A Baking Memorial

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:06:31 GMT

Saturday afternoon my time was the Bake-Along Memorial for 17catherines, which was taking place on Zoom. Some of us were baking, but pretty much everyone had some kind of treat.

The recipe selected was her Vegan Sacher-Cupcakes; Belovedest and I decided beforehand that strawberry jam would be preferable to apricot. (I like apricot fine, but they don't.) So I got a replacement jar of seedless strawberry for the cupboard and went ahead.

There were all sorts of tales. I am bad at phone-based Zoom, especially as it was on a less-used device because I prefer to not let Zoom out of its sandboxes. So I was on mute for a while, and didn't realize it until later. When I unmuted I was having a better time.

My initial mistake was FLOOF POWDER. The recipe calls for 1/2 teaspoon. I got the cans mixed up, and added 3/4 teaspoons instead (the amount of baking soda/bicarb called for). I was able to fish out most of the 1/4 spoonful, but there was still some extra in there.

I did most of the work seated, but shredding 126 (one extra for luck) grams of dark chocolate in the form of some Trader Joe's Pound Plus Bar was a LOT of arm-work, and I'm still a little sore. I could have made much bigger pieces, but I wasn't sure about their ability to melt on contact with boiling milk, so I went for pretty much shavings. I had a good knife, but still. This would have been much easier if I'd used thinner bars.

I substituted half-and-half for the non-dairy milk, so mine were not in fact vegan. They came out perfectly! I tried very hard to not think of The Hollow Places when scooping out the places to put the strawberry jam.

I struggled with the ganache. I had a hard time getting it up to temperature without scorching. I got maple syrup on the burner. When I poured the hot liquid into the chocolate, I'd made a bad choice of stirring implement, and the silicone bowl of the mini-ladle came off in the mix. Then I couldn't get the lumps out. I figured I'd better start ganaching the cupcakes before it set up solid, and did. First I tried dumping sprinkles on top of the frosted cupcakes, but that seemed insufficient, and also like I was getting sprinkles all over the stove. So I poured the remainder of my Fancy Sprinkles Jar (there is still a Fancy Sprinkles Tub) into a little bowl and dipped the tops of the cupcakes. Much better. There turned out to be 8 sprinkled cupcakes (7 after I ate one) and 4 unsprinkled. As I write this, there are 2 sprinkled and 3 unsprinkled left. Belovedest enjoyed them after the startling realization that the layer on top was less soft frosting, more hardened ganache.

We all introduced ourselves and how we knew 17catherines. There were lovely stories. There was an "Oh, so that's why I recognize your name!" when I mentioned the Bujold List. But the thing that brought me back into her orbit was The Patriarchy, which I think made it to Metaquotes. I recall that the entry I ran into first did not contain the fact that The Patriarchy was a cat, which led me to make an embarrassing error in the comments. I'm glad that we recovered from that first impression of the modern era, though!
I had the links to these in a contemporaneous journal entry (a Twitter import), but they were Delicious links and have died the death, alas. So here they are again.

Cats, chocolate, and cauliflower (or sometimes broccoli)
More cats, and doctors
Oppressed!
Overcoming The Patriarchy
plus one that followed:
More reasons to dislike the Patriarchy

I believe that last is the final update on the Patriarchy saga.

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The Lunatic is in my Head

A Baking Memorial