tacotacotaco

somewhat inspired by jim leff of chowhound's jackson heights map, I present to you my work-in-progress map of tacos in manhattan. yes i know all of the good ones are in east harlem.

new favorite wikipedia entry

List of foods named after people

spam spam spam spam

A (not so) new breed of spam uses some real-sounding text and an image as the ad. Here's the particularly interesting text of one I just received, which says a lot of nonsense about programming. The subject was game jeannedarc.

Iron Mountains See Ered Engrin.
Information Processing - 8-bit single byte coded graphic character sets.
Yes, assembly language is definitely worth the effort.
It was a walk in the park.
But as soon as I hung up, Higgy straightened up importantly.
If the nCode parameter is less than zero, the filter function should pass the message to DefHookProc without further processing.
Sets the background image for situations where the browser does not support windowless controls.
Here as elsewhere, everything was bathed in the golden glow of a myriad motionless candle flames.
Here are the steps to create DocObject container using MFC 4.
Iron Mountains See Ered Engrin.

trapped in the closet

I had to take some stuff out of the bottom of my closet because someone was coming today to run some cables through there. Among the stuff I found was remnants of this one time when I dressed up as Ford Prefect for a dress up day at camp.

Ford Prefect is of course a horrible costume choice, because it isn't really so much a costume as a bag (sorry, a "satchel") of specific things to carry around. I probably initially thought I would be Zaphod Beeblebrox, but then realized that getting a second head and a third arm was a bit beyond my reach for what I could do. In any case, here are some picture of my props.

First, there's the Hitchhiker's Guide itself, for which I used an old Wizard tip-calculator. I made a black case for it with large, friendly letters which read "Don't Panic."

Apparently I did not make an electronic thumb, but I did make a sub-etha sens-o-matic out of a foam-rubber brick wrapped in electrical tape, and labeled with a Dymo!

I was real thorough though, check out the back!

you ever listen to a song you've listened to many times and all of a sudden hear a really cool lyric you've never noticed before? that happened to me the other day, when I realized that in the last verse of Daysleeper, Stipe sings that the ocean machine is set to nine which i think is great.

return of the bakeoff

In celebration of the passing of Passover, it's time once again for The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038!

this time up the occasion is rebecca's engagement to nate! And hence horrible decorating: by the way, some photography by laura, namely the pictures like this that make my horrible decorating skills look somewhat presentable; the rest of the photos (the ones of the cake making process) are by me.

And we have finally, for reals, entered the america's test kitchen arena. Our cake recipe today is Cook's Illustrated's aptly named "Yellow Layer Cake." I pulled this from their website somewhere along the line, I'm not sure if it's still there. Some perusing in my not-so-local barnes and noble found the same recipe in The Best American Classics and I'd be willing to bet it's in the straight-up The Best Recipe too.

Frosting is again via Marion Cunningham, whose buttercream was absolutely wonderful on the last cake. Also, Marion has a far more extensive list of frosting recipes than the other sources I have. This time there's a classic 7-minute frosting on the outside and a chocolate sour cream frosting for the filling. More on the decorating below, but first...

MONEY SHOT!

Vitals:

Fat

Butter

Flour

2.25 cups SIFTED cake flour, which let me say is just annoying. For those who may not know, there is a difference between saying one cup of flour, sifted and one cup of sifted flour. The first one means you measure a cup of flour, and then sift it, the second one means you sift the flour and then measure it. Almost no recipes ever use the latter, because a) it is fraught with ambiguity: (do you dip and sweep into the sifted flour? or sift straight into the cup which by the way is what cook's illustrated wants you to do, or what?) and 2) if you're not careful, you end up wasting a ton of flour that you sifted but didn't actually use. I'd never seen cook's illustrated write it this way and in fact have heard Mr. Kimball talk about how you should always measure and then sift because sifting changes the volume of your flour. But I double checked it and determined that they did indeed mean 2.25 cups of sifted flour. Some versions of the recipe seem to actually say 2 cups cake flour sifted. In any case, I weigh most of my ingredients, so I just looked up what 2.25 cups of sifted flour is supposed to weigh (213.75 grams) weighed it out and then sifted it. Yeesh.

