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Coworker: You like to bake, don’t you, Terry?
Me: Yes.
Coworker: Have you tried making cake balls?
Me: No. What are they?
Coworker: They’re a treat where you coat a cake and something else in chocolate.
Me: Sounds like a truffle make with cake.
Coworker: They’re easier and more fun.
Me: Well, one of the constituent steps is “bake a cake” right?
Coworker: Yep.
Me: That step one is the only step for baking a cake as opposed to cake balls which I imagine then have other steps.  Sounds harder.
Coworker: But they’re more fun.
Me: How are they more fun?
Coworker: Because they’re cake balls instead of a cake.
Me: *blank stare* I… have a meeting.

?

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I made cookies for TI: Philly with the intent of shipping some to a friend now in California.  The half batch for him was prepared, placed in a zip-lock bag, and packed in a USPS priority box which I placed in the fridge until I had a chance to send it later that day.  Time ran out for me to send it before the weekend and on returning Monday evening and looking for something to eat, found the box I had forgotten to send.  I didn’t want to ship them at this point and happily ate them.  I did wind up shipping the cookies, it was just to me in the future.

Thank you, Conrad.  They were delicious.

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A friend requested something with chocolate and mint, so I figured I’d brush off my ganache-manship skills and try making chocolate mint truffles.  Truffles are crazy straight forward and only involve making a ganache of dark chocolate and cream, dipping a spoonful in tempered chocolate, and dusting with cocoa powder but to this I added a vial of mint extract.  The product of this mixture can be described as Whitman’s Sampler piece filled with mouthwash or a chocolate treat made with Hall’s throat lozenges.  Only then did I look up a recipe for mint chocolate truffles where I learned I used a mere three times the amount of mint extract that one normally uses.  Next time, I go for four.

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Coworker: You’ve brought in pineapple upside down cake before, aren’t you going to try something new?
Me: People seem to like it, and it’s easy to make.  Was there a problem with it?
Coworker: No.
Me: How many pieces did you have?
Coworker: … two, but the second one wasn’t that big.

I’m going to continue to bring in pineapple upside down cake.

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Recipes are more like dance steps than a wrestling match as failure is instant and total but attempts are repeatable.  Repetition is rewarded with the deep secrets of tender yet flaky biscuits or in my case moist yet non-doughy cookies which I’ve determined exists in an approximately 45 second window in this particular recipe.  I doubled the batch size, assembled the ingredients and set about making two pineapple upside down cakes while the cookies were being prepared and after setting the fudge aside to cool.  Somehow in the cycle of remove sheet pan-rotate-replace-put to counter top I injured my back.  This wouldn’t be exceptional except that during the previous weekend I re-arranged my Scout equipment in the attic, a vastly more taxing act, in my opinion.

As I sat holding my lower back I realized that I’ve only injured my back doing incredibly lame things.  Here baking, previously sorting books (when a week earlier I had to physical do the moving between my room and attic) and in my best instance, while getting out of the shower.  Maybe I should stick to things at either end of the activity spectrum of either throwing cinder blocks or laying myself down on the couch, reading Redbook and sipping ginger ale.

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I hate cupcakes.  From the production side, they land in a maximum valley of inefficiency as 12 cupcakes can serve 10 people such that no one is satisfied and such that I have to spend twice as long as if I had made an actual cake decorating them.  Cupcakes have no presence, sure they can be decorated and sometimes you can do some neat shit will fillings but otherwise, I consider them a waste of time.  Today I made red velvet cupcakes in response to a request and wanted to frost them,  but not knowing the appropriate tool, I reached out to my more skilled baking friends and quickly raged when I found that there was an entire specialized culinary armory for topping the lil’ bastards.  Baby offset spatulas, piping bags, icing guns, and legion implements strictly designed to make a hat of sweetened gel were in my future until Grant Keiser proposed a solution, “use a knife, call it ‘rustic’ and charge twice as much”.

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A tertiary goal for my dinner party was to have as much of the food homemade as reasonable and this included the hors doeuvres so I cracked open my cookbook and set to making my own crackers.  I threw down $12 for the ridiculous quantity of sesame and poppy seeds required and pulled out my new rolling dowel which I set to stun (about 1/4″ of an inch).  After increasing the bake time by a factor of 4, I pulled the cracker – which I had flipped twice – from the oven and saw that the top was nearly raw and the bottom slightly burnt and one spot that couldn’t have been more than a millimeter thinner than another looked like it had been taken to with a brule torch.  Finally, a 1/4″ cracker is incredibly thick and could be used to spread asphalt and, being a burnt cracker, when I tried to throw it down the hill in our yard it initially sailed a good 10 feet before shattering on the ground.  The 3rd and subsequent crackers of 1/16″ thickness (3/16″ or so after baking) were acceptable but had to be watched with the attentiveness normally given only to premature infants and burn victims and this was a level of helicopter baking I wasn’t used to.  Per pound, my crackers cost about four times what Tollhouse or Nabisco would charge so this will probably be my last foray into baking muffin wafers.

Crackers are hard.

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A housemate’s girlfriend makes wonderful pudding-based cookies and today I test drove the recipe. Ingredient #4 or so was “7 oz pudding mix” and I was glad for the weight indication as the rest of the recipe was by volume, a system I never understood for compressible semifluids like flour and brown sugar which makes as much sense as saying “two yards of gasoline” to me. I ripped open seven 1 oz packets of pudding and soon found myself working with some type of pastry cement when I realized I had been overjoyed in mass too early. I used sugar free pudding which is about 1/3 the weight as regular pudding mix to produce the same volume. This was a mistake even my dog, Max, would not suffer so I went to my memory hole of failed cuisine, the terrace at the end of my house. Somewhere, there is a hive of squirrels and field mice that are excreting masonry.

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Strawberries were on sale, and I’m a sucker for trying to use seasonal fruit, but strawberry usually means pie not cake, which, by extension requires crust.  I suck at crusts, every attempt I’ve made to fabricate one from close to scratch has exploded or turned into some terrible dessert matzo and today was no exception.  Starting with a biscuit-style crust recipe I mixed and pushed and pulled and did so apparently to sufficient excess that I created a giant… biscuit.  I split that with my house mate.  My next attempt was to use a doughier option but failed to properly dock the crust and got a biscuit pita.  This I split with my dad.  My final attempt involved using the Safeway Brand roll-out pie crusts.  I rolled, I docked, I curled, I crimped, I took a call and I burned it.  This I gave to Max.  Nabisco 4 – Terry 0.

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The secret to a cheesecake is that it’s not a cake.  The leavening agent is strictly egg rather than baking soda, baking powder, or yeast, and to get a smooth top one must coast over the finish line rather than dashing over it.  I put the cake into a roasting dish partly filled with boiling water and cooked the cheesecake with the residual heat of the oven coasting down from a few hundred degrees.  The cake finished and had a gorgeous uncracked top.

Bad Part: I had no one to share this with.
Good Part: I had no one to share this with.