I went food shopping the other day for the first time in over a month and acquired two mules worth of food. But with the oven broke, our options are limited. So, I decided to play it subtle. During unloading:
Dad: Stewwing potatoes, stew meat, chicken stock, chili mix, Crockpot Delights, and stuff for the toaster oven. I guess I should look into getting a new bake element for the oven if I ever want to use a fork again.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!
I returned on Monday a bit harried after driving 14 hours and I ran into one of my baking fans.
Coworker: Terry, why you in so late? Where the cake?
Me: Well, I got in from a 14-hour drive from Chicago this morning. The turnpike was really rough and I just had to sleep.  Also, my oven’s still broke.
Coworker: That terrible.
Me: The drive wasn’t that bad.
Coworker: No, your oven. How we get cake? What’s wrong with the oven?
Me: It might be the coil or the whole oven, I haven’t checked yet.
Coworker: Your oven too important to us. I see if I can start a collection. If not, I get purchase order. This too important to wait on.
Me: Thank you, I guess.
Coworker: No worry, I manager. It what I do.
Hm… Vital piece of test apparatus breaks and I have to wait 20 days to send it out for repairs. My personal oven breaks cutting off the confectionary supply lines and the full force of my division is brought to bear. It’s good that we have priorities.
I think my oven may be dying:
Me: Dad, I think the oven’s dying.
Dad: It’s only 23 years old. The light bulb even works still.
Me:Â That wasn’t the bulb, that was the break in the heating element that my aluminum foil on fire.
Dad: Terry, I think the oven’s dying.
The apple bundt cake was heavy, partly from the glass pan, partly from the five gala apples that went into the 13″ x 9″ dish, and partly from the ton of awesome contained within the pecans. I was hailed as a hero for unlocking the taste of apple and using cinnamon and nutmeg in something besides a pumpkin pie. I’ve been entered into the running for a Nobel Peace Prize as the recipe may stop wars and I keep getting called by Time Magazine. A statue is being erected in my honor and the part of my desk that held the tray holding the cake has been cordoned off with velvet rope as hallowed ground.
I picked up my phone to casually call Mrs. “homemade is boxed cake mix plus a tin of frosting” and tension mounted as the phone rang. I hit the magic 5 rings and heard “I won’t be in today… prattle prattle prattle”. Slam went the phone receiver as I saw the last piece of cake disappear in a cloud of salivating coworker and when the dust cleared I saw the clock: only 55 minutes had elapsed from arrival in work to first coworker discovering the cake to it being totally consumed. I’m lucky my rival wasn’t in, as I wouldn’t want to appear to be gloating by summoning her to an empty dish… I need to save that for the actual competition. She may be prepared for battle, I will win as I’m preparing for war.
Baking Challenge Lady returned today:
Her: Is this a carrot cake?
Me: No. It’s a fudge cake.
Her: Oh, so it’s a carrot cake.
Me: No. It’s a fudge cake.
Her: A fudge cake. Interesting.
Me: By the way, I never caught your name.
Her: <her name>, what’s yours? (Despite that she sought me by name on our first meeting)
Me: Terry.
Her: Oh, I’ve wanted to meet you.
Me: You did, last week, when you asked for me by name.
Her: It is you! (What?)
Me: Anyway, your palms feel rough, would you like some skin cream? *Present bottle of our firm’s skin cream*
Her: Thank you. *Takes dollop and rubs it onto the back of her hand* So you made this from scratch?
Me: I do with most of my stuff, except for pie doughs, I suck at pie doughs. And you?
Her: Usually, but I take shortcuts like using cake mix and buying the frosting in those little cans.
Ah… Mind you, if I were really a purist I would steep the vanilla beans myself and squeeze the egg out of the chicken but I’m confident in saying buying cake mix and frosting is not considered baking from scratch. I am now not only fighting for myself, my department, or my sex, but for every person who’s ever f*ed up recipe but gotten away with it because it was made with grandma’s recipe which included things like rounded 1/4 tablespoons, sweet milk (from a time when buttermilk was common) and considered instant yeast the devil’s powder. I will win, and it will be glorious.
Butter Cream is the result of great serendipity or genius like the Bessemer process, ePTFE (Teflon) or the chocolate chip cookie. Somehow, someone said to themselves “Scrambled eggs: within you I see the potential for a cake topping”. Then, with grim determination, this scion of flavor learned to think like an egg protein and deigned to find a way to prevent protein cross-linkage. The breakthrough was slow heat and rotary forearm ferocity normally reserved for pubescent teenagers.  I’ve attempted to make butter cream twice before, in the first case I created sweet scrambled eggs, in the second I created a stunt double for the The Blob that resulted in me losing a saucier. This time, I took a moment to center myself, made a double boiler of metal bowl and 2 qt chef’s pan and set to overcome the legion failures I’d made in the Organic Chemistry lab. The temperature approached 160°F which is normally the magical temperature that cross-linking begins but a little known fact is that egg foams can smell fear.  Alternatively, the pheromones emitted during my roar of determination at 159°F disrupted the electron cloud of the involved sulfur and my butter cream was victorious.
