Banana Bread: A Recipe in Photos

Over-baked Lemon Cake

Sometimes when things go awry they go right. There was very little that went the way I intended baking this lemon cake. Wanting to make the two-layer yellow cake from the Tick Tock box, MinCat’s recipe for lemon cake with lemon glaze looked delicious and like it could become what I wanted. Rather than using a bunt pan, I would divide the batter into two circular cake pans and use the glaze both over the top and between the two layers. It would look like the tiny picture. I do not have even have one circular cake pan. But no matter. Excited about my plan, I bought four lemons. They sat on the counter for almost a week, and my brother informed me that one of them was molding. The mold transformed the urgency of making cake from always present every morning but always put off, to this must happen today. It was only at this point that I actually read the recipe, and discovered that it called for yogurt, which I did not have. I didn’t care, I just wanted to make cake, to use the damned lemons, and to get material for this post. The layering would still happen somehow. I would bake a 9x13 cake, cut it in half, layer the halves on top of each other. I just had to make the batter. Recently I have noticed that I am almost incapable of actually reading a recipe. This time my skimming reduced making the cake batter to: sift the dry ingredients, mix together the wet ingredients (including sugar), and then mix the dry with the wet. I missed the fact that the lemon juice was not one of the wet ingredients, but a part of a syrup that is poured over the cake when it’s just out of the oven, and the rest goes into the glaze. While it was baking I toyed with making the syrup anyway for an ultra-lemony cake. I still had two more lemons, only one of which I needed for the glaze. But the syrup and and the glaze both got tossed out as ideas after I forgot about the cake and left it in the oven for at least twenty more minutes than I meant to. The edges came out a bit burnt. I rationalized that I didn’t want to waste glazes and syrups on such a bungled cake, but I think I was just already so half-assed about making this cake that this one thing gone slightly wrong gave me an excuse to give up on the endeavor entirely. But the thing is, this slightly over-baked lemon cake is good. Unadorned, unpretentious, and refreshingly but not overpoweringly lemony, it goes very well with tea. I’ll try the layer cake when I have the proper pans and all the ingredients.

1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup water
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
zest and juice from 2 lemons
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Whisk the water, sugar, eggs, zest, juice, vanilla, and oil until well combined. Whisk dry into wet mixture. When combined, bake for roughly 50 minutes, or until fork comes out clean from the center.

Rooibos

I would never have liked rooibos were it not for Tick Tock's packaging. When I was on a collage meal plan, there were an assortment of tea bags, one of which was Tick Tock. Drawn by the bold white lettering on red, the fact that it said "rooibos" and "caffeine free" at the bottom completely passed by my attention. In other words, I mistook it for a brand of black tea, possibly akin to English breakfast.

(Not that I actually remember, but mistaking it for proper tea makes a better story than, say, drinking it because I wanted to avoid caffeine and had heard about rooibos. Because the point I'm trying to make is the allure of the packaging, not the benefits of decaffeinated beverages or the goodness of rooibos. But at some point, whether before or after I discovered Tick Tock I’m not sure, I was avoiding caffeine, having decided that coffee did terrible things to me. But even on that point I don’t know: was I reacting against coffee or black tea?)

It was only after a few days of drinking it that I realized that it tasted a bit strange. And come to think of it the color wasn’t right either. But I kept drinking it because it was Tea Time. I wanted to live the little picture on the box of cake and tea in a black pot.

Let us obsess over this picture. The picture’s small circular frame doesn’t show much, but what little it does suggests a whole scene. Although the framing feels somewhat incidental, the necessary elements of Tea are there: a teapot, two cups (not one), a milk pitcher, and a sugar bowl. The blue-stripe teaware is ornate yet rustic and set on a wooden table. The cake, too, straddles fanciness and simplicity. Yes, it is layered and trimmed, but one does not have to be a patisserie to make this cake, just a cook. I am tempted to say that this is colonial Tea rather than English Tea, which is not particularly surprising because this brand makes much of its being “from the founders of rooibos,” who of course were in South Africa. So the picture may be imagined as an image of how “the founders of rooibos” drank their rooibos back in 1903. Before Tick Tock came to bring us rooibos, we are to understand, there was this scene.

But I’m interested in the cake. It takes up a great deal of the frame. And I can’t seem to read its three-dimensional aspect. The problem is the top, which looks like icing, except that it has these strange dark swirls in it, and the top edge is irregular. So perhaps it’s a very fluffy topping, like a meringue. Except that while the left edge and the shape of the top edge suggests that the cake is sloping, the cut on the right shows it to be straight. But if the top of the cake is flat, why are there dark swirls, and why is the top edge irregular rather than smooth?

