It's All About the Food

It's ok to hate to cook

2013-05-20T04:00:00Z

As much as foodies complain about their friends on fad diets ("It's nothing but hay and chocolate milk! I've been on it for three hours and I feel fabulous!"), they have an enormous blind spot when it comes to cooking at home.

Specifically, foodies don't understand that not everyone likes too cook, that, in fact, some people hate cooking.

There is the wonder that anyone would serve chicken nuggets to their children (because the kid will eat it without an argument), that they eat fast food (fast, cheap, filling, pushes all the sugar-salt-fat buttons in the brain), that a cooking show based around pre-made everything can be popular (isn't that better than fast food?).

One brave woman has come forth to explain why she doesn't cook, and never will:

"I undercook the chicken, burn the casseroles, and lose interest within five minutes of starting."

That's Jen, from Cake Wrecks. Who hasn't been reading Cake Wrecks since nearly the beginning? It's part of my Friday mornings: Cute Overload, e-mail, check the to-do list, do something, resist reading Cake Wrecks, finally give in. It makes every amateur baker feel like a pro. My cheese cake cracked, but I have never baked and decorated anything that looks like a penis.

And, as interesting as she finds wrecked cakes, and for all the hours she can devote to culling photographs and writing pithy captions, actual cooking is boring.

The pro foodie world seems to continuously discuss how to get people who don't cook to want to cook. Theories abound, ranging from the cardinal sins of the foodie world (loving junk food), to not knowing better, to no time or money. (I have big problem with this discussion being held by people who have the time, skills and interest in devoting a good chunk of their day to cooking. Much like anyone else would have a problem with my theories on why most people don't like math. I love math; I cannot understand why people don't like it.)

My own answers have been rather sarcastic.

Not liking to cook is not a sin, and it does not make you a bad person, no matter what two professional food writers on assignment say to a New York Times reporter.

Everyone should eat healthy food every day, and home-cooked food can be healthier. Of course, there are lots of things everyone should do, every day, and no one does everything they should. Life is pain, princess — no, wait, life is choices and compromises. Some people choose not to cook. Instead, they choose to blog or exercise or spend time with their children or even sit on the couch and watch TV.

And that's OK.

Jen, thank you, for reminding us foodies that some people just don't like to cook. (You should read the rest of Jen's Epbot site. She has a passion for steampunk, and has completed lots of really great projects.)

Tiffin, Tashan, Palace of Asia

2013-05-14T04:00:00Z

I love America, and big-city America, for all the cuisines available. Sure, you can't find everything, and food gets Americanized, if only because some ingredients just aren't available. Philly and its suburbs have been blessed with many good Indian restaurants. Palace of Asia is in the Best Western Hotel just off the Turnpike entrance. Not where you would expect to find good food, let alone good Indian food. However, it was and is the best traditional Indian food I've eaten in the city. Service can be slow, but the food more than makes up for it. Tiffin is a chain in and around Philly. They are not quite Palace of Asia, but they deliver. Tashan is owned by the Tiffin chain, but specializes in modern Indian cuisine. It could be called "fusion," if you thought only American or European chefs experimented with food. The menu is overwhelmingly long and varied. I cheated by choosing the three-course set price menu, which limited my options. My friend chose from the menu. The meals are intended to be shared "small plates."

Lego cake

2013-05-07T01:08:06Z

A very special friend had a "LegoLand" party for his seventh birthday. As usual, my gift was a chocolate-chocolate cake: two layers of Dorie Greenspan's buttermilk chocolate party cake (from Baking: From My Home to Yours) and standard American decorator chocolate icing. This cake is dead simple and quite delicious (even better with whipped ganache icing), but it needed to be special, and it needed to be Lego.

The "cake made of Lego" illusion is a very easy to create.

I used five colors left over from other projects: red, yellow, green, purple and white. I kneaded a two-inch diameter ball of each color, then ran it through my pasta machine, down to setting three. At this point, I use the past machine more for fondant than I do for pasta. It will be thinner than used for covering a cake; it's a good thickness for detail work.

