Cinnamon Girl

My worst kitchen troubles all seem to come about when I get cocky.

I'd had such good luck with yeast so far. I baked bread, and (despite it being shaped a little funny due to realizing halfway through the process that I didn't have loaf pans and having to bake it in a bundt) it went beautifully. I baked another bread, and that dough came right up like the rosy-finger'd dawn. Then, yesterday I decided I would attempt Paula Deen's cinnamon rolls, and all my luck with yeast went straight to hell.

My mother once said to me, "Anyone who says her bread has always risen, always rises, and always will is either a liar or too good a baker to be real." I am neither, and was punched soundly in the face with this knowledge yesterday when I skipped merrily across the kitchen to roll out my cinnamon roll dough and found instead of dough doubled in bulk the same sad little lump that I had originally placed in the bowl on the back of the stove.

In retrospect, I thought, this was probably because I had put too much water in with the yeast and discovered it too late and then decided I was not going to start over, no, I'd just not pour in all the water. It'll be fine, I thought. As usual, I thought wrong.

However, I did not learn anything from this initial refusal to just start over. Oh no, I was not going just scrap this entire lump of dough and try again. Oh hell no. "Surely," I thought, "the internet knows how to salvage this affair."

Upon asking the internet, though, the internet essentially pointed and laughed at my failure. If the combined baking wisdom of the internet had been an individual, it would have shrugged its shoulders and said "I dunno...make some kind of sweet-dough pizza with it? You're pretty much screwed."

Not one to be deterred by so simple a matter as the entire internet laughing at my misfortune, I said "Well, we'll just work some more yeast in there. Try out that instant yeast stuff Mum gave me. Yeah." Because after all, what was the worst that could happen? I could still have a useless lump of dough later on, and be in the exact same circumstances I already was.

And for once...for once, I did not find out what was the worst that could happen. Working in some instant yeast and a little water and a little more flour worked like a charm, the dough rose, and the rolls were beautiful and delicious. (but whoooooooagodsosweet. So far no one can eat more than half of one at a single go, even with a glass of milk.)


...which of course meant that while I was driving Betsy to choir practice, I hit a curb and blew out a tire. In the dark. And the rain. While my uncle was out of town on a business trip and unable to come to my rescue. And, of course, I bent the rim of my wheel sufficiently that I had to take the entire thing in to the shop this morning.

Never, ever say "What's the worst that could happen?"

Pride and Peanut Butter

Having tried out the homemade Samoas, I decided my next attempt would be to make homemade Tagalongs.

"They should be easier than the Samoas!" I thought, because I'm an idiot.

The shortbread bases cooked up just peachy. No problems there.

Mixed up the peanut butter and sugar, heated it up to make it pipeable...all's well there too.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, a sense of impending doom was building. I wasn't quite sure why at first, but there came a point shortly after I put the cookies in the fridge for the filling to set that I realized where it was coming from.

Eventually, I was going to have to dip those things in chocolate.

Not just halfway dipping, either - no, those suckers had to be completely submerged! Panic rising, I scrambled to the computer to look at the recipe and see what the author had to say about the chocolate. Get it good and hot, she says, and keep the bowl of it over hot water to keep it thin enough to work with.

Good advice, sure, but it didn't really tell me anything about the process of getting them in the chocolate. So, like a good girl, I emailed my mother.

"Hey Mum - Say you had to dip a cookie completely in chocolate. How would you do that?"

Just a minute or two later, a reply came.

I would use the tools that you find in the candy making department of a place like Michael's.

...I should have figured this would involve tools. Hubris is a dangerous thing in the kitchen.

Beginning to panic, I look to see who's online...and there's Kevin. Kevin worked in food service! Kevin even did a brief stint in culinary school! Kevin would know, right?

Kevin: stick a toothpick in the peanut butter now while it's setting?
Kevin: And then pull them out once the chocolate sets?

Not a bad idea, I figured. So I ran to the refrigerator, pulled out the cookies, and started jabbing each of them with a couple of toothpicks each. Two, I figured, just in case one fell out. Good logic, right?

Well...all it really did was give me a tray of cookies that looked like a tiny invading army of sweet, delicious aliens. I melted the chocolate, I tried to dip one by the toothpicks, and it was like dipping a cookie in the La Brea Tar Pits. Down went the cookie, and just the tiniest tug on its toothpick antennae promptly removed them from the cookie, leaving me to fish it out with a fork.

"This chocolate's too thick!" I wailed, and I turned up the heat on the water under the chocolate.

Uncle Mike, calm as usual, says, "Why don't you put some milk in it?"

All right, that seemed reasonable. So I splashed in a little milk.

...and about ten seconds down the line found myself frantically stirring a horrible, grainy fudgy mess. (According to my brother and his giant man-crush on Alton Brown, this is because I didn't put in ENOUGH milk. Then he started talking about molecules and I stopped paying attention.)

