Raccoon and Lobster

The lemon luxury layer cake left me with an abundance of egg whites. About 13 of them. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try my hand at making some fancy pants macarons. I read Syrup and Tang’s fantastic guide to macaron techniques and troubleshooting and decided that the slightly more difficult Italian meringue or sucre cuit method was for me.

Never has the world seen such wrinkled, deformed little beasts claiming to be macarons.

The batter was too thin and so the act of putting them into the oven caused the circles I made to ooze into amoeba blobs and melting snowmen.

None of them developed feet. The ideal macaron also has a crispy shell and a soft meringue interior. My crispy shells were usually cracked and the interior had giant air bubbles with a dense layer of chewy batter at the bottom. All wrong.

And yet, strangely addictive to eat.

Maca-so-wrong-they’re-rights?

Maca-gones?

Maca-real-beauty-is-on-the-insides?

Maca-noms?

Help me out here.

I can’t decide which is worse: missing a stick of butter because a puppy dog ate it, or missing a stick of butter because a puppy dog hid it. Either way, it’s not going to be pretty when I finally find evidence of the crime.

I needed an epic comeback to my long cooking drought. Something that would appeal to everyone. Something that would win me new readers and remind old ones why they come back. Something like a doughnut day with three different types of doughnuts made from the best recipes the internet had to offer.

By the time the last guests staggered home at 1 am, the doughnuts were looking a lot worse for the wear, the glaze had hardened up, and I was ready to do a face plant into my pillow. It seems I am suffering from some sort of doughnut related photography curse.

submitted to Yeastspotting

While I would recommend any of these doughnuts, and in fact, heartily recommend the very concept of a Doughnut Day, I would recommend that you do not, in your zeal, dip three of your fingers into 375° oil.  You’ll be happy to know that I still have fingerprints. In fact, there is no lasting sign of injury at all, and no one seemed to mind that the next batch of doughnuts developed a slightly meaty flavor. I kid. Mostly.

Also! It is a good idea to give your stove a stern talking-to beforehand so that it knows that it is highly inappropriate to go on the fritz an hour before guests begin to arrive. The crucial hour where batters are being made, what with the heating up of milk, and the reducing of apple cider. Fortunately, there was no gas explosion, and no subsequent splashing of hot oil or flying shards of hot cast iron. After making an offering to the appropriate gods of deep fried doughs, the problem seemed to resolve itself, which is not at all totally disconcerting.

On to the recipes!

All doughnuts are cooked in a dutch oven filled with about 2 inches of canola oil heated to 375°. For cutters, I use a 3 inch cutter and a 1 inch cutter from this pastry cutter set.

My personal favorite, and the easiest of all to make were the

Meyer Lemon and Sour Cream Doughnuts adapted from Tartelette.

2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup sugar
4 oz sour cream
2 large eggs
juice and zest from one Meyer lemon
1 tablespoon olive oil

Combine the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and stir together. In another bowl, combine the sugar, sour cream, eggs, juice and zest, and olive oil and whisk until smooth. Add in the dry ingredients and stir until uniform. Cover with plastic and chill in the fridge for at one hour.

Scoop using an ice cream scoop or teaspoon and drop the batter into the oil, flipping them when they brown. If you use a large scoop like I did, sometimes the centers were a little gooey and prompted some guests to ask if they were in fact filled doughnuts. I thought this was delicious and did not make any adjustments. This is the large round doughnut in the back.

The guest favorites were the Apple Cider Doughnuts which appeared on The Kitchn, and Smitten Kitchen within days of each other. With such an endorsement, who could resist?

I had some issues reducing the cider because of the aforementioned stove on the fritz, which I think is what contributed to the light, fragile, dough that was a little difficult to manage. This may have clouded my feelings on them as everyone else was very fond of them.

Apple Cider Doughnuts

1 cup apple cider
3½ cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
½ cup buttermilk (can substitute ½ whole milk with juice from half a Meyer lemon)

Step one is to heat the apple cider in a pan over medium heat until it has reduced to 1/4 cup, about 20 minutes or so. I found no good way to do this besides pouring it into a measuring cup and back. Slightly annoying and prone to failure if your stove starts clicking at you.

Meanwhile, when not trying to fix a stove that’s in use, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar at medium speed until uniform and then add the eggs one at a time and beat until the mixture is smooth. Reduce the mixing speed and stir in the cider and the buttermilk, then the dry mixture until just combined.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and sprinkle with generous amounts of flour. Transfer the dough to the sheet and coat the top with flour as well. Flatten the dough to about ½ inch thickness with your hands and transfer to the freezer for 20 minutes to firm it up. Remove the dough from the freezer and cut into shape with pastry cutters. Place the cut doughnuts and holes onto a second lined sheet pan and refrigerate for 20 minutes. They are then ready to fry. This is the large cake doughnut in the picture.

Finally, there was the classic raised doughnut, which I have made previously using another recipe. This time I used the Alton Brown recipe, which is a little bit fussier and tasted about the same to me.

