one of the major things that determines type of cook

[rushthatspeaks]

is the question of just what you will do to avoid having to go to the store.

Some people go to the store. Some people don't make that recipe. And some people substitute to the point of possible insanity. For better or for worse, I substitute, and I'm kind of starting to wish I could revise my brain.

You see, it went like this: I wanted to make a carrot cake. Last night at my usual baking time (c. 2 am), I discovered we had no brown sugar, and also we had no molasses (molasses + white sugar = brown sugar to all intents and purposes). This neighborhood doesn't have an all-night supermarket. Carrot cake with only white sugar would be less complex and mellow and dark-tasting, which is not the point of carrot cake, so no.

No problem. Just get up in the morning and go buy brown sugar, right?

Of course in the interim I had an idea. Sigh. And this demonstrates the lengths to which I will go to avoid shopping.

The recipe (from Cook's Illustrated) said:

Grease and flour a 13" x 9" baking pan. I do not have such an object. I have a 9" round pan. Sit down and calculate volume of pan they want, assuming 1 1/2" depth, versus volume of pan I have of same depth, which is meant to be filled only halfway up. I will have too much batter, but not ludicrously, so okay.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Easy. Done.

Mix 2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves in medium bowl. Check. I throw in 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, too, because I can't figure out why there isn't any.

Peel 6 to 7 medium carrots and use Cuisinart to grate them. This necessitates the usual struggle with the grate-y bits of the Cuisinart but works out eventually. Carrots grated and dumped into bowl, Cuisinart wiped down: check.

This is where there begin to be issues. I am now meant to put into the Cuisinart four eggs, 1 1/2 cups granulated white sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar and whiz them together for about twenty seconds. Then, with the Cuisinart staying on, I am meant to pour 1 1/2 cups of canola oil down the feed tube slowly so it emulsifies.

See above re: no brown sugar. After I side-eye the recipe for wanting me to make sugar mayonnaise, I process the eggs, white sugar, a large dash of vanilla because this is a cake, people, come on, and the oil. Yup. Sugar mayonnaise. Okay then.

Then I put 1/2 cup more white sugar and about 1/4 cup water into a tiny saucepan and put it over medium-high heat, because the flavor profile of caramel is pretty similar to the flavor profile of brown sugar, only if anything even more complex and interesting, right? This is the point where, if there had been anyone around, someone should maybe have tried to talk some sense into me. So I wait and wait and wait, because I always forget how long caramel takes to stop faffing about, and then I turn the Cuisinart back on (in hopes that thorough blending will keep the eggs from curdling, on the principal of Italian meringue), forget to grab a funnel, grab a funnel, pour the very hot sugar syrup down the funnel into the feed tube, burn myself badly on the pad of my index finger, and get spun sugar all over the kitchen. Sigh.

When things calm down somewhat I examine the substance in the Cuisinart, which didn't curdle. Huh. It looks familiar. I taste it.

I have independently reinvented vanilla pudding. If it weren't gritty due to the portion of unmelted sugar, it would be very good vanilla pudding indeed. Well, pudding cake is a thing. I scrape it and the dry ingredients into the bowl of carrots and mix it all together as well as I can while holding a can of cold soda in my dominant hand. Which is certainly more efficiently than I can scrape the batter into the pan. Possibly because the pudding had a substantial volume increase over the mayonnaise, there is way, way more batter than necessary, instead of just a little more. I end up filling the pan to the very top, as I don't really have the motor control to stop pouring. I only hope it doesn't rise too much, but carrot cake is usually pretty dense. It's meant to bake 35-40 minutes, but my oven runs hot, so I plan on half an hour and decide to come back in fifteen minutes to turn it.

Fifteen minutes later: that. That is. A carrot souffle, that's what that is. The top edge of the cake has risen at least four inches vertically from the top edge of the pan, in that beautiful classical souffle dome I can never get when I want it. I tiptoe away and try not to bang around when I swear about my finger.

Fifteen minutes after that: the dome has set in place. The middle is not just liquid but raw. Gah. I am concerned about its prospects of actually setting.

Half an hour after that: I have to take it out. The edges are burning. It's basically solid except this one tiny spot in the middle top. Good enough. By this point my girlfriend has turned up, so I get her to pry it out of the pan. It doesn't want to. It pretty much comes in strata. She also kindly saws off the most burnt edges. My wife gets home, so I make her frost it (a massive quantity of leftover cream cheese frosting was the entire reason for carrot cake). It will never win any beauty contests, but the frosting makes it appear edible.

Verdict: tastes fine. Tender, fluffy, soft texture with spicy, complex, true carrot cake flavor. Frosting masks bitterness of burnt patches nicely. Everyone likes it. My finger really fucking hurts, and I feel as though I have wrestled an alligator.

Next time I will just go buy the sugar.

Comments

[dandelion_salad]

EPIC carrot cake. It's not just a dessert, it's an adventure!