Using the ribbon roller/cutter from the Wilton fondant class kit (which you can buy on line without taking the class), I made two half-inch wide strips of each color. This is actually a bit taller than the real bricks, but there is no one-eighth inch spacer and I didn't have time to gerry-rig something. These cuts were free hand, and not perfectly straight, but the "bricks" were easily straightened out after being cut to the proper size.

Using real two-, three-, four-, six- and eight-dot long bricks, I cut at least two of each size from each color with a paring knife. The knife cut more cleanly and straighter than the plastic roller used for freehand cutting. Cut two "bricks" of the same size at the same time for more efficient brick manufacture. Cover the the cut fondant with a damp paper towel.

The cake was baked, crumb-coated and frozen the weekend before. For the next cake, I would give the full, final coat of icing before applying the bricks just to have more icing on the fondant pieces. They fondant adhered well to the crumb coat.

Starting from the bottom, with the longer bricks, I applied them carefully to the cake, straightening the edges as much as possible. As you can see in the close-up below, the edges were not overly square and didn't always match up perfectly. A damp paper towel was very useful in wiping off stray icing from my fingers and the white (always the white) bricks. After putting on a row of bricks, careful smoothing helped the bricks to stick to the cake and form a flatter surface. The upper layers used the smaller bricks.

The pyramid shape worked well, looking fairly realistic for a construction zone. A rectangle would have worked as well. Every kid wanted some bricks on their slice, and more of the cake should have been covered in bricks. It's not like there weren't enough bricks to go around the cake. The bricks went all the way to the top so that the top icing would push over the edge and mask it.

Once the fondant was on the cake, I iced the top, making sure the top icing spilled over. For the sides, I started at one end of the brickwork, and iced around the sides to the other end of brickwork, making sure the icing overlapped the fondant. Piped shell borders made this look like a normal cake from the front.

For the finishing touch, we used two Lego construction workers. The one with the wheelbarrow is bringing more icing. (We bought the birthday boy a new Lego set; if this had been for my son, his existing construction workers would have gone through the dishwasher.)

The cake would also work with the chef mini-figure, and perhaps some "construction zone" tape made from ribbons of yellow fondant. That's the next birthday.

Great Food Fast

2013-04-29T04:00:00Z

The thing about newborns is that although they might look and act like, and even be, mostly unmoving blobs of near humanity, they take a lot of time, attention and effort. I was spectacularly unsuited to a newborn (this eight-year-old thing is great, though), and particularly frustrated that I had no time to cook or garden, although I was home all day for three months. Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazine got me through many a dinner.

Now Great Food Fast gets me through a week's menu planning. It's one of two recipe collections, along with Fresh Food Fast, published before the magazine ceased publication last year. Flipping through Great Food's recipes for the season inspires me to know what to cook those last straggling, unplanned days of every week.

Great Food Fast is the perfect resource for low-stress, after-work meals: recipes are quick, usually taking half an hour or perhaps an hour of sitting in the oven; ingredient lists are pantry staples like soy sauce, chicken broth, herbs; following the seasonal organization of the book keeps menus from getting boring and makes it easier to use fresh ingredients; the results are tasty enough for company.

About half the recipes are main dishes, some vegetarian (Greek salad, spinach salad, risotto with zucchini and peas) but most are meat based (chicken breasts in mustard cream sauce, rigatoni with sausage and onions, salmon, farfalle, peas and mint,). The remaining recipes are side dishes (cucumber-radish slaw), appetizers (asparagus-gruyere tart) and desserts, and a small section on basics, like poaching chicken and vinaigrettes. They are all simple, tasty, and modern.

Even now, looking up recipes for this review, I see new dishes I want to make.

Great Food is for any cook who doesn't have the time or confidence for elaborate meals, but still wants a dish they'll want to cook again.

