Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Bake bake baking!

No, I didn't say bac bac bacon, but maybe I should have...

Yesterday I was caught up with most of my work and trying to think of a house-warming gift for my friends who just moved to D.C. I went recipe hunting and discovered this amazing recipe from The Amateur Gourmet: Zucchini Olive Oil Cake with Lemon Crunch Glaze!. It sounds weird, but the guy's a funny writer so he had me convinced. Besides, the zucchini is a squash that I have never learned to appreciate (actually I don't really like squash at all...), so I thought I needed to acquaint myself with it better.

And anyway, if the words Lemon Crunch Glaze don't make your taste buds twinge a little, perhaps you aren't eating enough lemon. So, I decided that after I got out of work and class today I would make this monster and bring it with me to DC on Thursday. I know it's a little early to make a cake for the weekend, but some classmates and I are off to get student rush tickets for Finian's Rainbow tomorrow night, so I just don't have any more time. I'm sure it will keep.

Well, here's the result. What do you think?



I'd doubled the recipe (well, almost...I ran out of vanilla. And granulated sugar(!) And, all-purpose flour. And the only nutmeg we had was whole, so I had to grind it by hand, and, well, 2 teaspoons is a lot of hand-grinding, and, well, eventually I just gave up. I ended up using my flatmate's flour, and substituting some extra confectioner's sugar for granulated, but the vanilla was a total loss). But somehow, despite the doubling and the disasters, I ended up with enough batter for three cakes (and an entire left-over zucchini...now what!?). The last one was a little thinner, and got a little burned on the bottom, the second one lost the bottom when I was taking it out of the pan, BUT the third one was just right.



They sure look pretty though! The last one is the one that is going to my friends. The other two I'll have to find something to do with...I'm just not sure what to do with these cakes...(nom nom nom...)

Of course, last night when I was thinking about the cake recipe, I couldn't wait to try out another recipe I'd discovered. It's the pizza dough recipe from Peter Reinhardt's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. You can find a link to enough of the recipe to try it here but the author warns that it is pared down. The key to success, claims the author, is an over-night refridgerated rising for the dough. So I halved the recipe, threw the dough together last night, balled it up, and floured it and wrapped it in oiled plastic wrap. I am a moron and forgot that this is BREAD DOUGH, and instead of putting them all on top of something solid I just tossed them in the fridge. One of them was on top of the bars (instead of on top of my carton of eggs or on top of my package of shredded mozzarella, yes, I cheated and used pre-shredded cheap store-brand mozzarella, but this is NY, there is NO CHEESE here), and when I came back the next day it had, of course, sunk through the bars, spread all over my flatmates enormous selection of jams, and solidified-ish into this paste-y mess. Awesome.

After cleaning that up, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the recipe, though I couldn't stretch the dough nearly as much as that recipe calls for. All of the times it tells you to flour your hands and mess around with the dough, you might be making a mistake, because the delicate flour to water ratio which is supposed to make pizza dough so good was definitely lost. This dough was easy to work with, which is nice but wrong. What I get from the reading is that pizza crust's water to flour ratio should be obnoxiously sticky.

All in all, I was happy with the dough anyway, although the high flour ratio was noticeable and a little weird (read: it tasted too floury). I also threw together a tomato sauce which I was also not-quite pleased with. There were too many seeds in the can of crushed tomatoes I used, and next time I would use more tomato paste and less oregano. But still, when this baby finally came out of the oven at like 10:30 pm, it was DE-licious.






The crust, for all its short-comings, was still the best I've ever made. It wasn't puffy, and the bubbles weren't fluffy, which is good, because I'm not really a fan of that kind of dough. It was crispy and chewy without being too crispy or too chewy. Woohoo! I used up my shredded cheese, so it looks like I am making flat bread tomorrow, which I think will turn out great. I'll keep you posted.

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