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I got this story from one of my old Everquest guildmates, and I laughed a lot, so I wanted to share.
However, I will leave you with this little story of what *not* to try...
I had some free time around Christmas, which proved to be dangerous. Keep in mind that I'm a horrible cook and my cousin/roommate is too. She's an engineer turned lawyer and I'm a software geek but together, we aren't sure how to properly cook a piece of beef. Serious baking for us is having to add milk and egg to the Betty Crocker mix. But we have this gourmet kitchen and decided we should do more with it than watch the range hood ascend from the center island at the press of a button when we're plowed.
Fate intervened and we received the former owner's December issue of Bon Appetit. The cover shows a glorious picture of Milk Chocolate Mousse Cake with Hazelnut Crunch Crust. It requires ingredients we can't pronounce and verbs that we know only from the dictionary. (Fold? Isn't folding something you do to laundry?) However, it's also the perfect cake to give to our friend Maria who has everything, including a gourmet tea and chocolate shop. So, we embark upon our gourmet cooking adventure.
Day 1: hazelnut chocolate we can't pronounce
The recipe calls for Gianduja bars which the magazine states is "luscious Italian hazelnut flavored milk chocolate." I found it at Whole Foods for $2/oz. This chocolate better be more than luscious. It better prepare the "chocolate genoise layer" for us. (What is a "genoise layer?" Do regular readers of Bon Appetit actually know this stuff?) Alright, after $30 in chocolate, I'm beginning to think this "cost-effective gift" isn't so cost-effective. For the practice cake, we decide to use Hersheys and King Soopers generic hazelnut chocolate bars. How different can it be?
Day 2: 2 trips to Target, 1 trip to Foleys, 1 trip to McGuckin's Hardware, 2 trips to the neighbor's house, and 2 dogs who came inches from losing their lives
Thank god we worked out before beginning the cooking process. The first "genoise top layer" was our starting point. We borrowed 2 spring-form pans from the neighbor because of course, we don't own spring-form pans. We own a dusty muffin tin my mom no longer wanted and a battery-operated flour sifter from my cousin's ill-fated 1983 bridal shower. In her 21 years of owning the battery-operated flour sifter and carting it with her across 4 continents, my roommate has never found a need to unpackage it. Alas, today was its moment in the sun. For a "chocalate genoise layer" you must sift. You must sift, and then resift, and then resift again. You must remove the foam from the top of the melted butter. What could possibly be so offensive about butter foam?
So I fight for my parking space in pre-Christmas hysteria at Target for the first time of the day at noon. We own two ancient but workable 9" diameter cake pans. They were hand-me-downs or acquired from a previous relationship. However, we learn that our 9" diameter cake pans have the girth but not the needed height. We need another half an inch (don't most women?). So we purchase our rubber spatula and 2" high, 9" diameter Calphalon cake pans. That's another $15. They didn't have any cheaper ones.
We successfully sift, despite the fact that we have no batteries for the battery-operated flour sifter. It doubles as a manually-operated flour sifter, fortunately. We successfully spoon and fold. We successfully remove the butter foam and the offensive "butter solids" from the melted mixture. We remove the egg placentas that neither of us had ever noticed before. We insert both the practice cake and real cake into the oven. And then Julie, my roomate, says she forgot the vanilla. We figure they can't have baked much in a minute so we add the vanilla and return them to the oven. We don't stir the vanilla much in the practice cake but decide we should in the real one. They seemed to bake fine, but they only rose to approximately a 1" height, meaning our original cake pans would've worked. Damn you, Bon Appetit.
We fashion a makeshift cake cooling rack using a rack from the second oven (I said the kitchen was gourmet) and some old paperbacks. So things are going well so far. It's only been 3 hours. We realize our borrowed spring-form pans are insufficent to the task since they are 9" and 10" in diameter and this recipe requires 8" pans. Having fallen for the pan height trick once, we read further to ascertain without a doubt that 9" and 10" won't work. Even with an engineering degree you can't cut down a 9" cake to fill a 10" pan, so we head back to Target. They only carry 10" spring-form pans on Christmas Eve so we walk to Foley's. The helpful novice housewares manager says with certainty that Foley's does not have an 8" spring-form pan. Feeling superior with my new-found talents, I ask him dubiously if he knows what a spring-form pan is. Cornered, he answers that he does not. We spend another half hour browsing housewares to no avail.
