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."

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Mmm chocolate.

If he needs to be more stern about following the recipe when baking, he can be.

Bake some brownies or cookies. Or brownies and cookies. And then there's plenty of cold milk and vanilla ice cream available to eat them with.

He's here. And he has cookies, if yours didn't turn out quite right.

OMG LJ finally is letting me post! Party time!

Karla

The problem with Steve's lecture was that he included the caveat that you could experiment, assuming you knew exactly what you were doing. And the problem with Karla was that she was convinced this was exactly the case with her cooking skills.

Edited 2011-08-08 20:18 (UTC)

Having mastered cookies, Karla was moving on to brownies. They wouldn't be too hard--

--Except for where she'd misread the direction and was melting the butter and chocolate in the pot of boiling water, instead of above it.

"Whoa, whoa, Karla, what are we doing?" Steve asked. Well. That pot was going to have to be scrubbed out.

Karla gave Steve a blank look. "Cooking?" she tried.

What did it look like? Honestly! She was mastering the art of baking, Steve. Duh.

"Well, okay," Steve said, subtly grabbing the pot with the mess in it and putting it in the sink to be dealt with later, "but it works better if you use a double boiler instead of putting it directly in the water, because, how were you going to get it out later?"

Karla looked very confused. "Just pour it out?" she said. "And I was double boiling!"

See, she'd waited until the water had boiled before adding the chocolate, and then was letting the melted stuff all come to a boil again!

Genius!

Toby Logan

Toby was still looking a little, er, grey around the gills today (not literal gills, thank god) with a few patches of scales here and there, but his eyes were back to their normal blue and his fingernails weren't black anymore, so he was happy to listen to the instructions- and nibble on a bit of chocolate because, hey, free chocolate.

"With all that water in it? That would make it really wet, don't you think? We're making brownies, not chocolate soup," Steve pointed out. "A double boiler means you boil water underneath a bowl or another pan--that isn't touching the water--so you can melt the chocolate gently without risking burning it." Steve grabbed another pot, filled it with water, and added a bowl to make a double boiler. "See?"

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?"

Seifer Almasy

"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.

Seifer knew better than to screw up with baking. There had been 'experiments' back in Garden that had turned out... interesting.

And he didn't want to have to explain why there was a hole being eaten through the counter top.

So, he followed the directions and made brownies.

Kenzi

Aaaand that would be Kenzi. Standing by. Ready for the worst.

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

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