Strongly Worded

Let Me Eat Cake

On Sunday I made a cake. As I may have mentioned, baking is not my core competency. I’m good at the savory aspects of cooking, especially those which afford room for improvisation. I’m not one for following recipes to the letter—I’d rather just get the gist of a dish. Especially since one of my cooking mantras is: Life is Short. This justifies my use of canned chicken stock, frozen garlic cubes, prepared pesto, and no-boil lasagna noodles—and my refusal to prepare anything that requires a meat or candy thermometer, a water bath or double boiler, an ice cream maker, or yeast.

Because of this combination of laziness and lack of detail orientation, I’ve never been big on baking. My few attempts have been unimpressive—a bland pear tart, a dry orange cake, soggy cobblers. I’ve come to terms with this.

But then last week, I finished reading Julie and Julia, which you should read if you haven't done so already. Julie and Julia is a blog-cum-memoir of a disgruntled secretary who decided to infuse her life with meaning by cooking all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking— in one year. Julie (the blogger-cum-memoirist) masterfully describes her conquests over aspic, canard en croute, and lobster thermiodor.

I became inspired. I told myself: If Julie can do aspic, I can bake cake. I am going to follow directions—all of the directions. I am going to create the ribbon (which is what JC—aka Julia Child—calls the indicator of perfectly integrated butter, sugar, and eggs).

So I went out and bought a new rubber spatula and a springform pan, and then I invited two friends for dinner, planning to tackle a flourless chocolate cake (which is not one of JC's recipes, but whatever) .

I almost wimped out when I realized that the recipe required baking the cake in a springform pan set into a roasting pan filled halfway with water. I do not own a roasting pan large enough to contain a 10" cake, but even if I did, it wouldn't fit in my narrow oven. I debated whether to go out and find a narrow roasting pan or a smaller springform pan, or to just make a different dessert. Then I applied the Life is Short mantra to the situation, and decided that the cake would be perfectly capable of surviving without a water-filled roasting pan, dammit.

OK. But then the recipe called for a blend of 6 ounces of unsweetened chocolate and 6.5 ounces of bittersweet chocolate, and the chocolate came in 4-oz packages. No unsweetened chocolate was available. So I flouted my vow to follow all the directions, and I used a combination of bittersweet and semisweet and adjusted the sugar.

I followed all the other directions. And I am pleased to report that the cake turned out fine. It was sunken in the middle, and a little cracked across the top, but I flipped it over to disguise that. The cake texture was so fudgy that a dinner guest wondered (kindly and respectfully) whether it was undercooked. The jury's out on that one, but I think I'm making progress.

Posted by Dori at 10:37 PM