I had to cut the butter cream with some confectioner’s sugar to edge out the saltiness of the sweet cream I was forced to use being otherwise out of unsalted butter but otherwise it served as a capable topping to the “fudge cake” that was neither fudgy nor cake-like but this failing was devoured by sheer metaphysical delight of having a cake topped largely with butter.
I’m incapable of down-scaling a recipe. I can make a double, triple or quadruple batch but not a 1/2 sized one. So, when I made a cake that produced two rounds instead of my normal 3 I had to get create in icing. After dismissing the idea of frosting the bottom, I started cutting divets to create holes across layers that became cream cheese frosting veins to connect the strata of sugared cheese and butter. I was unsure if it’d turn out too rich and my answer came from a comment from a coworker: “Terry, the frosting with cake in it was wonderful.”
Further confirmation came from the guy who kept coming in with fake questions so he’d have an excuse to coyishly have more cake.
I ran short on time to prepare Monday baked goods for work and was forced to use the boxed stuff. I felt dirty at first and compromised by using the box brownie mix in a novel way. I’d switch from oil to butter, add water and make cookies instead of brownies. I even had a packet of caramel to add to the top to make them look like those adorable (type of cookie where there’s stuff in the center) that everyone likes. I made thumb depressions in the cookie blanks, added the caramel, threw it in the oven at 350°F for 14 minutes and celebrated my victory by going to town on the beaters.
I pulled them from the oven left them to cool for an hour and came back to…. donuts.  Apparently, the caramel prevented the centers from cooking and with additional weight of the sauce the centers dropped through the grating of the cooling rack. So, tomorrow I will go to work with not one but two goodies. First, the donut cookies with their hole slightly creamed with caramel, and second the slightly under cooked centers that I’ve come to call caramel hats.
Stupid like a fox.
I love salsa and cheese dip or the aptly named salsa con queso and decimate several loaves of Velveeta annually creating this magnus opus of chip toppings. But the one failing of this East-meets-West culinary paragon is that it doesn’t store well, turning into a form of cheesy cement that doesn’t reheat well. But magically, the store-bought stuff can happily sit on either countertop or refrigerator shelf maintaining its always dippable texture due to some dark deal a food-scientist made with Satan to defy food physics. I must make my own.
Reading the ingredients list, the storebought dip large consisted of cheese parts (whey, lecithin, squirrel) and a few chemical stabilizers, oils, fats, actual cheese (holy crap) and the always present maltodextrin. Knowing I could create dextrin from baking corn starch and isolate the requisite sodium salts from other household goods I set to work. I melted the Velveeta and set about adding the various meth-lab reductions to prevent the Velveeta from hardening at room temperature while reducing the salsa after a bath in some decade-old molecular sieves. Final step: Create an solute of oil and Velveeta to reduce the melting point. So, I melted and mixed. And mixed, and mixed and mixed. So looks like, despite the fact that Velveeta is 62.5% fat, it won’t dissolve into oil. So, I have what looks like amazing nacho dip, with this puddle of greasy spittle floating on top of it like tard-drool on a math test. I went so far as to add a small amount of rendered lard as an emulsifier and put it in a blender and once again the non-emulsion laughed at me wearing a hat of corn oil. I tried some, and it tasted like it looked, really good nacho dip that had just gotten into a baby-oil soaked girl-on-girl cat fight. Our dog Max loves the stuff.
Mondays are baked goods days at work. Not because of some company policies but because I brought in baked goods four Mondays in a row and that broke the repetition barrier required for something to become a tradition. It was 1 AM on Monday and thought I’d go for the reliable pineapple upside-down cake but I only had 1 egg. So I decided to make a Various Pie containing:
Using the maxims of “if all else fails add butter” and “if all else fails add sugar” (does not apply to grilling) I think I made a passable pie. Someone said it was a bit smoother than normal; that was probably the caramel filling and “over ripe” apples. I need to find a way to keep an emergency stock of eggs a la “In Case of Emergency Break Glass” kinda way. I Googled “freezing eggs” and learned quite a bit about the cryonics of preserving human ova, sadly they’re far too small to cook with.