My roommate suggests I call McGuckin's Hardware. In most places, you wouldn't call a hardware store for baking items. Not so in Boulder. Apparently McGuckin's *does* carry everything. We make it with 2 minutes to spare before they close but we are now proud owners of 2 8" spring-form pans, for a total ownership cost of $12, plus a bonus cake-pan lid. Things are looking up when Julie turns to me at the stoplight and says, "Oh @#%$! We have to go home right now! Skip the grocery store! Just go home!" That's when it occurred to Julie that we left the cakes cooling on the table with 2 unattended Jack Russell terriers at home. Julie reasons that Andre the Giant is in fact an exceptional dog with a well-honed sense of right and wrong, despite his strong appetite for sticks of butter and baked goods. She suggests that he might have convinced his weaker-willed terrier sibling, Zena the Crazy, not to eat the cake either. So now our afternoon is hinging on a terrior's communication ability and his moral code. I'm not hopeful.
When we come home to intact cakes, Julie is triumphant. It seems her pup does possess some strange knowledge of the importance of these particular cakes since the dining chair has been pulled away from the table enough for an inquiring Jack Russell to view the situation. We determine that the fates had taken pity upon us and it is a sign of success to come.
With the favor of the gods and our properly-sized springform pans, we start on the hazelnut crunch layer. This seems easy enough, almost like making Rice Krispy treats, and even Julie and I have made those. (They only require a microwave and a refrigerator, remember?) We carefully melt a portion of our cheap grocery store chocolate for the practice crunch layer in our makeshift double-boiler (which made use of the neighbor's metal bowl that we had surreptitiously borrowed). We successfully mix and spread the contents in the bottom of the 8" spring-form pan. We do even better with the expensive gianduja chocolate and feel the subtle transformation into real cooks beginning. We can't resist a finger-taste of the italian chocolate and are dismayed to learn it tastes just like Nutella, which can be purchased for $2.99 a jar at King Soopers. I first tasted Nutella a few days earlier when Julie bought it as a possible chocolate alternative. I was immediately addicted. EVERYTHING tastes better with Nutella. For those of you who have never tried it, consider this your warning.
We pop our crunch layers into the fridge to cool as Julie's mom arrives from Indiana. She was due 2 days before but the blizzard in Evansville had prevented her from leaving. Our neighbor, Alan, is desperate to have someone else entertain his visiting mom so they also come over to hang out in our baker's kitchen. Earlier that afternoon, Alan's mom had dubbed us Lucy and Ethel after watching us through the front window all day. From an outside perspective, she simply saw 2 women repeatedly run to the car, come home with bags, spend some time in the house, and then repeat the scenario every few hours. But we now have an audience (including people who actually know how to bake) for the final steps of the evening.
We carefully remove the cooled cakes from their rack for the next step, which involves shaving a microthin layer from the top and sides so only pristine spongy goodness is left. Soon, we realize the bottom of the 8" springform pan is supposed to be a cutting guide, but said pans are currently lined with crunch layer. We also deduce that in order to meld the crunch layer with the cake, the crispy chocolatey mass is supposed to be gooey and warm but is now refrigerated.
Never fear, we're engineers. We find some leftover cardboard from Christmas wrapping and Julie remembers a box she located in her recent move. It was from her engineering office and includes a rusty compass with a broken pencil lead. By sharpening the pencil with a knife, we draw a perfect 8" circle on the cardboard and use it as a guide while the peanut gallery looks on and offers tips. With the precision of a surgeon, we successfully cut down our cakes into their proper 8" size. We reheat the crunch layer in the oven and successfuly merge cake and crispy bottom.
