but what would Paul and Mary say?
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st_aurafina made me watch The Great British Bake Off (she flew all the way from Australia to twist my arm until I surrendered!) with two results: (1) I'm now a slightly obsessive fan and (2) I want to BAKE ALL THE THINGS.So I tried, for the first time ever, to make a proper layer cake with frosting and everything. I was cautious and used a recipe actually designed for the altitude at which I live (7000 feet or 2100 meters, which has big effects on baking). The end result was sort of a hilarious disaster and sort of a triumph. The hilarious disaster part happened because I was halving the recipe, only I misread the very last bit, the liquid, as 2 1/4 cups instead of 1 1/4 cup of buttermilk. So I carefully calculated half of 2 1/4 cups and added that to my cake . . . in other words, almost the full amount of the original recipe. I didn't notice immediately because the cake batter didn't seem excessively runny to my inexperienced eye. The penny didn't drop until I'd already had the cake in the oven for ten minutes longer than the recipe called for and it was still wobbly in the middle.
But I did not panic. I turned the oven temp down, as the cake was browning too much at the edges, kept the thing in there until it stopped wobbling, and ended up with edible cake despite it all. I would not venture to call it good cake (it was dense and a bit pasty, and part of me kept imagining Paul Hollywood calling it "wallpaper paste") but it was nevertheless edible cake, which I frosted and ate over the next several days. (From this experience I have also learned that a six-inch round cake goes much farther than the Smitten Kitchen website claims--over there it says you can get four generous pieces or six dinky ones, while I got seven or eight quite adequate pieces out of mine.)
This half-failure half-triumph has whetted my ambitions, so for my next trick I intend to make a variation of the same cake recipe (with the right amount of buttermilk this time!), only with each of the two layers split in half, the whole thing filled with homemade lemon curd and then topped with a light lemon glaze instead of frosting, because the cake and the lemon curd are probably quite rich enough.
I also want to try making biscotti, which held no interest at all for me until the second Bake Off episode. I've always thought of them as nasty stale things that coffee shops overcharge you for, but the ones on the Bake Off all looked really good. I'm thinking of cranberry, orange zest, and (maybe) crystallized ginger for my attempt. I'd like to have hazelnuts but they're awfully expensive, especially for a first try at something.
I only wish you all lived close enough that I could invite you over to help me eat all the cakes, etc. I'd like to bake. And not only out of the desire to share--frustratingly, my baking is still limited to things that will keep for at least several days, as I hate wasting food and bringing stuff to work has limited appeal. I do it sometimes, but I'd rather share with friends, and plus too much of that sort of thing can give you the reputation of being the workplace mom, which I really really don't want for all kinds of reasons.
By the way, on the subject of baking, can anybody recommend a good book on baking techniques that's preferably geared towards the home baker rather than a professional or would-be professional? I want a book that will tell me how to make basic components like a sponge or puff pastry or a pastry cream and how to combine those components into a variety of tasty things, but that doesn't assume you have a professional oven and so on. It's bad enough that all baking books assume you have a stand mixer. So far the most helpful book I've seen is my old Joy of Cooking, but it doesn't go far enough, and other baking books I've seen all give plenty of recipes for specific cakes or pastries but don't generalize their instructions or contain much if any focus on technique.
My life has not been entirely consumed by baking, of course. As always I'm reading a ton of things, most of them not especially worth mentioning. I've been wanting to read more history and, of all things, philosophy, for which I blame the In Our Time podcasts, but the local library system is underfunded and I think has sometimes made bad choices with what funds it does have. I understand that public libraries have to respond to public demand, but it's a bit shocking that there are so many diet books and new age woo-woo books and practically nothing on, for example, German history apart from the Nazi era. And no biography of Frederick the Great apart from one written by a Mitford (Nancy?) in the early 1970s, which I can't imagine will deal sensibly with his sexuality.
A couple of good things I've read, or partly read: I got about a third of the way through Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps before I just couldn't go on. It's an excellent book full of first-rate research, and not one of those Holocaust books that are thin excuses for atrocity porn, but by 1938 I was already overwhelmed and the Holocaust per se hadn't even started yet. Knowing it was just going to get worse, I had to stop. But I may go back to it eventually and I recommend it to those with strong constitutions.