Cool things I've seen via twitter

2013-04-22T23:09:06Z

Interesting articles I've run across on Twitter:

Hervé This' Chocolate Mousse: I have so many friends who can't eat dairy and love chocolate. I cannot wait to try this recipe on them. Who's Hervé This? you ask. Apparently the chemist who invented the term molecular gastronomy. Cooking is just applied chemistry, after all. Applied, delicious chemistry. (via Cooks & Books & Recipes)

Couldn't be Parve: These are not dairy substitute recipes, these are recipes that need no dairy. (via Sarah Melamed)

In Defense of Pretentious Hipster Douchebaggery, Culinary Edition: Who doesn't like to laugh at hipsters? Even hipsters like to laugh at hipsters. Greta Christina makes a great point: the stereotypical hipster obsession with "artisinal" and small batch is preserving a lot of great food in the face of economy-of-scale homogenization, and making it possible for more people to eat really great food. (via Melissa McEwan)

How to cook with cardamom: Cardamom is my favorite spice. There are never enough baked goods with cardamom. These flavor combinations listed here (cardamom and almond, cardamom and apricot) should make some delicious scones. (via Heather Atwood)

Steak Shows Its Muscle: If you can make it through the description of "the very finest, perfectly velvety, unctuous steak I'd ever tasted" — bull's blood, there's a fascinating history of steak and it's place in the American diet. I'm not convinced many (any?) vegetarians would agree fresh blood is "the only steak a vegetarian could ethically eat." (via Melissa McEwan)

Anything but scrambled eggs: how I learned to cook at 78: Really, a tribute to his late wife, with digressions into his children and grandchildren. Touching. (via Heather Atwood)

Food is now the ultimate class signifier: Poverty is neither a sin nor a crime. Dignity is a human right. This critique of the UK's consideration of food stamps applies equally well to the US program. (via Historical Recipes)

Confessions of a Kitchen Gadgets Collector: Confession: I've met Barbara Haber, and she is awesome. She balances perfectly between discarding unused equipment and finding space for those odd single-taskers that make life and cooking so much easier. You will pry my waffle maker from my cold, dead hands.

Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

2013-04-15T04:00:00Z

The handmade bread was available all over New York City, and it wasn't a rarefied delicacy. Everyone knew what it was and took it for granted.

Confession: I am a terrible bread baker. Or, I was, until I too found the secret of no-knead bread. Another confession: Anyone talking about no-knead bread sounds like they've joined a multi-level marketing scam.

But no-knead bread is really and truly that easy to make, although it requires more than five minutes of time. The five minutes of the title refers to the time one is actively mixing and then forming the loaves. It doesn't count the two hours of for the autolyse reaction to "knead" the dough, or the time for the dough to rise and bake.

Artisinal Bread (sorry, "artisan" is a noun, the adjective is "artisinal.") starts with a multi-pages long description of the basic recipe and technique. It's exactly what anyone who can't bake a good loaf needs, and is worth at least half the cost of the book.

The remaining 180-odd pages are variations on the recipe, like rye bread and pizza dough, and even sweet breads, like sticky buns, chocolate-cherry bread and, my favorite, panettone. The recipes are for multiple loaves and are designed to be left for hours or days in the refrigerator before baking. The yeast keeps growing, but very slowly; the slow yeast growth is what gives the leaner breads their excellent flavor.

One step not included in the recipes that I have found particularly successful is not to bake with a pan of water to simulate a professional steam oven, but to back in a cast-iron casserole or Dutch oven, starting with the lid on, and removing after about half the baking time has elapsed. The loaf provides its own steam, generating that beautiful crust. It can be hard to get the sticky dough to dro in properly; I've sacrificed looks for taste.

I also haven't found the recommended baker's peel to be necessary, having made do with a well-floured, rimless cookie sheet.

If you are afraid to bake bread, or even just want a varied collection of bread recipes, this is the book for you.

Murder most fowl

2013-04-08T04:00:00Z

Authors mentioned in the "Murder Most Fowl" Panel at the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference, 2013

New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio's comment: "I read so many of these for you! I read dozens." Most of these were her recommendations. These are not all "foodie" detectives (who are market with an asterisk *); food often plays a central role in the developing the character or setting the scene.

Authors Patricia King and Julia Pomeroy were also on the panel and discussed how they used food in their novels. This list came mainly from Marilyn Stasio, but also from the other panel members and the audience. It was a very fun panel.

