The One Where the Baker Finally Sets Something on Fire!

Oh dear readers, you’re in for a rare treat of baker ineptitude. I’ll cut to the chase: I finally set something on fire. But oh the tale of how I got there…

In the midst of Easter preparation madness, I was informed that I had to bring a dessert to Easter. Since my brain was mostly on a work crisis, I decided to go with something easy, tried, and true…the pecan pie. I've never actually blogged about the pecan pie but I've made it twice before with varying degrees of help. It’s a great recipe that makes a very pretty pie. So with that, we commence!

I first had to make the pie crust which is a pretty straightforward process. Except that my mom usually does that part. Mixing the ingredients was easy but then I had to cut in the butter and that was such a colossal pain in my ass. I really don’t like the sound that the metal knives made against the metal bowl that I was using. Eventually, I got there though and, after confirmation from my sister that it looked ok, I set about rolling out the dough. Well, I don’t know if I made the dough too sticky or if I’m just bad at it but when I rolled it out, I got a bunch of holes, it stuck to the countertop, and when I tried to move it, the whole thing broke into about four pieces. Too frustrated to re-roll the crust, I just smooshed it all together into the pie plate. I tried to use my fingers to make it look pretty and to make it of even thickness but honestly, I was tired and didn't care that much.

On to the filling! The filling is super simple: light corn syrup, dark corn syrup, crushed pecans, eggs, and…brown sugar. Whoops. I totally forgot to check if we had brown sugar when I assessed that we had all the ingredients. So I went digging around and eventually found a little bit of brown sugar. I needed ¾ cup and I really didn’t think there would be enough. Also, the brown sugar was hard as a rock. Not exactly the consistency you want for brown sugar. But that’s ok, I know that I can microwave brown sugar to soften it up. No big deal. As it’s microwaving, I start to try to figure out what I can substitute for the remaining brown sugar that I’ll need. Eventually I found some dark brown sugar. Perfect! Except that it’s also hard as a rock.

At this point, the light brown sugar only needed about another 30 seconds in the microwave so I figure “whatever, I’ll toss the dark brown sugar in there too to soften it up.” So I do. Approximately three seconds later, there’s a loud bang from the microwave and a tiny, tiny flame on the bag of dark brown sugar. Apparently the twist tie was still on the dark brown sugar and, being metal, it doesn't like microwaves. Now things get comical. I immediately turned off the microwave and was just standing there staring at the tiny tiny flame. Seriously, it was little match girl tiny. Almost adorable. Except that it’s a fire in the microwave. Meanwhile, my sister panics and runs to get the fire extinguisher…except she ran to the place where the fire extinguisher was before the kitchen remodel and there is a refrigerator in that spot now. Actually, the kitchen fire extinguisher isn't even in the kitchen anymore (a detail that should probably be corrected). So my sister is all “I don’t know what to do! Open the microwave and we can put water on it to put it out!” Now, what do we not do if there is a tiny microwave fire? We do NOT open the microwave, give it oxygen, and turn it into a big microwave fire. Somebody wasn't paying attention to fire safety. So picture if you will: me standing calmly in front of the microwave waiting for the flame to burn itself out and saying “oops.”, my sister pacing and freaking out, and my mom…in the other room having no idea any of this happened. Until now. Sorry Mom, I cleaned it up! Microwave’s fine!

So there you have it. I finally caused a fire. But it was tiny and controllable! Here’s the best part: turns out there was actually enough light brown sugar in the bag. I never needed to put in the dark brown sugar. Oops.

Last thing to do was to make the pie look pretty. I made some lovely pecan concentric circles. And I had juuuust enough whole pecans to finish it. My sister was in charge of preheating the oven…unbeknownst to me, she set the oven to convect bake. I don’t have a newfangled convection oven so I’m not used to it. I noticed when I put the pie in the oven though and asked my sister if she did the time adjustment on the oven. Her actual response “No, but it doesn't matter, things just go more quickly. Keep an eye on it to see when it’s done.” Dear sister, that is not how baking works. So then she says “you just take off five minutes.” Ok, easy enough. My mom checked it 15 minutes before the timer was due to go off and it was already getting pretty burn-y. Alas alack. First a fire, now a burned pie. Fortunately, my mom pulled it out so it wasn't really badly burned. (I was way too busy watching Billy Crystal’s HBO special, “700 Sundays” which was fantastic).

When all is said and done, the pie still looked and tasted terrific. So it was a baking win, ineptitude and all!

A Disney Moment:…nope, we still have one more movie to watch in the next group of five. We’re so close but we just can’t make ourselves watch Home on the Range! 

Channeling My Inner Martha

I know, I know, I've been bad again. Baking has been happening, I swear! It's just that the blogging part hasn't been happening. Believe it or not, I've been actually doing work lately! Hang on, I'll wait for you to absorb the shock of that statement. Good now? Ok, good.

