sovay: (Default)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2010-03-09 02:58 am

But the sugarcane was plentiful and tea grows on every tree

Yesterday I made a hazelnut cake with pears and two kinds of cherries. Being the kind of recipe that involves a race between the folding speed of egg white and the laws of gravity, it left me with a number of egg yolks. Somehow this translated into the belief that a good solution to the surplus problem was a king cake. I had never made or even eaten one before; I got the recipe out of Gourmet. Apparently the result is a brioche bigger than my head. Hello, breakfast for the next ten days.

(And then I iced it with the prescribed combination of confectioner's sugar and condensed milk. In retrospect, that may have been a tactical error, and not only because the icing behaved like something out of a '50's B-movie and attempted to engulf the cooling rack. I may end up scraping most of it off, or at least replacing it with jam. I don't actually eat a lot of very sweet things. I realize that doesn't explain why I turned the last of the egg yolks into lemon curd, except that I wanted something to put on the king cake . . .)

Otherwise I spent the afternoon at the MFA with [livejournal.com profile] rushthatspeaks, who then introduced me to the really awesome pork bao sold by a bakery in Chinatown whose name I cannot remember, although I could find them by walking from Downtown Crossing. My brother and I watched Ghost Town (2008), a small delightful movie that reminded me strongly of the classic screwball comedies without being any kind of pastiche or homage; having mostly avoided The Office, I may have to watch its British original just for another angle on Ricky Gervais. And it is my mother's birthday tomorrow. (By now, today.) Fortunately, I have discovered a mystery series she hasn't already read.

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2010-03-09 05:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Cakes sound lovely, attack icing or no. Lucky you, to have king cake for breakfast for ten days.

Happy Birthday to your mother!

Hurrah for museum, movie, and bao!

On the subject of mysteries, did (either of) you ever read P.F. Chisholm's Sir Robert Carey novels? A Season of Knives, A Famine of Horses, A Surfeit of Guns, and A Plague of Angels. Set in the Anglo-Scottish Border country in the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and very nicely done. One character is Kinmont Willie's favourite niece; Marlowe and Shakespeare make appearances in the last one. I keep hoping to see A Quarreling of Lawyers in print, but it doesn't seem to be happening, sadly.