Aaron Elkins
Louise Perry
Katherine Hall Page
Donna Leon

Magdalen Nabb

Martin Walker

Peter Mayle

Joanna Fluke *

Ann B. Ross *

Michael Connelly

Anthony Bourdain (yes that Bourdain)

Virginia Rich *

Nan and Ivan Lyons: Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe

Rex Stout, especially Too Many Cooks

Charlotte Murray Russell

Robert B. Parker (defining his relationship with Susan)

Dick Francis: Proof, and with Felix Francis Dead Heat

I'll add Janet Evanovich, whose Stephanie Plum can't cook and eats fast
food or at her mother's.

Many thanks to the Roger Smith Hotel Cookbook Conference for a wonderful weekend!

Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman

2013-04-01T04:00:00Z

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking made me want to quit my job and just make stock and salmon mousseline for the rest of my life. I do actually like my job, but Ruhlman makes cooking sound easy and simple (and make no mistake, simple is not the same as easy — biking 50 miles is simple, just keep pedaling). But Ratio does two things to make cooking and baking easier: it really does simplify basic recipes for bread, pasta and sausage down to the bare bones, and thus helps the cook to understand the chemistry of the cooking, and be confident in building on this base. Ruhlman has a mission to free bakers and cooks from doggedly following recipes without knowing what can be changed and what can't. Half the ratios are baking, and half are for cooking, like making emulsions and stock. Ratios might seem modern, but to my mind they are quite old fashioned; we all have an image of the grandmother who cooked and baked by handfuls and pinches. She knew her ratios so well she needed no scale or measuring cup. Ratios have saved my Stollen. It was realizing the liquid to flour ratio for the original almond stollen recipe was far out of whack that enabled me to bake an edible loaf. The book has also rescued my stock: less water, more vegetables. Who knew it could be so simple? And Ruhlman's goal is to make recipes so simple to understand that more people to whip up a their own dressing or bread. One caveat I have for Rhulman's book is that he forgets that not everyone has the time to whip up a batch of stock after roasting a chicken. In other words, not everyone is a freelancer working at home. Some of us finish dinner, bathe the kids, and collapse directly into bed ourselves. But, if you can ignore the occasional blind spot for time, it's an excellent book.

Do you need a scale to bake?

2013-03-26T04:00:00Z

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: probably not.

Did your grandmother bake with a scale? No! My grandmother was the best baker I know, and she never used a scale. Well, outside of her time living in Germany, and when her recipes that called for four pounds of flour, but other than that, she always measured in cups.

Perhaps this needs an even longer answer.

Professional baker, teacher and cookbook author Nick Malgieri has famously refused to included weight measurements in his books because most home bakers don't have a scale and measure by cups. Professional baker, teacher and cookbook author Rose Levy Berenbaum always includes measurements by cups, ounces and grams. She also included a table of volume to weight conversions for many baking ingredients; I use these tables to convert my American measurements into metric, and vice versa.

Much of the world measures dry ingredients, such as flour and nuts, by weight, because it's more accurate. Personally, I find it easier to bake by weight, and wouldn't mind if the rest of the US woke up one morning and replaced every measuring cups with a scale. And switched to the metric system.

Scales are straightforward. Set a bowl onto the scale, reset it to 0 (called zeroing out or taring), then spoon in or slowly pour the ingredient into the bowl. To add the next ingredient, zero out and add the next ingredient. The bowl can be anything, even the food processor work bowl with the un-ground nuts measured directly. Although a digital scale makes it easy to obsess over every gram or fraction of an ounce, my personal tolerance is within two to five grams. There is something very satisfying about casually dropping in a partial stick of butter or handful of chocolate pieces and hitting the exact weight called for.

The accuracy comes from the density of the ingredients. A cup of sifted flour is less dense and weighs less than a cup of flour straight from the bag (about 4 ounces compared to 5); therefore, recipes are very specific about sifting before or after measuring. Sifting and then measuring is so inconvenient that I'd rather do the math and measure 3/4 cup unsifted flour instead of 1 cup of sifted flour. When measuring by weight, you can measure first and sift later; the 4 ounces of sifted flour will weigh the same after it's sifted.

