potentiality_26

So.  Having finished the BBC adaptation of Les Miserables, there are a couple of things I want to say right off.

1) Enzo Cilenti should have held out for a bigger part.  He's the light of this production and he does nothing.  I quite shipped his character with Javert as well, especially toward the end.  Very sad.

2) Clearly I was right not to talk too much about it before seeing the whole thing.  I've had time to forget a lot of my more minor gripes and to focus on broader issues, and I did think the last episode was really very good.  It was kept from being great, imo, by the problems the adaptation had had throughout and by the general "eh" feeling of the ending, but it was good.

3) I've had to ask myself if it is in fact possible to make the end of this story uplifting without the spirits of the dead singing a rousing chorus about freedom, and I just don't know.  I've seen the 1934 French version, and 1935 version with Charles Laughton, and 1978 version with Anthony Perkins (it occurs to me that I only ever remember who played Javert), and I don't strongly remember the end of any of them.  The end of the 1998 version is memorable only because they made the executive decision to cut it short, and maybe that's fair.

Anyway, uplifting was not achieved, but I say again that the last episode was very good.  I also liked a lot of the casting, especially Enzo Cilenti once again, and the genetically improbable Thenardier family.  Really good performances all around there. I enjoyed the Waterloo opening as well.        

But I do still have complaints.  They are as follows:

( Read more... )

TL;DR I love the book, I love the musical, and I liked this adaptation toward the end and maybe overall I judged it too harshly.  If you haven't seen it, please don't hesitate on my account. 
   

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.