A Headstart on Weekend Baking

It is Friday morning and the hours in the morning stretch pleasantly when you decide to work from home. So I utilized my hour long commute time better today getting ahead on my weekend baking. I made an eggless cake and a cookie. The eggless cake is a repeat recipe, it is the mawa cake I attempted soon after Diwali. I generally have a strict non repetition policy so that I learn new cake and cookie recipes and so I don't get bored of my new found hobby as well. But the mawa cake had to be made primarily so I could finish up all the yummy things which could go into it, which have been sitting in my fridge for ages now. If anything, it turned out even better than the last time I tried to make it, none the worse for my abuse of the ingredients.

But the real star of my culinary chronicle today is a cookie. After a long time, I got a cookie perfectly right. I guess, I just had to try enough number of times to get it right. So when I started off, I was intimidated by cakes and made only cookies. So I made cookies very well. Then I stopped and made only cakes. When I got back and tried making any sort of exotic cookies which involved egg, like shrewsbury biscuits ( rock hard and had to be broken with excessive force), zebra cookies ( had to miraculously transformed into cupcakes) and my most basic cookie failure, rice cookies (enough said). So baking has me believing in Malcolm Gladwell's tenet that enough practice can make you an expert in anything. 

So I was happy to get into the cookie baking groove again with these awesome melting moments cookies.  They are so pretty to look at and the prettification doesn't really take too much effort. I found this recipe at Bakeclub.com.au. They had a very good video trailer of the recipe and very very detailed instructions. So this is not the only recipe I am going to be trying from this site, I have already book marked a bunch for future reference. Possibly, they have made their instructions so fool proof that even I cannot go wrong.

Now without any further ado, presenting melting moments cookies with orange icing.

On my kitchen counter: ( To make 18 or 36 halves)

250 g butter (softened and cubed)

110 g icing sugar

11/2 tsp vanilla extract

250 g flour

60 g corn flour

For the orange icing:

60 g butter softened

125 g icing sugar sifted

rind of an orange scraped

a drop of food colouring (optional)

How to make them:

1. Cream together sugar, butter and vanilla, until they mix well. The butter goes pale and creamy and sort of streaky as well, this is when you stop.

2. Scrape the mixture from sides of the bowl and mix thoroughly with sifted flour and corn flour.

3. Once you have combined it using a spoon, you can use your hands to bring the dough together.

4. Grease and line a cookie tray. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celsius.

5. Take heap teaspoons of the dough between your hands and form into equal sized balls. Place them on the cookie sheet about 4-5 cm apart.

6. Press down on each ball with a fork, very gently, to create a pattern and sort of flatten the cookie a little bit.

7. Place in the oven and bake for about 18 minutes, the lower side of the cookie turns golden brown while the top half remains sort of beige in colour.

8. Remove from cookie tray and allow to cool before icing.

For the icing:

Combine butter, sugar and rind and also a drop of food colouring ( use orange instead of lemon yellow like stupid ol' me). Cream together and spread evenly on one cookie and sandwich with another.

So thanks to my brilliance, I have executed one of Heston Blumenthal's Masterchef tasks quite unwittingly. When you look at it, you expect to taste lemon cream and what you get is orange cream (looks are deceptive).

Why baking is like analytics

I have been doing analytics consulting for all of my professional life and I have been baking only in the past year, that too only on weekends. I love baking as long as my results are sweet and I like my job on most of the good days. The similarities between these activities goes much further to me when I think about it. So here's one of those ridiculous lists which lists out why:

1. Baking is neither an art nor a science. Same goes for analytics. They deceive you into thinking it's a science and numbers game. But you need a feel, otherwise known as common sense for both. For example, you cannot add 100g of flour that the recipe calls for and say but it s not supposed to be this liquid. Just like you can't say you don't know why your numbers fell off a cliff.

2. There are some things you only learn by doing. These are two of them. There are siren like recipes which seem so super easy for a complicated sounding cake or biscuit. Theoretically, we are all on the same page and then your oven steadfastly refuses to yield results. While you may give an awesome theoretical spiel on a math model, you might see them all come tumbling down when you actually get to work.

3. Half baked results can always get you in trouble, though you may try to spin it otherwise. It is not easy to eat a half baked cake. You will choke just like you would when you eat one, if you try to deliver half baked results.

4. You need to follow instructions, step by step. Missing an instruction or mixing up order of events can prove to be costly mistakes. Procedure and quality checking at each step is important.

5. All measurements need to be accurate. Guessing and approximation isn't always the best idea.

6. Practice! Practice! Practice. The longer you do it, the more number of hours you put in practicing initially, the better you get at it. Soon you are almost perfect and hardly make any mistakes at all.

7. It's easier to explain to others how to execute something- whether a cake or an analysis, It becomes difficult only when you have to do it yourself and then you might have to ask the person you explained it to for help

8. An extra pair of hands is always a good thing. Delegation helps you get to timely and accurate  (read tasty) results.

9. Stirring the pot too much isn't always a good idea, Like an over-beaten cake, over analysis only falls flat on its face.

10. Appearance is more important than you think. The shape and embellishments of the cake make the first impression before it is even tasted. Your content and analysis may very likely go for a toss if you are not a pro at formatting and 'prettification'.