First foray into baking
May. 19th, 2013 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo a few months ago I made a post asking for easy baking recipes. And in spite of making a public commitment that I was going to start baking before Passover, life and procrastination got in the way. Then when I was asking for topics for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, an anony person asked
Last week when I did my major store-cupboard restock I made sure I had most of the ingredients mentioned in the recipes people had suggested to me. And this weekendjack was here to provide moral support and help with QA, so I decided to take the plunge.
I pickedforestofglory's butterscotch brownies, because it looked reasonably technically simple and didn't involve creaming. I'm going to write up my experience in detail just because I'm so new to this, so I want to document things to help me improve at this.
Recipe calls for an 8'' x 8'' pan. I'm judging that it probably needs a fairly shallow, tray type of deal, rather than a deep cake tin. The nearest I have is a 10'' round flan dish. I calculate its area and figure it's about 1.5x the suggested dish, so I determine to multiply up the recipe by 50%. The pan has to be greased (good thing I have the scientist's habit of reading through the protocol before I start, or I might have got to that stage with hot mixture and not had a greased pan ready). OK, I know how to grease pans, that's something I've seen my mother doing, you get a butter paper and rub the remnants of the butter all over the base and sides of the dish.
Next problem:forestofglory is American, so she measures ingredients by volume, not by weight. (Converting between Imperial and metric units is no problem, but converting between volume and weight is harder!) British butter doesn't come in "sticks", and I don't fancy trying to squish the butter into tablespoons, especially not twelve tablespoons, in order to measure its volume! So I ask the internet to convert from sticks to ounces. 1 stick of butter is 4 oz, so I weigh out 6 oz of butter. I do however have a measuring jug marked in US cups so I can do the dry measures by volume. I hesitate a bit; if I've converted the butter into weight, but I do the rest of the ingredients by volume, will the proportions work out? I decide to take the risk anyway, rather than faffing about trying to figure out the weight equivalents for all the suggested measurements.
I start the butter melting on a low heat. I assume that stirring it with a wooden spoon from time to time probably can't hurt, so I do that. Then I attempt to measure out 1½ cups of very dark brown sugar. Sinceforestofglory had mentioned molasses, I assumed that something sold as molasses sugar was the nearest equivalent. Though maybe that was too rich, I should have mixed ordinary brown sugar (Demerara? Muscovado?) with a little molasses sugar? Anyway, molasses sugar is quite clumpy and sticky. I kind of crumbled it with my fingers into the measuring jug, pressing it down a bit to fit it into the volume. But I don't know if that was the right thing to do, maybe I was supposed to measure 1½ cups of loose, clumpy sugar? Or maybe I was supposed to tamp it right down so it was tightly packed? This is why measuring by weight seems easier to me! Anyway, by the time I'd done this, the butter was all melted and was starting to bubble, so I added a big thermal mass of room temperature sugar to keep it from boiling or burning, and stirred it a bit.
The next stage takes place
The mix went into the tin ok, it was kind of sticky but just about liquid enough to reshape itself to fit the container. 350 °F is approximately 180 °C. And I have a nice fan-assisted gas oven so I reckoned it would likely run fairly hot. Lots of people in the thread had advised me to get an oven thermometer and not trust the temperature on the dial, but I have generally found my oven to be reasonably good at cooking savoury dishes evenly and at the temperature given in the recipe, so I decided to risk it and not wait until I get round to getting specialist equipment. After about 16 or 18 minutes the cake starts to smell cakey, so I decided to take it out at exactly 20 minutes, no longer than that.
The cake looked as far as I can judge like a cooked cake. It hadn't risen much, but it had a bit and the recipe didn't seem like the kind of thing that's supposed to rise. I prodded it in the centre with a knife and the knife came out clean, which is something I've vaguely read somewhere is a good sign. Slightly under an inch deep, and just starting to be a little crisp at the edges, but as best as I could tell reasonably cooked in the middle. I waited 20 minutes for the delicious-smelling cake to cool, and then attempted to get it out of the tin. My shallow flan dish doesn't have a removable base, so I thought this bit might be tricky. Actually it came away from the sides really nicely, and I was almost able to invert the whole thing onto a plate. Except that the middle was very slightly sticky, so part of it was left behind and the rest kind of cracked a bit.
