Sally Lunn Bread and the Dangers of Overmixing

While poking through my Joy of Cookinglooking for something to bake (and an excuse to use my new mixer) with limited ingredients on hand, I came across a recipe for Sally Lunn Bread, which contains nothing more than sugar, fat, flour, eggs, milk, and a pinch of salt: things I try to have in my pantry at all times. It actually sounded really bland, but two and a half years ago I actually was in Bath, home of the apparently famous Sally Lunn's, which I seem to recall being toted as the "oldest house in Bath" or something. We were escorted to some frou-frou, overcrowded tea room and ordered the standard afternoon tea meal-esque thing - tea and a Sally Lunn Bun, served with tea and Devonshire clotted cream (which I still crave every now and then) and cinnamon butter. In all honestly I have no recollection of how good or not good this thing was, so I'm guessing it was just something that made me less hungry for maybe two hours or so.

Anyway, I tried making this at my house and I learned a few things. First, if you're going to make sweetened butter (yes, I tried making cinnamon butter), you're going to want to sift your sugar or else it's going to be all lumpy and ugmo-spreading. I never sift anything, somewhat because I'm a lazy bastard about that, but mostly because I don't actually own a sifter. I think that would stop you from sifting too, but if you have a sifter, you should sift your powdered sugar before you make sweetened butter.

Second, don't walk away from your mixer while it's mixing a cake (or muffins, or anything really) to go have an IM conversation with someone. Overmixing is bad. It makes things un-fluffy and dense and unappetizing. Overmixing is hard to do when you don't have a mixer - you just combine everything until there's not dots of flour left and then you STOP.

So my Sally Lunn cake ended up slightly bricklike, and the cinnamon butter is still sitting in my fridge waiting for me to sledge it on to something, and I ate the cake with some butter smudged onto it for breakfast for a few days but Ralph-dog got about half of it. He digs the overmixing, but I swore to him, and I'm swearing to you, dear readers, that I am going to use my mixer more conscientiously from now on.

Holy Whipped Cream, Batman (er, Fatman?)

I didn't buy the Redi-Whip to accompany my parkin. I don't think Whole Foods even had any pressurized whipped cream, but I didn't get around to looking, because the organic heavy cream was on sale, and goddammit, I am a cheap bastard and buy things that are on sale (wait till you see what I'm getting from Amazon tomorrow). I bought two pints.

The instructions for whipped cream didn't seem hard. Put the bowl and the whisk in the freezer, make sure the cream is chilled, and once you take the bowl out stick it in a bowl of ice water and add some sugar and vanilla. Whisk until soft peaks form. Can do.

Not trusting the generic ("Chef's Essentials") 10-parts-in-1 hand mixer/food processor/immersion blender thing I found on sale for $20 (yes, cheap bastard) four years ago that I haven't used since moving to Arizona three years ago, I decided some manual labor was in order. I was chatting with Stephen about it and he said making whipped cream by hand was possible but just involved some considerable "stamina and endurance". I'm tough! I just climbed an 18,143-ft mountain. Stamina and endurance! What's some wrist-flicking?

I got the whisk and bowl out of the freezer and plopped my bowl into the ice-water bowl. Half-teaspoon of vanilla, two tablespoons of powdered sugar, a cup of cream, and whisk away! And away. And away. Zanotti goes and takes a shower. He comes out ten minutes later and I'm still fucking whisking. I asked him if my cream would deflate if I stopped, because my wrist is killing me and I'm not dextrous enough to whisk with my left hand. He says it won't, so I go look for the 10-in-1 thing in the cabinet. I find it, but it's in some weird configuration, so I go back to hand whisking and get it to some foamy state (how it gets after it bubbles) but it doesn't seem to be progressing much beyond that. I'm mortified at this point that it's too warm, get more ice to put in the water, and contemplate how happy Jake and Ralph-dog are going to be to get a batch of fucked-up whipped cream to eat.

Zanotti, being Zanotti, goes and looks at my hand mixer contraption and somehow gets the balloon whisk attachment on. We plug it in and it actually spins when I push the button. I gleefully stick it in the semi-whipped cream, and find that the button is just a pulse button - I have to keep pressing it to make the thing keep going. I see there's another button on the bottom, and I get excited there's a perma-mode, so I press it.

The goddamn whisk falls into the whipped cream.

The top part is untainted so I put it back in, and somehow not realizing what I just did, I do it again and Zanotti makes fun of me at this point so I realize I am doing something pretty stupid, and go back to holding down the medium-speed button, which cramps my hand, but after a few minutes the whipped cream is holding up enough so that the whole bowl turns by itself because it is floating in the other bowl (ghetto mixer! I have to try that with actual batter sometime), and I get enough willpower to keep holding the damn button down because it's resembling something like whipped cream. I keep at it a little longer and it magically becomes actual whipped cream, which I promptly slather on my cake and eat. It's good. I put the rest in a container in the fridge for tomorrow. I still have leftover cake, but I might just eat it out of the bowl. Ssssh.

Parkin: A Day Late and A Dollop of Whipped Cream Short

It is currently 10pm and it is 82 degrees in my unheated apartment, fine cake-baking weather if I do say so myself. I'm too much of a cheap bastard to turn on the air conditioning, and it's a matter of principle anyway - it's November! Only in Arizona would you need the bloody air conditioning in November. Poor Ralph-dog.

Anyway, I made Guy Fawkes Day cake, aka parkin, today. I meant to make it yesterday for no other reason than it's in my beloved Joy of Cookingand it's a mostly brainless, easy recipe of the "mix the wet stuff into the dry stuff" variety - might as well make it on the day it's supposed to be made, but I went out with Z and some pals and our dinner became a very extended dinner waiting for people. No cake-baking for the Donger.

Nevertheless, I'd been itching to try out the new cake panI got last week, as I used the loaf panfor some corn bread with sexy results, so easy-peasy British holiday cake for everyone! I got a Cuisinart pie pan too, but I realized I can't make pie crust because I don't, uh, have a rolling pin. Yeah. Anyway, the parkin cooked perfectly in the recommended 35-min time slot, and after cooling it for 10 min it happily slid right out of the pan with nicely crusted sides. Cake pan gets an A!

Apparently you're supposed to put whipped cream on it, but I don't have any, so I just ate it, because I was hungry (as usual). It's got a nice moist texture (the weird white dots in the picture are rolled oats) with a solid crust on top to hold it together, but since it's not a very sweet cake (only one tablespoon of sugar in the whole thing), the whipped cream would definitely help. I know what I'm buying at the store tomorrow! I don't know if I'm brave enough to make my own whipped cream yet. I also have fond memories of eating whipped cream right out of many spray bottles as a child. Endless entertainment, except for my mother, who got to clean up all the whipped cream that somehow missed my mouth.

Leftover updates: the ratatouille from two days ago tasted better today. I put some fresh grated parm on it and it was a good side to my giant hunk of beef jerky. I hate buying beef jerky because I can't stop eating it, and then my jaw and teeth get sore, and... yeah. I know. Important problems.