'Beasting' some baked goods

So... baking kinda weirds me out. To me, baking is more alchemy than chemistry - oh and maths. And NO ONE wants to do maths when cooking, least of all me. But for reasons I will explain later, the urge took me and I thought I'd give it a crack.

Now let me kinda defend myself when I say baking freaks me out... It's the 'exactness' of the whole thing. I have a few of mates who are very proficient at this - 2 who do it as a job, one who was (is) an extremely talented pastry chef and another who makes the best damn homemade cakes you'll see. Now, I look at these guys and wonder to myself "what's all the fuss about?", "Could I actually get interested in this baking malarkey?" and of course "there are some pretty cool toys that go along with baking... can I justify spending nine-hundy on a bitchin' cake mixer?!"

My cooking style is to tinker - you'll get a feel for this as I post more on GTAL (evident by the ABSOLUTE lack of recipes and therefore repeatability of my dishes). I like to add a dash of this, a spritz of that, a nob of something else and give it all a big mix up and see how it comes out at the end. Mostly, this works out quite well. Mostly. (There was only that one time when I made my wife's skin turn purple...) To me, baking doesn't really tolerate this style very much. You have to have the right amount of the shizzle to make the blah rise, but don't put too much blurgh in there otherwise it'll make the snarfle go poos. Uh, come again? But when given an opportunity, well a good reason actually, to give baking a crack for the first time since manual in Form 2, I thought "stuff it - ima give it a bash anyways."

Long story short, the good reason is for a non-profit group I am involved in to save some money by me spending a little time and effort. We were all given the same recipe and sent off on our own merry little way to make one or more banana loaves for the cause. I had the bright idea to make a gluten-free, dairy free variation. I personally don't like milk - the idea disgusts me. I like cheese, cream, ice cream, just not milk. Ew. The loaves are mainly going to be eaten by a bunch of city teenagers. You know the ones; identifiable by their pastiness, awesome attitudes and intolerance to pretty much every component of every food ever made. Ever. Hence the hippiness - NOT something I will be making a habit of. Trust me.

 

One of the things I was most interested in was to see if I could simply exchange the non-usual ingredients for the hippy stuff. So I followed the same recipe, i.e. I didn't go and find some special hairy-legged, unwashed-hair science experiment to make a small banana flavoured windowless building. I was keen to see if I could just swap stuff out and still make it work.

I'll be honest with you... I may have added a bit of stuff to- or modified the recipe in a couple of ways. JUST to keep the tinkering vibe. For example, I switched the regular sugar out for soft brown sugar and golden syrup. I added a little more banana than called for and there is a dump-load of walnuts and coconut thread in there. When these pasty little tumblr-bags eat this loaf, they're gonna lose a couple of inches in height. Yeah, that's right, inches - heard of 'em kids? There's 36 of 'em in a hard yard...but I doubt you've heard of those either.

I'm pretty light on baking type equipment - well, anything used for measuring really - couple that with the fact I needed to double the recipe for efficiency some serious number crunching was required. No kidding, there is long division and about 2/3 of the periodic table scribbled in the margins of the recipe. This is serious business.

I'll agree, they're not pretty. But hey - neither's your average hippy? (I can't substantiate this.) By the way... baking paper is your friend. I go through a 30m roll about every 3 months or so. I put it down when cooking ANYTHING. Try sticking it down on your sandwich grill next time. This technique saves lots of fights over whose responsibility the crusted "nuclear waste" cheese gluing the plates together is at the end of the night.

It doesn't look half bad. By crickey these kids better love it! Or, holy crap there'll be some fist shaking.

While I watch this there is a show on FoodTV with a bunch of restaurants being ambushed by all sorts of people with different diets - gluten-free being one of them. I seriously hope not ALL gluten intolerant people are as self-righteous as these jerks. I'm sure they're not. But MAN these guys are dicks.

Oddly enough, this last picture is of the single item in my kitchen that kicked off the idea that I might want to try baking again. It's something an old flatmate left behind when he moved out. Last time we shifted I very nearly threw it out, but I stopped. I thought to myself "I'll keep this, maybe I will do some baking one day". I've effectively been looking for a reason to do so since.

So, it's been a bit of a trip this baking thing. Not sure if it'll stick, but I'll keep an eye out for shrinking teens this weekend and see if the "Mmmmm & nod" moment happens - ultimately, it's that that drives me to keep cooking, to keep experimenting. Maybe I'd better explain that in another post...