butter

I have this habit of baking whenever I'm bored. Especially with something like bread, the whole process from start to finish can take over 4 hours. It's a great way to kill time when you have no plans, the weekend is stretching out in front of you, and there's lots of quality programming to listen to on your local NPR station. Or if it takes you kind of a while to get going on weekends and you don't actually start mixing the ingredients until 5pm at which point the quality programming is mostly over and the ever-boring Prarie Home Companion is about to start, bread rising time is a great opportunity to catch up on DVD box sets of awesome old TV shown.

Wow, my life's sort of pathetic.

anyway, moving on...

The thing about baking is that after you've done it for a while, especially if you're using really good recipes, like the ones in the awesome book that Meghan bought me, you start to understand what makes good baked goods taste so good. And it's gross. Pie Crust? Is basically butter with a tiny bit of flour mixed in. Those amazing blueberry muffins? Called for an entire tub of sour cream. That cinnamon bread? Used a carton of heavy cream.

Put another way, can you imagine eating a quarter stick of butter, just plain? It's repuslive. But if you cut yourself a slice of pie, you could easily be eating that, plus all the sugar and carbs and other crap that's in the filling.

I was thinking about this today because my mother's birthday is this weekend and I've been tasked with baking her a cake. Normally, I make what a cousin affectionately refers to as the chocolate thing (only modification: I use cointreau instead of rum, because I have a bottle of cointreau.) and it tastes fantastic. The only thing is, it doesn't *look* very impressive. Even when it's the tastiest thing on the table, which it often is, it is not the first dessert people go for. And I've been reading all about frosting techniques (I really do read the cookbook for fun in the evenings) and I want to try a cake with frosting. Preferably one with lots of chocolate, and maybe lemon? I dunno, I've felt like making lemon curd lately. But oh my god is there a lot of butter and cream involved. I'm going to make this cake and then be so grossed out by what's actually in it that I won't be able to eat it.