Sundays, too, Are for Baking

Yesterday’s baking challenge was Basic Soft White Sandwich Loaf, and it was my first sponge-based bread. I made it on Sunday because I’m a nervous baker and my husband, who cooks most of our food and who attended culinary a billion or so years ago, is home to help me out.

I read the recipe several times before starting, as usual, but I wish I’d added up all the rise times before starting!

I found the recipe on Epicurious (though it’s actually taken from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book The Bread Bible). I find Epicurious recipes to be detailed and reliable, answering your questions before you know to ask them, which is great for a new baker. I read the recipe several times before starting, as usual, but I wish I’d added up all the rise times before starting—the darn thing took 9 hours from start to finish! Not that 9 hours is a ridiculous amount of time for bread, but the bread I’ve made so far has taken 3–4 hours. I’d definitely have started before 11:30 AM if I’d realized how long a sponge takes!

Getting the sponge ingredients and the flour mixture ingredients was a comedy of errors—well, at least getting the flour mixture together was a comedy of errors. The “Flour Mixture and Dough” list calls for 311 grams of unbleached white flour, 1/4 cup dry milk (yes, I freely mix my cups and grams, depending on which is easier for me), 3/4 teaspoons instant yeast, 9 tablespoons unsalted butter, and 2 1/4 teaspoons of salt.

First act in my comedy of errors: I added 3/4 cup of powdered milk to the flour instead of 1/4 cup, so into the garbage pail it went.

Second act: I added the salt to the flour mixture—I do wish they’d separated the Flour Mixture ingredients from the Dough ingredients. I knew well enough that the 9 T of unsalted butter didn’t go into the Flour Mixture, but I wound up adding the salt—it’s a dry ingredient, right?—to the Flour Mixture by mistake. Into the garbage pail with the second try.

Third time’s the charm, dammit—and it’s a good thing I have plenty of yeast: Oops, it’s supposed to be instant yeast! Into the garbage pail again.

The third time may be the charm, but four is my lucky number. Those 311 grams of flour, check. Into its own tiny bowl went the 1/4 cup of powdered milk, check. Into its own tiny bowl went the 3/4 teaspoon of instant yeast.

I asked my husband to look at everything, and he decreed it good. I heaved a sigh of relief and dumped the powdered milk and instant yeast into the flour and stirred them together. Whew!

After making the sponge, I covered it with the flour mixture and let it rise for 1 hour—the recipe says 1–4 hours, but I assumed, for no reason at all, that 1 hour would be fine. But after 1 hour, the sponge hadn’t bubbled up through the flour blanket, as the recipe had indicated. Okay, lesson learned. I left it for another hour, but still no sponge bubbling up through the flour blanket. Another hour later, and the volume had increased a fair amount and the flour blanket—at least an inch thick on top of the sponge in my KitchenAid mixer bowl—had several deep cracks. I called it good enough, added the butter and mixed for 1 minute, then scraped it down and covered it in plastic, then let it rest for 20 minutes.

I sprinkled in the salt—finally!—and let the dough hook manhandle it for 10 minutes. Into the oiled bowl it went to rise. And rise. And rise. The rising time was “until doubled, 1.5–2 hours”. Of course it took the whole 2 hours. Though I wish I’d pushed down the dough before letting it rise, as I realized the recipe called for just when I went to turn it out. Oh, well, what the hell. It’ll either be edible, or it won’t.

After turning it out onto the counter, I folded each corner into the center, trying not to squish out the air bubbles, and returned it to the bowl to double again. Yup, it took the whole 2 hours to double in size.

Finally it was time to separate the dough into two. I eyed the splodgy mass and split it with a pastry scraper. Well, it had looked like an even split. One was, of course, fairly bigger than the other. Next time, it gets weighed.

De-airing, folding, sealing, shaping, and general fussing done, each half of dough went into a greased bread pan.

To rise AGAIN, for 1.5 hours. Oh, my God.

As it turns out, making sponge bread gives you plenty of time to clean the kitchen, eat lunch, clean the kitchen, bake a pudding cake, clean the kitchen, watch a lot of TV, give your husband a haircut, vacuum the downstairs, watch some more TV, do some reading, do some mending, eat dinner and pudding cake, clean the kitchen, do some more mending, and watch some more TV.

