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matthewdalyOf course, I can make pies. Three honest no-fooling different kinds of pies. But my family, they deserve even better than that. So I decided that I would bring a scratch cake to our Independence Day get-together. It's a cake, what could be hard?
First off, baking soda. I knew that my baking powder expired back when The Simpsons was watchable, so I went with baking soda (with cream of tartar) that I bought a month ago. And the cake still didn't rise. I swear, it's unjust to force a bachelor to buy an entire pound of a staple when he is only going to use a few tablespoons during its useful life. I understand that the stuff has ten thousand uses and costs less than a dollar, but I don't want to have to change my life just to go through it. Hey, baking powder fatcats, be like the nice yeast people and put it into tablespoon-sized packages!
And then I ran into the abuses of the baking chocolate trust. Curiously, all of my chocolate cream pie recipes called for semi-sweetened chocolate squares, all of my chocolate cake recipes called for unsweetened chocolate squares, and it's taken me this long to find the web page that tells me that the only difference is a tablespoon of sugar per square. Conspiracy? To add insult to injury, I did a bad job of melting the chocolate in the microwave and so it turned out to be more of a chocolate chip cake, plus I couldn't scoop half of the sludge into the mixing bowl and I got some of it on my hands and it doesn't wash off and God forbid you should lick unsweetened chocolate goo off your hand because that stuff makes vanilla extract taste like sunshine. You're fired too; next time I'm going with cocoa powder.
And the vegetable shortening! I swear, you guys have got to help me out on this because it's driving me up the wall. I've got a tub of the stuff now, and I like that it's half the price of butter and all, but measuring it is functionally impossible. You go to measure two tablespoons of it, but that would require emptying out the measuring spoon which doesn't happen ever. My brainiac solution was going out and buying a "cookie scoop" (a tablespoon-sized ice cream scoop), and that gets me over the measuring hump. But now I can't clean it! I swear, I left it overnight it in a bowl full of hot water and detergent and that still didn't break down the half-millimeter film on the inside of the spoon. Soap and water beat lard, for crying out loud, what the hell is vegetable shortening made out of that makes it immune? Maybe I should try keeping the tub in the freezer and scooping it out like ice cream. It certainly couldn't be harder to clean.
And then there was the frosting. First of all, now that I've made frosting I don't think that I'll ever eat it again. Meringue is a health food in comparison. And I was lulled into a false sense of security about using my Magic Bullet to create powdered sugar out of granulated sugar, because my frosting was quite gritty. Finally, the recipe made about three times as much frosting as I could put on a cake with a clear conscience. I think I did a good job of technically putting the frosting on the cake especially without a teacher or even a YouTube video to guide me. I didn't use as much frosting as I could, which is surprising since I made so much but unsurprising since it was so gritty and I couldn't ignore that I was essentially buttering my cake.
Finally, with my torte-like grittily underfrosted chocolate chip cake in a pie carrier on the hood of my brother's car while I'm talking to him before going into the party, it slides off the car and lands top-down on the road. I can't decide whether to laugh or whimper; I'd already decided that I was only bringing the cake for novelty mocking purposes. Amazingly enough, the cake is unaffected. (Which is another indictment, of course -- what kind of frosted two-layer cake can survive a four-foot half-gainer?)
Of course, my people are a noble and fearless folk, and probably about half of them have made their own first scratch cakes before, so they eat it and praise it.
In other news, I gave my high-school graduating cousin paperback copies of a world atlas and Strunk and White, as I couldn't decide to be confident enough to give her a leather-bound copy of either. She gave the latter that withering teenager look that could only have meant "What the hell is a strunk?" because for some reason we don't teach kids that style guides are extant and essential for college. But she flipped through it and read the back jacket endorsements and all of the college graduates in this half of her family and concluded that it was "cool". So I win this round of Matthew vs. Teenager.
First off, baking soda. I knew that my baking powder expired back when The Simpsons was watchable, so I went with baking soda (with cream of tartar) that I bought a month ago. And the cake still didn't rise. I swear, it's unjust to force a bachelor to buy an entire pound of a staple when he is only going to use a few tablespoons during its useful life. I understand that the stuff has ten thousand uses and costs less than a dollar, but I don't want to have to change my life just to go through it. Hey, baking powder fatcats, be like the nice yeast people and put it into tablespoon-sized packages!
And then I ran into the abuses of the baking chocolate trust. Curiously, all of my chocolate cream pie recipes called for semi-sweetened chocolate squares, all of my chocolate cake recipes called for unsweetened chocolate squares, and it's taken me this long to find the web page that tells me that the only difference is a tablespoon of sugar per square. Conspiracy? To add insult to injury, I did a bad job of melting the chocolate in the microwave and so it turned out to be more of a chocolate chip cake, plus I couldn't scoop half of the sludge into the mixing bowl and I got some of it on my hands and it doesn't wash off and God forbid you should lick unsweetened chocolate goo off your hand because that stuff makes vanilla extract taste like sunshine. You're fired too; next time I'm going with cocoa powder.
And the vegetable shortening! I swear, you guys have got to help me out on this because it's driving me up the wall. I've got a tub of the stuff now, and I like that it's half the price of butter and all, but measuring it is functionally impossible. You go to measure two tablespoons of it, but that would require emptying out the measuring spoon which doesn't happen ever. My brainiac solution was going out and buying a "cookie scoop" (a tablespoon-sized ice cream scoop), and that gets me over the measuring hump. But now I can't clean it! I swear, I left it overnight it in a bowl full of hot water and detergent and that still didn't break down the half-millimeter film on the inside of the spoon. Soap and water beat lard, for crying out loud, what the hell is vegetable shortening made out of that makes it immune? Maybe I should try keeping the tub in the freezer and scooping it out like ice cream. It certainly couldn't be harder to clean.
And then there was the frosting. First of all, now that I've made frosting I don't think that I'll ever eat it again. Meringue is a health food in comparison. And I was lulled into a false sense of security about using my Magic Bullet to create powdered sugar out of granulated sugar, because my frosting was quite gritty. Finally, the recipe made about three times as much frosting as I could put on a cake with a clear conscience. I think I did a good job of technically putting the frosting on the cake especially without a teacher or even a YouTube video to guide me. I didn't use as much frosting as I could, which is surprising since I made so much but unsurprising since it was so gritty and I couldn't ignore that I was essentially buttering my cake.
Finally, with my torte-like grittily underfrosted chocolate chip cake in a pie carrier on the hood of my brother's car while I'm talking to him before going into the party, it slides off the car and lands top-down on the road. I can't decide whether to laugh or whimper; I'd already decided that I was only bringing the cake for novelty mocking purposes. Amazingly enough, the cake is unaffected. (Which is another indictment, of course -- what kind of frosted two-layer cake can survive a four-foot half-gainer?)
Of course, my people are a noble and fearless folk, and probably about half of them have made their own first scratch cakes before, so they eat it and praise it.
In other news, I gave my high-school graduating cousin paperback copies of a world atlas and Strunk and White, as I couldn't decide to be confident enough to give her a leather-bound copy of either. She gave the latter that withering teenager look that could only have meant "What the hell is a strunk?" because for some reason we don't teach kids that style guides are extant and essential for college. But she flipped through it and read the back jacket endorsements and all of the college graduates in this half of her family and concluded that it was "cool". So I win this round of Matthew vs. Teenager.
