Lily’s Blog, Dragon Absconded!
Baking Until I Drop

Saturday 13 September:

After I couldn’t sleep the day before, I decided to peruse my cookbooks. If you remember the last time I tried to make pancakes for my family for suhur, NOBODY FASTED!

Now, I did see a recipe for Feathery Banana Pancakes in Lisa Yockelson’s Baking by Flavour, but Chennette was at home. And there were some suspicions about whether she can eat bananas or not. Also, I can’t remember if there were any bananas.

Also, since I was thinking of making this for Suhur, I didn’t want this oh sooo complicated.

But I couldn’t sleep and it was 2 am when I started looking at cookbooks and I was to get up at 4 am so did it matter?
Hmm
I could go downstairs *now* and collect all the ingredients and just pre-prep them. So down I went with Alton Brown’s baking book in hand to make buttermilk.

And *measured* out flour and such (yes measure not weigh because Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible said it didn’t matter too much for pancakes; you didn’t need to be uber precise). I also melted the butter. It’s so hard to cut frozen butter. Wish we’d stop keeping it in the freezer. I put it in the fridge and it magically appears in the freezer. *sigh*

And then I had prepped the ingredients…and it was 2:40 am…hmmm…maybe I better mix the batter and start frying them.

So I did.

We really need a gridle.
Really badly.
My 10″ fry pan isn’t so very good. And it was awesome when I took out another one…it was like they started finishing in no time at all. But of course, they were more oval than round and harder to get out without marring it or its neighbour (because I squeezed two in a pan to finish quickly).

And then at 4 am nobody was stirring. I set the table and called to dad…who finally came down.

I went up to wake up Chennette who said water water is all I need. I told her fine! There are pancakes. You can get your own water.

So when she eventually appeared she demanded if we were all under my thumb, or whim or something about whatever I feel like making, people just have to eat.

INGRATE!

Thankfully my parents were happy to eat pancakes.

Regardless. They were very nice. I added a touch of cinnamon and nutmeg. Coming down to the end the batter started “melting” so they weren’t as thick as the first pancakes but I prefer thinner pancakes than those thick ones the other sister likes.

So then, promptly back to sleep for many hours…no wait…rudely awakened at 11 because we have to leave at 11:30 to go pick up “my” (Chennette’s) glasses at a store … that is closed for the weekend for stock taking!

Grrr.

Well, we bought sneakers for the niece and … stuff.

And then back…oh sooo tired.

Wait…did you think we slept? Because there was an iftar in *our* jamaat? *our* masjid? And so we didn’t have to cook dinner?

You must be silly.

Chennette found a recipe for brownies that she absolutely *had* to try (but did she know where any ingredients were? no not really). Which she also put in too big a pan. I didn’t stop her. It was her baby. And she didn’t want to overbake. Which meant…they kinda fell apart but are so soft you can smoosh them back together.

The recipe makes me wonder if we took our regular cocoa brownie recipe (sigh! I have pictures of these to post) and cooked it in the same way, what would be the result?

Oh, rest now? No. Dad doesn’t eat chocolate.

So, we made butter crescents from Yockelson’s above mentioned book.
These were very buttery.

Also, I think she has a sweet tooth. I mean an overly sweet tooth. This is only the second recipe I’ve made from her book, before I made a cinnamon sour cream coffee cake, which although very good was tooo sweet. I think it hurt my mouth. Well, okay, cold water and hot tea have been hurting my mouth the last month.

In this butter crescent recipe, she said after the cookies have cooled for 3 minutes, roll them in powdered sugar. Then after 30 minutes, roll them again.

Yeah. Well, I conveniently couldn’t find the icing sugar (seriously I shorted on where it was but maybe it was subconscious? and I didn’t want to look). I didn’t want them to be ruined by too much sugar. And as long as Chennette was willing…well fine.

We tasted them in the airport (oh do you remember Chennette was overnighting? so yeah after iftar we went to the airport) and they were good. Sweet but like a lovely hint of sweetness. We couldn’t imagine rolling them in sugar TWICE!

And I left Chennette alone for a bit when I went to meet mom, and when I came back it seems left alone with the brownies and the crescents she’d worked something else out in her head.

The recipe called for superfine sugar.
The recipe had no weights.
For various reasons, (Alton Brown), we used the food processor to “sift” the flour and such and the food processor to process our granulated sugar. I didn’t have the energy to look for anything else. I didn’t want to.

Chennette: You measured the sugar?
Me: You did.
Chennette: No, you gave me the sugar to put in the food processor..
…
After a little talk we remembered, I gave her the big tub of sugar and the 1/3-cup and 1/8-cup to measure sugar.
And we worked this out.
Granulated sugar should be coarser than superfine sugar.
The same volume of superfine sugar should be heavier (more densely packed?) (and more sugar) than the same volume of granulated sugar. And we, measured the granulated sugar before processing it.
So, our cookies would’ve been even *sweeter*.
Maybe by not a lot but when you consider rolling them twice in icing sugar…!!

HORROR dawned on us.

You know, I like her recipes but I clearly don’t have her uber-sweet tooth.
Next time I make anything of hers, I’m going to have to blindly adjust the sweetness … or maybe I should try a third sweet recipe and see if I just got lucky. Reread the intros and see if she says this is very sweet. And then try a savoury. And then start adjusting.

Regardless of the issues, the resulting baked goods were a hit.
If only we had ice-cream for the brownie, it would’ve been perfect.

There are pictures. Chennette took lots. They will eventually reach the internet…really. She used my camera. And they’re still on my camera. Either I’ll shrink ‘em and watermark them and e-mail them to her or I will upload them myself.

I *told* her, just download the pictures directly to your computer.
So in the time between baking and going to the masjid, she appeared in my room asking for my camera.

Me: It’s downstairs.
Chennette: What’s it doing downstairs?
Me: I came up before you and left it down…
Chennette: Why?
Me: Because I left you to come pray and you were taking pictures with it at the time. Why didn’t you bring it up???

So, yeah, I have them.

After this baking extravaganza we had less than an hour to get ready to go down to the masjid to break fast.

We went and broke fast with other members of our Jamaat (yay!) and had dates, grapes, sahina, pholourie and a mango chutney (picture at the top). Lots of water and juice. Note the non-individual plates.

For dinner, there was rice and dhaal and curry aloo and stew chicken and mango and curry goat and green salad and paratha roti and who knows what else. I took a picture of my plate (above) and Chennette’s.

And then, quickly, we raced off to the airport where we limed for about 20 minutes until her flight was called and we went home.

And because I’m trying to get rid of backlog, on the following day:

Sunday 14 September, Ramadan 13: Suhur:

I bought a spinach and feta croissant at the airport the night before for suhur so I warmed that up and yummy.

THen…hungry so avocado and toast.

And lots of water.

Sunday 14 September, Ramadan 14: Iftar

Um, at home, as is normal (haha! such a relief), we had tea, water, dates (mom) and food. Mom and I felt we needed to eat. So, I had some leftover curry-stew chicken and rice and tuna pasta salad from…err Thursday.

And some…brownies and crescents later.

Disclaimer: All conversations heavily paraphrased.

I feel like I’m coobook-author-name dropping. *sigh*