I spent much of yesterday morning in the kitchen, banging away at a pair of baking projects-- the now-famous no-knead bread recipe and a caramel cake that I have been craving this week (assembled out of a pastiche of these recipes). The bread turned out okay, although the crust (as ever!) is not crackly enough. The cake frustrated me. Leaving aside the total mess I made trying to pour caramel glaze over it (thank God I was doing it over the sink), the cake itself took too long to bake, and by the time it was fully cooked it was much browner on the sides than I meant for it to be.
The culprit? Our oven runs cold, so everything has been baking for too long at too cold of a temperature. I suspected this so I'd been adding 50 degrees to my baking temperatures, but I've now concluded that's not enough. I could just go buy a thermometer, but rank empiricism is the easy way out. I need something else to bake, to try baking on +75 or +100. What did Einstein say about doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results?
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Having a new stove has gone a long way toward emboldening me about cooking, especially baking. The recipes actually work for the amount of time they prescribe! I finally understand why people say one can bake if one can read.
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