Those who know me may or may not be aware that I worship at the altar of Nigella. She is my idol and (as Eric von Zipper says) my ideal. She cooks and bakes to picturesque picture perfect perfection – okay, alliteration failed me – and it always looks like something you’re meant to eat. And she does. And I want to… a lot.
The other day I watched a few hours worth of The Almighty N on youtube and got all bakey. So I made a Mediterranean herb and cheese bread from a bread machine mix. Only I’m an epic failure with those death machines so I did it all by hand. It was a little chewier in the center than I would have preferred – a little dense – but the hubbs loved it and we ate the whole thing with oil and balsamic vinegar. Yay!
For New Year’s we made a Russian chocolate cake (apparently a traditional thing there) from scratch. He loved it even though the cake was a bit dense and dry (totally my bad on poorly scooping flour) and the rum wash didn’t quite come through the flavor of the ganache. I love that word. Ganache. All this baking and cooking and talk of food makes me want to get even more bakey so I’m trying a recipe that’s deceptively difficult.
Hokey Pokey. Honeycomb. Diabetes in a tin. That’s what I’m working on right now. You know what they say – third time’s a charm!
We’ll see.
Batch one was awful. The instructions call for 1 ½ tsp of baking soda. I accidentally grabbed a ½ tbsp. Whoops.
Batch two tasted better but was flat and chewy and still a tad too carpet powdery. Blech.
Batch three is cooling now and I’m praying my tiny heart out – oop. Nope. Flat and chewy again.
The whole idea of this snack/desert thing is that it’s supposed to set all fluffy and hard and then you smack the crap out of it with a hammer to make hard little chunks of biteable yummy. I can’t tell what I’m doing wrong but I’m doing it WAY wrong because I keep ending up with chewy taffy-like stuff. While I’m sure someone somewhere could do something with this stuff I’m unfortunately not that talented and I’ve got a hubby on a diet. WAH!! Anywhoo… there are no pictures of this baking failure, but I will embed what should have happened a’la Nigella.
All hail Nigella!
Jen.e.SoftD 