Mr. Beefgnaw's Wild Ride

The King's recipe as usual. Made in a springform pan because I didn't have a pie pan. I was a little worried about structural integrity but now that it's chilled it's fine. This is my first crumb crust and it's a little thick down in the corners but that's okay. It's fucking delicious!

The dark specks in the filling are lime zest. This recipe calls for the zest of two limes. Two whole ass limes. There is really no quick and easy way to zest two whole ass limes. Also I do not have a citrus juicer but you bet one is on my shopping list now because wringing every drop of juice out of four whole ass limes with my bare hands sucked and I'm never doing it again.

I tried to candy the lime slices it's garnished with. That didn't work so well and it left me with a shit ton of lime flavored simple syrup which is now turning into ice cubes for my iced tea.

I'm... not sure I can be trusted with the ability to just make an entire key lime pie whenever I want.

So I'm doing a baking course on Udemy, and it's mostly pretty good and pretty informative and now I know the difference between French meringue and Italian meringue and Swiss meringue and also I have learned that this "creme pat" stuff that sounds so fancy when they say it on GBBO is basically just... pudding. It's fucking vanilla pudding. Hell, remember those cream puffs I made last week? I looked at the eclair part of the recipe again and King Arthur even comes right out and suggests using instant vanilla pudding for a quick and dirty creme pat. What the hell, man.

...I digress. Anyway, we're in the cake unit now and I've encountered a minor issue: the instructor is based somewhere in the world that doesn't use Freedom Units and my oven temp can only be set to multiples of 5, I cannot set the damn thing to 338 degrees Freedom Temperature, and also she was using a much longer and skinnier pan than I have, and being the scratch baking noob I am I figured I'd better hunt down a similar recipe that I could follow exactly. No problem. If nobody else got me, the King got me.

Now, you can see by the photo there that while I do have a cake to show for my efforts and it even looks pretty tasty (it is!), there were clearly some Issues experienced here of the sort that make it probably a good thing this isn't the kind of course where I have to submit shit for a grade.

Nevertheless, I did learn a valuable lesson from this week's bake and that is: ALWAYS READ THE COMMENTS ON THE RECIPE BEFORE YOU BAKE IT. Had I done that, I would have seen baker after baker whose marble cake just inexplicably said "fuck ur cake release" and clung to the pan for dear life and said to myself "self? we should probably give this shit a parchment sling." Alas, I did not.

The cake, or most of it anyway, did eventually come out of the pan after much loosening with a knife, shaking, and begging and pleading. And it tastes great! Maybe a tad dry but I could have maybe overbaked it just a hair.

Who knows how long this is going to last but I decided for my New Year Thing this year, I'm going to bake a new thing every week(ish). I've always been into cooking but scratch baking has always been witchcraft and sorcery to me and I want to learn these black arts.

Anyway, I figured I'd just jump right in the deep end and whip up some choux puffs! I have never made choux in my life! It looks complicated when they do it on GBBO! It really isn't!

I used the King Arthur recipe and also watched the video they link to in the "tips" section of the recipe. And I highly recommend you do watch that video even if you hate video instructions, because there are at least two points in the preparation where it will look like you have just royally fucked up but in reality it's supposed to look like that and you gotta just trust the process!

There is one scary part in the process and that is the part where your water and butter come to a boil and against all instinct you gotta grab your premeasured flour and salt and you just DUMP THAT SHIT IN THE POT ALL AT ONCE and whatever you do, don't stop stirring! After that it's not too hard. It's a little tedious, what with beating four whole-ass eggs in one at a time, but not hard thanks to my friend Mr. Kitchenaid. And next time I make these I'm going to scoop them instead of piping them, because filling the pastry bag/piping the little shits/washing the pastry bag sucks and I never want to do that again.

The two biggest and prettiest ones got filled with HEB Swoon red velvet cheesecake ice cream, dusted with powdered sugar, and drizzled with chocolate. The rest (save for the one that went onto the floor while I was putting the rest in a baggie, RIP) will get stuffed with either plain whipped cream or matcha whipped cream. Maybe I'll do a couple of savory ones. Maybe a couple more of them will end up being profiteroles because that shit was good.

think I'm gonna bake a banana bread today lads

baked a banana bread today lads

(it has white chocolate chips. normally I use semisweet but I had some white that needed used up. also holy shit if y'all could smell my apartment right now)