Last Friday I discussed baking multiple batches of blueberry muffins so I thought I’d follow up with another baking post. Before we get to the cake of the story though, it’s interesting to think about why I like baking more than cooking at this point in my culinary evolution. Baking is exact, so much so that you often weigh things like flour to make sure you really have a “cup”, and while you can ad lib, changing one thing too much gives you something distinctly different than what you started out with. An example is adding bananas to a plan cake recipe, bananas add a lot of water and the end result is edible, but not quite perfect. In any case it’s often not as easy as just following the recipe, if anything measuring everything just so lets you focus on the harder stuff – ever try making your own pizza? Making the dough is easy, putting the toppings on is easy, stretching the dough – harder than it looks!
My guide for cheesecakes has been The Joy of Cheesecakes ($13 @ Amazon) and my most recent attempt was the marble cheesecake, a plain cheesecake with some sour cream plus 4 blocks of chocolate swirled in. Made the crust from graham crackers – why miss out on the fun by buying crumbs? I use a Kitchen Aid stand mixer and that makes the process a lot easier, doing it with a hand mixer is tedious, especially if the cream cheese isn’t almost melting. The challenge of cheesecakes isn’t in combining the ingredients (muffins are much fussier in that regard), but in the baking. If you’re trying to get a crack free cheese cake you have to baby it, even putting the spring form pan in a water bath. It’s often a source of great stress for those new to cheese cakes. Can’t say I’ve mastered them, instead I’ve learned that a few cracks don’t affect the taste at all!
Baking for me is family time. Making bread or dessert, something that doesn’t matter if it goes wrong – not the same when it’s dinner you’re cooking. Good to get the family in the kitchen and enjoy making something from scratch instead of buying it ready made.
You’ve probably heard of Costco, one of those warehouse type stores that sells stuff in bulk. We buy stuff there for the office and have used it for stuff at home too. Good prices on most items if you can use the medium to large size quantities they typically sell. The downside to shopping there is that they rotate a lot of items and so you’ll see stuff that you don’t expect – something cool or interesting – and there’s another $10-$1000 in the cart! Impulse buying is rarely a good idea unless you have already decided in principle to buy something and just find a good deal on it, but I think they are pretty good at driving that behavior.
To offset that, I try to limit myself to one “extra” per trip. Most recently we browsing their fresh vegetable area (refreshingly cold in Fla!) and they had a large flat of blueberries, about 4 pounds worth. Sudden craving for blueberries, it was $5, why not?
My plan was for blueberry muffins, but 4 pounds of blueberries is a lot of muffins. The upside to that is it encourages tinkering in the kitchen, a definite bonus as things don’t always turn out well. I started with a recipe similar to this one and they were ok, maybe even good. Good enough to eat! My wife was grading them as ok, not thrilling. Tried a second batch with the same recipe, about the same. Dug around some and found a recipe in Cooks Illustrated (my favorite cooking magazine) that had an interesting twist; they created a blueberry jam/syrup to add some extra flavor. Definitely a step up, and the aroma of cooking blueberries was nice too! I think sharing the recipe probably pushes the limits of the copyright, so you have to pay up to get the details (hint: if you start to register and cancel they offer a one day free trial).
The lesson, if there is one, is when you do any type of project it’s not entirely reasonable to expect the first one to turn out perfect. Even if it does, there’s a lot of value in doing in a couple more times to reinforce lessons learned.
Next Friday we’ll talk about cheesecake!