Next is the mousse top layer. Julie elects me for this task because it requires whipping cream and I have some whipping cream experience. (NO, not that kind of experience. I made the meringue layer every year for my grandfather's lemon pie.) However, for this particular cake, my merigue-making is moot. The instructions call for stopping when the cream is fluffy but still pourable so now I must walk the thin line between between milky and whipped. Although I'm in unfamiliar territory, I manage to form the cream into "very soft peaks" as instructed. Meanwhile, Julie melts the rest of the cheap grocery store chocolate in our double-boiler. We successfully fold (why couldn't they just say mix?) the melted chocolate, softly peaked cream, and 3 tablespoons (distilled, not tap) water into a mousse. We take a few "test sips" of the Frangelico before realizing we lack a basting brush to apply it to the cake. I volunteer to sacrifice an unused lipstick brush and am secretly pleased that my obsession with Estee Lauder free gift sets has finally come in handy. The cakes receive their blush of hazelnut-flavored liqueur and are sent to their refrigerated beds with aluminum foil sheets to protect them.
Day 3: stencils and powdered sugar
With anticipation, we remove our cakes from the refrigerator and carefully lift the foil. To our horror, the foil has touched the top of both cakes and marred the smooth mousse surface. We are beside ourselves with disappointment when my attempt to resurface the practice cake serves only to further ruin it. But then the coffee kicks in and I realize that heating the knife will remelt the mousse. Success! Now we simply have to apply the intricate cocoa and powdered sugar snowflake design before our gift is complete. But we do not have a snowflake stencil and there is nowhere to purchase one on Christmas morning. Julie's mom was an elementary school art teacher for 37 years and is overjoyed to save the day with a hand drawn stencil of the tea cup logo from Maria's store.
We dust the cake with cocoa to attain the deep brown color that will serve as the backdrop for our sugar art. We learn there is a color difference between Dutch-process cocoa and Hershey's cocoa. Our Hersheys is the same color as the chocolate mousse layer rather than the rich dark one in the picture, but we've gone too far to give up now. We rehearse carefully lifting the stencil without disturbing the powdered design on some dinner plates and then on the practice cake. With one final calming breath, I lay the stencil on the real cake and sift the light powdered sugar on top. I still my shaking hands and lift the stencil. SUCCESS!
We take the cake to Maria at her tea shop and she is floored. She tries explaining the magnitude of the gift to one of her regular customers who is sitting nearby by saying, "You don't understand. These women can't cook!" Alas, now we can. We are gourmets.
However, I will leave you with this little story of what *not* to try...
I had some free time around Christmas, which proved to be dangerous. Keep in mind that I'm a horrible cook and my cousin/roommate is too. She's an engineer turned lawyer and I'm a software geek but together, we aren't sure how to properly cook a piece of beef. Serious baking for us is having to add milk and egg to the Betty Crocker mix. But we have this gourmet kitchen and decided we should do more with it than watch the range hood ascend from the center island at the press of a button when we're plowed.
Fate intervened and we received the former owner's December issue of Bon Appetit. The cover shows a glorious picture of Milk Chocolate Mousse Cake with Hazelnut Crunch Crust. It requires ingredients we can't pronounce and verbs that we know only from the dictionary. (Fold? Isn't folding something you do to laundry?) However, it's also the perfect cake to give to our friend Maria who has everything, including a gourmet tea and chocolate shop. So, we embark upon our gourmet cooking adventure.
Day 1: hazelnut chocolate we can't pronounce
The recipe calls for Gianduja bars which the magazine states is "luscious Italian hazelnut flavored milk chocolate." I found it at Whole Foods for $2/oz. This chocolate better be more than luscious. It better prepare the "chocolate genoise layer" for us. (What is a "genoise layer?" Do regular readers of Bon Appetit actually know this stuff?) Alright, after $30 in chocolate, I'm beginning to think this "cost-effective gift" isn't so cost-effective. For the practice cake, we decide to use Hersheys and King Soopers generic hazelnut chocolate bars. How different can it be?
Day 2: 2 trips to Target, 1 trip to Foleys, 1 trip to McGuckin's Hardware, 2 trips to the neighbor's house, and 2 dogs who came inches from losing their lives
Thank god we worked out before beginning the cooking process. The first "genoise top layer" was our starting point. We borrowed 2 spring-form pans from the neighbor because of course, we don't own spring-form pans. We own a dusty muffin tin my mom no longer wanted and a battery-operated flour sifter from my cousin's ill-fated 1983 bridal shower. In her 21 years of owning the battery-operated flour sifter and carting it with her across 4 continents, my roommate has never found a need to unpackage it. Alas, today was its moment in the sun. For a "chocalate genoise layer" you must sift. You must sift, and then resift, and then resift again. You must remove the foam from the top of the melted butter. What could possibly be so offensive about butter foam?