Several curses and grumblings later, I pitched the whole mess, took all the toothpick antennae out of my alien army, and put them back in the refrigerator. A request was made for more chocolate chips to melt (because of course I used my last bag on this monstrous failure).

While Uncle Mike went to the store, I used the time to ask the internet what to do about this too-thick-chocolate problem--since obviously my uncle didn't really know the answer to this. The first suggestion I saw said to put a couple tablespoons of oil in the chips, and heaven knows I wasn't gonna fool around with a ganache, so...oil it was.

And it worked! Well...okay, sort of. The chocolate was thin enough for dipping. With a little help from my aunt, I managed to just use my fingers to dip them in the chocolate and get them back out - it made a mess, but it worked. The only problem was the the chocolate absolutely refused to set but just so much. It took the better part of 24 hours in the fridge to get anything solid out of them. And they're...um...kinda funny-looking.

The up side, though?

Totally delicious. Even better than the Samoas bars!

The Crucible (now with coconut!)

Let me introduce you to That 70's Mixer.

Back at Mum's house, we had a sweet KitchenAid that did everything but make little baby KitchenAids. When I was living on my own, I just didn't bake much - any cooking I did was just to make dinner. (Between working full time, stage-managing for community theater, and skating with the local roller derby team, I just didn't have time. We can't all be superheroes like Annie.) Well...I decided I wanted to make homemade Samoas, and the base is shortbread. Creaming butter and sugar is required, and did I want to sit there doing that with a hand mixer? Oh, hell no. I am not Wonder Woman.

Now, no one here no one really bakes, but my aunt's mother did once upon a time. So when I went looking for a stand mixer in the uncharted wilds of The Hall Closet, I did in fact find one. It has been here a long, long time. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...That 70's Mixer.



According to my aunt, That 70's Mixer actually dates from the 1950's, but The Happy Days Mixer is not as cool a name and does not allow me to envision myself as Kitty Foreman while I make things. Therefore, That 70's Mixer it will remain.

When I first turned it on, there was this...smell. It was similar to the acrid, dusty smell you get when you turn on the heat for the first time in the late fall, or maybe what you'd smell if you set a mummy on fire with napalm. I was genuinely concerned that it might burst into flames.

But slowly, slowly the beaters began to turn. They sped up, and then while they were certainly not turning with the kind of vigor that I have come to expect from my mother's KitchenAid, they were turning with sufficient speed to cream the small amount of butter and sugar necessary to my cookies.

When Jamie pointed the homemade Girl Scout cookies out to me, I decided that attempting them was necessary. Samoas and Tagalongs were always my favorites, so the Samoas were my first try. I thought using the recipe for the bar form of the cookies was the safest bet - okay, really I was just too lazy to make all the tiny donut-shaped cookies. But either way, bars.

At first, everything seemed to be going SO WELL. The shortbread baked up all nice and pretty, the caramel melted beautifully, I mixed in the coconut...and um...yeah. Kinda dumped the whole bag in there.

LOOK IT SEEMED LIKE THE THING TO DO AT THE TIME, OKAY?

Usually when I make things with coconut, it's like...twelve ounces of coconut. The whole bag. And I had melting caramel, and some of it was stuck to my hand and it really hurt, and so I just...I don't know. I panicked. I panicked, and I threw all the coconut in there, and it was like...okay, they were still good. They're just really, really thick, and nobody can eat more than half of one at a time without total sugar overload.


BUT THEY WERE STILL TASTY, DAMMIT.

The Culinary Tales

In September of 2009, I moved from my small NC city to take a teaching job in Washington D.C.

This turned out to be a bad idea. Well, not the moving. Just the teaching job in D.C.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself unemployed and living with family, dead broke in a city where I know very few people. I needed something to do with myself to prevent me from simply sitting around the house watching Law & Order in between doing job applications, so I decided that "something" would be baking.

I've done a bit of baking before, mostly under the tutelage of my mother. My mother is a master baker who's been in the kitchen for forty-some years. The top of her cheesecake never splits, her bread always rises, her biscuits are always light and fluffy, and she has never overcooked a meringue or burned a cookie.

I am not my mother.

I regularly commit fantastic kinds of kitchen-fail, usually while making a spectacular mess. Sometimes I'll make something that turns out beautiful and perfect...but it usually took a couple of tries before I got there. So, expect tales of "and this is how I completely screwed up this here before I got it right..." and such.

It's also important to note that when moving up to D.C., I moved in with my uncle, aunt, and three cousins. My aunt and uncle don't cook for fun much at all, which means we're rather lacking in equipment (you'll be introduced to That 70's Mixer shortly) and I am the authority on how to cook things. The cousins are age 17, 13, and 6, and alternate between being incredibly harsh food critics and picky eaters to gushing endlessly about anything I make. Really, there's no telling with these guys.

So...this is the chronicle of my cooking adventures, plus the occasional tale of my zany family and my terrified attempts to navigate the D.C. Metro Area. TAH-DAH!!