To Lisa, you win

Many months ago when I re-embraced my love of baking and was terribly unemployed, I asked some friends if they wanted some baked treats. My dear friend Lisa opted yes and requested cookies made with maraschino cherries.

Excuse me?

I was immediately struck with doubt and thought that whatever I ended up making was going to taste like shit. Really, I didn't think there was a way to make good cookies with maraschino cherries. I kept passive aggressively bating her with recipes made with real cherries that I thought would be vastly superior to her foolish recommendation of crap you put in a drink. I mean really, Lisa. You want a maraschino cherry, go to a bar or get a sundae.

I can be a bit of a B...

But, Lisa being a friend of mine, she stuck to her guns. She knew what she wanted and I was left to start making what I thought would be crap. Here is how it began:

You can bet your ass that if I'm not feeling a recipe that I'll be making it on the hooch.

I follow the odd instructions and measurements, only adding to my lack of confidence in what the end result would be. I do the dry and wet, repeatedly glancing at the piece of paper to check that I hadn't misread the amount of salt.

Looks about right. So I start to mix and things start to look off.

Admittedly this picture was taken before everything was fully incorporated, but trust me. It didn't look right. The dough was way too dry. Drier than anything I'd ever made and I was certain that this was going to wind up in the trash. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment or maybe I wanted to be right, but either way I continued against my better judgment. I started preheating the oven and began to chop the cherries.

 

Look at how dry that is! The cherries were drained and there was a lot of coconut, so before I balled these bad boys up I took a much needed break

That's my cat, Clavius Biscuit. She smells, doesn't clean herself very well, and loves to sleep by my head. I love her dearly. Back to the cookies!

So I ball them up and blah blah blah.

Get to the point, right? Ok. Lisa, you are brilliant. I was wrong. Dead wrong. Your choice of that key ingredient resulted in one of the most delicious cookies I have ever had. They were small, so the cuteness factor was pretty high. They were sweet and flavorful and right before your mouth would say, "hey now, that's too sweet," it would get a punch of SALT that made it divine. I will definitely make these again and again and again. Hell, I might make them again tonight...

So there you have it Lisa. You were right and I was wrong. Deliciously wrong.

The Bain of My Existence

God damn apple cake. This simple, easy recipe has consistently left me muttering 'fuck' under my breath for over 6 months now. It is the only recipe that when something goes wrong, which it always does, I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Remember why this would bother me?

Before I get too far into this rant, I will offer you the reader the happy, cheerful part of this recipe. Let me say that I love my apple peeler. It peels, cores, and slices the apples perfectly. It is easy to clean, cuts down the time for prepping apples to just a few minutes, and it makes these great apple peel spirals. On this occasion, our friend Brian who typically eats the spirals queried, "At what point is that trash?" I still have no answer and leave it up to you readers to decide.

 

Since there was company I didn't take many pictures of the process of making this cake. I assure you it is very simple. Mix wet ingredients together. Mix dry ingredients together. Mix the two together and add whatever chunks of stuff are being added; in this case, walnuts. With the dough mixed and chunks folded in, I spooned everything in as appropriate. First the batter, then a layer of apples. More batter, then more apples. I had some extra batter that I spread over the top. It wasn't much and so it didn't really affect the cake. I then put it into the oven and away it baked. It smelled delicious, which it usually does. Once it was finished, I took it out of the oven and it looked great, which it usually does. Here is my evidence:

Now doesn't that cake look swell? It's almost as though I should be able to just run a knife around the sides, flip it over and say "Gee, that sure is a good looking cake!" 

That never happens.

The 'always' in that first paragraph refers to the the very last step of the cake: the inversion. I have used tube pans and bunt pans, oil and butter, hot cake and cool cake, and no matter what I do this cake always splits in half. Always. Every single time this stubborn cake ends up looking like this:

God Damn It!! It always splits. No matter what I do. I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I've used more apples, then less apples. It split both times. I've used various pans, it always splits. My last and final guess is that I am putting too much dough on the top (when pouring it's the bottom) of the pan, making the bottom fall off. You would think that the weight of the top would make it all just flop right out considering the amount of non-stick business in play, but noooOOOOooo. 

What makes this even more frustrating is that I can't stop making it. I cannot erase this from my list of recipes, it just tastes too damn good. It's easy and extremely delicious. It's moist and sweet and flavorful and in all the right proportions. It just looks ugly and that is why I have renamed this from Apple Cake to "Ugly Cake." What can I say? It has a great personality. 

No stress though because the next day I got to be here:

Damn do I love my life.

What the hell is a kringler?

About two months ago my boyfriend asked me what his parents and sister should get me for Christmas. I abhor this question for two reasons:
1) I rarely know what I want and if I mentally noted to myself that I wanted something, chances are I won't remember it.
2) It completely defeats the purpose of Christmas in my eyes. I don't believe in impersonal gift giving and I do my best not to practice it. Give gifts to the people you care about and give them something that you want them to have or something that is based on your collected knowledge of them.
So when I'm asked what I want for a gift, I immediately am annoyed and when he asked me on behalf of his parents and sister (god damn secret santa) I had to think about it. I came up with some gift certificate stuff and then had a eureka moment; old family recipes! I wanted them to give me either some old school cook book or a bunch of well-established recipes. And give they did! Dozens of recipes and an old church cookbook to boot! Overwhelmed by all the mention of rhubarb, butter, sugar, and dates made me have to bake. But alas, twas winter and the grocery stores are filled with little more than apples and three year old oranges. So what to bake? The answer was Scandinavian Kringler.