But then you finally, FINALLY, get to put it into the oven! Which has been tricked out, per the recipe, with a preheated baking sheet on the lowest rack and a preheated cast-iron skillet on the oven floor. And then you try to finagle the 1/4 cup of ice cubes into the cast-iron skillet, which is kind of difficult because, you know, the baking sheet is taking up all the room on the rack, and pulling out the rack just hides the skillet further. But your husband inserts himself into the process and manages to get the ice cubes into the skillet, saving you some second-degree burns without incurring any himself, which is really nice for both of you.

And then you dutifully turn the loaves around at 25 minutes, as the recipe instructs.

And then you pull them out 25 minutes later.

And then you stare daggers at them, willing them to cool enough to take them out of the loaf pans so that you can just go to bed because it’s already way past your bedtime and waiting an hour for them to cool just to taste them and see how they turned out is not gonna happen.

In the morning, they’re nicely wrapped in a bread bag, courtesy of your husband, who’s gone off to work while you slovened away an hour in bed.

And you stare daggers at them, waiting for your husband to come home from work so you can try them together.

Ah, true love.

Today’s Cooking Adventure—Crazy Cake

Today’s cooking adventure is Crazy Cake. I’m learning to bake cakes, spurred by tremendous envy of the folks on the Great British Baking Show. However, I’m coming to believe that cakes are like cats—they do want what they want, when they want it. Cakes, for example, usually require fancy equipment, like springform pans, tube pans, and bundt pans. Buying cake flour is something I can live with, but I don’t want to lay out big  bucks just to buy a set of fancy cake pans.

Case in point about fancy cake pans: The original Bundt pan design—along with a drool-worthy bunch of follow-on designs—goes for $38.57 on Amazon.com. Not in my budget right now.

Mondays Are for Blogging

Youtubing around for videos on how to clean stainless steel pans—sorry, honey—I just kind of happened to click on over to Oddly Satisfying videos… and then the new Walgreens commercial popped up on “The Day His Heart Stopped”.

Now, like any sane person, I normally stare pleadingly at the “You can skip to video in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1” button when those ads pop up. But, not being immune to sentimentality, I let this ad run. In it, a woman told the story about how her new husband’s heart stopped during his morning run—thankfully, he survived. The video ended with her saying that she sets her intention every morning.

There’s nothing that someone with ADHD likes more than something new to click on, and there’s nothing I need more than structure in my life. So I immediately google “how to set my intentions for the day”.

First link: “50+ intention ideas“—whoa, way too many!

The second link looks better: “10 intentions to set for your most authentic life“. Cool! It’s a highly readable page, plus—scrolling immediately to the second screen to see how long it is—there’s a list of those 10 intentions! I can manage 10 ideas, especially because I’ve already decided to choose one of these to start on Right Away!!!

Click….

• I intend to manifest happiness naturally.

This one’s so not me that I have no idea what it means. How does one “manifest happiness”? By being happy? By deciding to be happy, whether you are or not? Skip.

• I intend to respond first, and then react.

Not sure what this one means, either. The only interpretation I can come up with is being civil (responding) to someone who’s ridiculously provoking me and then fuming (reacting) on my own, later on. Not sure what this one does, as I’ve learned through the years to keep a civil tongue in my head.

• I intend to witness Divinity in everyone.

Ah, this one is more like it. I’d had this practice a while ago, then I kind of forgot about it. Because did I mention ADHD? I’d like to start remembering this Right Away. But that’s an old intention, and I need A New One.

• I intend to lead by example.

I don’t think I lead anyone. So I can live on the shoulders of example giants all I want, but who the hell cares besides my family and friends—and I have more friends nowadays, thanks to witnessing Divinity in everyone.

• I intend to be open to success and abundance.

This one makes me uncomfortable. “You’ve never had success”, the voice in my head says. “What makes you think you deserve abundance?” Okay, so This Is the Right One for Right Now.

I glance at the other intentions, but none of them has as much impact as “I intend to be open to success and abundance”. There, I wrote it again so that I can start owning it.

Actually, I don’t like it. Natch, I disagree with the wording, not the intention itself. The “intend to” strikes me as a weasel word—something you say when you don’t really mean it; a loophole.

Instead, my intention is that “I am open to success and abundance”. And I will remind myself that “I witness Divinity in everyone”.

No weaseling out.

Now, on to a day of “washee, cookee, cleanee”, as my Nona used to say, and of being open to success and abundance.

Tell Me Why I Like Mondays

On Mondays, my husband is at work and I’m off. So Monday is my day to do whatever I want without feeling like I have someone’s eye on me. And I always feel like I have someone’s eye on me.

