Happy Thanksgiving!

As the weather gets colder, I've been compelled to start cooking again, with mostly disappointing results. Today is no exception. I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's house, and she had the idea that I should try to bake a cake. I tried to bake two cakes and ended up with half of one. How did I accomplish this confusing feat?

Well, half of one of the cakes ended up stuck to the tinfoil. I was trying to recreate a previous failure, the slow-cooker chocolate cake in The Italian Slow Cooker. Except this time, I searched around on the Internet and found that other people were making a similar cake in the oven. So, I took the sour-cream chocolate-chip cake, the one I am too embarrassed to photograph, out of the oven.

The instructions said to line a springform pan with buttered foil. More importantly, the instructions said to butter the BOTTOM of the pan with buttered foil. But my son was up last night from three to five a.m. because of a scary dream about a monster, and I forgot this important detail about the foil. I put the foil up the sides of the pan and poured in the batter.

Suddenly, I panicked. Would my cake be tremendously misshapen and unattractive? I hurriedly poured the batter back out into a bowl. I lost at least a quarter of it in the process. I washed off the foil as best I could (I ran out of foil and didn't have any more, and I imagine all the stores are closed today), and poured in what was left of the batter. I stuck the whole mess in the oven.

I think my oven doesn't work very well. I always have to double the cooking time. It took an hour to bake the cake instead of 25 minutes. At the end of baking, I cooled the cake down for five minutes as instructed.

I was then supposed to invert the cake. It was then that I lost another quarter of it.

The cake, which had risen somewhat in the oven, sank again dejectedly.

And this, my friends, is how two cakes became one-half of one cake. I am pretty sure I will be attending Thanksgiving dinner empty-handed. But this is probably to the benefit of my hosts.

No-Eat Bread

I'm sure you've heard of No-Knead Bread. This revolutionary new baking method was the brainchild New York Times, and I proceeded to fail miserably at it. I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but my attempt at bread ended up the size of a small salad plate. The crust was the texture of cement, while the crumb was the texture of warm, sweaty Play-Doh.

Eat me, I dare you.

of Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery. Mark Bittman updated the method for the

What went wrong? Well, firstly, I have a tendency to have two different tabs open on my browser at the same time. This was the case when I was trying to bake the bread; I had the above-linked recipe open as well as this one. (Is the second recipe even No-Knead Bread? I don't think so.)

The second recipe specified that I must fold the dough. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is, or how to do that. Belatedly, I perused some Chow.com threads...

Anyway, the third problem was that I was trying out another soon-to-be-ill-fated slow cooker recipe. I accidentally placed utensils and a small cookbook over the "rising" dough. Realizing that this was probably a big no-no, I attempted to rise the bread again.

The final fiasco happened inside the oven. The recipe (or some recipe, because at this point I had forgotten which recipe or message board I was supposed to be reading), directed me to cover the  bread inside the oven for the first half-hour in order to promote rising. The final half-hour, I was supposed to uncover the bread to then promote browning. You guessed it... I transposed the directions, uncovering for the first half-hour and then covering for the last half-hour.

The results are above!

Even the Candle Broke...

Today is my poor husband's birthday. I know he was wondering why I was so preoccupied; I was frantically running around trying to create this disaster without him noticing my efforts. My technique? I started out with a flourless chocolate cake recipe from Italian Slow Cooker. (I forgot to post that I recently purchased a slow cooker, which I hoped would alleviate some of my more egregious cooking errors.) The recipe called for bittersweet chocolate, sugar, coffee, eggs, and butter.

I should mention that my disposable aluminum cake pan was too wide for the oval slow cooker, so I had to kind of smoosh it into the cooker insert. I set the cooker on HIGH, and waited for the results with bated breath.

After over an hour of baking, the cake showed no indication of progressing beyond a liquid consistency. So, I stuck the cake in the oven. A knife never came out clean, although I read that this might be a common occurrence with flourless chocolate cakes. I simply had no idea when I should take the cake out. One baking blog said that this kind of cake should not stay in the oven for more than 35 minutes. Panicking, I took the cake out.

Drama: the moment of unmolding was at hand. This step, I should've skipped. I turned the cake out onto the plate, and a big chunk of the middle immediately stuck to the pan. Whatever aesthetic potential this unfortunate cake may have had was greatly reduced.

The final step of the recipe was a dusting of cocoa - not having the right sort of gadget, I emptied a teaspoon of cocoa over a strainer that I drain spaghetti through. Unevenly, I tried to camouflage the valley in the middle of the cake.

(By the way, the cake was originally round, I swear. The uneven right edge is due to the fact that my husband - inexplicably - tasted the cake.)

Look, Don't Taste

What is this, you wonder? Is it vegan "tuna salad," or is it something you'd feed a horse? Alas, it is an experiment that will possibly (probably) go awry. You see, a friend posted his success on Facebook with Mark Bittman's maple cornbread cookies, which were already a variation on butter drop cookies. One of the other variations was olive oil cookies.

