Last night I was home alone and the movie Julie and Julia popped up on my Amazon Fire TV. I looked at the time and the mountain of things I had to do and then I slid deeper into the couch and pressed play. Have you seen it? This is a movie about a blogger, Julie, who decides to make every recipe in Julia Child's masterpiece book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, all in a year. The movie shares intimate moments from Julia Child's life while also demonstrating the life and cooking difficulties, frustrations, and triumphs of a New York City blogger.
I cringed watching the characters preparing lobster (I have a severe shellfish allergy), and eggs (I have a significant intolerance for eggs), but as the story unfolded I began to question the way I have been cooking. The movie highlights some cooking techniques, and in the process reminds us that the how in preparing things can significantly impact the final result. Technique is important.
When making a batch of cookies from scratch we know to first cream the sugar and butter. Then you add the eggs. Something a dear daughter learned the hard way. All of our modern day convenience items- brownie mixes, cake mixes, and even cookie mixes- disregard this basic baking rule with a simple dump it all in at once and mix approach.
So, this morning I decided to get back to basics. I studied the techniques for baking cakes and looked at the purpose of each ingredient. What does it do? What does it add to the final product? I studied cake flour and eggs. I looked at the influence of sugar and butter in cake. Here is what I learned:
So....besides all of my notes, I learned that 9 times out of 10 my batter is 'curdling', my butter is never the right temperature (because I am a spur of the moment baker, and incredibly impatient), and I am probably not using enough leavening. OK. I don't think I had 'curdling' before I started baking gluten free. I'm not sure I even had 'curdling' before I started using flax eggs. Maybe these ingredients are more prone to the 'curdling'. Got it. And then I went off to bake.
First I mixed up my 2 flax eggs with room temperature water.
Then I whipped the room temperature butter in my mixing bowl. Then I added my sugar. It was good.
Next I added my flax eggs...I really paid a lot of attention here, because this is supposed to be where you are most likely to 'break' your batter and I wanted to get it right. I added just a little flax egg at a time because even a 1/4 of my flax slurry seemed to make my batter start to get that curdled look. I found guiding the mixer in a large bowl to only grab and blend a small portion at a time helped control the curdling. This will be harder in a stand mixer, so really just add the flax eggs one little bit at a time. Looking back, I know I've had these results before, but not consistently. I never imagined it was because I wasn't taking enough care, or paying enough attention...The difference is amazing!
So, this is what you should have before you even add any gluten free flour. Which means the eggs are huge in getting the batter right, but the good news is the flax egg really is up to the challenge!
So, after taking so much care beginning my batter, I didn't want to fall into the trap of just dumping everything else in. I added my vanilla...
and after blending in the vanilla I added a scoop of my gluten free flour blend and mixed it in (I used a 1/4 cup measuring cup as a scoop). Then I added 1/4 cup of my milk...and I immediately started getting a curdled look in my batter-yikes!! So, I quick grabbed another 2 scoops of the flour mix and blended that in. It definitely saved the batter from breaking. The key seems to be not adding too much liquid too fast. The batter needs to absorb it slowly, so I alternated the dry flour mix with drizzling the milk (liquid) into the batter. It was so incredibly light and fluffy!
So, all that was left was to pop it in the oven and wait patiently for my beautiful cake to bake!
Except, there is another tip I learned from my movie...one that I really wasn't paying particular attention to, and didn't get until things went sideways. Not everything in the kitchen goes smoothly. Even when you think you have it all sorted out, followed the directions exactly, and it all looks great going into the oven, you are likely to have some failures in the kitchen. How you react to those failures are what makes or breaks your future successes. In my movie, the blogger had self-proclaimed meltdowns over failures and flops. She blamed her small kitchen, her husband, her day job, and a multitude of other things. I've been there, but what I say is don't blame. Own it. And accept it. And make the most of it. Learn from your failures and move past them to try again. Yes, these mistakes can be expensive- the ingredients are ridiculously expensive and nobody wants to be scrapping them off the bottom of the oven because they misjudged (ahem, overcompensated) the amount of leavening when dreaming of a light airy vanilla cake...but we all do....
So this is when you start to look for any possible way to salvage something for your time and ingredients. Leaving this in the oven was not an option. I couldn't get the bottom of the oven cleaned up with that bottom rack in there and the sugar was already forming a noxious cloud of burnt smelling smoke. Convention says it's done, ruined, can't be helped. But thinking outside the box I pulled it out of the oven and working as quickly as I could (with the smoke alarms blaring in the background) I removed that bottom rack, scraped out the bottom of my oven, and slid it back in on a pizza pan, because it was still overflowing. Then I yanked open the doors and windows to the 30 some degree day with brutal wind and proceeded to air out my house while the furnace blasted heat out the windows and doors...sorry hun.
Yes, the cake 'fell'. It went from the nice, even 350 degree oven to my 70 degree house and back into a 200-ish oven before it continued to bake. No, the end result was not pretty...and to add insult to injury it stuck in the pan and broke into pieces...
But, it tastes good. And that means I can use it in a multitude of ways. There are so many uses for leftover cake scraps I know it will be valuable for something else, if I don't finish it off just snitching at it as is. Cake pops originated as a use for unusable pieces of cake. Toasting the crumbs on a cookie sheet will yield perfect crumbs for a crumb pie crust (who needs graham crackers anyway?), those same toasted crumbs can be used as a crumb topping for ice cream, muffins, or parfaits, the list of ideas is endless. A success? Hardly. A pretty end result to blog about? Nope. Not everything turns out. To be a good recipe it has to work, and be repeatable. That means making something once doesn't result in a blog post. There is time, the expense of ingredients, and thinking on your feet. Maybe I didn't end up making what I set out to do, but it leads down another path to something as good, or even better.
We seem to live in a time when resourcefulness is in short supply. The ideas that 'nothing should go to waste' and 'necessity is the mother of invention' should accompany you into the kitchen each and everyday. We have the world at our fingertips and see all the beauty and successes of food blogs jumping through our screens. It is intimidating and when things don't work out it is also discouraging. I'm here to tell you that even those bloggers have failures.
I hear so often from people that they don't try to make things because they don't want to waste the ingredients or they are afraid to take the risk of things not turning out. That is life, life is messy. Smoke alarms go off. Your father will remind you that mixing baking soda and vinegar was never meant for your oven, only middle school science projects. Your husband will joke about getting 'battered around by the confections' and ask if he can pick up a fire extinguisher on the way home. Laughing about it keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously and moves us from 'meltdown' to acceptance. And so humor, it seems, also has a place in the kitchen.
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