How you measure with a cup also affects how much flour or what have you goes into the cup. That's why most cookbooks have a section about how to measure. The usual methods are dip and sweep (hard to do with a small bag of corn meal) and spoon and sweep (put a piece of wax paper down to catch the excess); dip and sweep gets more flour into the cup. Often, home cooks use the dip and press or dip and shake methods, which gets even more flour into the cup. Because cooking and baking is about the ratio of each ingredient to another, too much of any ingredient can throw the recipe off.

Scales help with portioning. Bread rolls and loves are more uniform if you can weigh the full batch of dough and weigh each loaf or roll to get consistent sizes.

Scales don't need to be washed either, because all ingredients are weighed in a bowl or on wax paper. One tool replaces four (or more, if you own multiple sets of dry measures). The one tool does cost more than the other four.

Kitchen scales are not accurate enough for measuring less than a tablespoon of most dry ingredients. German and British recipes still specify teaspoons and tablespoons for small amounts ingredients like salt and baking powder. Recipes for professionals will measure even these small amounts by weight. This is why I have a scientific scale that can measure to 0.1 gram. I use it only for baking from cookbooks written for professional chefs, where everything, even the baking powder, is measured by weight. When measuring 3 grams of something, being off by a gram is quite a lot, really.

However, even the cheapest scale on Amazon is still twice the price of a set of measuring cups, and you'll still need a liquid measuring cup and set of measuring spoons. They take up more space. The more accurate digital scales need batteries or an outlet.

The big question is, will it make you a better baker?

Maybe. If your biggest problem is measuring dry ingredients accurately. But then it would seem that learning to measure accurately (dip and sweep! dip and sweep!) is just as effective and cheaper.

You need a scale if you bake from recipes that measure by weight, either grams or ounces. These would be:

Professional bakers, making six layers of cake in a 20-quart mixer that stands on the floor.
Non-Americans, baking from non-American recipes, living in countries where every kitchen has a scale.
American amateurs who bake from professional or non-American recipes.
Anyone overly concerned with exactitude.
Bakers practicing for the eventual conversion to the metric system.

If you like baking with cups and tablespoons, there's no reason to stop, unless you turn pro or move to Europe. Owning a scale won't make you a better baker. Using a scale can help you understand the ratios that underlie all baking. Reading Shirley Corriher's Bakewise or Mark Ruhlman's Ratio will help even more.

I have many scales: an Italian balance scale shaped like a ladle that can measure up to 200 grams; my first scale, mechanical and turquoise plastic, bought in Germany to bake my aunt's recipes; the sleek electric model I bought when we renovated the kitchen and is the main one I use; and a very accurate scale for use in laboratories. I also have four sets of measuring cups and four sets of measuring spoons.

Rose Levy Berenbaum: Rose's Christmas Cookies

2013-03-19T01:24:46Z

"There is a reason that the word cookie follows Christmas with such inevitability. After all, what would Christmas be without Christmas cookied? Nothing represents the spirit of loving, nurturing, and giving more than a homemade cookie."

For years, I avoided this cookbook. It was "too popular." Too frequently, I've found myself out of synch with popular taste. I don't get Cheers or Seinfeld. Red velvet cake seems overrated. I've heard enough of bacon to last a lifetime. I held off buying Rose's Christmas Cookies for a decade. I've no idea what finally impelled me to buy it, but I'm glad I did. Probably The Cake Bible convinced me. Berenbaum deserves her reputation as one of America's leading bakers and cookbook authors.

The recipes range from the simple, like spritz, through the very ambitious, like Swiss-Italian mocha meringues, made by pouring melted sugar into stiffly-beaten egg whites, and a gingerbread model of Notre Dame Cathedral, with ten pages of blueprints alone. "Hardcore," my husband commented.