Well, I'm mighty fond of the farro extra-virgin olive oil cookies from Alce Nero; so fond that I have only half a bag left. Naturally, I wondered if I could try to approximate them. But the ingredients in Bittman's recipe diverge from the ingredients in this bag of cookies, of course. Bittman's recipe contains an egg, vanilla, and milk. The Alce Nero cookies only contain farro flour, farro flakes (this is something I could never find in this town), extra-virgin olive oil, brown sugar, and baking soda. There is no mention of egg or any liquid.

Right now I'm in the middle of this ill-fated project. I haven't yet added any liquid, just the egg, but it is clear that I need to do so. There is no way this cookie dough will be dropping off the spoon. Also, the smell of olive oil is overpoweringly strong - Bittman cautions one to use light olive oil, as the flavor is less intense, but how did those folks at Alce Nero get away with it? This is one case where no one's going to be fighting to lick the spoon.

ETA: Is there something wrong with my oven? The cookies have now been in there for 10 minutes and show no sign of baking.

OK, which cookie is mine and which is Alce Nero's? Whoever guesses right gets the whole batch of

mine, for free.

Tonight's Accident Waiting to Happen

Note to self: when sifting or mixing dry ingredients, it is not a good idea to leave the mixing bowl in the sink while the faucet is running. I wonder how much water splashed into the bowl, because the batter was awfully sticky. The unfortunate,unintentional addition of liquid occurred before I was supposed to cut the butter into the flour (I was trying to make scones).

I am not sure why I was so absent-minded as to leave the faucet on. I could have been thinking about any number of things... our dishwasher is broken, and the baby didn't want to eat most of his dinner (I wouldn't either, I prepared it!), I'm procrastinating on a bit of freelance copywriting work that I have to do, and I hadn't adequately dried the mixing bowl before beginning this whole ill-fated journey. Ah well.

The directions specifically indicated not to knead the batter very much. They also said that if the batter was much too sticky, to add a little bit of flour, but just a little. I am not quite sure of how much I added, but I don't think it was very much, because the batter was the texture of glue when I dropped it onto the baking sheet.

I was supposed to lightly flour a surface and knead the dough ten times, but I figured I would just try to do it in the mixing bowl.

I just opened the oven door; things do not look promising. Stay tuned.

ETA: It looks like wet, hot, mushy oatmeal, smells like a dog that just came in from the rain, and tastes like pure baking powder! I must have not mixed the dry ingredients very well. Then again, those dry ingredients weren't very dry! Maybe I'll rethink those plans to bake my son a birthday cake.

Brownie Blues

I was craving brownies. I'm the kind of person who can screw up a brownie mix, so you can imagine the challenge of trying to make brownies from scratch. But a woman on a moms' message board claimed that it was an easy task.

I madly searched the pantry, and the only substance of chocolate origin that I could find was a tin of Jacques Torres hot chocolate mix that had expired in June. It consisted of chocolate nibs, sugar, vanilla and cornstarch - I figured I would try it out.

Googling, I saw that many people were fans of the Ghirardelli recipe for Classic Chocolate Brownies, so I decided to use that as the basis for my experiment, even though I had no baking chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate chips. Since the hot chocolate mix already included vanilla and some sugar, I didn't add any vanilla and added half the sugar. I thought this seemed reasonable. I also omitted the salt since some of my butter was salted (I had three-quarters of a stick of unsalted butter and a quarter of a stick of salted).

I melted the butter with 1/2 cup of nibs. Then I added two eggs. This is where I believe things started to go awry, as I don't think I waited for the mixture to cool before adding the eggs. One of my problems with cooking is that I am too impatient to go through all of the necessary steps. So instead of sifting all the dry ingredients together and then adding them to the wet, I just put each one in separately. Unfortunately, this meant that the baking powder was probably not distributed evenly.

There was definitely something wrong with the batter. I remember from my years of Duncan Hines that the batter is supposed to be creamy; mine was almost leaden in comparison; I hesitate to use this analogy, but it almost looked like a small turd. I wondered if I had any milk. Only half a container of half-and-half. What the hell. I threw it in. At least now I could stir the batter and lick it off the spoon.

I decided to get creative and chopped some walnuts, then threw them into the batter. This was the only good idea I had.

The result was less than appealing. The surface had a granular quality, probably the result of inadequately mixed sugar. And the brownies weren't chocolatey enough; this could be because of the ill-advised addition of half-and-half. They were too cakey yet not risen enough, if this makes any sense. I remembered those Duncan Hines brownies - so chewy, irresistibly fudgy and moist, yet slightly cracked on top - and tried to imagine their flavor, letting the memory erase the present taste.