Leaveners

2 tsps Baking powder

Ratings:

Flavor

Very good. A very similar flavor to the very similar cupcakes (which I identified as being very good but should have just said good) except without the winy flavor I disdained in them.

Texture

Lovely! A little less delicate then the last one, which is fine. Very even crumb, just a little chew. Excellent in fact.

Moistness

Good. 'nuff said.

Aesthetics

Inside this cake was a pale yellow which is exactly what I want (too bright a yellow might seem artificial). Outside it was a bit mottled (and sticky!) exactly like the cupcakes, but like I said about those, everyone likes frosting. When they came out of the oven, the tops were very wavy, but they flattened out after cooling. Also, one side of each layer was significantly higher than the other; maybe I should have turned them halfway through baking.

Decorating

I went all sorts of crazy decorating this cake.

7-minute frosting is usually done all swoopy, but actually goes on smooth fairly easily. Don't ask me how I got that spiral in the middle, it was a fortuitous accident. The frosting itself is basically a meringue, which is not my favorite thing but 7-minute is one of the classic frostings, so I felt like I had to do it once. The sour-cream-chocolate filling was good but sets up very thick, which was kind of odd in relation to the super-light 7-minute. It also has a very distinctive tang, causing the very first comment at our tasting to be is this sour-cream frosting?

Because this cake was for a particular occasion, i also wanted to write on it. Anyone who knows me knows that my handwriting on paper is not so great, so this had disaster written all over it! But, it was an opportunity for me to flex my coronet skillz.

When I started writing (in plain melted chocolate) I had a lot of trouble, as you can see. But by the time I got to the end of writing (the ATS in CONGRATS) I'm starting to look like a pro! Could it be that practice makes perfect?

No! I was just afraid to cut open the coronet too much. If you don't cut it enough, it's very hard to control the chocolate as it comes out and nigh impossible to keep it flowing. So if you ever do this, be sure to cut a good size hole in the bottom of your coronet. After that, the job is very similar to caulking. Incidentally, I personally caulked around the edge of the sink in the background of that picture. Truly I am multifaceted. In any case, Rebecca declared that the way the cake was decorated represented our progression from childhood into the adult world, as many of those present started high school together 12 years ago and were now celebrating Rebecca's engagement! crazygonuts.

After all of that work, the cake naturally got smashed by one of those iron-maiden style subway exits. If you look carefully at the first phot in this post, you can see on the right that there's frosting stuck to the side of the box. Laura did an excellent job of making my cake look awesome though, don't you think?

Miscellaneous baking notes

Since I was making two identical layers, I decided to do a little experiment. One pan was greased with butter and then floured. The other was sprayed with Baker's Joy, which is this spray-on stuff that is supposed to be like butter and flour in one shot. The results were pretty clear:

Baker's Joy
Butter and flour

The butter obviously wins. What isn't visible in the photograph however, is that there was a spot on the buttered pan that I touched by accident when moving it, and the cake stuck in that spot.

As mentioned in Sweet Cuppin' Cakes, Cook's Illustrated cakes generally make use of the one bowl mixing method, rather than the far more common creaming method. What you do is mix together all of the dry ingredients (including the sugar), then mix in the butter, and finally add the liquid. From what I have read, it sounds like this produces a somewhat heavier cake with a little more texture. However, it is much easier to perform with a standing mixer which I do not have, than with a hand mixer, which I do. The recipe I made here actually includes instructions for using a hand mixer, but I somehow missed that entirely. In any case, those instructions call for using a pastry blender to mix the butter in, and I don't have one of those anyhow. But I would have cut the butter in with a couple of knives or something had I actually read the instructions properly.

Conclusions

Pros

Very good flavor, excellent texture, excellent color.

Cons

A little difficult to make without a stand mixer; mottled, sticky exterior; uses cake flour and may have a confusing way of measuring it.

Bottom line: close to excellent. A, but not A+.