Say Cheese... Cake

Cheesy as it may sound, or is it actually cheesy to say it out loud, or should I just say CHEESE? Are you getting the gist what I am trying to get at? I guess you’ll eventually get it, but for now I guess I am deviating from the topic, or I am actually speaking random gibberish?

Ok, so to get to the point, baking has been quiet therapeutic especially during this lockdown situation, when find yourself quarantined in your house, though you still make trips to put together household essentials. So after you have baked buns, chocolate ganache tarts, biscuits, the natural thing is to try your hand at baking a cake. But why go with a normal cake, how about baking a cheesecake?

Your first step is to find a recipe that you can follow. Once the recipe has been zeroed in, you read and re-read to make sure you are aware of the list of ingredients and have memorised the steps to prepare your cake (even though you will spend time referring to it during the duration of your bake).

So you make a couple of trips down (and here you were supposed to be quarantined) to put together the ingredients. After standing in a line for almost an hour, or what felt like an hour (cause time doesn’t go fast when you’re not having fun) only find out that they don’t have cream cheese, your core ingredient, which ends up getting your panties in a bunch (was I even wearing one 😉). But since you are hell bent on baking, you pick up the next best thing you think you can substitute for the ingredient. 

When you reach home, all tired and sweaty, you google ways to make cream cheese, and you figure out you can make it home. So off you go (so much for being quarantined) to get milk and vinegar. Once back you set yourself to the task of splitting the milk and trying to make some cream cheese (which suspiciously tasted a bit like a better version of paneer). And you stir and stir and stir, till the milk splits. After draining the water (which mom insisted on storing, as it could be used as butter milk) and letting leftover content cool and then putting it through the food processor (read mixer) to prepare you very own homemade creamy cheese (how cheesy of you). So problem solved, and the cheesecake’s back on the plate (at least the idea of baking it).

Now that the problem of the cream cheese was solved it was time to prepare base from Oreo cookies and butter, and me desperately fighting the urge of consuming some of the cookies. Putting together the ingredients for the base brought up another problem, I didn’t have tray to bake a cake and the pie dish I thought I would bake it in turned out to be too big. So in the end had to use my tart trays instead. 

Once the base was ready it was time to let it cool in the fridge (in this heat I would love to be the one cooling in the fridge). While the base rested (and I didn’t), it was time to get the filling together. So taking the freshly made and cooled cream cheese (which was lesser than what the recipe called for but still decided to go ahead with the bake anyway), and the other ingredients, you prepare your filling. You then take out the bases from the fridge and you pour the filling into the trays only for you to realise that you  didn’t have sufficient base for your filling. So after you fill the trays to the brim (another of your silly mistakes) you let the rest go down the hatch (read, into your mouth, down your throat and into your tummy).

While the trays were being filled, the oven was getting warmed up (or in baking lingo, preheated) and the water for the water-bath was getting ready (cause apparently the cake cooks well in a water bath). Once all the stars aligned together, it was time to bake. Ok there was nothing to do with the stars aligning together. Once everything was ready it was time to bake.

I tried hard to be steady and not let the filling leak out into the bath water and water spill on the floor and in the overnight. But no matter how hard you try you’ll still have some spill over, thanks to your unsteadiness. Finally you manage to get it in the oven and set the timer and let it bake. 

While your cheesecakes are baking in the oven (you have two those), you go about doing the time pass you do. You keep an eye on the cakes as they bake while going about your daily chores. After an hour of baking, you set the timer for another thirty minutes cause you oven doesn’t have a 90 minutes timer and that how long you need the cake to bake. You let them bake a little longer till the filling turns brown.

Once the 90 minutes are up (where exactly did time go), you let the trays be in the oven for sometime (read an hour). After an hour, you take them from the over and keep it on the rack till it cools down to room temperature. When they are cooled you transfer them to the fridge to let them cool down further (they seem to be getting more rest than you).

After a good four hours of refrigeration you remove one of trays from the fridge because let’s face it what use is baking if you can’t click and post it as part of your lockdown diaries. As you try to get the cake out of the mould, you try and do this as gently as possible. But then the cake won’t leave the mould without a fight and threatens to crack under pressure. But somehow you manage to get it off the mould, with a little part still sticking to it. Once off the mould, it was time to say Cheese... Cake, and then enjoy the labour of love for baking.

