It's official, I really am in love with the King Arthur Flour Company. I check the blog daily (okay, maybe two or three times a day...), have bought and memorized all the cookbooks, and am asking for a subscription to the Baking Sheet for my birthday. Why do I do this?
Because everything is so good.
I love being able to trust a recipe. Recipes abound online, and I am always optimistic about trying them. However, I've made some pretty horrible things from the web, ranging from microwaved cakes to brownies made mostly out of bananas to weird chicken concoctions. I've also found what I'm sure were great recipes that turned out to be nearly impossible to do, like the lemon coffeecake with sticky, persnickety dough I had to cut up into a million squares, or the cupcakes baked in ice cream cones that ended up dripping all over the bottom of the oven.
And those are simple! It should be easy to roll out dough, cut it up, stuff it in a pan, and stick it in the oven. I usually bake with endless patience, and I follow every direction. Somehow, though, something always goes wrong.
Not with KAF, though. (This is turning out to be a total plug for them, I truly don't have any affiliation except for a deep love.) I made this cake, a fancy, layered, complicated cake, in three hours for a birthday dinner- dinner with my then-boyfriend and his parents, no less. I frantically whipped things together, I didn't have enough cake pans, I didn't have a carrying case, I didn't have mini chocolate chips, I ran out of butter, I put it under a salad bowl and seat belted it in the passenger seat for a 20-minute car ride...
And it turned out perfectly.
I made it again here at college, it was the first (and only) baking project I've done in the college kitchen. It's very strange not to have constant access to a kitchen and ingredients, and right now I haven't baked as much as I'd like. I'm still getting the lay of the land. This experience baking was just as frantic as before, only this time I didn't have any cake pans, and had only two hours because I had been locked out! (I stole an extra hour, though. Shh.) It still came out perfectly- though the picture doesn't do it justice.
I carried it down three blocks of city streets, uncovered, and stored it in our miniature refrigerator. I think this is becoming a pattern with this cake, and my 100% hit rate led me to my final decision:
I carried it down three blocks of city streets, uncovered, and stored it in our miniature refrigerator. I think this is becoming a pattern with this cake, and my 100% hit rate led me to my final decision:
King Arthur Flour is magical.
Today's good thing of the day is mail. Mail is fantastic. Getting a letter or a package is one of the best feelings in the world, especially when it's from somebody you love. "Brown paper packages tied up with string/ These are a few of my favorite things." Maria said it all.
And related KAF Blog Post
