Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Baking Blindfolded


During my week back home in Gabs, I was able to convince my very tolerant friends to indulge me and my baking. Having carelessly forgotten 'Chocolate', I quickly summoned the power of the internet, and was able to find a variation on the recipe, which I was able to further vary to produce an approximation of the cake I was looking for.
We began baking, and soon found that we were lacking in a sieve, any measuring instruments or sensibly sized baking bowls, or a scale. Or mixing spoons.
We managed though:

Yep, chopsticks.

Let me put this in perspective; I normally use perfect cup, spoon, volume and weight measurements, going out of my way to get them just right. Here, I had little or nothing of the sort. Oh, and we were making twice the normal (already monstrous) amount. We estimated everything, and ultimately, it came out alright in the end.


In fact, we had only one hiccup, and it was not the fault of adventurous equipment. We poured the first quarter of the batter (we intended to make four cakes, you see) into the baking tin, popped it in the microwave, and returned to our game of counterstrike. Forty minutes later, upon removing it from the oven, I was struck by a very obvious fact; We had forgotten in our haste to grease or line the tin. Inevitably, this meant that when we gingerly tried to ease the cake from the mould it did not oblige. Instead, it collapsed out of the tin, still desperately clinging to the sides. In the end, we were left with a broken, steaming mass of dense chocolatey goodness. It was not a complete waste though, as we were able to enjoy a rare thing. While one usually must wait for a cake to cool before icing it, thereby missing the fresh-out-of-the-oven warmth. It was this moist warmth that we greatly enjoyed before cleaning out the tin, properly lined and refilled it, and put it back in the oven. In the end, we produced four perfect cakes which we sandwiched into the two you see above. We finished icing it well after two in the morning, true to our insomaniac style.


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