A foundational example of why I always feel like someone is watching and disapproving of me: I am 18, and I’m home for summer after my first year in college. We live in an upper-middle-class cul de sac in a well-off suburb of Boston. Our house sits on an acre. It’s not a semi-rural acre that you might find in a hobby-farm area. It’s just a well-to-do neighborhood of big houses on big lots. Our house, surrounded by its lawn that won’t grow because of all the trees, sits on the half-acre closest to the street. The half-acre in the back is “woods”. Not, you know, forest, but enough trees that you can’t see the neighbor’s house, not even in winter. (My mother likes living in a house where the neighbors can’t see her.)

Today, my mother wants me to do some yard work, picking up sticks and such after a windstorm. I’m to put the sticks in garbage bags (it’s the 1970s; yard clipping bags haven’t been invented yet) and put them near the garage so that we can haul them to the dump. I say that it would be easier to empty the bags in the woods behind the house. “No”, she says. Her voice is even louder than usual. “Then I won’t be able to see you. I need to be able to look out of any window and see you”.

So I like Mondays, when I am alone. On Mondays, I am free.

Today I will vacuum, do my laundry, and make a Victoria Sponge (https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mary_berrys_perfect_34317) to please my Immediate Gratification Monkey (I call her Iggy) [https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html] who really, really enjoys the Great British Bake Off. Oh, and I will try to catch up with my emails and return my phone calls. It’s a middle-aged, middle-class woman’s day off.

I turn on the TV, which was set to TCM, despite the fact that Kevin was supposedly watching the Superbowl last night. They were showing “The Sorrow and the Pity”, which started at 6:45 AM and ends at 10:45 AM, so it’s 5 hours long. It’s a 1969 documentary: “Marcel Ophuls uses interviews as well as clips from French and German newsreels to shed light on the Nazi occupation of France”. I haven’t heard of this film before. It’s riveting. I can’t look away:

The apparent cheerful ignorance of the merchant who took out a newspaper advert in the late 1930s/early 1940s, stating that he was a Frenchman and not a Jew, disgusts me. I presume that he knows that what he did was wrong. But he’s so cavalier: “I’m a Catholic, but my name is ‘Stein’, which sounds Jewish. I just wanted everyone to know that I’m a Frenchman…. My brothers and I fought in the first war, and one of my brothers was killed…. I’m a Frenchman….”

This disgusts me, but it does not surprise me. People no longer surprise me. People are the same old story on an endless loop.

But it makes me wonder: How much of your life do you have to hide from yourself in order to live? People are icebergs: you see 10%, and the other 90% is hidden beneath the water. I always thought that 90% is hidden from other people, because someone else can never see your life—what you’ve experienced, what fears motivate you. They can only see the outer wrapping. But we hide our lives from ourselves, too, diving into the cold, black waters to bury parts of ourselves in the heavy ice. Once we’ve completed this ordeal, we convince ourselves that we can never get back there—it’s too deep, the pressure is too high, it’s deadly cold. We imprison our lives in the ice. Sometimes an epiphany breaks us free, but those are rare and we can turn away and refuse them. We rarely want to look at the things that make us free. If we did, we’d have to dive down and mine our lives back out of the ice and deal with the pain. I don’t like pain any more than anyone else. I’ve buried enough things. I’ve buried most of my life in the ice.

Anyway, I finish the vacuuming, eat lunch, put in my laundry, and make a Victoria Sponge, per Mary Berry’s recipe. I weigh all the ingredients because I have a scale. It has 4 ingredients: eggs, sugar, flour, butter.

It turns out that XL eggs (which are what I have) in the U.S. weigh just about what a medium egg does in the U.K., per my research (https://www.nigella.com/ask/egg-sizes). I blend the egg and spoon out quarter teaspoons until the weight is 250g, just to be on the safe side.

I grind the sugar in the blender to turn it into caster (superfine) sugar. I grind it a little more than I probably should because the blender isn’t the right tool. I should have broken out the food processor. The sugar touching the blender blades whirs into a vertical column that doesn’t mix with the sugar around the sides of the vessel. So I grind a little and then shake the blender to mix the sugar so that enough of it is superfine—grind and shake, grind and shake, grind and shake. Eventually it looks pretty okay.