I also liked Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, which is about the era just before the First World War. I picked it up off the new book shelf at the library, not realizing it was a re-release. As is my habit, when I got it home I went to the index for something queer-related and looked up what she had to say about the Eulenberg scandal. I was struck by the homophobia of the language, then saw that the book was first published in 1965. In that context the homophobia looked very mild, actually--more like the sort of standard disapproval anyone would have to express lest readers be outraged by its absence. (I've seen a similar level of homophobia in basically pro-gay books from this era written by gay people.) I thought there was an interesting resonance between the (token?) homophobia and the way Tuchman discusses socialism--when she talks about poverty and working conditions etc. she's clearly, strongly in favor of change, but if the dreaded word "socialism" comes up she has to be disparaging about it, because 1965 was the middle of the cold war and socialism was a very dirty word in the United States.
Apart from that I've been re-reading the best of Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries. I might request these at Yuletide, with a focus on Edgar Wield, both because he's awesome and because I want a good proportion of my Yuletide requests this year to be for canonically queer characters. Out of my five likely requests so far, three are for canonically queer characters (Wield, Leonard Finch from Grantchester and Colonel Tick-Tock from The Thrilling Adventure Hour, though he's only strongly-canonically-hinted as being queer if you want to split hairs about it) and two are not (York from Hyperdrive and Tintin and Haddock from Tintin). If we have six requests this year I want to add another canonically queer character. *thinks*
Shutting up now as this post is long enough already.
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What seasons of GBBO did you watch?
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Writing down the quantities beforehand is definitely a good idea. Must do that from now on.
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It definitely made me try baking new things - I baked my first pavlova because I saw it on Bake Off and it didn't look as hard as I'd been led to believe. It's very encouraging to actually see people going through the process. (I don't like biscotti either, but they looked so good!)
The hilarious disaster part happened because I was halving the recipe
I have a horror story about a giant, erupting gugelhupf, from which I have learned that if you're halving/doubling a recipe, you have to write the quantities down first. I'm glad yours turned out all right! I had to put mine on the patio to finish erupting.
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An erupting cake! I am impressed and terrified. It would be kind of awesome if you could figure out a way to do it on purpose--the next step up from those molten chocolate cakes that were all the rage some years ago.
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Usually I make biscotti for Christmas presents, and one year I figured I'd cleverly make orange-anise biscotti because I don't like aniseeds very much so I figured I would not be tempted. Unfortunately, they were so good that I ended up eating quite a few.
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I was a bit surprised at how much I liked the fennel seeds in the ones I made. Probably I shouldn't have been, because I've previously discovered I like star anise very much, though I'd assumed I wouldn't because I hate black liquorice.
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I'm afraid I can't help you with the baking books. I have one that's more like a brochure than an actual book that show how to make specific types of cake (choux pastry, yeast dough etc.) with step by step photographs and then gives you some recipes to use that cake mix. But I got it as a gift and it's in German. And I agree: most baking and cooking books just assume you know the technique. It's literally "make a yeast dough, proof for one hour". It was GBBO that showed me that you really have to knead yeast dough for a bloody long time to get a rise.
It's the same with our public library - and awful lot of crime fiction and fitness books but almost no history section. I live in a university city so I don't know if it's not a deliberate move by the library to exclude history because you can quite easily go the the university library. I have no idea why our library is so dirt cheap. I pay the full price and it's an annual fee of 15 € which is a joke. It gets funding but why not make the people who use it pay a little more? I'd gladly pay 60 € or more.
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I think it's even odder than baking books assuming you know the technique. At least in the US, they seem to assume that you know a little and don't want to know more, but rather just want a specific recipe that you can follow to make a specific cake and will never tinker with. Also, and for understandable reasons because most people don't have a lot of time to bake, there's a tendency for recipes to be quite simple: loaf cakes, single layer cakes, cheesecakes, that sort of thing. But I'm interested in trying more complicated cakes, or at least knowing how to do it if I do decide to try, and plus I'm the sort of person who likes to know why.
One nice thing about US public libraries is that they're completely free to use, because they're entirely funded by tax revenue. I think that's important because then the library is a resource for people who can't afford to buy their own books (and might not be able to afford a user fee either). But sadly, libraries get less and less funding these days because the right wing hates the idea of poor people
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There is only one recipe from bake-off I tried and that's the couronne. Delicious. I want to do one now but I don't have tried apricots. Maybe I can do one with chocolate.
This site works well for my bake-off needs.
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(Anonymous) 2015-08-22 08:00 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
I'd have liked to see Wield have some nice, low-key, non-serious and non-tragic affairs before he settled down with someone, because I think he needed that emotionally. But of course, you can't have a Jane Austen homage without a marriage at the end, and since Pascoe is already taken and Dalziel in that role would be grotesque, there was only Wield to be married off after about a three-hour courtship in Pictures of Perfection.
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