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 Buttercrotch Pudding 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)

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)

Sheri, 0; Pumpkin Pie, 8.

I have tried to make pumpkin pie on many occasions. I hate pumpkin pie – so gross. But Larry loves it and I know homemade must be better than purchased. So I keep trying. Every time something goes horribly wrong.

This time, it was the crust. How many times have I made a blind-baked pie crust that turns out just perfect? A lot. So why did this one shrink from a lovely unbaked crust into a tough, tiny shrunken crust? I don’t know, but it barely took half of the filling. The rest went into ramekins.

Larry tried a piece, just in case. Sometimes things will seem horrible, but in the end they turn out fine. The only good thing about this pie crust is the outside crust. The rest was tough and chewy. The filling is allegedly good but I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

• Bourbon-Vanilla Bean Pumpkin Pie (Fine Cooking #88, November 2007 online extra)

I made a lovely little chocolate stout cake today, except it came out looking like there was a brain embedded in the middle of it. Or warts, take your pick. The disaster continued when I attempted to cut the 9″ round of cake in half (crooked), then tried to frost it with ganache that had been refrigerated too long. I popped it in the microwave, but for too long. Then had to refrigerate it again. It was messy, frosting the cake, because the ganache was still kind of gooey, and by the time it finished it looked like a chocolate grenade had exploded in my hands. Luckily there was lots of it to cover up the Cake Brain, and it ended up tasting pretty good.

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

I have all these Meyer lemons from the neighbor’s tree, so I’ve been making lemon desserts for a week now. Larry thought this cake looked really good. I ended up starting it really late in the day, so I made the cake layers and curd one day, then assembled and frosted the cake the next day.
Once the layers were cool, I stuck them on my cake plate with layers of wax paper in between, and just covered it with the dome that goes with the plate. The layers looked okay. One was kind of uneven and I thought they looked a little deflated.
The next evening, when I un-stacked the layers… cake was stuck all over the wax paper. Okay, no matter, it will be covered up anyway. I proceeded to slice each layer in half horizontally so the cake would have four different layers. Following the instructions and the photo, I carefully but firmly set my hand on top of the first layer and used a serrated knife to slice the layer in half.. sort-of. One of the layers broke in several places, and on the top of the layer was an impression of my hand where all of the outside of the cake came off. Repeat with the second layer.
By this time I was cranky and about ready to burst into tears. My lovely cake looked like a mess. I stacked up the layers with lemon curd in between, and shoved the broken parts in there to fill the holes.

Looks great, doesn’t it? I was close to just throwing the whole thing in the trash. I mixed up the delicious lemon buttercream frosting anyway and applied a crumb coat, then stuck it in the refrigerator to firm up. Then I applied the rest of the frosting. It turned out not to be a complete disaster. The cake slices weren’t as perfectly aligned as I would have liked, but the cake was good and looked decent at the end.

• Triple-Lemon Layer Cake (Fine Cooking #63, September 2004, p. 66)

This was my first attempt at making naan. It was not easy to make – the dough was really hard to handle. I got better at it the more I made, but this first one looks like *ahem* male genitalia.

• Homestyle Indian Naan (Fine Cooking #47, November 2001, p. 47)