More than anything else, though, I want to know what kind of cake this is. Because obviously whoever painted this must have had a type of cake he or she was painting. All I can say is that it is yellow.

I think it’s time to make a yellow cake and drink rooibos brewed from loose leaves, longing for my longing for Tea.

Inedibles: Beet Cake and Boiled Turnip

As a certain song would put it: what is a cake with no one to eat it? I have complained, I have belittled, and I have relativized, but never* have I written on this blog about something I cooked and refused to eat.  How does one deal with inedible food, and just what is meant by ‘inedible’?

I began composing this entry before I made the beet cake. Specifically I planned to write that I began composing the entry before I baked or ate the beet cake that the entry was to be about. I was supposed to then connect this fact to the idea that I tasted the cake before I tasted it--an idea I have been developing (or perhaps only reiterating) in recent entries. But instead the real cake completely collapsed the cake I had imagined (in addition to itself physically collapsing). It went against my expectations in the most extreme way. I couldn’t even manage to eat more than a bite.

The photo from When Mia Cooks

After the last time I wrote about beets I googled beet cake, and, really, just looked for the most appealing images. The photo of uncooked batter in one recipe looked incredible: bright pink. Although the interior of the cake is hidden in all of the photos (all are taken from directly above the item), I suspect that it was in fact cake, and not whatever substance my ‘cake’ turned out to be.  Of course I didn’t exactly follow the recipe. My most egregious mistake, I think, was not measuring the amount of beets while following the measurements of everything else (eggs, flour, baking powder). But who knows. Now I want to write a recipe for something not at all appealing or expected, but photographs well. Watch out for that one. (Not that I imagine anyone is following any of the recipes I post.)

In preparation to be blogged, the process of creating the cake was photo-documented in detail. You can see the beets being boiled whole, releasing their wine-colored dye into the water. For some reason I decided that, contrary to the recipes I had read, I needed to boil the beets and puree them in a food processor rather than grate them into the cake batter. You can see the deep violet (even violent violet) batter, and the pink frosting. I reserved and then reduced the dyed water that the beets were boiled in, and used this liquid in the buttercream frosting. The reduced liquid had an overpowering taste, but the frosting was both delicious and pretty. You can see that the ‘cake’ that came out of the oven even looked like a cake on the outside, just like the photos from the recipe I didn’t follow. But look inside to see the strange, soggy result. It might be best described as beet puree with other things in it, as opposed to cake with beet puree in it.

What you can’t see is that I deliberately omitted sugar from the cake. I wanted to see how sweet a cake only sweetened with beets could be. Also I was motivated by the beet mythology that I established earlier.  The beets, I thought, should not be corrupted by their inferior cousin, sugar. My plan was to keep the sugar separate, to load enough sugar into the frosting that the cake would be sweet enough yet the beets would still remain beets. In the end omitting sugar from the cake only made it more disgusting than its texture did already.

Earlier I wrote of beets as an antithesis to taste in relation. I treated beets as a taste singularity around which language strains to find adequate comparisons. What happens when a singularity is baked into a cake? It intervenes. 

When I was carrying them home, the beets stained a library book I had in the same bag. One more beet just fell out of my bag. I had no idea it was still there, lurking.

It wasn’t just the beet cake that was inedible. Mashed turnip too. I assume this is the work of the beet. However I would also be willing to believe, given the legends surrounding mandrake root, that all roots are malevolently disposed. I had never tried turnips before. One reader pointed out that the turnip I boiled and mashed may not have been ripe. Do turnips ripen? “Doesn’t everything ripen?”

I feel obligated to describe how the turnip was inedible. I’ll go about this in a roundabout way by describing the anxieties that the guide to cooking turnips I found online gave me. While not explicitly saying so, the guide gave the impression that the turnip is a toxic vegetable, similar to, say, cassava. It warned that “turnips tend to have a bitter flavor if not boiled long enough, with at least ONE water change (usually two)!!” I had to extract the bitterness from them by changing the water, twice? Moreover for larger (and therefore more bitter) turnips “it is best to cook them uncovered so the bitter gasses can escape.” They have gasses? What was I trying to do, exorcise a possessed vegetable? If so I was not successful. The cooked turnip smelled nice, but I could not stomach it. It was not an immediate bitterness; it twisted slowly in my mouth, making all food distasteful for the rest of the evening. It was something evil. But I’m willing to believe that the evil can be more completely beaten out the turnip, if not entirely, and that the result would be tasty.