Like I said, there's been baking. In fact, there was baking during a very special visit from a friend who lives very far away. We made Martha's Ne Plus Ultra cookies. They were quite good but there isn't much to report besides me buying a $2 SlapChop at the Goodwill store to chop pecans because I don't have a food processor. And alas, I ate them all before I remembered to take a picture so you'll just have to take my word for it that they looked and tasted delicious. Oh, one note about these cookies: Martha seemed to think that the recipe made 8 cookies and I made about 30. No one wants a cookie that big.

So that's the Ne Plus Ultra cookie story (by the way, ne plus ultra just means "awesome cookie") and it wasn't very interesting so we'll move on to my attempt to make an Easter themed dessert. When considering what a good Easter dessert might be, I thought long and hard about what would capture the Easter spirit and then I just caved and Googled Easter desserts. Of course, Martha recipes came up with some of the most precious looking cakes ever. I decided to tackle one of her easier ones: Rich Chocolate Cake with Ganache Frosting and Truffle-Egg Nest. Yep. The recipe can be found here. Basically, it's just a chocolate cake with a precious shaved chocolate nest built on top with homemade truffle eggs in the center. Modification #1: I was not making truffle eggs from scratch. I just didn't have the energy or the drive to color egg-shaped truffles robin's egg blue. No freaking way. I bought some Cadbury eggs and called it a day on that one.

The next adventure, so to speak, was the search for the 7 inch cake pans. To give you some context, a standard round cake pan is 9 inches. We had one 8 inch pan (and several 9 inches) but no 7 inch. Oh, and a 6 inch is about the size of the top tier of a wedding cake. So off I went to hunt for the elusive 7 inch cake pan. I asked a neighbor to start with but alas, no 7 incher. I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Kohl's, AC Moore (on the day before Easter, mind you) and nothing. So before even beginning to bake, I was already frustrated. Not cool, Martha. Not cool. I decided to pick up two 8 inch pans for my collection and resolved to watch the cakes carefully to adjust the bake time.

Here's one cool thing about this cake: it's made entirely in a pot. Seriously, all you need is a pot and a whisk. Nothing too interesting to report in the baking process except that I perhaps should have whisked more vigorously in the last step to fluff the batter up more. Anywho, baked up the cakes and left them to cool for a while. Now, here comes another point of confusion: the recipe called for both a whipped ganache frosting and then another ganache topping but I did not realize that upon my first reading. Or second. Or third. By the time I did figure it out, I realized that I didn't have enough chocolate or heavy cream for the second ganache. Maybe I'm just stressed out but this was an extremely frustrating discovery. Eventually I got over it and iced the cake with the whipped ganache frosting and covered it with the thinner ganache. The cake itself came out looking quite professionally done, if I do say so myself (and I do.) I was initially saddened by what seemed like a waste of perfectly good ganache (I pretty much had to pour ganache over the whole cake and let the excess run into the bottom of a pan) but then my mom saved the day by scraping the ganache into a container for later use in strawberry-dipping.

Now, all of this is well and good from a baking standpoint. But now we get to the Martha-ness of the recipe. Anyone can make a simple chocolate cake. It takes a real pro to make a bird's nest out of chocolate. Here are the directions: "using a chef's knife, scrape milk chocolate bar at 90 degree angle, forming enough curls and shards to measure 1 1/2 cups." Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It took three masterminds to figure out that scraping down the chocolate only created tiny chocolate confetti. Eventually (and I do mean to imply that this took some time and some staring at a chocolate bar and some experimentation with potato peelers on chocolate), I discovered that instead of scraping, I could just chop thin slices of chocolate which yielded much better results. Then the last step was to build the nest. I was bad at this. My "nest" didn't look at all like a nest. My sister had to fix it for me. But whatever, I'm not the artistic one of the family. It came out pretty precious looking in the end. Here's a picture for your judgement:

As for the taste, it went over very well with my family on Easter. I thought it was a bit denser than it should have been but maybe that's just a personal preference. I bet having a 7 inch pan would have made it better. Stupid 7 inch pan.

A Disney Moment: Oliver and Company
I love Oliver and Company. I think it's adorable. And anyone who disagrees is wrong. Again, we see my affinity for cartoon cats and dogs coming out but I think it's a pretty well structured film. I like the pacing. I like the referrals to Oliver Twist. It's certainly not an original story but it's fun nonetheless. Certain moments really stuck with me. Small things like how Dodger struts every time he walks. And to me, a four-legged strut is a bit of an accomplishment. "Why Should I Worry?" is a really fun scene with a truly terrific song. The other musical high for me was "You and Me Together" which is just one of the sweetest things in the world. I may be biased because the girl is named Jenny but I just find that whole song endearing.

Let's see, what else? Oh, I was a bit surprised to discover that I didn't mind having the characters voiced by famous people. Bette Midler voicing the overdramatic show dog was especially perfect to me. Overall, I was just left with a happy feeling when the movie ended. I also really enjoyed the opening and closing landscapes of NYC. That all said, I'm still only giving this movie a 3/5. Why, you ask? Well, because, my friends, we are on the cusp of the Disney Renaissance! Great things to come. But Oliver and Company is still ranking a lot higher than the likes of Fox and the Hound, for example, despite its low group rating.