Recipe for failure
I get a lot of food emails. Many are spammy. Usually I ignore them, but a recent one from the National Honey Board caught my eye. It included a recipe for King Cake, which has been "a Mardi Gras focal point since the eighteenth century." I've never been to Mardi Gras; heck I've never even been to New Orleans. But I can't resist any recipe for eggy sweet bread, and that's what it seemed the good people of the Honey Board were encouraging me to bake.
The first attempt came out fine:
The second did not. I made a number of moronic errors while being swept out to sea on a wave of haphazard technique and bad decision-making masquerading as Creativity.
Here's a short list of things you should NOT do if you want your baked goods to come out properly:
1. Substitute key ingredients
I didn't have the proper type of yeast, but I plunged ahead anyway. The recipe asked for rapid rise; I only had the normal glacial pace variety. I didn't bother to look up the difference this would make in rising times.
2. Make inaccurate adjustments
I played fast and loose with yeast quantities while doubling the recipe. Big mistake.
3. Combine unrelated recipes
Since I'd never made King Cake before, I started poking around the internet, investigating other recipes for an idea of what this thing was supposed to look like. I found another recipe that included a pecan brown sugar filling. That seemed delicious. I wanted it. In addition to sweet-yeasty-bread weakness, I also suffer from anything-containing-brown-sugar weakness. For the second cake, I rolled in a bunch of brown sugar filling to form a sort of mutant cinnamon roll, which led to tragic leakage once it melted in the oven.
4. When in doubt, add flour
The recipe created batter. But I wanted dough, so I could roll the thing up and slap the brown sugar in it. I kept adding flour until it became kneadable. This was just plain silly. I knew it, but I could not stop. Could. Not. Stop.
When it came out, it looked like a gargantuan bagel oozing brown goo:
And guess what? It didn't taste too good either. [Slapping hand. Tying string around finger.]
I don't like coloring inside the lines. But I don't like baking monstrosities either.
The first attempt came out fine:
Here's a short list of things you should NOT do if you want your baked goods to come out properly:
1. Substitute key ingredients
I didn't have the proper type of yeast, but I plunged ahead anyway. The recipe asked for rapid rise; I only had the normal glacial pace variety. I didn't bother to look up the difference this would make in rising times.
2. Make inaccurate adjustments
I played fast and loose with yeast quantities while doubling the recipe. Big mistake.
3. Combine unrelated recipes
Since I'd never made King Cake before, I started poking around the internet, investigating other recipes for an idea of what this thing was supposed to look like. I found another recipe that included a pecan brown sugar filling. That seemed delicious. I wanted it. In addition to sweet-yeasty-bread weakness, I also suffer from anything-containing-brown-sugar weakness. For the second cake, I rolled in a bunch of brown sugar filling to form a sort of mutant cinnamon roll, which led to tragic leakage once it melted in the oven.
4. When in doubt, add flour
The recipe created batter. But I wanted dough, so I could roll the thing up and slap the brown sugar in it. I kept adding flour until it became kneadable. This was just plain silly. I knew it, but I could not stop. Could. Not. Stop.
When it came out, it looked like a gargantuan bagel oozing brown goo:
And guess what? It didn't taste too good either. [Slapping hand. Tying string around finger.]
I don't like coloring inside the lines. But I don't like baking monstrosities either.
posted by cindym at 2:06 PM
4 Comments:
I made a King Cake too, and the first one was a failure and it looked much like yours, with the filling all over the place (I doubled the amount of filling - oops). For my second attempt I used Dorie Greenspan's recipe for brioche and filled it with a small amount of cinnamon/butter/brown sugar. It came out so much better and it was great. Thanks for that, your post made me laugh!
Cindy, this is a funny post and informative too. The second one looks like a pimple gone wild. :) But as always, cooking/baking is a learning experience, right?!
Lu
Good lard this made me laugh. Its nice to know that someone else is baking up monstrosities too every now and then.
Oh my gosh you made me laugh AND took the shame out of my baking failures.
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