Bottom line is this stuff was weird the whole way through. The dough was sticky and seeing as I'd neither heard nor seen anything remotely like this before, I had nothing to compare it to.

The Kringler is basically taking two different kinds of dough and layering them. After baking the two layers, you take a third mixture and smear it over the entire thing. For the bottom layer, I felt as though I didn't have enough dough to follow my boyfriend's mother's directions. Since I was at the assembling stage and the oven was a ripe 400 degrees, it was time to call the woman. Due to my hands being covered in sticky dough, he had to function as mediator, telling me her thoughts on what was happening and her assurances that I was, in fact, doing everything right.
Ok. It's supposed to look like this?

The directions had called for the bottom layer to be 3" wide and 15" long. Not only did I not have enough dough, my crappy apartment sized oven would never permit such a glorious baking tray. Nonetheless I had his mother's go ahead and that's why you see a pan full of water and butter; layer number two in the making.

Every baker gets hungry in the process.

I finished the second layer and spread it on. Thick. At this point I was convinced that I had royally screwed up, with my boyfriend even going so far as to say "That doesn't look how I remember it." A comment I was less than thrilled to receive. No matter, I was too frustrated and had come too far so in my shitty oven it went to bake at what seemed like too high a temperature for what I thought would be too long.

That just don't look right and I prepared myself for disappointment. Just in case though, I worked on the third layer; the shmear to be shmeared  on my layers of questionable doughs. Now the first two layers left me with doubt, but not in regards to their composition.

Engage the rant.

I hate cooking. I hate cooking because dealing with abstract measurements and techniques do not work for me and at the age of 26, I can make good fried eggs and basic tofu curry. Anything else goes to my boyfriend and I like it that way because baking is straightforward. One cup of this with two cups of that and a few teaspoons of some other things baked at this temp for this long will almost certainly result in success. If it doesn't come out right, there is a good chance you can figure out why. Unlike cooking.

RETURN TO ZE KRINGLER!

The third smeary layer was just off and I can say now that it was because I used butter instead of shortening, something I avoid as much as possible. At first the layer would clearly not shmear as shmears should shmear (say it!) and in the end I had to add heavy cream to make it spreadable, deviating from the recipe. I care not, for shortening lacks flavor and love! After the prescribed time had passed and I'd added a third layer onto the Kringler, this came out of the oven:

So there it is. Scandinavian Kringler made to consistently doubted perfection. My boyfriend said it was spot on and although it turned out great, I must say that this wasn't as good as I was hoping. It was really just a shit ton of almond extract, flour, enough butter to ensure a future bypass, and sugar. It wasn't bad in that it tasted fine, but I love a complex baked good with more going for it than the flavor of fat and something else. I'd make this again for a holiday or something, but not anytime soon. My talents are better utilized on other recipes.

Quantity beat out quality

First, let me say that I am writing this having drunk some wine on an empty stomach. Let the fun begin!

Months ago during a normal lunch with my coworkers we all decided that it would be a fantastic idea to do home baked cookies cut out as the state of Michigan (guess where I live) as holiday gifts. Neat-o right? Wrong. It resulted in a horrific number of cookies and the possible alienation of a friend who I think didn't believe me when I left her birthday sporting the excuse of "I have to make cookie dough." Maybe after reading this she will believe me...

Hey look, it's Michigan! What you don't see is that I did this for over 200 cookies. My hands were raw by the end and I swore off baking cookies for the foreseeable future, something that has been the case more than a month now. This endeavor required perfect sequencing of one cookie tray being in the oven, another on deck, while the third was being loaded up. Since sugar cookies bake for only 8-10 minutes, this process was repeated dozens of times over the course of 4 hours. Bear in mind that the dough had been made the night before in anticipation of this tiresome afternoon.

This picture was taken half way through my afternoon o'cookies. By the time I finished, this giant rubber maid tub was full to the brim of these little bastards. Why am I still so bitter about this? Because they're god damn sugar cookies! The most bland and boring form of baked good, in my humble opinion. They are a lovely canvas upon which to add pretty designs, but I am all about taste and these offered little, despite being a tried and true recipe of grandmothers.
I'll soon be re-embracing my cookie recipes since the torment of this day has long passed. My cherry cookie plan will be posted here for your enjoyment. If you'd like the recipe for the sugar cookies, I'll add it to this post, but only upon request.

Per request: The recipe.
3 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup soft butter
1 egg, slightly beaten
3 tbsp cream
1 tsp vanilla (can substitute almond extract)

Sift dry ingredients, cut in butter and add other ingredients. Blend thoroughly then let chill at least 1 hour.

Break off a piece of dough the size of an orange and pat it flat in your hand. Using a rolling pin, roll on dough on floured surface.

Roll out to about a 1/4 inch thickness. Cut out and put on an ungreased baking sheet.

Bake 5-8 minutes at 400 F. Remove the cookies from the oven as soon as you see them turning color at the base of the cookie. Do not let them brown more than a bare minimum around the edges. Let cool.

If you'd like to know how I did this for well over 200 cookies, comment below and I'll happily oblige.