Yeast Doughnuts
1½ cups milk
2½ ounces shortening (about 1/3 cup)
4.5 teaspoons instant yeast (2 packages)
1/3 cup warm water
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup sugar
1½ teaspoons salt
23 ounces all purpose flour

Warm the milk over medium heat for a few minutes and pour over the shortening to melt it. Set aside until lukewarm.

In a small bowl, combine the yeast and warm water and let sit for 5 minutes. Then pour the yeast mixture into a mixer and combine with the milk mixture. Be careful that the milk is not too hot or it will kill off the yeast. Add the eggs, sugar, salt, and half of the flour. Sprinkle in a small amount of nutmeg and/or cinnamon if desired. Mix at low speed until ingredients are combined and gradually add in the remaining flour. Using either a dough hook attachment or a wooden spoon, knead the dough until it becomes smooth, about 3-5 minutes. Transfer to an oiled bowl and let rise until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

On a generously floured surface, roll out the dough to about ½ inch and cut using pastry cutters. Transfer cut doughnuts and holes to a floured baking sheet and cover and let rise for 30 minutes before frying.

I dropped the doughnuts in over the course of the evening, and even though they were extremely over-proofed by the time midnight rolled around, they were still delicious fresh out of the fryer. The biggest problems seemed to be cosmetic, as they were so fragile that even the gentlest touch left indentations that never bounced back. They are the blurry, malformed, light-colored doughnuts on the left side of the plate.

For toppings, I had cinnamon sugar, powdered sugar, the same vanilla glaze as last time, and apple cider glaze. Just whisk to combine. If glaze thickens, place the bowl in a warm water bath .

Vanilla Glaze
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups powdered sugar

Apple Cider Glaze
2 tablespoons apple cider
1 cup powdered sugar

When you are working with a recipe with 4 ingredients, it is especially embarrassing to omit one. And if this is a recipe for bread that you make over and over and over again, it makes you seem especially foolish.

Did all that running shake all of my baking knowledge out of my head? Is this the price I must pay for actually starting to enjoy my runs? Maybe if I secretly add a cup of salt to the olive oil no one will notice how bland the bread is. Dammit.

If, after stuffing yourself full of homemade pizzas, you forget about your bread and realize too late that it has almost quadrupled in size instead of tripled, you’re already so late that taking an extra 30 seconds to toss it in the oven isn’t going to make a difference. If you panic and rush through it though, this might happen:

and then you’d be even worse off. On the upside, you will then have the makings for a filler blog post.

The one day your boyfriend decides to make breakfast by turning on the broiler is the day that you have a 2-day bread in the oven awaiting it’s final rise. This is not Nancy Silverton approved bread-handling behavior. Next time, put a sign on the door.

Pro pro tip: If you’re going to blame the failure of one loaf on someone else, make sure you don’t mess up the second loaf that he didn’t touch. And if you do mess it up, make sure it doesn’t come out worse than the first. Sigh. Slashing loaves before you bake is important, folks!

It seems that I have managed to curse myself by adding the catastrophes tag, as this weekend was filled with an unusual number of cooking mishaps.

In grinding pepper for the chicken used for my (typically very successful) homemade tacos, I managed to unscrew the cap off of the pepper mill and deposit approximately 1/4 of the container all over the pan and its surroundings. We are big fans of pepper in this house but it was still…suboptimal…when some bites resulted in a mouthful of whole peppercorns. 

Oh, did I mention that we made our own tortillas for the first time? We did.

Let me just say that 2 hours before you have company over for brownie waffles is not the best time to experiment with making tortillas for the first time. Aside from the mess in the kitchen, however, about half of them came out quite good. The other half ended up overcooked to various degrees and came out too crispy to properly hold the taco ingredients. All of them were more suited in size for burritos than tacos. 

Still, coupled with a catastrophe-free homemade pico de gallo, some sour cream, and guacamole, we had a thoroughly delicious if occasionally obnoxiously peppery meal that took forever to clean up.

Sadly, this was not the last of our food service related misadventures for the night. The boyfriend offered to bartend for our guests that night and make mint mojitos. As a guideline, he used the recipe from wikipedia which gave all of the quantities in centiliters. Who even uses centiliters anymore? Apparently not us, because he proceeded to botch the conversion to milliliters and made the equivalent of 10 mojitos using the sugar and mint for just one. Another mouth puckering moment. By the time the mistake was discovered and rectified, we all managed to be sufficiently blitzed off of sour rum to not care. 

But for the record:

And finally, a question of taxonomy for my readers:

Should a cooking escapade be categorized as a catastrophe if the taste bud impaired boyfriend considers it edible but both dogs won’t go near it?

Secondary to this, should it be categorized as a catastrophe if the original author of the recipe you used admitted to writing down the wrong quantity of a key ingredient?

If you are not a roundeye who is familiar with roundeye cooking, a dessert made from a vegetable that looks like celery and sounds like rutabaga does not exactly trigger the salivary glands*. But my friend Stacy could not stop talking about it.