The Adventure of (baking a) Pie

They say “Pie Pie, till you succeed”. Is that the right way of saying it??? Well in the current situation it sure would be pretty. So carrying on, when you don’t succeed the first time, you Pie it again (there I go again)! When the first attempt didn’t go as planned, I just had to Pie it again (I promise, this is the last time).

When you try it again (phew, no more pie silliness), you try and avoid the pitfalls of the previous attempt. So before you get your bake together (now that’s a clever play on words, if you agree to see it that way), you try and figure out what you didn’t get right the first time around. The first possibility could be that you ended up kneading the dough, as advised against by the recipe and your friend Hemangi, cause kneading causes the gluten to come up (if I got this concept right), but then the dough was not quite binding so I did knead it, a little bit too longer than I should. Or maybe you just let it rest more than you actually rested.

Whatever the reason may have been, you felt the need to do it all over again, or maybe you just wanted to bake a fresh pie for your friends. Then you also wanted to take your minds from that what troubles it faced. So in the end you wanted to do some baking therapy.

So as you prepared your dough, you tried your best to avoid tbt pitfall of the previous bake, but then the dough doesn’t bind easily and you’re worried about once again overdoing it. You take a deep breath and slowly bind the dough, trying not to knead the batter, breathing a sigh of relief when it all comes together.

Setting it aside you work on preparing the filling. And after pealing two apples (actually make that four, two from the previous day) you come to a conclusion that you would rather run a marathon, or dance bachata, than try and peel an apple ( on second thought, using a knife would have been a better option than using a potato peeler, but then this boy has no knife man-ship skills). So in hindsight, I was better off doing what I did.

Once the filling was done its time to bake. But before you get to that step you have to roll the dough. This time around you try and do things a bit differently. Firstly no blind baking (I.e. baking the dough, the bottom crust, in advance, something I learned thanks to Hemangi and Google), and rolling the dough on the floor, cause face it, rolling it on a polpat (as my mumma termed it) meaning that the dough wouldn’t go beyond the rolling surface, and adjustment would mean damaging the rolled dough (which I know I am expert at). 

So siting, and at times squatting, I rolled the dough, up and down and left to right, from all angles, though not getting the perfect circle, put thankfully not the map of India or even the world. So then you fold it and do it all over again, till you get the perfect dough, or something very remotely close to it (face it you are not an amateur baker also). You place the your dough on your pie pan (which your mumma has oiled, or greased for you), and you proceed to add the filling, as neatly and picturesque as possible (common I need to click pictures for my post). But no matter how careful or artistically you think you’re doing, it all looks a bit, ok quite, clumsy. But then you have to be proud at what you’ve managed to accomplish.

So finally you roll the covering dough and you cover your pie. Make holes with a fork to let the steam through, trying to make a pattern, instead of making it look very random. You try your best to give the edges of the pie some design, courtesy of your  fork. You lightly brush it with milk and dust cinnamon powder as well as sugar on it and viola (and not Davis), your pie is ready for the oven. 

After preheating the oven, in goes the pie, to be baked at 180 degrees Celsius for a whole 60 minutes. But then you have this nagging feeling at the back of your head that you have forgotten something. And then you realise that you have forgotten to add drops of butter, or olive oil, as mentioned in the recipe. You simply put the blame squarely on those lessening grey cells, and just hope that your bake goes well.

Now as your pie is in the oven you are constantly checking on it if it’s getting too brown (in short, burnt), or do you want to lower the temperature. You try your best not to panic, if things don’t go as plan, but just wished that they have damned well put a light bulb in there so that you could actually see the pie bake.

After waiting patiently for almost an hour, the buzzer goes off and it’s time to get the pie out of the oven. When you get it out, you look at it with great pride. It may not be perfect but it sure has hell looks good. You remove the pie off the baking tray, after all the jatkas you inflict on yourself, and you let it cool. But then also you try to click pics of it cause your write up needs some pics. 