The flour surprises me. I weigh the measuring cup and then weigh the flour that I’ve put into the measuring cup. But the ostensible 8 oz that the measuring cup holds doesn’t weigh 8 oz—it weighs something like 4.5 oz. I dump the flour into a tared bowl and switch the scale to metric. I go back for more flour. Finally I have 250g. And I realize that I’m not sure how much flour that is. Maybe about 1.5 cups? 1.75 cups? Plus, it’s not self-rising flour, which is what the recipe calls for. I’ll have to punt with adding the baking soda and salt to make it equivalent to self-rising flour. I decide to take the easy way out and just double the baking soda and salt. It will probably be too much and screw up the recipe, but I do it anyway.

I weigh the 2 sticks of butter. 252g. I decide that the butter papers weigh 1g each and that it’s close enough.

I put the eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and butter into the big red mixing bowl, which weighs 1,496g. I use the hand mixer because I imagine it will take me forever to mix with a wooden spoon, which is the recipe’s first choice. The recipe says “not to overmix”. But the butter, which I’ve cut into ~1 T bits, isn’t mixing in, although it’s room temperature. Eventually it all mixes together—”eventually” is that time when you’re doing something new, and you don’t have any idea how long it will take and what the end result will look like. It’s both an eternity and the blink of an eye in which everything seems to go wrong, and you’re still not sure if it’s right when you’re done.

It doesn’t drop off the spoon, the way the recipe says it should. In fact, it’s quite clumpy. But it’s mixed, and I’m always doing things wrong, especially when cooking. I work hard to divide the recipe in half so the two layers are identical. I’m not used to grams. A gram is both more than and less than I imagine. Spoon one smidgeon over here—no, spoon two smidgeons over there….

Eventually the same amount of batter is in both tins, give or take a gram or two. Now is the time to “gently smooth the surface of the cakes with a spatula”. Smoothing is not my strong suit. I try to bring the lessons I’ve learned from raking the shavings around the horse stalls to this task. I’ve put the batter in the middle, so I use the little metal spatula to draw the batter out to the sides, going around the tin one stroke at a time, just as I used to rake the heap of shavings into the corners of the stalls. Okay, there’s less batter in the middle and some filling the tin, almost reaching the sides. I set the tip of the spatula at the edge of the tin, handle in the middle and try to hold it horizontal as I turn the tin, trying to distribute the batter evenly while smoothing it. Eventually I call it “good enough” and give up. It’ll smooth out in the oven, right?

Into the oven they go. I set the timer for 20 minutes.

When it goes ding, there’s cake stuff to check. The cake on the left is darker, though the edges facing the front of the oven for both cakes are beginning to become light brown. The cake on the right is quite light and, though the top has set, it’s fallen in the middle. No doubt because of the extra baking powder and salt I added because I hadn’t measured the flour properly. I turn them 180° and set the timer for 5 minutes.

In 5 minutes, the cake on the left looks maybe done-ish. The cake on the right still looks quite light. Next time I’ll need to swap them as well as rotating them. But I don’t really know how to tell when they’re done. When I press them gently, as the recipe instructs, they rise into place again, but they don’t feel “springy”. I put them in for 3 more minutes.

In 3 minutes, the cake on the left is definitely, definitely done. Overcooked. Ugh. I take it out and put it onto the wire rack. The cake on the right is still possibly underdone because it was on the cooler side of the oven. I put it in for 1 more minute, hoping that it won’t be as overdone as the first one.

One minute later, the cake is definitely done. I guess. I take it out and put the timer on for 4 minutes of cooling. When it goes ding, it’s time to decant the cakes.

I run the spatula around the sides of the first cake, but it’s definitely pulled away from the edge of the tin. No need for the spatula. I grab a fresh dishtowel and put it over the cake, then put my hand on the towel. I turn the tin over and the cake drops out into my hand, showing its burnt bottom. Ugh. I put the bottom onto the wire rack where I can’t see it.

The second cake… doesn’t go as well. I somehow don’t get my dishtowel hand on it properly and it tips off my hand and lands on the counter, breaking into thirds. Of course, this was the better cake, which I had planned to use for the top.

I gather it carefully and get it onto the wire rack. At least no big pieces have fallen out. I pick up the kitchen, trying not to listen to my mother’s voice looping through my head, telling me all the things I did wrong, that the cakes are awful, that I should have known better, that the cakes are ruined. I try to remind myself that I don’t have much experience baking, that it’s the first time I tried the recipe, that I solved almost all the problems up front and now I can solve the additional problems next time, that they’ll turn out better next time, and so on.

Mom’s voice is always louder, but at least I have my own voice now.