Mon Bijoux

Once upon a time, I thought that using electrically powered appliances for baking was for wimps.  If our ancestors for ages untold had managed to churn out meal after meal with wooden spoons, whisks, and will power, I could do so as well.  I was a teenager, my mom did most of the cooking and my sister did most of the baking, and my favorite thing to make was a batch of brownies with melted butter.  A wooden spoon or spatula worked just fine, and I didn't have to worry about dangling the cord into anything sticky.  Furthermore, a lot of doughs, either for bread or cookies, were stiff enough that most hand-held mixers (the only kind of mixer I knew of ) couldn't handle them anyway.

Time-out for cake

Sheeeeeeeeee . . . don't tell; I'm supposed to be writing my thesis.

But thesis-writing has the amazing ability to make one both quite hungry and suddenly full of inspiration for every other writing project one has ever contemplated. Ever. So allow me a little cake-writing before returning to my technical design reports.

I am not the baker of my family. Shocking, I know. But growing up I was never as eager to be attached to the oven as my little sister; the attachment to baking came later, when I had to start consistently feeding myself. 'Twas her who collected cookie recipes and could time every element of a meal to be done within minutes. I could . . . well, I could turn out a decent batch of brownies, but more ambitious projects tended to run into problems.

Easter: The Ugly

Contrary to popular belief, most of my cakes don't go according to plan. It is not uncommon for them to dramatically not go according to plan. In fact, from my success rate I don't know how the belief that my cake escapades normally go according to plan got accepted as a popular belief. It could only be held by those who have never, ever, ever joined me in my kitchen while I bake. Nothing goes according to plan. This is why I would never attempt a wedding cake without some serious training first.

Instead, I remain evasive about my plans beforehand and get creative about salvaging things that go wrong. So when my intended cake roll refused to roll nicely, I attempted a layer cake instead. Less fancy, but still decent and tasty, right?

Easter: The Bad

Yea, so this post is late. I spent the month of May working a lot. I do that sometimes. And then I left CERN for a week to do (almost) nothing physics-related for a week. It was awesome.

I could also argue that this baking episode kind of, sort of deserves to be forgotten, and I can't even find the picture I wanted to top this post with. But I will shoulder on anyway. Despite the insanity, I still found a little time to cook.

Way back in Easter-time, I decided I wanted to make myself a special cake. I had the year previously bought a nid de Pacques and quite enjoyed it, and I wanted to make something a little fancier. My intention was to make a small jelly roll cake, and then decorate sections with chocolate frosting and candy to look like eggs. The cake was to be a genoise sponge, and the frosting was to be chocolate ganache.

Easter: The Good

Happy Easter, everyone!

Easter is pretty big holiday around here. Most businesses and banks take both Friday and Monday off, making it a four-day weekend. Even CERN closes for the holiday, though by "closes" I mean that the restaurants and post office and UBS branch and bureaucratic stuff is all shut down and no official meetings are held. The experiments still run, and they took a huge amount of data over the weekend.

I worked--that's part of being a grad student, after all. But it was Easter, and so I also indulged in a few treats. For myself, I got the classic Lindt chocolate Easter bunny shown above. For everyone else, I baked.

Some of it even turned out.

Happy Birthday, Einstein

I find March a very interesting month. It is the tail end of winter, so it is still cold and frosty. But spring is also coming, so there is more sunlight and flowers start to pop up and the birds get very, very noisy arguing about whatever it is birds argue about in the wee hours of the morning. It doesn't really have any official holidays unless perhaps Easter falls during the month, so for the duration of my college career the entire month of March is a marathon of projects and tests that doesn't let up until you crash into finals in April.

This year is not exception, though tests aren't to blame this time around. Now it's shifts and a paper for my professor.

It's too bad, because I would like to celebrate the first flowers and actually make myself a cake for once. Besides, March 14 is Pi day (March 14 = 3/14 = 3.14 . . .) and Einstein's birthday, so every physicist should have a chance to celebrate.

Kasekuchen

Baking projects tend to come in twos for me. The first project is to produce a birthday cake or scones for breakfast or candies and petit fours for a certain red dominated holiday in the recent past, the project that was planned out and ingredients purchased for and a final home pre-determined. The second project is then found to be necessary to use up the leftover cream or spare egg whites or spare egg yolks or abundance of butter that take up residence in the fridge and threaten to invite their fungal friends to visit if allowed to grow bored. These second projects have the benefit of requiring a fair amount of creativity to use up what random and perhaps mismatched ingredients were left by the first project, and they also give me a fun chance to test the type of recipes I might never otherwise make.