Rose's Christmas Cookies is a beautiful book to read. In addition to a full-page, full color photograph of each cookie. (And the cathedral. Holy wow.) She introduces each recipe with a few paragraphs with how the cookie and recipe came into her life. I have literally spent hours just paging through and planning what to bake for the season.

In general , the recpies work. Berenbaum writes for bakers with at least basic skills (like creaming and measuring). As with all her books, measurements are giving in usual cups and teaspoons, and also in ounces and grams. However, the ingerdents are not listed in the otdrer in which they are used, which I find an odd oversight; when whisking the dry ingredients together, it's easy to overlook one if the butter and vanilla is between the salt and the flour. The book is divided into Christmas social occasions, like "for Open House" and "for Holiday Dinner Parties," that I can't quite understand, although the "Kids" and "Mantelpiece" categories are clear enough.

Additionally, there are her usual detailed sections on ingredients and equipment, and sections for storing and packaging cookis. Each recipe includes hints and tips.

It's perfectly fine if you ignore how it tastes

2011-05-26T02:18:06Z

As Shawn and Steve's wedding draws ever nearer (It's almost summer, and you know what comes after summer? Fall! And that means Halloween weddings!), it is time to try my hand at a fondant cake.

Well, actually, the plan was to take a class at Fantes, but, if you follow my tweets, you might remember that they started the class early, and they think they left a message on my phone, but I can't find it and learned of this only when I called a few days before the original start date to ask why I hadn't received an equipment list in the mail like I did for the last class. So, yeah, still pretty aggravated. And my knives are still dull, too.*

Panic ensued -- could I get into a class before the Fall? Is it possible to learn this stuff from books and the student guides you can buy on line? Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can learn how to smooth the damn stuff onto the cake -- something all the Wilton instructions gloss over.

This weekend saw the first fondant-covered cake from my kitchen. It was an acceptable first attempt. The fondant wrinkled terribly at the bottom, but was covered with a fondant haunted house, fondant gravestones, fondant grass, fondant ghosts, fondant stars, and a fondant moon. The covering was quick. The house and its landscaping took three hours. At the end, I jettisoned the planned black fondant roses in favor of cleaning the kitchen and taking out the recycling. And a gin and tonic.

The cake was also a test: Rose Levy Berenbaum's genoise moistened with almond syrup, then covered in vanilla mousseline buttercream**. Cake test successful, but the fondant ...

My six-year-old son loves eating fondant. He also loves to eat sugar from the canister, and says he's eaten an ant. The chocolate smells chocolatey. But in the end, the fondant was just chewy sugar. By the last piece of cake, I'd peeled all the fondant off and scraped the buttercream off it. I used Duff's purple (made by another well-known fondant manufacturer, although I've seen conflicting stories on whether it's Fondariffic or Satin Ice) for the deep color, Wilton white (left from the lightsaber experiment) and Wilton chocolate (to dye black). None was tasty.

On the other hand, fondant is so easy to work with, no wonder so many decorators and bakers love working with it. Because it has the consistency and forgiveness of playdough, it's much easier to get a good-looking result than with buttercream.

As long as you can ignore the taste.

* Fantes sharpens knives, and as I don't trust myself, I usually take a sackful of cutlery to the Italian Market once a year.

** RLB's mousseline buttercream from The Cake Bible is, even with the sugar syrup, and amazingly easy and fast buttercream. It's so very smooth, and so very rich. The lightness of the cake and the small amount of buttercream RLB recommends using kept it from being overwhelming.

Raytek MiniTemp infrared thermometer

2011-04-13T23:30:00Z

I am death to most kitchen equipment, but especially thermometers. Standard alcohol thermometers get tossed into the dishwasher or stuck into far-too-hot oil, effectively "blowing out" the thermometer. The cheap instant-read worked well, until a splash of something caused the plastic dial cover to bubble. Cheap and expensive digital thermometers get left in a puddle of water with the drying dishes (short circuit) or get so gunked up with grease, the buttons stick. Nothing caught on fire, but the average lifespan of a thermometer in my kitchen is less than a year.