[zeborah]

I too am a substituter. I began back when the nearest shops were a half hour walk in each direction and I'd sprained my ankle. Now I have no such excuse. Technically I could have just thought ahead one day and shopped when it wasn't a public holiday. Instead I opened the macaroon recipe when it was too late and ended up substituting cornflour for almond meal, cider vinegar for vanilla essence(1), and butter for cream. And yet the recipe actually worked. I thought unsalted butter would have been better, but my friends liked the saltiness to the filling. ...At some point I do mean to try the recipe as written, however.

(1) There was method to my madness. Firstly, I was desperate. Secondly, it was essentially for making a meringue and my mother always uses (malt) vinegar for making meringues.

This is the best sentence I have read in several days

[thisone]

"After I side-eye the recipe for wanting me to make sugar mayonnaise, I process the eggs, white sugar, a large dash of vanilla because this is a cake, people, come on, and the oil."

And OWWCH on the finger :-(

[axiom_of_stripe]

lightgetsin pointed me to this post on the theory that i would recognize myself and laugh, which is very very true. :)

[tirerim]

I find the lack of 24-hour things around here rather annoying. I don't know why they're all concentrated in Porter Square, with the exception of the Dunkin Donuts in Magoun Square, which is somewhat less useful than a grocery store.

On the other hand, I do live not much more than a mile from you and am often up odd hours, so you can always IM me to see if you can borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. :-)

[q10.livejournal.com]

was there any maple syrup or strong honey around? not a direct flavor substitute for molasses/brown sugar, but maybe an interesting source of complexity. (i have the questionable habit of making a lot of inappropriate-sounding sweetener substitutions, provoked by a combination of curiosity, poor supply management, and cooking for people with unusual dietary preferences/restrictions. some of these substitutions work better than others.)

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've substituted maple syrup for molasses in the past, so was going to suggest this as well. Works best with Grade B maple syrup. Possibly does not work as well for people who do not come from places where maple syrup is considered a necessity of life and therefore always have it around.

[sovay]

Verdict: tastes fine.

Inevitable postscript: being unable to inflict its malice on you any longer and resenting its confinement to a rather handsome cake tray, cake on its way from Somerville to Lexington covers your girlfriend in melted cream cheese frosting so that by the time she arrives in Davis Square, she looks like the punch line to an extremely blue joke about bakeries. Plan: to eat it vengefully, somewhat later on this evening, and enjoy every bite.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

...like the punch line to an extremely blue joke about bakeries...

*snerk*

Nine

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, sadly for me the question with an iffy answer is often not "can I make something edible and even pleasant and even sort of maybe in the direction I intended with the ingredients here present?" but "is it a reasonable use of available mrissa to do so?", and I often ask the first question as though it is the relevant one when the second one is the one I should ask.

[weirdquark]

This is the point where, if there had been anyone around, someone should maybe have tried to talk some sense into me.

Had I been around, I would not have done this thing because my first thought upon hearing that you didn't have brown sugar or molasses was pretty much "hey, burnt sugar is caramel, that would be pretty close..."

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I never try to talk sense into people in these situations, because the results are almost always *either* good food or good stories, and more often both. Although burning your finger is non-optimal.

For me, last week, it was "Everything has gone into the muffin bowl except the flour, and I have... Hm. Okay, the convenience store has... hm. Corn meal. Well, what can possibly..."

(Good story, anyhow.)

[juushika.livejournal.com]

Whatever it says about me, this made me want to hurry into today's Great Brownie Making Adventure (which, finished product not yet tasted aside, went well—but I have a healthy history of on-the-fly substitutions so, oh, do I understand). I was always taught that cooking could be an on-the-fly art but baking, baking had to be a science; I like it much better when it's a beautiful, hectic combination of the both.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

It depends on whether I'm making comfort food, or something that has the potential for desirable results even with variation. Frequently I will go to (read, send my wife to) the store and change the recipe. Last night, frex, the steak had not sufficiently thawed, but we had farmer's market tomatoes. It is mostly Ada's fault that I sent S out for mozzarella and basil, and stuck the steak back in the fridge.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Ow!

At least the cake sounds delicious.

Sadly, I'm the wasteful inverse: I am always buying lovely ingredients because aren't those red currants beautiful and really honestly this time I'm going to cook with them--and aeons later, I scrape the remains out of the fridge. Hopeless.

Nine

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

this is the best story

plz post more cooking adventures

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Count Wim as another one who saw the caramel coming. I wound up reading this whole thing aloud to him.

Hope your finger feels better soon!

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

The image of "drizzle hot sugar syrup into eggs" rang a bell... I must have seen Alton Brown do it at one point. Google turns up recipes for buttercream frosting, marshmallow, nougat, and meringues. (Probably people pigeonholing *stuff* differently.)

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I had a cake recipe that called for sour cream and got yoghurt, or possibly the other way around, on the grounds that they are both milk that bacteria have been at in a controlled way. It was perfectly edible, if perhaps a bit dense.