So not really pretty enough to offer to people other than my nice patient husband, but not obviously disastrous either! We tasted some, and for a first attempt it was really pretty good. The texture was almost exactly perfect, cakey and rich but not too fudgey for most of it, and even the "sticky" bit in the middle was perfectly nice, just a teensy bit gooey. The lumpy flour wasn't too bad at all, but there were just a couple of pea-sized lumps in the mix. It tastes really nice; I think maybe I could have got away with a little more vanilla, but basically it does in fact taste of butterscotch!
That was encouraging enough to make me fairly ready to try again! Many thanks toforestofglory for the recipe and to hadassah for bequeathing me her cake tins when she left Sweden. And to all of you for encouraging me to believe that I might be able to learn baking if I put my mind to it. And of course to jack for helping me taste the finished product. I think I will probably make a separate journal for documenting future baking attempts, I'm going to need this level of detail for a while until I build up enough experience to feel confident experimenting and troubleshooting. Equipment I could have done with: sieve, proper cake tin for storing the finished product.
if there have been any results from the baking experiments you mentioned a while back...I was embarrassed to have to say I hadn't got started, and that motivated me to pick up the project again.
Last week when I did my major store-cupboard restock I made sure I had most of the ingredients mentioned in the recipes people had suggested to me. And this weekend
jack was here to provide moral support and help with QA, so I decided to take the plunge.I picked
forestofglory's butterscotch brownies, because it looked reasonably technically simple and didn't involve creaming. I'm going to write up my experience in detail just because I'm so new to this, so I want to document things to help me improve at this.Recipe calls for an 8'' x 8'' pan. I'm judging that it probably needs a fairly shallow, tray type of deal, rather than a deep cake tin. The nearest I have is a 10'' round flan dish. I calculate its area and figure it's about 1.5x the suggested dish, so I determine to multiply up the recipe by 50%. The pan has to be greased (good thing I have the scientist's habit of reading through the protocol before I start, or I might have got to that stage with hot mixture and not had a greased pan ready). OK, I know how to grease pans, that's something I've seen my mother doing, you get a butter paper and rub the remnants of the butter all over the base and sides of the dish.
Next problem:
forestofglory is American, so she measures ingredients by volume, not by weight. (Converting between Imperial and metric units is no problem, but converting between volume and weight is harder!) British butter doesn't come in "sticks", and I don't fancy trying to squish the butter into tablespoons, especially not twelve tablespoons, in order to measure its volume! So I ask the internet to convert from sticks to ounces. 1 stick of butter is 4 oz, so I weigh out 6 oz of butter. I do however have a measuring jug marked in US cups so I can do the dry measures by volume. I hesitate a bit; if I've converted the butter into weight, but I do the rest of the ingredients by volume, will the proportions work out? I decide to take the risk anyway, rather than faffing about trying to figure out the weight equivalents for all the suggested measurements. I start the butter melting on a low heat. I assume that stirring it with a wooden spoon from time to time probably can't hurt, so I do that. Then I attempt to measure out 1½ cups of very dark brown sugar. Since
forestofglory had mentioned molasses, I assumed that something sold as molasses sugar was the nearest equivalent. Though maybe that was too rich, I should have mixed ordinary brown sugar (Demerara? Muscovado?) with a little molasses sugar? Anyway, molasses sugar is quite clumpy and sticky. I kind of crumbled it with my fingers into the measuring jug, pressing it down a bit to fit it into the volume. But I don't know if that was the right thing to do, maybe I was supposed to measure 1½ cups of loose, clumpy sugar? Or maybe I was supposed to tamp it right down so it was tightly packed? This is why measuring by weight seems easier to me! Anyway, by the time I'd done this, the butter was all melted and was starting to bubble, so I added a big thermal mass of room temperature sugar to keep it from boiling or burning, and stirred it a bit.The next stage takes place
when it is nicely melted and there are no lumps. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to actually dissolve the sugar in the melted butter (is that even possible?) or just make a smooth suspension. I also wasn't sure if I was supposed to mix up the eggs before adding them either. So I took a guess and mixed two eggs, and when that was done the sugar was still grainy and somewhat distinct from the melted butter, and didn't seem inclined to actually "melt" or dissolve, so I decided to just add the eggs anyway. But then I forgot I was supposed to be doing only 1½ eggs, and added the whole 2 eggs by mistake. I hoped that was going to be ok! My experience of cooking savoury sauces with eggs told me that I probably ought to stir the mix to incorporate the egg without turning it into scrambled eggs, so I did that. When I had a homogeneous mixture I added the 1½ cups plain flour. I stirred that in to the mix as well, and at that point realized (based on my vague general concepts of baking) that I probably ought to have sifted it first, because it was a bit lumpy in the mix and I couldn't make the lumps go away by stirring. I tried for a while, and decided I wasn't getting anywhere, but that I had a texture not completely unlike my experience of raw cake batter , so I reckoned cooking it was doable.
