posted the recipe–with good reason. Yummy!

Uh-huh

Mellystu — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:11:49 +0000

I just read this quote: “Baking bread at home saves hundreds of dollars on groceries every year. ”

Here are the current containers taking up space on the baking countertop: AP, bread (or high gluten, depending on which I find), whole wheat, rye, spelt, semolina, durum, masa, flax meal, wheat germ, dry milk, hi-maize, vital wheat gluten, and one to hold a premade pasta mix (AP, semolina & durum). And sugar. Oatmeal is in the pantry, but rolled oats are another frequent ingredient I use. Before I started making bread, my baking counter consisted of AP and whole wheat. And sugar.

Maybe it saves hundreds of dollars if you have a bread machine and just make soggy crust loaves from AP. It does save hundreds of dollars over buying bread at Wheatfields.

And guess what I didn’t do last night or this morning! Wash my hair! That’s right! I sprayed on the dry shampoo this morning, got dressed and then brushed it out.

I cooked my first boule from my sourdough starter. Using a starter really isn’t more time consuming than using instant yeast. It just requires more planning because making the bread takes more than 1 day. Most of that is sitting. Feeding your starter takes little time. And once it is in the fridge, you just need to tend to it once a week. I hope that I can keep this starter going for a long time.

I want to try a bite now. Waiting until tomorrow seems cruel. And I have wine. What goes better with bread than that^*?

*I’m sure M will pop in with his opinion on that. And a valid answer would be “butter.”

On Ada and hats and baking

Mellystu — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 03:15:42 +0000

Ada’s speech is developing a great deal since she started Raintree. She is speaking bigger sentences, and more of it is understandable. Tonight while playing Lego Batman she said, “Don’t go that way. I fall down.” Mac also found the container that had the hats and gloves. She grabbed one of mine and said, “That’s a nice glove. I put it on.” She is also starting to refer to herself in the first person instead of always in the third person. She is now trying on all kinds of hats and gloves. She just now tried on one of my hats and said, “Oh no, that’s too big.”

I think that I need a new matching hat and gloves. Ada needs a new hat too. Her last year one doesn’t fit her head and a hood isn’t enough to keep her ears warm. They go outside at 8:30am almost everyday at Raintree, their motto being that there isn’t inappropriate weather but only inappropriately dressed children. I have the snowpants and the insulated mittens for her, but no hat. Tomorrow may be a hat shopping day.

I made cinnamon rolls today for our chili tonight. One pan of cinnamon rolls is too much for one meal for us, so tomorrow’s breakfast will also be cinnamon rolls. The bucket worked great–both for proofing and as noisy entertainment for the kids.

Tomorrow I may make some sandwich loaves. We are out, but instead of buying more bread, I bought a big jar of yeast. I’m also thinking about getting a couple of containers to store different types of flour.

I still haven’t made my meal list for this coming week, except for the chili tonight. I need to do that tonight or tomorrow morning.

Day 176: Weed or Not Weed?

Mellystu — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:36:16 +0000

Day 176: Weed or Not Weed?

Look! I did a photo for today!

I’m hoping that someone can tell me what this is. It has overtaken my planter in my front yard. I noticed it sprouting up after the ugly, thorny bush was ripped out. I was curious about it, so I let it grow. It took about two weeks to completely overtake the planter.

Thank-you interwebs! It is called portulaca oleracea. It sounds like I should throw some in my next salad. Or wear it as a amulet to ward off evil.

Here are a couple more photos.

In a somewhat related topic: I like Agave Nectar. It is my sweetener of choice, but I don’t really know of a lot of uses for it. I’m trying to not start my baking hobby back up again nor spending money on cookbooks, but I wouldn’t be sad if this kind of just showed up in my kitchen.

Time can be on your side

Mellystu — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:12:27 +0000

I was going to make cookies for some friends, but seeing that it is now 9:00pm, and I have to clean-up the counter tops from something, and I have to be in KC tomorrow at 9:30am, I don’t think that I’ll get it done. I did get dinner made for said friends who just had a baby, and man, do I know just how exhausted they are right now. So, I feel like it is too late, which is good because I would just eat some cookies if I made them. I bought more flour and sugar for the first time since December, that is how much I do not bake anymore. The back of the flour bag had a recipe for “The Best Fudge Brownies Ever.” I see this as a challenge. One that I will have to take after mid-June.

I’m taking the day off tomorrow so I can get my hair a much needed cut^*, and then make a trip to Whole Foods, Penzey’s, Friend’s house, and try to get some clothes shopping done since my last-year’s spring/summer clothes are too big. I don’t want to wear my heavy, dark clothes to work anymore. And I have one pair of jeans left and those are getting baggy-assed. Sometimes I like shopping for clothes, and sometimes not. I may even go to the *gasp* mall. Maybe I should hit an outdoor mall instead of Oak Park where I usually go. It may help stave off the headache I always get when spending too much time in a mall.

Mac just brought home a big storage bin that also serves as seating for the deck. He is pulling the pieces out of the box, and Ada is jumping up and down yelling, “Oh wow! That’s a rectangle! That’s a rectangle! It’s big!” Her latest phrase is “my, my, my.” She took Mac’s shoes off today, pointed at his feet and said, “oh, my, my, my!” When I made the mistake of mentioning that I was making cookies, she immediately wanted one, so I had to let her look in the cookie jar to prove that we didn’t have any. She looked in and said, “Oh, no. My, my, my!”

*I looked at my calendar, and I last had my hair done right before James’ birthday. 3 months ago.