And, if the experimental second project bombs and lands in the garbage, I haven't really lost anything compared to throwing the offending ingredients away directly.

Anyway, there was in the recent past a holiday devoted to chocolate, and so I opted to celebrate one of my favorite ingredients and the birthdays of a few friends by making a tray of goodies. I make chocolate-covered candies and petit fours iced with mousse. It was all quite good and eaten quite quickly. But the mousse had required heavy cream, and after my previous sad experiences trying to get French cream to whip properly, I had bought rather too much. Downsizing the butter and egg populations in my fridge didn't look like such a bad idea, either.

A Year After Arrival

On February 4 2010, I arrived to a gray, cold morning at the Geneva airport to start my residence in Europe while working at CERN. I spent the next month hunting for a decent apartment. Finding housing in Geneva is a pain for everyone right now, with how expensive the city is and stiff competition for any and all housing. Luckily for me, CERN isn't in Geneva, and it is much more practical to live just across the border into France.

I wasn't looking for a particularly nice or fancy apartment. I really only had one criteria: I wanted one with an oven. It turns out that that can actually be a fairly specific request around here. In the realm of tiny single bedroom or studio apartments, a stove-top is considered necessary for a kitchen, not an oven.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I know, I'm a little late. But I've been busy. I had to make my way past the storm that closed the Northeast's airports to get back, before dashing across the country. I spent New Year's Eve at a huge dance on the outskirts of Paris, and some time on January 1 wandering along the brilliantly lit Champs Elysees. Notre Dame was lovely.

And then I went back to CERN and back to work. It's amazing how much one forgets after taking a couple weeks to not think about one's code. One wonders how it ever worked in the first place.

A Curseless Cake

I love to make cakes, and will spend time perusing cookbooks for ideas and planning out how I would assemble some of those intricate constructs myself. However, I know from much sad experience that in making a fancy cake something always goes wrong. The caramel burns, using up the last of your sugar. The whipped cream refuses to set up. The layers slide during transit, leaving you with the smashed ruins of a cake upon arrival. The top of the cake bumps the shelf in your fridge, and all your carefully piped decorations stay behind when you take the cake out. You inhale half a pound of powdered sugar in the process of making frosting and give yourself a sugar migraine for the rest of the day.

In particular, I attempted to make a cake at the beginning of September that gave me more than half of the above issues. My kitchen looked like someone had detonated a bomb filled with chocolate shavings in it. It took me forever to get my refrigerator clean again.

My favorite breakfast

In my humble, American, opinion, the French have an odd relationship with breakfast. It seems to barely count as a meal. The typical menu contains coffee and a pastry and maybe, maybe a yogurt. Even the name makes breakfast seem insignificant; in French, it is le petit dejeuner, as compared to lunch, which is huge and crowned with the name dejeuner. Breakfast seems to just be a placeholder to tide you over until lunch.

I find that a crying shame, since I love breakfast and the baker in me bows to French breakfast pastries as royalty amongst baked goods, requiring great knowledge and skill to accomplish. They taste really, really good, too.

There is of course the croissant, which I will probably never again be able to eat sullied with chicken salad. This is the basis and originator of all the rest, with its layers of butter carefully enrobed in a slightly sweetened yeasted dough. There is the pain au chocolat, or croissant pastry wrapped around two sticks of dark chocolate. There are variations folded around apricots, and even occasionally with ham and cheese, though I feel that savory variations are due to foreign influence. There are the choussons aux pommes, or something rather like a pie crust that somehow has far more structure in the hand, full of sweetened applesauce. There are the brioches, the queens of enriched doughs, and the tartines, fresh baguettes spread with butter or honey or the lovely fruit jams available here.

It came!

When I arrived home this Saturday evening after a full day of grocery shopping, research at CERN, and French class, out of habit I checked my mail box. I check it about daily, for reasons I do not know. I receive mail at a significantly lower frequency than daily, that's for sure. But there is a bit of magic in opening the box and perhaps finding something for you that you did not expect.

