Kitchen F#!% Ups

I’m not taking the blame for this one. But it was still pretty spectacular – gingerbread bubbling all over the pan and inside the oven. The pan size called for in the recipe is either too small, or the amount of baking soda is too high (2 tsp seems high)! Luckily my pizza stone, which sits in the oven at all times, took the brunt of the gingerbread lava, so cleanup wasn’t too awful… although I haven’t tackled the pan yet.

Notice how there’s no overflow on the handles of the pan. That’s because Larry and I ate it. Crusty, delicious gingerbread.

• Gingerbread Cake with Root-Beer-Poached Pears (Fine Cooking #102, December 2009, p. 57)
  

So far most everything from Baked has been delicious. Not always simple to make or without some sort of near disaster happening, but at least everything has tasted good. Until now.

My friend and co-worker Laura was in town for a day, so I decided that I’d make up these tarts. We both have a caramel obsession, and in my book butterscotch falls under the caramel umbrella.

The crust for these is rustic and oat-y. A good start. I made up the butterscotch pudding, adding a bit of scotch and butter at the end (because it’s a real butterscotch) and poured the pudding into the tart shells. I had a little taste. Hmm. Not great a little off. But I figured I’d still bring one in for Laura to try the next morning, maybe she could help me figure out what was wrong.

We found a moment during the flurry of the workday to pull out the two treats I had brought, a divine pear caramel ice cream, and the tarts. Which no longer tasted like slightly off butterscotch. They tasted much, much worse. Which is how they came to be known as Ass Tarts.

• Butterscotch Pudding Tarts (Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, p. 104)

This cake ended up delicious and even looked decent once I did quite a bit of structural intervention. My first problem was with the caramel. I normally make caramel based on how it looks – I don’t use a thermometer. But I have a habit of following a recipe exactly the first time, especially when baking, so I stuck my thermometer in and waited… too long. Caramel will burn very quickly and I took about 15 seconds too long to remove it from the heat. First batch burned.
Second problem came with the layers of cake. They were very delicate. I wonder if I could have cooked them slightly longer, but they kind of stuck to the cooling rack, and I could tell I was going to have difficulty getting the layers stacked up.
I started building the layers: cake, whipped caramel ganache, fleur de sel. I got all three layers stacked up, covered them with a crumb coat, and carried it to the refrigerator to firm up. Except as I moved it to the refrigerator the layers began to slide around on the caramel, and two of them cracked and the entire thing began to disintegrate. I did the best I could to shore it up and continued on to finish frosting it.
There was more ganache than I needed so I stored the rest in the refrigerator just in case. Good thing. When I took the cake out after dinner, part of the ganache on top had slid off the top of the cake. The whole cake had shifted and stuck to the side of the dome top of my cake plate, so it tore off a bunch of ganache when I removed it.
I made do with what I had and cut pieces off of the sections that weren’t ripped or melting. Later, I used the leftover ganache to do a patch job, and it ended up working out pretty well. And the cake, well, it’s really fabulous.

• Sweet & Salty Cake (Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, p. 67)

I’m a huge fan of David Leibovitz. His Perfect Scoop cookbook is fantastic, and I made ice cream out of it all summer. So I thought, I’ll pick up another one of his cookbooks from the library and make something of his besides ice cream.
I don’t know if it was the recipe, or if my oven is really off, but this cake was way overdone even though I set the timer for ten minutes before it was supposed to be done. It was so overdone, it literally crumbled as soon as I cut into it.

• Chocolate Macadamia Cake (Room For Dessert, p. 33)

I don’t particularly like hazelnuts, so I’ve never used them at home. I’ve started to use them sparingly, because I’ve decided they’re okay in small doses. I had a recipe that called for roasting hazelnuts. First the nuts are roasted in the oven, then you rub them in a clean kitchen towel and the skins come right off. I went to the store, bought the nuts, and roasted them. Took them out of the oven… hey, why aren’t the skins coming off?

