fandomhigh | Cooking for Beginners & Not-So-Beginners, Monday 3, Week 6

"We were going to cover something a bit more practical this week," Steve admitted, "but I know everyone had a rough week last week, and the island seems to have been sending me a message today..." Oh, look, he found another piece of chocolate in his desk drawer. He held it up illustratively and said, "So, instead, we'll be making brownies and chocolate chip cookies.

"A quick note on baking. In cooking, experimentation is encouraged. Expected, even. In baking...not so much. There's a lot of science, chemistry especially, involved in baking, and if you mess with the ingredients and don't know exactly what you're doing, you're going to end up with a disaster. So it's really best to stick to the recipes, especially the first time you make something, and even after that, if you're not an expert, it's probably a bad idea to play around. Something like omitting nuts or switching walnuts out for pecans probably won't cause a problem, but if you, say, substitute buttermilk for regular milk, or use medium eggs instead of large ones in a straight numbers swap, you're not going to be happy with the results. So. Stick to the recipe." He was unaware of Karla's reputation, not living in the dorms and all, or he might have been looking directly at her, if she was present.

"So, get to baking. Please don't hesitate to ask for help if you need it, or if there's something in the directions that is confusing you. And if you feel the need to snack on the chocolate while you cook, there seems to be plenty more where that came from."

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Karla was rereading the instructions again. "Oh. Huh. I guess that's what it says." She decided not to mention that when things seemed too soupy, she usually just added more flour or sugar until it looked right again. "Though I think the chocolate might have gone bad."

Someone didn't understand that unsweetened chocolate was supposed to taste like that.

"No," Steve said without even tasting the chocolate to check. "It's unsweetened. It's supposed to taste like that. You're not supposed to eat it straight, just use it in baking."

"Oooh," Karla said, nodding. She'd just have to add a little more sugar to make sure it tasted right. "Good on whoever first tried that stuff and didn't just decide it was awful."

Because life without chocolate would be unbearable.

"...Do we have coffee beans?"

"That's why the recipe is calibrated with the right amount of sugar to make the chocolate taste good," Steve continued, oblivious to Karla's thoughts. He consulted the recipe and, just as he thought, it called for instant coffee, which he'd provided, not brewed coffee. "You don't need coffee beans, we're not making coffee, you're using instant coffee, which is this stuff here," he said, indicating the jar. "The moisture already in the recipe will be enough to dissolve it."

Karla had never run into instant coffee before. She'd been planning to crunch up the beans and add them into the recipe. "What is this?" she asked, opening the jar and sniffing. "How is it instant?"

"I don't know all the exact ins and outs of the production process, but I know it involves freeze-drying the powder," he said with a shrug. "It makes a powder that dissolves instantly in liquid, unlike with normal coffee where all of the methods involve running hot water through the grounds in some way, which takes longer and may involve waiting for the coffee to steep, and then discarding the grounds, since coffee grounds and coffee beans are no good to eat." Unless you subscribed to the chocolate-covered espresso bean thing, but caffeine did nothing for Steve, so he didn't. "Hence, instant. Even if the recipe called for brewed coffee, I would've provided grounds, I wouldn't make you grind your own," he assured her.

Karla was still looking dubious at the jar of instant coffee. "They dissolve? That's so weird. I made ice cream with coffee beans a few months ago. It was good."

Or so people had told her. She'd managed not to eat any.

"Well, everyone's tastes are different," Steve allowed, "but I think most people wouldn't enjoy eating coffee beans. They're very hard. Not to mention extremely strongly-flavored."

"Oh, I chopped them up," Karla assured him.

Not that people hadn't nearly lost teeth trying to chew on the pieces anyway.

"We were making vanilla ice cream!"

"Into shards?" Steve asked dubiously. "That sounds like it would be...painful," he admitted.

"Well, they were in ice cream," Karla said, though why that would help was beyond her. "Along with gummi bears, I think. And chocolate sauce."

While making vanilla.

Okay, Steve was going to have to break some home truth to Karla here. He was going to try to do it gently. "Karla, putting sharp shards of something like coffee beans in ice cream doesn't make them less painful when they're lodged in your gums. It just makes them harder."

...wait. "...you put chocolate sauce...on the ice cream. Right?" He had sort of lost all faith in the natural right to just assume that by this point in the conversation.

"Oh no," Karla said, the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth while the concentrated. The whole first bit of what Steve had said had gone flying right by her as she managed to turn 'measuring flour' into 'creating a small whirlwind.' "We figured if it was good on ice cream, it was probably better in the ice cream."

Cooking for Beginners & Not-So-Beginners, Monday 3, Week 6

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