 When it finally cools down, you cut slices of the pie, taking some for your friends at dance class. You try and taste a bit of it and you surprise yourself that’s it has not come out bad (as you were scared it would), in fact it’s quite good for a not so amateur attempt at baking. Yes the apples tasted a bit tart, and the crust ain’t that flaky as it should be, barring that, everything is good. So woohooo, another good attempt.

So there you have it, the adventure of baking an Apple Pie.

The Baking Adventure (or Misadventure)

With Christmas just around the corner, this boy loves getting into the Christmas spirit, even if it wasn’t even Advent yet. So all caught up in the pre-festive spirit and bitten by the  do-it-yourself bug, this boy decided to try something new. After long hours of pondering and strainous thinking (ok ok not that much of pondering, maybe just a couple of minutes), baking cookies it was!

So the first order was to  decide if there was the most important equipment in place, an Oven. So the Internet was scoured and questions to friends and colleagues asked, and in the end an OTG was secured and delivered and demonstrated and the boy was was all raring to bake. 

The next step was finding an easy to follow recipe, cause this boy is no cook. But the boy was willing and eager to learn. So once again the Internet was searched and countless pages visited and YouTube videos viewed, till this boy came to a recipe he was confident and comfortable he could follow.

The enthusiasm was burning bright and the josh was high. It was time to put together the core ingredients. So the ingredients and other equipment’s were sourced. But not before a detour of his bike being towed (ok Activa) for being parked in the wrong spot. But not even this setback could throw a monkey wrench (or a monkey, or a spanner) in his enthusiasm. So trying to put aside the exertion of the morning (after all the weekend long run followed by a gym workout can be tiring), and sourcing the ingredients and trekking to the RTO to pay the fine, can take its toll, even on the best. But in the end it was time to bake.

Putting all the things in order (and in the process driving his mother nuts) he began to prepare his dough. The unsalted butter didn’t melt causing him to fret a little cause he couldn’t beat it with the sugar to a light fluff (as mentioned in the recipe). So in his haste he added the milk and vanilla essence and began to hope against hope that the required consistency would be reached.  So he furiously continued to beat it.

All this while he tried to keep his mum at bay, but now he needed her. He got her to put together the dry ingredients, giving her instructions on what he needed to be done (a head chef moment, though I am not sure if that applies to the boy). So once done it was time to prepare the dough. The wet mixture was added to the dry one, little by little. This mixture was stirred with a spatula and then by hand till it was made in dough. The boy got a bit panicky as it was no where close to what he had observed in the videos he had seen.

Now that the dough was ready it was time for it to rest, and with it it was time for him to rest too. So the dough was wrapped in cling wrap and placed in the fridge to rest. After letting it rest for an hour (or almost an hour) it was time to remove it from the fridge and preheat the oven.

Following the steps shown during the demo, the boy ser the temperature and timer for the oven, and proceeded to to roll out the cookie and cut the cookies out of it with a cookie cutter. As the dough was still soft and the boy wasn’t an expert at rolling anything, not even rolling his eyes, dough stuck to the rolling pin no matter how much flour he added. But somehow he tried his best to do his best and cut out the cookies, to varying degrees of success.

With the oven heated and the first batch ready to go, the tray was put in the oven. He stood there staring at cookies baking, wondering if they would get brown. His mum joined him in the staring competition with the oven, trying to get the whiff of the dough baking. 

As the buzz going off the first batch was ready. He removed it from the oven, with a sense of pride as this was the first thing he ever managed to bake. But then this feeling was short lived as the first batch slightly soft and crumbly. He tasted it, and though it tasted nice it had a bitter after taste.

Not to be disheartened by the first attempt, he went about preparing the second batch, and there lay the second mistake. Varying the time and temperature he hoped this batch would bake well. Alas this batch got a bit burnt.

With every batch he struggled a bit , with every batch he got more weary has it the cookies weren’t baking the way he wanted them to, the way they should. 

When the final batch was done he breathed a sigh of relief, as it was late and he tired and fatigued. He tried to figure out what he did wrong and worried if he would ever try baking again. But then he knew he could never give up and never give up. He would learn from his adventure and try avoiding the mistakes he had made. But he would bake again, he could now that he had an oven there was no backing down, giving up, whether it was an adventure or a misadventure.