Rather than continuously buying and destroying thermometers, I committed to a life of old fashioned estimating of how hot the oil is (generally, too hot) or whether the eggs had hit the appropriate temp to make custard.

Then an Alton Brown episode came to mind, where he used a laser-guided, infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of frying oil.

A quick look at Amazon showed that non-contact thermometers, like every other measuring instrument on the planet, are more expensive (but not more accurate) when they are to be used in the kitchen rather than a laboratory. I disregarded the $100 models for cooks, but the Raytek MT4 Mini Temp Non-Contact Thermometer Gun with Laser Sighting was worth considering at only $45.

We've had a lot of fun with this! (It might help to have a childlike wonder at being able to measure the temperature of everything.) At first, I doubted it. Surely the oil in the cast-iron fry pan was not over 400 degrees, but when the doughnuts turned dark brown almost immediately, I was convinced (and added more cool oil to the pan). Since then, we've measured:

which of frozen doughnut doughs were defrosted and ready to fry
frying pan while heating and browning
back of the oven, to see if the thermostat was calibrated (yes)
back of the refrigerators, to see if they were too cold (yes)
various lightbulbs
every wall, ceiling, floor and window
ourselves, by pressing the measuring end against our foreheads (no lasers in the eyes!)
front porch before leaving the house to see if we needed heavy or light jackets
water at various stages of boiling
hot cocoa

The battery is a standard 9 volt (the square kind), and one is included.

This thing is nearly magical! Touch nothing, just point and shoot, and bam! A fairly accurate temperature reading!

It only measures surface temperature, so liquids should be stirred before measuring and a probe thermometer is still needed for roasting meats. (I do so wish someone would create a laser-guided turkey thermometer. In our latest fiasco, we never fully plugged the sensor's plug into the base of the thermometer, and it kept claiming the chicken was "LO" degrees. I should have known better, as the thing accurately measures room temperature.)

The final test will be whether it lasts the year. If I can keep it dry and away from oil splatters, it should make it.

Chocolate wookiees and raspberry roses

2011-02-26T20:41:37Z

I am keeping up with my vow to practice more to not embarrass my friends at their Halloween wedding.

I baked two cakes from the Cake Bible (delicious), a cake and Swiss meringue buttercream from Baking: From My Home to Yours (delicious), two dozen chocolate-raspberry cupcake "roses," and six dozen vegan, Star Wars-themed cupcakes for my son's birthday.

(On a side note, let me tell you what a score the vegan cupcakes were -- not for the birthday boy, but for his classmate who is allergic to eggs. I don't understand people who won't accommodate kids (and adults, but really kids) with food allergies. Can you imagine what it's like to worry that something you absolutely must do three or more times a day could send you to the hospital if you don't have the vigilance of a Marine sergeant during a surprise inspection? How about not eating the cake at every party you go to?)

Conclusion: the cake itself will be the easiest part. I am good with cake. Separating, sifting, whipping, folding, beating, creaming, measuring, alternating, melting -- all those verbs in the cake recipe? I can do them, no sweat. Sure, I sift my dry ingredients into a bowl and promptly drop it on the floor, overfill the rose tube pan and turn it into a cake batter volcano, and occasionally set things on fire. But in general, batter and I have an understanding.

Icing and I, on the other hand, have yet to reach detente. My icing still has swoop marks and small pot holes; it's not even close to smooth. The Swiss meringue was smoother and easier to work with; future practice might concentrate on that.

Then there are my piping skills. I'm about as proficient with a pastry bag as my kindergarten-age son is with a pencil. Smooth, swooping curve? Sustained pressure? No. Instead, the pastry bag of royal icing exploded on the rebel logos I was flooding, then fell to the floor. A teacup full of icing fell onto three Chewbacca cupcakes. The uninjured Chewbaccas did look more like wookiees than shar peis, but just barely. A week later, I fell back to creating roses with a large, closed star tip.

Flooded icing decorations are out (that's the technique people decorate sugar cookies with), but fondant is still in the game. After making three dozen lightsabers, the attraction is clear: fondant is sugar-based playdough. It's so sweet as to be inedible, but damn, it looks good and is easy to work with! If I can't get a smooth icing, the bride will just have to settle for a fondant-covered cake.