I checked my mail box and found a box. A box that makes one wonder how the mailman managed to fit it through the slot of the mail box, as that strikes one of being of moderate size while this box was not. Well, the box had been slightly squished. But it had my name on it and was for me, so with childish glee I scampered up the stairs to my apartment to find a knife and open it.

My suspicions were that this was the book I ordered from Amazon. But I only placed that order ten days ago, and the website repeatedly promised delivery times to Europe on the order of three to five weeks. Besides, there was no lop-sided smile on the box.

But there was a lop-sided smile on me as I opened it and found my book, nestled amongst its plastic air cushions. A salute to Amazon for its marvelous service. I have gotten myself Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, and here it had flown to me in a mere ten days.

Because I am probably the only person in this corner of France, the land of amazing boulangeries, crazy enough to be making my own bread. Where shall I start? The challah? Oh, no, wait . . . the English muffins! But the pain a l'ancienne . . .

American to French Baking

It is a fairly well accepted fact that I like to bake. While this hasn't always been true, enough evidence has amassed over the past three years or so to be tolerably convincing. So, when it was decided I would be living between the lands of really awesome chocolate and really awesome desserts, I was assured my baking would never be the same. Imagine what it will be like, they told me, baking with Swiss chocolate and French butter.

Well, they got part of it right--my baking is not the same.

Warning: serious baking geek-out session follows.

Apartment-grown strawberries

I know, I shouldn't have, not if I intend to recover from all the cake-baking. But don't my little strawberry plants look so proud of themselves?

Something Dramatic to Prove It

I told ya I could bake:

Chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling and chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate circles. I loved how impressed everyone one was with the chocolate circles, as they were very easy to make. Unlike the ganache.

Chocolate cake with almond-coconut buttercream frosting and toasted almonds. I used coconut in the frosting in place of some of the powdered sugar, which tasted great even though it made for a rather not-smooth frosting job.

Chocolate cake alternating with layers of chocolate ganache, petit buerre cookies, and whipped cream, frosted with whipped cream and topped with crumbled cookies. Invariably when making cakes, something completely bombs, and in the case of this cake it was the whipped cream. Hence the sorry-looking frosting job--I could only handle so much hand-whipping before something was going to get damaged. It's too bad I don't have a picture of the cross-section of a piece; this cake cut into very clean slices, with the dark chocolate cake contrasting prettily with the cookies and whipped cream.

Now, having sufficiently soothed my baking pride, I just need to get all the dishes done and my jeans fitting again.

Anatomy of a (kitchen) disaster

Now I realize that I enjoy thinking in symbols and therefore allow natural coincidences to take on deep meanings. Still, sometimes I get the creepy feeling that the country of France is out to demonstrate just how not French I am.

For example, I was once again in need of using up some baking ingredients before they spoiled, and so opted to make a blueberry coffee cake, the recipe for which I had gotten online. This recipe was written by a resident of Paris, so I felt that I would be safe in using French ingredients in a French recipe. I couldn't find enough blueberries for the cake, so instead I opted to make up the difference with dark chocolate (I wanted to see if I liked the flavor combination). It was extremely dark, Lindt dessert chocolate, too--I was using good stuff. The batter was easy enough to mix up in my food processor and get into the pan and into the oven.
Now, the recipe clearly stated that I should use a 9 inch/22 cm cake pan, which I did. There was a note that a spring-form pan was preferred, which surprised me since the batter was kind of thin and I would have thought it would leak out the bottom. The pan was quite full, but I've made a cake or two from this website before and neither of them rose very much.

I must have been tired, because how I could expect a cake containing baking powder and baking soda, even weighed down by 500 g of blueberries and chocolate, not to rise, in hind-sight I do not know.
As you are undoubtedly foreseeing by now, about fifteen minutes into the baking I heard a sizzle and caught of whiff of something burning. Sure enough, batter was trickling over the sides of the pan. I hurriedly transferred the mess onto a cookie sheet and let it finish baking, thinking that even if the cake was completely ruined it's easier to throw away an entire burnt cake than an overflowing pan of half-burnt batter. Instead I ended up with an overflowing pan of crisped cake.

Lava-flow, by Physics Girl, in mixed media

(Banging head against counter)

I can bake. I promise I can bake. Even though now I get to scrub out the bottom of my oven before I can do so again, I Can Bake. I think I may have to do something dramatic to prove it, but I Can BAKE.