Tag Archives: butter

22/10
2020

Shortbread is the purity of cake; just flour, butter, sugar, heat and long-term cardiovascular trouble requiring medication and surgical intervention.

I set myself an admittedly silly challenge yesterday as a response to an enormously stressful Tuesday, by applying the sane type of approach that gave the world USA President Donald J. Trump and outsourcing my challenge to Twitter. Anyway, the upshot was to get the divorce process moving and bake a cake of some sort, and somewhat surprisingly keeping my job.

It’s a Jaime Oliver recipe, from his Big Book, so I have no link. He probably has it on his website, or a variation of it. It’s lovely, but heavier than depleted Uranium. A small piece of this could sustain an adult for weeks (and that’s what it was originally supposed to do).

In conclusion, by way of outrageous statement, I’m pretty much an incredible guy. If you met me you would be all “wow, this is pretty much an incredible guy” and I would say ”Well, hey” because I already knew it but enjoyed your realisation of it.

31/08
2020

I went there, and I brought it. Behold!

I just love the textures. It’s like the surface of the moon or something.

It tastes magical, and I’m a harsh critic of my own efforts. I don’t know if I’ll do it again soon though, this is pure badness. Here’s the recipe I worked from: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/ultimate-lemon-meringue-pie – it didn’t go so well last week and I was dubious, but this week I bought a hand mixer and better sugar, and it all went lot better.

Yeah, no, I didn’t eat all that myself, we both had some, and then I sent off a big slice with Smalls so she could get some dessert out of it. I still have some! Sadly, the number of you that are ever going to get to taste this stuff is vanishingly small, and you already know who you are…

By the way, this is all somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It did go well, and it does taste great, but I’m no match for even the most modestly skilled baker. I’m learning and following instructions meant for idiots. I’m just pleased that I didn’t kill anyone.

23/08
2020

It doesn’t look like much, but this is my first attempt at BBC’s Lemon Meringue Pie, which I wanted to take a crack at to impress my daughter. I’m starting to think that the BBC recipe site isn’t all that; the stuff is ok, but it seems to not quite work out and involves incredible amounts of butter and sugar, and frequently too much of one thing or another. Maybe that site is a sort of Wikipedia for recipes, with the veneer of respectability afforded by the BBC logo at the top, but without the quality control and self-defeating right-wing agenda of the rest of the organisation.

Obviously, I’m a master baker so I can criticise ignorantly all the things. But this is, so far, what baking looks like to me. Different ratios of butter and sugar, occasionally some eggs and/or flour, and twenty minutes in the oven. This doesn’t end well from a health perspective. I will bake, I will eat, there will be a visit to a GP, and there will be stern advice and a prescription for Statins.

In all fairness to me, it does look good out of the tin. A few months ago, I’d have been somewhat forlornly adding ‘Does anyone want some?’, but not any more. Go, and bake your own one. Let me know how it goes for you.

16/08
2020

This was a last-minute thing yesterday while the pizza was baking, it didn’t go quite as intended, but it got a solid thumbs-up (in spite of the bizarre ‘moon-rock’ crumble). A small Apple Crumble, from a BBC recipe which I had misgivings about as I was making it (mostly made of crumble, which is itself mostly made of butter? Seriously?). Also, I did not have Cinnamon. It’s one of those things that you take for granted until… you need it.