2:50 PM Stacy: couldn’t find rhubarb, though, had to go back to the grocery store for it

2:52 PM Stacy: hafta decide, rhubarb CRISP, or CAKE

3:01 PM Stacy: ronnie do you… not like… rhubarb?

9:28 PM Stacy: so i just served [my  husband] his rhubarb crisp…

9:17 PM Stacy: oh, did i send enough rhubarb recipes?

So I finally caved and bought some of this infernal plant to see what the fuss was about. So I bravely chopped up my red celery and placed it in a baking dish only to realize that Stacy’s recipe calls for 4 cups of rhubarb, while scaredycat that I am, I had only purchased what amounted to 2.5 cups. My sad little pile of chopped rhubarb was going to cook down to nothing in the 8×8 dish so I decided to make 2 personal pan rhubarb crispettes ™.

[40 some odd minutes later] The rhubarb crisps smelled fantastic when I pulled them out of the oven. A quick picture for the blog and it was time for the first tentative bites.

After bite #3, it became very obvious that this is extremely tart rhubarb. Extremely. Perhaps even Xtremely. I used 2 heaping tablespoons of sugar for 2.5 cups of rhubarb. Keep in mind that the recipe called for 1-3 tb for 4 cups. I added more sugar to my fork. Then even more. When I had sprinkled another 2 tb of sugar onto one of the cups and was still puckering my mouth, it was time for drastic action. Fortunately I had something saved for just such an occasion:

Miracle fruit, for those who don’t know, contains a molecule named miraculin, which binds to your taste buds, causing sour food to taste sweet. With its help, I finished off my personal pan rhubarb crisp and then drank some unsweetened lemon juice. I can’t wait for my boyfriend to wake up from his nap so that I can offer him a tasty dessert.

For the record, this is what Arthur thought of it:

He did not want seconds.

* Oh dammit. Wikipedia informs me that rhubarb originated in Asia and was only introduced to the Americas in the 1820s. There goes my whole opening premise. Then again, this is the same wikipedia that informed us that our mint mojitos last night were incomplete without a sufficient stock of beef or walrus. Also, I believe the Chinese only used rhubarb root medicinally and it was the barbarian hordes of Mongolia [NOT BARBARIAN HORDE-IST] that actually ate them, so my aversion to them as a food source is still justified.

Breaking news update:

(19:40) Stacy: hmm
(19:40) Stacy: don’t hate me
(19:40) Stacy: in retrospect, i think i underestimated the amount of extra sugar
(19:41) Stacy: i think i meant 3-6 tablespoons
(19:41) Stacy: >_<
(19:41) Stacy: i made it too sweet once
(19:41) Stacy: so i was trying to be judicious

Nancy Silverton says that you should treat your starter like a baby. Regular feedings and careful attention to all its needs. When I failed the last feeding and my attempts to revive the starter looked unsuccessful, I was tempted to scrap it all and restart with the pound of grapes I saved for just this occasion. But hasn’t everyone been dropped on the head a few times as a baby? No? Just me? Well my mother kept me instead of starting over and I turned out juuuuuust fine*.

So I turned to the bible and looked for guidance.  Well it turns out that the adding of water during feeding is just to maintain the consistency and so my attempts to fix my mistake by preserving the listed proportions did more harm than good. A little extra fuel in the form of flour wouldn’t have hurt as much as drowning all the baby yeasties. Which, by the way, also happened to me as a youngster left improperly attended in a boat…

Moving on again, the starter still smelled viable but the consistency was that of thin gruel, so there was no real chance for bubble formation and lord knows what was happening to the poor yeasts. So I bit the bullet and started adding flour sans measurements until it was about the same consistency as before. And you know what? The bubbles came back. The casual observer would never suspect that this starter had been nearly drowned. So if you’re intimidated by the idea of making your own sourdough starter, don’t be. Like babies, they’re much harder to kill off than you think.

*Okay so technically under the one child policy she couldn’t exactly start over anyways. So this analogy is perhaps not the best. But anyways. Moving on.

Circumstances beyond our control necessitated a deviation from the orders we were given, but I have no qualms about taking evasive action to prevent a catastrophe, and I believe this type of independent thinking is necessary for anyone who aspires to be a master baker. 

Whereas the situation had seemed secure yesterday morning, by late evening a worrying calm had developed.

By this morning, there was little sign of activity and a separation of the solid and liquid factions had occurred. In violation of the Directive, I offered to mediate a treaty and provided humanitarian aid in the form of 8oz of flour and 4 oz of water, a full 11 hours in advance of the relief convoy. I am confident that this will further diplomatic proceedings and enable renewed cultural expansion in the region.

Baker’s log supplemental:

In going over the events of the day, I realized that I had made a terrible error. The scheduled delivery had been for 4oz of flour and 8oz of water, and in reversing this, I had unknowingly engineered the very catastrophe that I had hoped to prevent. In the hopes of buying some time for me to rectify matters, I delivered another 12oz of water to the liquid faction but I fear that my actions have doomed this culture for good.

Supplemental to the baker’s log supplemental:

The internet is a beautiful thing. Nerdiest greatest oven mitt ever.