Quote:
Originally Posted by Typhoid
The thing I don't do is bake. I'll applaud you for that, but I've never been into it. It's too precise. You can't really just wing anything with baking, or else your cookie will come out like a rock.
|
Well, once you learn the fundamental chemistry of a recipe, you actually can play around with it a lot. If you have a good and reliable recipe for basic yellow cake, for example, you can do a reasonable interpretation of about half of the other cakes you might care to make. Substitute cocoa powder for part or all of the flour and you have chocolate cake. To make carrot cake, use oil instead of butter and brown sugar instead of regular sugar, then add spices to taste. Sure, it's always good to have a recipe to tell you exactly what to do (and it's always easy to find recipes on the internet these days), but when you understand the chemistry that makes up a cake, you can read a recipe and figure out if it sounds like it will come out too dense because the ratio of flour to eggs and water doesn't sound right.
Also, cheesecake is very adaptable. If you have a good, reliable recipe for cheesecake, you can add whatever you want to it and just taste the batter to make sure it's good before you bake it. Got some maple syrup and pecans? Toss them in. It'll be good. Got some left over limes? Throw in the zest from the limes for key lime cheesecake.
And then once you've made your cake, all the fillings and frostings can almost be improvised. For example, the mousse part of a mango mousse is just mangoes, sugar, whipped cream and gelatin. I essentially mixed the first three together by taste, then measured how much volume I had and added the appropriate amount of gelatin.
It's probably worth noting that I'm not very good at cookies. You can cover a less than ideal cake with decorations and frostings that will still make it taste and look good. With a cookie, all you've got is that one shot at baking properly.
Oh, and I second Bond's request for sushi tips.