The mix went into the tin ok, it was kind of sticky but just about liquid enough to reshape itself to fit the container. 350 °F is approximately 180 °C. And I have a nice fan-assisted gas oven so I reckoned it would likely run fairly hot. Lots of people in the thread had advised me to get an oven thermometer and not trust the temperature on the dial, but I have generally found my oven to be reasonably good at cooking savoury dishes evenly and at the temperature given in the recipe, so I decided to risk it and not wait until I get round to getting specialist equipment. After about 16 or 18 minutes the cake starts to smell cakey, so I decided to take it out at exactly 20 minutes, no longer than that.
The cake looked as far as I can judge like a cooked cake. It hadn't risen much, but it had a bit and the recipe didn't seem like the kind of thing that's supposed to rise. I prodded it in the centre with a knife and the knife came out clean, which is something I've vaguely read somewhere is a good sign. Slightly under an inch deep, and just starting to be a little crisp at the edges, but as best as I could tell reasonably cooked in the middle. I waited 20 minutes for the delicious-smelling cake to cool, and then attempted to get it out of the tin. My shallow flan dish doesn't have a removable base, so I thought this bit might be tricky. Actually it came away from the sides really nicely, and I was almost able to invert the whole thing onto a plate. Except that the middle was very slightly sticky, so part of it was left behind and the rest kind of cracked a bit.
So not really pretty enough to offer to people other than my nice patient husband, but not obviously disastrous either! We tasted some, and for a first attempt it was really pretty good. The texture was almost exactly perfect, cakey and rich but not too fudgey for most of it, and even the "sticky" bit in the middle was perfectly nice, just a teensy bit gooey. The lumpy flour wasn't too bad at all, but there were just a couple of pea-sized lumps in the mix. It tastes really nice; I think maybe I could have got away with a little more vanilla, but basically it does in fact taste of butterscotch!
That was encouraging enough to make me fairly ready to try again! Many thanks to
forestofglory for the recipe and to hadassah for bequeathing me her cake tins when she left Sweden. And to all of you for encouraging me to believe that I might be able to learn baking if I put my mind to it. And of course to jack for helping me taste the finished product. I think I will probably make a separate journal for documenting future baking attempts, I'm going to need this level of detail for a while until I build up enough experience to feel confident experimenting and troubleshooting. Equipment I could have done with: sieve, proper cake tin for storing the finished product.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-05-19 08:04 pm (UTC)Have you come across http://www.cookingforengineers.com - you may find it suits your technical mindset. The other books you might find useful are American (but feel free to borrow mine) which are by Alton Brown. He does a programme called Good Eats and has brought out 2 books which again are for the scientifically minded cook. (He studied food science later in life, having trained as a cinematographer - he makes good food programmes and I've found his methods bombproof)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-05-20 12:23 pm (UTC)I think what I want to do is get more experience of baking based on using my friends' suggested basic recipes, and when I have more of an idea of the sorts of things I enjoy, then go out and buy cookbooks. But I'll make a note of Alton Brown, thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-16 05:00 pm (UTC)(they've just emailed me to remind me about it)
mair