Baking Adventure #2 - Turrón de Doña Pepa

EXAMS ARE OVER!

I made a cake not to celebrate this fact, but rather to procrastinate studying for my last exam. Haha whoops

                                              Not the most beautiful thing I've ever made

I dated a Peruvian guy for a while, and through him learned about the glory that is Peruvian food. People always think of countries like France when asked about the best places in the world for eating, but from what I've heard and tasted, Peru is 'da bomb. Peruvians have a whole holiday dedicated to eating roast chicken (Día Nacional del Pollo a la Brasa - Look it up, I'm not even kidding), and have some wicked awesome pastries.

My ex's mother is an excellent chef, and one day she sent over a tupperware container with a large slice of cake, the likes of which I had never seen before. It was absolutely heavenly. After being given the recipe months and months ago, I finally decided to give it a shot yesterday. Mine isn't nearly as beautiful as the first one I tried, but oh well, it tastes great!

The secret to the cake is anise, a spice that tastes a lot like licorice. For this recipe, it's toasted in the oven, then ground up before being added to the dough. 

The dough is shaped into long rods, then baked in the oven until golden. They're then stacked on top of each other in layers, and drenched with syrup. 

The syrup (honey) is made by first simmering water with some fruit and spices, then adding a lot of sugar and boiling the heck out of it until very sticky and quite thick. I didn't boil mine quite long enough, so it was too thin to stay on top of the cake. Lesson learned!

Since I don't have permission to reveal the possibly top secret recipe I was given for this cake, here's a link to a website with a pretty similar recipe (and a cool post about its history!).

Happy new semester!

E

Chocolate Truffle Ice Cream

 So I accidentally created something delicious this weekend,

I was not at all intending to be making ice cream in the middle of January. What I wanted to make was a recipe for chocolate truffles made with coconut milk which I saw on the super cool website "The Bojon Gourmet". You should read her recipe - it's hilarious and includes a story about a dead pig hanging from the ceiling of a cold room. 

Unfortunately, I decided to conveniently forget the section of the recipe where it says 'only use 70% chocolate or else your ganache will be way too runny and it won't work' and I decided in my infinite wisdom to use chocolate chips. After a very sad 24 hours of praying that the pudding like substance in my fridge would somehow solidify, I decided that I needed to improvise. I added more milk, whisked it up, and stuck it in the freezer overnight. Yum! 

Here's how to make it if you don't want to  make a batch of failed truffles beforehand: 

In a saucepan, combine a can of full fat coconut milk, a big pinch of cayenne pepper, a pinch of salt, and two or three cinnamon sticks. Cook on medium heat until it's steamy and starts to bubble around the edge. Then reduce to low and simmer covered for 20 minutes. 

Measure six ounces of semi-sweet chocolate chips into a large bowl or a measuring cup. Strain the hot coconut milk on top of the chocolate, and leave to sit without stirring for 2-3 minutes (this allows the chocolate to melt properly), then stir to combine. 

Let the mixture cool to room temperature, then you can either put it into a tupperware container and place it in the freezer, stirring every half hour until frozen, or just put it in an ice cream maker if you're making a double recipe. 

Julia Child once said: "Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?" 

Be fearless, internet friends.When life gives you runny ganache, make ice cream, because who's going to know? And if it doesn't, make ice cream anyway, because it's delicious and you deserve it, damn it!

Hope exams go well for you all. 

E

I wish I'd never taken this excursion around the bay

Well internet, I'm in the mood for sea shanties about people dying and that means one thing - it's almost exam week!




"Oh me, oh my, I heard me old wife cry,
Oh me, oh my, I think I'm gonna die!
Oh me, oh my, I heard me old wife say,
I wish I'd never taken this excursion around the bay!"

Going into highschool a lot of people told me horror stories about how terrible the workloads were. Luckily, I have somewhat decent time management skills, so for the last 3.5 ish years I've managed to get a good night's sleep and get my homework done.

However, the next two weeks of my life are destined to fit the stereotype and be absolute hell. Oh well! I'm already out in the water, no turning back now.

Good luck fellow highschool friends. Listen to lots of disco music, put a fake smile on your face, and we'll sail through this!

On stress etc.

While in a practice room last week, I overheard one grade nine violin player say to another while struggling with tempo:

"Guys, we need to get our shit together!" 

I had a good giggle. Don't we all need to get our shit together around January.  

The more I think about this time of year, the more I am willing to believe that it is some type of cruel plot to suppress rebellion in late teenagers. You know, keep them so freaked out about their future and mountains of homework that they don't have time to go against the man like in the olden days. It certainly has worked on me lately. I'm much too tired for world domination. 

I was in a variation of this state around exam time last year, and I came up with a sort of backwards, nonsensical, yet useful mantra. It was something like:

"Everyone expects you to be stressed. People keep giving you all these things to do to make you stressed! However, being too anxious and obsessive keeps you from doing all the important things in life. Thus, to be overly stressed is to let them win, and to fight against the man is to be happy and calm." 

Yes, I am a philosopher. 

I learned a new word this weekend, 

equa·nim·i·ty

noun \ˌē-kwə-ˈni-mə-tē, ˌe-kwə-\

: calm emotions when dealing with problems or pressure

I think it's a word I should try to take to heart a bit better, this week especially.

Hope you all are surviving and not catching senioritis, internet,
E 

Baking Adventure #1 - A study in butter and patience

So today to celebrate the end of stress-day and the commencement of this blog, I attempted to make Danish butter cookies. You know the kind in the blue tin you probably ate at some point? Yeah, those.

I found the recipe here on the blog "Travelling Foodies". They made it seem very easy. I soon learned that Danish butter cookies are one of the challenges of life mentioned in the title of this blog.

(please excuse my lack of photography skills - I'll get better, I promise)

First you start with an unholy amount of butter. 

You mix this room temperature butter in with flour, icing sugar, an egg, and 'vanilla bean paste'. I am ashamed to say that I have never heard of vanilla bean paste in my life, so instead I used 1/2 a tsp. of ground vanilla beans.

Eventually you'll end up with a rather stiff cookie dough. This is where the challenge comes in. I could not for the life of me find my piping bags, so I attempted to use a thick ziplock bag with the corner cut off instead. For the love of God, do not do this. I wasted five bags and a lot of my sanity while trying to make this work. Eventually I got fed up and searched my kitchen to eventually find my piping bags hidden in a cupboard. Lesson learned.

if at first you don't succeed

just go and find the piping bag ok - it's so much easier

They were as delicious and caloric as you would expect for a recipe with the word butter in the name. Happy Thursday, internet. 

Hello all

Hello! Welcome to the inaugural post of this blog. I don't have readers yet, so I will ask myself questions to get things started. Don't judge. 

"So, author of this blog, who are you?"

I'm E, an almost-adult-like person living in Ontario. I play the flute, piccolo, and piano. I am a proud band nerd, and I hope to be going into music education this fall. I love to bake and cook in my free time. I'm semi-fluent in French. Terrible puns are my favourite form of humour. I have a vast knowledge in all things Harry Potter related that is sadly under utilised at present.

My mom writes the blog "I can fly, just not up". She's funny and likes Benedict Cumberbatch a lot.

"What can I expect you to post on this blog?"

Hopefully I'll be posting pictures and recipes from my baking adventures. Music anecdotes. Flute related frustration. Funny stories from my fascinating life. Sad break-up poetry (but not really).

"Why are you starting a blog anyways?" 

I'm currently enrolled in a writer's craft in school, and it's a ton of fun! I hope to keep writing even after my semester is over, so this is a good place to do that. (also my deep wisdom needs to be shared with the world)

Stay tuned, friends!