So I fight for my parking space in pre-Christmas hysteria at Target for the first time of the day at noon. We own two ancient but workable 9" diameter cake pans. They were hand-me-downs or acquired from a previous relationship. However, we learn that our 9" diameter cake pans have the girth but not the needed height. We need another half an inch (don't most women?). So we purchase our rubber spatula and 2" high, 9" diameter Calphalon cake pans. That's another $15. They didn't have any cheaper ones.
We successfully sift, despite the fact that we have no batteries for the battery-operated flour sifter. It doubles as a manually-operated flour sifter, fortunately. We successfully spoon and fold. We successfully remove the butter foam and the offensive "butter solids" from the melted mixture. We remove the egg placentas that neither of us had ever noticed before. We insert both the practice cake and real cake into the oven. And then Julie, my roomate, says she forgot the vanilla. We figure they can't have baked much in a minute so we add the vanilla and return them to the oven. We don't stir the vanilla much in the practice cake but decide we should in the real one. They seemed to bake fine, but they only rose to approximately a 1" height, meaning our original cake pans would've worked. Damn you, Bon Appetit.
We fashion a makeshift cake cooling rack using a rack from the second oven (I said the kitchen was gourmet) and some old paperbacks. So things are going well so far. It's only been 3 hours. We realize our borrowed spring-form pans are insufficent to the task since they are 9" and 10" in diameter and this recipe requires 8" pans. Having fallen for the pan height trick once, we read further to ascertain without a doubt that 9" and 10" won't work. Even with an engineering degree you can't cut down a 9" cake to fill a 10" pan, so we head back to Target. They only carry 10" spring-form pans on Christmas Eve so we walk to Foley's. The helpful novice housewares manager says with certainty that Foley's does not have an 8" spring-form pan. Feeling superior with my new-found talents, I ask him dubiously if he knows what a spring-form pan is. Cornered, he answers that he does not. We spend another half hour browsing housewares to no avail.
My roommate suggests I call McGuckin's Hardware. In most places, you wouldn't call a hardware store for baking items. Not so in Boulder. Apparently McGuckin's *does* carry everything. We make it with 2 minutes to spare before they close but we are now proud owners of 2 8" spring-form pans, for a total ownership cost of $12, plus a bonus cake-pan lid. Things are looking up when Julie turns to me at the stoplight and says, "Oh @#%$! We have to go home right now! Skip the grocery store! Just go home!" That's when it occurred to Julie that we left the cakes cooling on the table with 2 unattended Jack Russell terriers at home. Julie reasons that Andre the Giant is in fact an exceptional dog with a well-honed sense of right and wrong, despite his strong appetite for sticks of butter and baked goods. She suggests that he might have convinced his weaker-willed terrier sibling, Zena the Crazy, not to eat the cake either. So now our afternoon is hinging on a terrior's communication ability and his moral code. I'm not hopeful.
When we come home to intact cakes, Julie is triumphant. It seems her pup does possess some strange knowledge of the importance of these particular cakes since the dining chair has been pulled away from the table enough for an inquiring Jack Russell to view the situation. We determine that the fates had taken pity upon us and it is a sign of success to come.
With the favor of the gods and our properly-sized springform pans, we start on the hazelnut crunch layer. This seems easy enough, almost like making Rice Krispy treats, and even Julie and I have made those. (They only require a microwave and a refrigerator, remember?) We carefully melt a portion of our cheap grocery store chocolate for the practice crunch layer in our makeshift double-boiler (which made use of the neighbor's metal bowl that we had surreptitiously borrowed). We successfully mix and spread the contents in the bottom of the 8" spring-form pan. We do even better with the expensive gianduja chocolate and feel the subtle transformation into real cooks beginning. We can't resist a finger-taste of the italian chocolate and are dismayed to learn it tastes just like Nutella, which can be purchased for $2.99 a jar at King Soopers. I first tasted Nutella a few days earlier when Julie bought it as a possible chocolate alternative. I was immediately addicted. EVERYTHING tastes better with Nutella. For those of you who have never tried it, consider this your warning.
