fandomhigh | Baking Workshop 5/29, Monday Morning

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cooking

Baking Workshop 5/29, Monday Morning

Piper smiled at the students as they arrived. "Just so you all are clear, none of my ingredients are demonic. I know some of you were wondering last week."

She couldn't help snickering a little before pointing out the carrot cake sitting on the counter in front of her. "We're going to make carrot cake today. As you can see, I made one for the class. Feel free to take a slice."

She gave each student a list of ingredients and instructions. "I'll be around if you have any questions. Good luck."

Equipment Needed

Mixer

Paper Plates

Grater

Measuring Cups

Measuring Spoons

Spatula

Non-stick cooking spray

Cooling Rack

Ingredients

2 Cups Sugar

1 Cup Corn Oil

3 Eggs

1 Can Pineapple (15oz)

2 Cups Grated Carrots

2 Cups White Raisins

1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract

2 Cups Toasted pecans

3 Cups Flour

2 teaspoons Baking Powder

1 teaspoon Salt

1 teaspoon Cinnamon

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

1 Cup Powdered Sugar (for lemon icing)

2 Lemons (for lemon icing)

Instructions

Mix together until well blended:

2 Cups Sugar

1 Cup Corn Oil

3 Eggs

1 Can Pineapple (15oz)

2 Cups Grated Carrots

2 Cups White Raisins

1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract

2 Cups Toasted pecans

Pre-heat oven to 350F

Mix together on a paper plate:

3 Cups Flour

2 teaspoons Baking Powder

1 teaspoon Salt

1 teaspoon Cinnamon

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

Spray your cake pan with cooking spray, make sure you cover all the inside of the cake pan.

Pour the cake batter into the cake pan and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 1 hour.

Make icing while the cake is in the oven:

Take your two lemons and grate 1 teaspoon lemon peel.

Juice the two lemons that you just finished grating.

Mix together:

1 teaspoon lemon zest

Juice of the Two Lemons

2 Cups powdered sugar

Cut the cake loose once it's finished baking.

Take a knife and cut the edge of the cake loose from the pan around the outside and around the center stem.

Shake the cake back and forth until it seems to be detached form the pan.

Now put a cooling rack on top of the cake and then flip it over.

Remove the cake pan and let the carrot cake cool.

Add the icing to your carrot cake.

[ooc: ingredients and instructions from here and here.]

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Make carrot cake and chat with each other.

After taking a slice of cake, Stark started working on his own.

He managed, this time, to not completely ruin his eggs on the first try. Yay. Baking was so much cleaner this way. Well, it was cleaner until he turned the mixer up to a very high speed anyway. Then he was a little spattered with cake batter. At least the mask was easy to clean off.

Sam decided to take a different approach to baking this week since last week had been such a disaster, and began carefully measuring out all of the ingredients first. She also preheated the oven, this time to 350.

She may have also snitched a couple of raisins while she was measuring, but she figured it probably wouldn't hurt anything.

Ainsley had set up not far from Sam.

She waved.

"Hey, Sam."

~~And did not wonder why that particular phrase seemed so portentious. Nope, nope, not at all.~~

"Hey, Ainsley," Sam said as she tried to concentrate very, very hard on measuring flour. She was frowning at the effort--she had a PhD in astrophysics and had saved the world at least eight times. Surely she should be able to back a cake.

"Settling in?"

"Yeah." Ainsley decided to skip the part where she had lunch with Walter and Nadia and checked up on Sam. Or at least the information Sam had given her over brownie batter.

Ainsley started grating carrots, and scraped her knuckles on the grater.

"Ow!"

"You okay?" Sam looked over. "I didn't know cooking was quite so dangerous."

Ooh. Carrot cake.

Munching along happily on the complimentary slice, she gathered the ingredients and supplies and began to bake.

Willow was determined to show she could crack eggs into a bowl using only one hand.

This could take a while.

Jude was impressed by her attempts and tried to do it himself.

Frighteningly, he managed it on the second try.

"Awesome . . ."

Willow pouted when she saw this. "I keep getting shells in mine."

Jude shrugged. "Can't help ya, bra. Maybe the eggs are apologising for last class."

"I guess I could say it's added calcium," Willow said. "But some people might not like crunchy carrot cake. Which doesn't make sense when you think about it because carrots crunch, so why not the cake?"

She started to fish out the shells.

Jude could follow this logic. Sadly. He chuckled. "Crunchy carrot cake makes way more sense than non-crunchy carrot cake. But I guess the crunchiness is lessened when ya grate the carrots?" He picked up some grated carrots and peered at them.

"I suppose," Willow said. "But it does make you wonder who thought of it first. Like who looked at the long, crunchy, orange thing and said hey, this would be way better if it was softer and sweet. And at that point why not just skip the carrots and go for chocolate? Unless maybe this was before the discovery of chocolate? Which I think we can all agree was a sad time in human history."

"Very sad," Jude agreed. "But ya never know. I mean, who first thought that really funky milk was a good idea? And then ya get cheese." He continued cracking the eggs. "I tried to make soup onna stick once. I still think the idea has potential."

Willow pondered this as she mixed her other ingredients. Feeling certain that an entire cup of oil had to be wrong, she cut that down to 1/4. "Was it in a cup and the cup on a stick?"

Jude shook his head. "That would be way too messy, bra." He kept mixing ingredients. Despite the fact that he ~~was~~ looked like a screw-up teenager, he was surprisingly good at it. "Froze it instead."

"Neat!" Feeling certain the order of mixing ingredients couldn't matter either, Willow went for the - to her - far more efficient method of adding in everything based on what was closest to her. "What flavors did you have? Was stew like the fancy version? Like ice cream with cookies in it? Only stewy?"

"Never got out of the development stage," Jude replied, slumping a little. "Had somethin' to do with havin' to turn a profit at the Stick-It. But that's a great idea, bra."

Willow smiled. "Thanks. It's a creative idea. The soup thing, I mean. Did your boss appreciate that at least?"

Ingredients mixed, she put them all into the pan and the pan into the pre-heated oven.

"I never met my boss, actually." Jude smoothed down his eggshell- and lump-free batter in the pan. "I was hired over the phone and then when I called my manager's number I got the store. Where I was the only one working. So I guess I was my own boss?"

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Pip was pretty impressed by this feat and, being Pip, attempted to do it himself.

It took him a couple of tries. And a couple of spare eggs.

Okay, a lot of spare eggs.

After making her cake and putting it into the oven, Maia started on the icing.

Several eyewashings from squirted lemon juice in her eyes and some swearing as the juice got into the cut she has sustained during the weekend; Maia managed to complete her icing and waited for the cake to be done so she could frost it.

Anders and a grater are probably a very bad combination. It's a good thing he's so paranoid about keeping his fingers in good condition for playing Pyramid, or his carrot cake really would have been partly made out of human. Unfortunately this also meant that it took him half the class period to get the carrots grated.

Good thing he'd made enough cupcakes to be decent at cracking eggs (you know, when he wasn't all flustered), or that would've taken up half the time that was left.

It was the combination of forgetting the cooking spray, and accidentally preheating the oven to 450 instead of 350, that spelled his doom today.

The double batch of icing to cover up the carbonized cake top was probably a dead giveaway anyhow.

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