This week the baby turned 7 months old. So I baked a cake. The slimmest of excuses to bake a cake, but I think little things are worth celebrating these days. And cakes are worth baking. I’ve been looking through my collection of cooking magazines – Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, Saveur, Gourmet, stretching back ten years. I would like to cook from them more, partly in an effort to cull the ones that have no future with us, as they do take up quite a bit of space. Anyhow, I found a recipe for yellow cake with chocolate frosting in Cook’s Illustrated that was surprisingly unfussy. While I love the tenacity and scientific bent of Cooks Illustrated, sometimes I find the results aren’t worth that extra step or ingredient they like to throw in. Tastes are perhaps a little more subjective than their authoritarian voice allows. The cake turned out beautifully.
And while the oven was hot, I finished making at batch of Fig Newtons. (King Arthur Flour Cookbook)
So it was a full day in the kitchen. A full-messy-mountain of dirty dishes-batter on the floor-there are no plates leftover for dinner kind of day. I had many more of these days when this isolation thing started. Days where the kitchen was never clean and I went through 5 lbs of flour in one week. But lately we haven’t been able find flour in the store, so I’ve pulled back on the baking a little. And, really, maybe I only have the energy to be up to my elbows in dishes a couple days a week, rather than every day of the week.
So far in quarantine baking, I’ve made: Sourdough bread (lots of this), Chocolate Walnut Scones, Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chip Cookies (really a huge amount of chocolate barely held together with a little dough), granola bars, and granola, empanadas, dinner rolls for Easter, and lots of pizza dough for our Friday night pizza/movie tradition.
It seems very cliched to panic bake during these times, but we do like our carbs here. Even the baby, who, despite my saying that she was too young for cake (never mind that I baked it for her), did manage to sneak a nibble from my mom’s plate.