Turns out the hazelnuts need to be shelled before roasting. Duh.

I roasted a couple of trays of tomatoes, fresh from our garden today. We have a bumper crop of sauce tomatoes, and I didn’t feel like making a bunch of sauce. This is a great way to use them up. I like the roasted tomatoes just eaten plain as a snack, or on a good grilled cheese sandwich. Or on bruschetta. Don’t ask me why I took these smaller tomatoes and set the oven and timer for the same amount of time as what I use for larger tomatoes. Basic bone-headedness – nothing in the recipe calls for slow-roasting until almost ashy.

• Slow-Roasted Summer Tomatoes (Fine Cooking #66, September 2004, p. 60)

This is the second time I’ve made this cake, and it’s really not easy to work with. It fell in the middle and when I cut it in two, it wasn’t thick enough in the middle so I ended up with the top in pieces. And a gigantic hole on top. Luckily ganache covers all and it ended up looking and tasting okay in the end… but I’m not sure I’m going to try making this cake again.

• Chocolate Stout Cake (King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, p. 422)

I suspected this was a bad idea to start but decided to give it a try anyway. I had a batch of bread dough that had been in the refrigerator a bit too long, and from experience knew the dough would be a little loose and sloppy. I used plenty of flour and a banneton that Amy gave me. After about 45 minutes, I went to turn out the dough. See the horrific results below. What a mess to clean up, too.

• Boule (Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, p. 26)

I made gnocchi for the first time ever today. It wasn’t very hard, and it turned out really nice. Until I tried to cook it. The plan was to cook the gnocchi in boiling water, then pan-sear them in butter and shave black truffle on the top. I cooked the gnocchi in the boiling water until it floated to the top. It didn’t take long. Then I heated butter in a skillet and when it stopped foaming, I added the gnocchi. Everything was going fine until the gnocchi started to stick all over the pan. I ended up with a mushy mess, no brown crust on the outside of the gnocchi. It was all stuck to the pan.

Problem number one: I should have cooked the gnocchi slightly longer. The main bonehead move was using a regular pan instead of a nonstick. What was I thinking? I cooked a second batch and it turned out much, much better.

Big gloppy mess:

What it should have looked like:

• Pan-Seared Potato Gnocchi (Fine Cooking #90, January 2008, p. 62) with Browned Butter & Black Truffle

I thought maybe something happened to my bread-baking abilities. I rarely have trouble with bread. I proof my yeast if it’s in question. I use my microwave as a proofing box – after boiling some water in there, it’s nice and warm and humid.

Since I’ve had really great luck with the recipes from King Arthur Flour’s cookbook, I decided to make this bread. It looked easy, doesn’t require a huge amount of kneading, and is relatively quick to make.

Things started off on the wrong foot when I dug through the newly-purchased groceries to find the yeast I had just bought. Uh… where’s the yeast? Gone. I was cheated out of yeast! So I sent Larry off to the store while I tried to keep my oats warm (soaked in boiling water, but they were quickly cooling off).

Then everything came together okay after that. The dough mixed up fine, and I put it in a bowl and into my proofing box for a 1-hour rise. But it wasn’t rising. Boiled more water, left it for another hour. It rose some, enough, I decided, and I shaped it into a log and put it in the loaf pan for the second rising.

Again, it wasn’t rising. I ended up working on that thing until the next day. I finally just gave up and baked it. The top is completely flat. It’s about the size of a half-slice of bread. Beautiful crumb, though, and super tasty. Just really stupid looking.

So what was the problem? I read back over the recipe and referred to the front of the chapter, where it states that instant yeast is NOT the same as active dry yeast. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (Peter Reinhard, bread god) says they’re the same. I read a bunch of online forums and I’m not the only one that’s confused. After searching everywhere, I discovered that no one sells instant yeast. So I ordered some from King Arthur Flour and made the bread again. Guess what? There’s a difference. So the secret is true instant yeast. Who knew?

• Honey-Oatmeal Sandwich Bread (King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, p. 197)