How can one book be intimidating?

2011-01-28T02:44:05Z

Having committed to baking Shawn and Steve their wedding cake, it was time for the second best part of making a wedding cake &emdash; researching the design and flavor possibilites. Out came all the professional books and the standards of enthusiastic home bakers. I remembered that Rose Levy Berenbaum's Cake Bible had, in addition to a variety of scalable recipes for any size cake, gorgeous pictures of wedding cakes she'd baked over the years. For those featured cakes, she has recipes that start off not with a list of ingredients, but with a list of recipes to make (X batches of this icing, Y batches of this filling, Z batches of fondant, plus extra fillings and icings and oh yes the cake) and directions for assembling them into one giant confectionery skyscraper.

It was like opening the directions from that new super-cool Lego set (for young singles, substitute Ikea here) and finding that it's just the directions for how to ready the other seven booklets of directions. (That's an exaggeration; the big Lego sets have only seven pages of directions on how to read the directions and properly assemble the Legos, an important step of which is to throw out all your shag carpeting before you lose all the tiny pieces deep in the pile.)

Am I out of my depth here? Paging through the Cake Bible, I became convinced I was, although I'd made wedding cakes before.

Clearly, the answer is to bake more, if not absolutely everything in the Cake Bible before September. Also, I need to decorate more. The first step of which was to commit to six dozen Star Wars themed cupcakes for my son's sixth birthday, Dorie Greenspan's celebration cake (with Swiss meringue icing) for a friend's birthday, and Berenbaum's golden genoise for the hell of it and to use up the yolks left from the Greenspan cake.

So that's where I am in the wedding cake project: a freezer full of vegan cupcakes and a slice of breakfast cake every day this week.

(The best part of the wedding cake is eating the experiments.)

In which our heroine bites off more than she can chew

2011-01-04T00:47:21Z

Our good friends Shawn and Steve will marry this October, in what will certainly be a themed, costume wedding. Because we have both looked forward to this wedding, my husband and I immediately volunteered our services, him as photographer, and me to bake the cake.

Shawn's favorite holiday is Halloween, hence the October wedding date; Steve is a Star Wars geeks of the first order. They are undecided between pure Halloween theme and Star Wars. Her college-age daughter opposes the Star Wars idea, but I pointed out that going along with it would make negotiations for her own wedding much easier.

So far, Shawn and Steve like the suggestion of each layer being a different flavor. What flavors, they haven't decided yet. Because I'm a home baker, this isn't any more work, because my mixer can only mix up batter or icing for one or two layers at a time. And chocolate is the easiest icing to dye black.

I've made wedding cakes before, but very simply decorated. Swirls of cream cheese icing with fresh berries! Smooth icing! Simple shell border! This will certainly stretch my decorating ability.

For the Star Wars cakes, the first thought a traditional tiered wedding cake with Leia in a veil, Han in a bow tie, and other toys (er, "action figures") arranged as a bridal party. Then I thought I could make a purely geometric Death Star or R2-D2 without cursing overmuch, even if it would be a lot of work and necessitating a course in fondant. The light-saber cupcakes would also be possible, and perhaps even some wookie faces in chocolate buttercream. There will be no expired tauntauns warming a near-to-death Luke Skywalker.

I've found three categories of Halloween cakes.

The elegant cakes appear to be traditional tiered cakes, but on closer inspection there are spooky accents, like black and dark red roses, or "pillars" and "rosettes" of icing that turn out to be bones and skulls on closer examination. Or this black-fondant covered cake with skulls, and swirls and beads of white buttercream.

The fun cakes come in Halloween colors, like black, orange, purple, green and blood-red, with stripes, swirls and polka dots of contrasting colors, and cute fondant figures of witches and vampires. There are topsy-turvey cakes and multi-story haunted houses, and silhouettes of bats and cats, and figures from popular movies.

The creepy cakes go beyond spooky, with dismembered body parts and dripping blood icing or filling (really red fruit jam).