I try. Truly I do - but baking just isn't one of my strong points. I can cook just about anything, so long as it's a meal or savory dish. I can taste a dish at a restaurant and go home and mimic it from memory. Cooking is an art; you can be creative and fix something if you need to. Baking is a science - and if you don't do it all just right -- you'll have a flat cake, or hard brownies, or some other inedible catastrophe. So cooking a 6 course meal, I've got under control. But if it's a cake for dessert? Forget it. I mean, I can make a cake from a box -but from scratch? Ha.
Case in point. Saturday, it was lousy out. I took the kids to one of our favorite places - The Butterfly Place. It was pouring out, so an ice cream was out of the question for afterwards. It just wasn't a Kimballs kind of day. So I said, "lets go home, put on our cozy clothes - and bake a cake!". Well, while I was prepping for the cake, I realized I had no frosting. You can't have cake without frosting....so I thought, hmmm. I'll make my own frosting. Except.....
I had no confectioners sugar. So I thought, if I pureed my granulated sugar fine enough - voila! Confectioners sugar. No such luck. Maybe if I had a real food processor....? So, our frosting was a little, crunchy I guess you could say. Of course plain frosting wouldn't be enough...I threw in baking cocoa and coconut. Tasted okay, but the consistency was really bugging me. So....I added peanut butter to try to smooth it out. Tasted fantastic...still crunchy. Sigh. So, I thought I'd double boil it on the stove to melt it out and smooth it up. You guessed it.....still crunchy-ish.
Fortunately, the kids don't care how perfect the frosting is - they just wanted to eat it.
The cake? Well, it came out okay. And despite the fact that I greased AND floured the bottom as I was supposed to - it still stuck a little. So I had to cut it out of the pan. No pretty cake plate decorated with ribbons for this girl.
I've got nothing on Martha Stewart!
I'm a bit more Rachel Ray, but without all the yelling.
2 comments:
I'm with the kids. I don't care about looks or consistency. so long as it's good.
(Funny thing is, MY WIFE feels the same about me. Thank God.)
Sounds like my cake experience with it coming out of the oven lopsided and I didn't even realize it was RAW!!
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