We pop our crunch layers into the fridge to cool as Julie's mom arrives from Indiana. She was due 2 days before but the blizzard in Evansville had prevented her from leaving. Our neighbor, Alan, is desperate to have someone else entertain his visiting mom so they also come over to hang out in our baker's kitchen. Earlier that afternoon, Alan's mom had dubbed us Lucy and Ethel after watching us through the front window all day. From an outside perspective, she simply saw 2 women repeatedly run to the car, come home with bags, spend some time in the house, and then repeat the scenario every few hours. But we now have an audience (including people who actually know how to bake) for the final steps of the evening.
We carefully remove the cooled cakes from their rack for the next step, which involves shaving a microthin layer from the top and sides so only pristine spongy goodness is left. Soon, we realize the bottom of the 8" springform pan is supposed to be a cutting guide, but said pans are currently lined with crunch layer. We also deduce that in order to meld the crunch layer with the cake, the crispy chocolatey mass is supposed to be gooey and warm but is now refrigerated.
Never fear, we're engineers. We find some leftover cardboard from Christmas wrapping and Julie remembers a box she located in her recent move. It was from her engineering office and includes a rusty compass with a broken pencil lead. By sharpening the pencil with a knife, we draw a perfect 8" circle on the cardboard and use it as a guide while the peanut gallery looks on and offers tips. With the precision of a surgeon, we successfully cut down our cakes into their proper 8" size. We reheat the crunch layer in the oven and successfuly merge cake and crispy bottom.
Next is the mousse top layer. Julie elects me for this task because it requires whipping cream and I have some whipping cream experience. (NO, not that kind of experience. I made the meringue layer every year for my grandfather's lemon pie.) However, for this particular cake, my merigue-making is moot. The instructions call for stopping when the cream is fluffy but still pourable so now I must walk the thin line between between milky and whipped. Although I'm in unfamiliar territory, I manage to form the cream into "very soft peaks" as instructed. Meanwhile, Julie melts the rest of the cheap grocery store chocolate in our double-boiler. We successfully fold (why couldn't they just say mix?) the melted chocolate, softly peaked cream, and 3 tablespoons (distilled, not tap) water into a mousse. We take a few "test sips" of the Frangelico before realizing we lack a basting brush to apply it to the cake. I volunteer to sacrifice an unused lipstick brush and am secretly pleased that my obsession with Estee Lauder free gift sets has finally come in handy. The cakes receive their blush of hazelnut-flavored liqueur and are sent to their refrigerated beds with aluminum foil sheets to protect them.
Day 3: stencils and powdered sugar
With anticipation, we remove our cakes from the refrigerator and carefully lift the foil. To our horror, the foil has touched the top of both cakes and marred the smooth mousse surface. We are beside ourselves with disappointment when my attempt to resurface the practice cake serves only to further ruin it. But then the coffee kicks in and I realize that heating the knife will remelt the mousse. Success! Now we simply have to apply the intricate cocoa and powdered sugar snowflake design before our gift is complete. But we do not have a snowflake stencil and there is nowhere to purchase one on Christmas morning. Julie's mom was an elementary school art teacher for 37 years and is overjoyed to save the day with a hand drawn stencil of the tea cup logo from Maria's store.
We dust the cake with cocoa to attain the deep brown color that will serve as the backdrop for our sugar art. We learn there is a color difference between Dutch-process cocoa and Hershey's cocoa. Our Hersheys is the same color as the chocolate mousse layer rather than the rich dark one in the picture, but we've gone too far to give up now. We rehearse carefully lifting the stencil without disturbing the powdered design on some dinner plates and then on the practice cake. With one final calming breath, I lay the stencil on the real cake and sift the light powdered sugar on top. I still my shaking hands and lift the stencil. SUCCESS!
We take the cake to Maria at her tea shop and she is floored. She tries explaining the magnitude of the gift to one of her regular customers who is sitting nearby by saying, "You don't understand. These women can't cook!" Alas, now we can. We are gourmets.
