And now for something completely different...

[potentiality_26]

I’ve been struggling to post something this week.  I was going to write about episode one of the Les Miserables miniseries now that PBS is airing it, but “is this less good than other adaptations of its kind or am I just bitchy about Les Miz?” isn’t much of an update. 

So anyway.  Here's a post about baking instead. 

I really think bakers make people scared of baking.  Yes, you do have to have a pretty good understanding of how ingredients come together before you can experiment much, but this insistence that unless you follow recipes exactly and measure perfectly it will All Go Wrong is just... a terrible way to get people interested in baking. 

Case in point: I made a chocolate bundt cake the other day and did basically everything wrong. 

The recipe called for creaming butter and sugar, which means room temperature butter.  The cake was an impulse decision, so not only did I not have room temperature butter, I had frozen butter.  No problem, toss it in the microwave.  This part actually went fine; I’m good at getting softened butter without melting it even in the microwave.  But then I got carried away and used all the nice softened butter I had come up with.  That was about four tablespoons more (half a stick) more than the recipe called. 

But I kept going, figuring that since the recipe called for sour cream later I could take the amount out of the sour cream and not destabilize the recipe too much.  The dry ingredients I mixed together and didn’t really fuss with.  But then I had too little brown sugar.  I figured I’d make up the amount in white sugar, added some of that, started to add the rest, decided it was too much sugar, and stopped.  I was supposed to add a full tablespoon of vanilla, but vanilla is expensive now so I used just a teaspoon, and then a full tablespoon of Kahlua because I felt like it.  I had the wrong kind of cocoa, and the wrong kind of chocolate, but I used both anyway.  I used brewed coffee instead of hot water and espresso powder, and yogurt instead of sour cream.  The recipe called for five eggs and at this point I’d gone mad with power so I only added three. 

And my bundt pan was too small, so I filled it about a third of the way (not knowing how much this monstrosity would grow) and then put the rest in a loaf pan.  The batter was quite thick when it was all mixed together- think soft serve ice cream- and I expected the cake to be dry, so after baking I put a ganache glaze on instead of powdered sugar.

But you know what?  That cake was great.  It wasn't dry at all- it was moist and super soft.  The yogurt brought out a fruitiness in the chocolate that was lovely.  It was a really good cake, is my point.  I shared the bundt cake with people and put the loaf cake in the freezer for another time.  I think I’ll try that with a caramel sauce instead of ganache at some point- the flavor of the cake really reminded me of the dark chocolate-salted caramel combo you find in some candy bars and I think it would work. 

I’m planning to make this cake again on purpose next time to see if I can streamline it more, but as it is I'm pretty proud of myself.