I was going to write about the (im)possibility of taste independent of other tastes. This was brought about by the realization that my writing usually peters out into thematic dissonance. Themes may be dissonant, but can they have no relation to one another? Can tastes? Circumstances changed , but I could have just the same written about bad taste (in)dependent of other bad tastes, or good tastes. I could have tried to answer the inane question: does the turnip I didn’t eat constitute a singularity of inedibility?

It turns out this was not an entry concerned with the ontology of inedibles. Instead I wrote a great deal about how the inedibles were cooked, and how they tasted. Their specific visceralness blinds me to the social construction of inedibility waiting just beyond the immediate “ew.”

* Except on one occasion.

Bizcochuelo de Papa

I had forgotten about Olga de Trejos' La Cocina Practica. This ardently mundane title resurfaced in a--no, the: I haven't done it in five years or more--thorough cleaning of my room. I think the fact that it's in Spanish, a language I more or less understand but am not very comfortable speaking has a great deal to do with my conviction that there is something to be found in this book. In it's range of recipes it is The Joy of Cooking, but unlike Joy it is more concerned with nutrition facts than technique, and rather than outlining recipes in painstaking specificity, de Trejos, with her exceedingly short recipes, seems to assume you know what she's talking about. Not knowing, in my case, is compounded by the fact that Spanish is not my native tongue. However most of the recipes are nonetheless very recognizable. The book seems to be for the most part (and here's the resemblance to Joy) a convenient anthology of European-derived classics.

So I'm fascinated by a dessert I've never ever heard of: Bizcochuelo de Papa, or, in rough English translation, Potato Cake.

1 libra de papas
6 huevos
9 cucharadas de azúcar refinado
jugo de 1 limón y cáscara rallada

Se hace un puré con las papas bien calientes para que quede espumoso. Se le agrega el jugo de limón, la cáscara rallada y las 6 yemas bien batidas, con el azúcar. Se baten las claras a punto de nieve y se incorporan suavemente a la mescla anterior. Se coloca en un molde engrasado, se espolvorea con azúcar refinado y se hornea a calor moderado.

Nasty lightining isn't it?

At first, having no idea what bizcochuelo meant, I thought it was a kind of potato pudding, because of the large quantity of eggs. The eggs are separated and the whites are beaten into frothy peaks. I like the spanish metaphor for this: one beats them "a punto de nieve"--"to the point of snow" or "into snow." The beaten egg whites, in my mind, make it a kind of angel food cake, but with potatoes. Why use potatoes in a dessert? The exotic imagination boggles.

My bad English translation of the recipe:

1 pound of potatoes
6 eggs
9 tablespoons sugar
juice of 1 lemon and its zest

Make a pure with the hot potatoes so that they stay fresh (sparkling? in spanish espumoso) Mix in the lemon juice, zest and the six egg yolks, beaten well with the sugar. Beat the egg whites to high peaks and fold in the yolk-potato mixture. Put in a greased mold and sprinkle with sugar and bake to a golden brown.

Yes, you have to see three photos of potatoes.

You might notice there is no oven temperature, or, for that matter, baking time. Nor is any shape or size of baking mold specified. But what I really love is the way the recipe begins in the middle of the action. Never mind how the potatoes are cooked, or even if they're cooked--just puree them when they're hot, so that they remain... what? Perhaps someone could help me out with what espumoso means here?

Not nearly yellow enough.

I decided to try it anyway, making the following assumptions: the potatoes would be boiled and mashed without any of the water, the baking temperature would be 350 F, and the baking pan would be whatever I had that seems about the right size to accommodate the batter.

My friend who agreed to join me in this endeavor (as in to make another version and tell me about it) commented that it seems like a lot of eggs for not very much potato. I agree, but when I began mixing it together it began to make sense: the potato paste is very dry, and the six yolks are just enough. Well, five might do.

 

This, as well, was more yellow.  And on the right side.

The result was something very nothing--pleasant and delicate. The metaphysical implications of describing it as “very nothing” are familiarly appalling, but. Why not give (or allow) it a bit of fruit and/or a glaze? Doesn't this little cake look sad and alone?

PS I just realized that's calor moderado not color moderado. So the recipe does specify oven temperature, albeit vaguely, but not how to tell when it's done.