Baking

Here, I'm baking a cake almost every day. What I bake are new sorts of cakes, with "experimental" recipes. I find them looking at some interersting blogs. The first ones were related in Gloubiblog, recipes she was passing on or that she modified, in accordance with her gloubiboulga principe... 

I tried two. One with crystallized fennel. It was so soft, it was an ovation. Soft, in texture and taste, due to the use of both olive oil and blond sugar - I must add that it was an AOC and medal oil, produced here in Provence, at Aix-en-Provence. Both children and growns up found it delicious, and my little neighbour - a lovely little girl - was totally addict. She ate slice after slice, greedily.

The crystallized fennel with vanilla. My favourite vanilla is the Tahiti's one, whose pods are really pulpy (thick?) and wet. The flavour and the fragrance can't be compared to the other vanillas, it's strong, spicy but so sweet. I first discovered them in a well-known parisian grocer's, Izrael, the Ali Baba's cavern for spices lovers, where you can find the subtlest and rarest ones - and the most expensive too..... But a Tahiti vanilla pod is the equivalent of several Madagascar ones, for example, so you only use pieces of your pod, and not the whole one.

Mmmmmmm. Just hot from the oven, it filled the air and was fragant with a good scent of  fresh  butter....  when there wasn't an ounce of ...... just oil only.......

("it filled the air and was fragant with a good scent of fresh butter".... I must say - well maybe there are beautiful english expressions for it - that I'm so disappointed with this translation. It 's so beautiful and literary in french when we use these expressions - specially for cooking scents. "Il embaumait et fleurait bon le beurre frais"......... for language lovers, you can only be upset when you can't translate it..... because it gives off immediately dream pictures in the head. It's very specific and the sound of the words contribute to it too. You miss something in english. Sad.)

 "En habits de fête"..... (like we say in french :P)

 

So the same day, I also baked a chocolate cake, but in place of butter and flour, canned chickpeas mixed with milk were used. I love it a lot, really light. My neighbours' children don't really like chocolate cakes, so I can't tell, and they prefered the fennel one ; for my mother, there wasn't enough sugar. But the others who tasted it were addict, the parents, as well as my best friend, who previously visited me from Italy.

Now, let me introduce the third one. Found in another blog (les miam miam d'Annabel) With chestnut squash and orange........ I was really attracted. But I made two mistakes baking it. First, with my mother's oven, when you change the cooking program, it automatically puts on the last temperature used for this program..... I didn't know that, since I only have a little oven. And once I had put my cake in the oven, choosen program and temperature, I wanted to change the program......... so.......... 15 minutes before the end, I saw it was 240°C, and not 180°C like needed.............. Aarrrrghhh !!!!! it rose, at first, with the heat, but after that the excessive heat hardened it with a little crust, so it stopped to rise....   Luckily, I found then my second mistake, which corrected the first one. In fact not really corrected, but helped it to taste better. In fact, when I weighed the mashed squash, I went out to get soft brown sugar at my neighbour's... and I stayed there for an hour, drinking Rooibos tea, lefting the mashed squash in the scales. When I came back, I forgot that I had around 400g (well 360 I think) instead of 300..... 

But as a result, it helped the cake to taste better, and to have a pudding texture. Hot, I found it rather good. The day after - today- it was really good, like a true chestnut squash pudding, with strong orange flavour. My neighbours were amazed, they were found of it. Their little girl, who was reluctant after hearing the word "chestnut squash", found it delicious. And they gave me all the chestnut squashes they had left, so that I could bake it again this week-end !!!!! But the same cake, the failure!  not the one I should have baked...... So i'm facing now a new and harder challenge, how to deliberately fail a cake...... Don't know if I can get the same result... it'll be the surprise !