Baker's Bruises

Oh, KitchenAid, why can you not think for me, too? All else you touch is magic. But you are only as good as the crap or not-crap that I feed you.

Most of the time, I can take a meal from awesome to awful in a heartbeat--a little too much salt, a few too many pounds of buckwheat...you know how it goes. But I tend to do pretty good desserts. Under my belt this year (year 1 AK: After KitchenAid):

• White chocolate cake with raspberry filling and white chocolate French cream
• Senior Mints: deep chocolate cake with mint butter cream and dark ganache
• Umpteen batches of biscotti (banana and butterscotch, chocolate mint, macadamia, and my favorite--pistachio, cranberry, and lime with white chocolate drizzle)
• Mocha cake with coffee butter cream
• Chocolate mint  ice cream cake
• Chocolate pound cake with peanut butter frosting
• Coffee marshmallows (that's right--homemade marshmallows a million times better than the store bought kind...so much so that I may use them to make homemade Peeps this year)
• Apple cake with maple butter cream
• Carrot cake with homemade cream cheese

In the past? Homemade meringue cookies. Brownie top cookies (they taste just like that fudgy, shiny top layer of brownie, which chunks of heath and butterscotch), chocolate pot de creme, pecan pie, and croissant/cherry/white chocolate bread pudding. And? I am the queen of lemon meringue pie. I also do a pretty good lemon chiffon and French silk.

But today? Today, what should have been spectacular became so-so. Rather than trusting myself to adjust a recipe I know like the back of my hand, I started with an unfamiliar recipe, and what should have been easy, the Elvis biscotti--banana, peanut butter, and chocolate chip biscotti--scared me. It was a cookie without the creaming process, that seemed more like a soft quick bread than a cookie. It used oil, not butter. It had the sugar in with the dry ingredients. It used white sugar for banana bread, instead of brown sugar. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. So I fixed it.

The result: biscuits instead of biscotti. Clunky instead of crunchy. Chewy mini loaf instead of crispy dipper.  *Sigh* It had so much potential. I mean, it's not gross by any stretch of the imagination. But it's definitely more savory than sweet, for which I blame my self-righteous trading of half the white for brown sugar. Oh. And I doubled the recipe, succumbing to the fallacy that I can double the output by doubling the ingredients. For you pastry virgins? That no work. I don't know why. Alton does, though. Either way, it's a chemistry thing, and I was its pool boy today.

So today we have breakfast biscuits. Thursday, though, I am making honey marshmallows, and Chemistry should watch its back. I have a candy thermometer and some Silpat, and I am not afraid to use them.