Lemon Bars

Oh, no. It was coming up again, word vomit... no, wait a minute...

                        -- Cady

Editor's Note: Has anyone else noticed that I apparently only make tan or yellow food?

The Gaggle's main objection to these lemon bars was that they caused loose bowels. But Dorian and Miss Marple are whiners, so what are ya' gonna do? Personally I didn't experience this problem. My mother's genetics and a diet based mostly on sucrose have left me rather impervious to the dangers of my own cooking. So if you eat junk food and like lemons, this recipe is very close to perfection, but if you have a delicate gastrointestinal system or eat vegetables, this recipe is apparently like firing a cannon through your colon. Also Miss Marple threw up or something.

Apple Pie

"It's called the South Beach Fat Flush and all you drink is cranberry juice for 72 hours... I really want to lose three pounds."

                        -- Regina

Absolute Yums.

I promise I'm actually good at baking. For reals. I can throw together cookies, brownies and cakes without trying, but those are boring. So I keep attempting things I'm not good at or haven't done before, which most recently produced a saccharine eldritch horror.

I know an apple pie seems straightforward enough, but I've failed miserably before (something Miss Marple loves to reference). I have as much experience cooking/consuming fruit as I do with cooking/consuming crystal meth, Breaking Bad not withstanding. My previous attempt at apple pie was both watery, gummy, crunchy (in all the wrong ways) and bland. I think I'm going to start taking pride in not just failing but failing spectacularly. Anyway, this attempt was supposed to be different because I: one, followed the recipe; and two, had the assistance of my aunt, MFK Fisher. She's an experienced home baker and in the past we've formed a symbiotic partnership cemented with butter and chocolate. It seems that even her skilled hands cannot salvage the utter meh that this pie became.

Sponge Candy

“First you bloat, and then you drop pounds like that… It explains it all on the label.”

                        -- Cady

Julia Child was popular less for her culinary excellence and more for her tendency to fail. Omelets were lost mid flip, fingers were burnt, and as - Dan Aykroyd has pointed out - small cuts were sustained. I’m grandiose enough to fancy myself a future pioneer in culinary education, so I will now compare myself to Julia Child. This post is dedicated to recipes that fail spectacularly. There. I’ve spun this. I’m not admitting to making a hot mess; I have intentionally ruined this dessert as part of a “teachable moment.”

Sponge candy is delicious. As Wikipedia points out, it goes by many names, but the premise is simple and directly related to 3^rd grade science class. Make a dark, toasty sugar syrup (that always goes well) and then add vinegar and baking soda. The mixture foams like crazy and then hardens, trapping millions of crunchy bubbles into a honeycomb.

This is the recipe I used. I cannot recommend it. Sure that opening photo looks okay, but photos can be very flattering taken out of context (i.e., eHarmony profile photos). Let’s take a journey…

Flan

“I can't go to taco bell, I'm on an all-carb diet. *God* Karen, you're so stupid!”

                        -- Regina

Custard at its most basic is eggs and milk. If you’re making dessert custard then you have to bring in some sugar. That’s all it takes to make something velvety and wonderful. Except, not really. Even if the only ingredients were eggs, milk, and sugar, I could write a whole book on exactly what to do with those base materials.

Flan takes things a step further and brings in my culinary nemesis: caramelized sugar. How many pots of crystallized or burnt sugar have lost their lives in my drive to make a toasty sugar syrup? It’s taken me dozens of attempts to figure out the appropriate technique, but melting sugar is clearly a skill that only comes with practice.

This time I’m using an excellent recipe from Rick Bayless. I’m sure it’s perfect made exactly as he specifies, but I’ll never know. I can never make this recipe without feeling compelled to change it; I'll discuss some of those alternations below. Needless to say, this post will be filled with stories about incredibly stupid custard shortcuts I've taken over the years. Don't follow in my footsteps.

Devil’s Food White-Out Cake

“Oh my God, Karen, you can't just ask people why they're white.”

                        -- Gretchen

My first post indicated that I would not be able to provide recipes from cookbooks. This remains true, but one common loophole is to have a link to another website that did have the stones to post the recipe, a passing of the legal buck if you will. I can do that with this recipe, but first a little story.

I was sitting in Book People – for those unfamiliar with Austin, just take a Barnes and Noble and fill it with hipsters – waiting for my roommates to finish filling out job applications when I saw it, the holy grail of baking: Baking, From My Home to Yours. Dorie Greenspan is right up there with Alton Brown, i.e. I would stalk them. I grabbed the book and scurried back to our table, rifling through gorgeous pictures while my roommates tried to ignore me. After I began cooing (somewhere in the brownie chapter), they stopped making eye contact.

Eventually I came across this cake. Like Sméagol, I immediately coveted the precious and had to possess it. Unfortunately the cookbook was forty dollars; how do those “book people” sleep at night? So I spent ten minutes furtively scribbling down the recipe. I was terrified I would get caught in the act and thrown out of the store. Walking out I was so nervous I was convinced the stolen instructions would set of the door alarms. I am not an innate shoplifter.

Anyway, I got home and on a whim did a Google search for Baking, From My Home to Yours. It seems to promote the book Dorie was kind enough to share a recipe with NPR. One specific recipe. So. Awesome.