Hello, all. Just like all of you, I am safe (not stuck!) at home right now in the midst of the Covid-19 chaos. As a person that is used to being on-the-go and surrounded by people all the time, I feel like I am constantly awash in contrasting emotions. I feel grateful for the time to rest and recharge, frustrated about the uncertainty, fearful for the state of the world and the health of my loved ones, thankful for the chance to spend time with my finance, and devastated for my students, particularly my seniors.
Like many type A personalities, I really struggle with disconnecting my sense of productivity with my self-worth. Intellectually, I know that my value as a human being does not correlate with the number of tasks that I accomplish in any given day, but I find this hard to remember when faced with many hours of forced idleness.
I also feel a certain amount of guilt for my good fortune… as a teacher I have the privilege to enjoy a certain amount of job security in this uncertain time, and I know so many people that don’t have that security right now. A lot of my friends are musicians living gig-to-gig, and this is all so scary for them. When this finally ends, please go enjoy some live music to show your support for the arts!
Distracting myself with various hobbies has been key to maintaining my sanity, and I’ve been diving into many projects.
With the help of my mom, the quilting queen, I have been working hard on this scrap quilt. It’s a rainbow, do you see it?
Matt and I have done several puzzles, including this very cool spongebob puzzle:
We’ve been spending a lot of time outside enjoying the nice weather and my pretty new grill. We’ve also been bickering a little bit over who exactly gets to sit in our hammock at any given time. I’ve been losing.
I have, of course, been spending a lot of time with my kitties, who think they’ve won the lottery. Every time I start to wish I could go to the movies I just remind myself of how happy these cats are to have us around right now.
I’ve been enjoying doing a lot of yoga, particularly “yoga with Adriene” on youtube at the recommendation of my dear friend Jacob. I HIGHLY recommend this youtube channel for anyone interested in yoga, even true beginners. She’s pretty awesome.
I have also been really enjoying doing some adventurous baking of course, but I did have a fairly disastrous experience right at the beginning of the quarantine. I debated blogging about it… it is fairly embarrassing, after all, but I decided its ok to fail sometimes. And sometimes layer cake doesn’t work out the way we want.
Before the stay-at-home order went into effect, a few friends gathered to enjoy one more game night, and it seemed like such a good opportunity to bake something. So, I decided on a caramel cake after searching through one of my favorite cookbooks, “Grandbaby Cakes.” I had all of the ingredients, except for one. I only had one can of evaporated milk instead of two.
However, I convinced myself that sweetened condensed milk would be an adequate substitute for the evaporated milk when making the caramel. You make dulce de leche using sweetened condense milk, right? So it would be fine! I’d just add a little less sugar and it would work out!
I threw the caramel ingredients in a pan to start cooking down while I made the nice yellow sponges.
I popped those in the oven and then began to suspect that my caramel was… an unmitigated disaster.
The directions lovingly described the glistening bubbles that would begin to form over the smooth caramel sauce and the heavenly smell that would soon fill your house. Yeah, that’s not what happened. Big burned bits began floating to the top. The mixture became an increasingly lumpy mess of goop. The butter never joined with the milk and cream. I burned my fingers several times. A smell of burned sugar began emanating from my best pot and still haunts the corners of my kitchen.
I gave up and turned the page to a nice plain chocolate frosting instead.
Before I whipped that up, I took the sponges out of the oven and set them to cool. Those looked nice, at least.
After making an enormous mess with the cocoa powder and powdered sugar whipping up a basic chocolate buttercream (that tasted amazing, by the way, I ate quite a bit of it straight from the bowl,) I trimmed down the tops of the sponges and frosted the three layers.
Dexter judged me from afar, as usual.
I snuggled my cake stand in the fridge and went obliviously off to bed, assuming that everything would be fine. However, much like the year 2020, a surprising disaster lurks around every corner. In the morning, I went skipping to the fridge, opened the door, and discovered this lovely sight:
For some reason, the top two layers of my cake decided to take a dive into the bottom of the fridge. I am unsure as to the reason for this architectural failure, although I suspect that the culprit is, as usual, my own impatience. The sponges probably weren’t cool enough.
I stacked the wobbly sponges on top of each other and tried to make the best of it.
So elegant. So tidy. It could be a wedding cake, honestly.
Whatever. It tasted good.
I was pretty angry about this whole episode, so I was pretty fed up with baking for about a week. However, I got to go home to Michigan to hang out with my parents a little bit and run some errands for them, and my Dad loves baked goods. So, I decided to brush off my self-contempt and try again. This time, things went much more smoothly. There is a certain dearth of pictures in this section because I was convinced that nothing I baked was ever going to work again and taking pictures was pointless. However, my Mom convinced me to stop being silly, grow up, and just take some pictures.
I decided to make a strawberry coconut cake, also from the “Grandbaby Cakes” book. It was good, guys. If you are a coconut fan, get in your kitchen, because this one is worth it.
I started out by cleaning and pureeing a pound of strawberries. This was mixed into my basic cake batter, which included some beautiful (and enormous!) eggs that my parents had acquired from an Amish neighbor.
That photo brought to you by my sour attitude about the Chocolate Frosting Incident of 2020.
My folks didn’t have any strawberry extract, so I added a little extra vanilla and some almond extract instead. Because I like almond extract. It’s fine.
My mom didn’t have three cake pans, so I decided to just do two layers. One of the layers wound up having to be baked in a springform pan, but it worked just fine.
The frosting was interesting. It called for cream cheese, sour cream, some milk, powdered sugar, and a healthy pour of coconut extract. I thought this might make it taste kind of artificial, but I liked the flavor a lot, it was very tropical, like Malibu rum.
I stuck the two layers together with the frosting, frosted the top and sides, and coated everything with some sweetened shaved coconut.
I found the cake to be tender, the frosting to be nicely tangy, and the whole experience to be indulgent, satisfying, and delicious. I would definitely make this cake again.
However, if I were going to be on the Great British Bake Off (a girl can dream!) I would definitely change a few things to make this recipe more interesting. I would make the cake three layers (like it was really supposed to be), and I would add layers of either fresh strawberries or strawberry jam between the layers to amp up the fresh strawberry flavor. I also think that you could make a variation of this cake with pineapple and some coconut rum to make a fun pina colada cake.
I hope you are all staying safe and sane during these terrifying times. I recently spoke with one of my friends and colleagues that reminded me that I am not “stuck” at home, I am “safe” at home. It’s hard to keep that perspective sometimes, and I try to give myself permission to feel sad and angry. However, I also know that while it is ok to feel down in the dumps sometimes, it’s important not to live there. We’re all going to get through this together. Go into your kitchen and bake!!
