cimorene

I sort-of-accidentally made a double batch of walnut shortbread yesterday (slightly more walnut, replaced ½ the vanilla extract with almond extract; in future I would leave the vanilla but increase the almond extract, maybe try with different nuts to test? A mixture of almond and walnut?) according to this recipe, having specifically looked for a recipe with measurements in grams so we could weigh the ingredients.

It uses egg yolks, so Wax decided to make meringues with the whites. She had a total of four whites, and they remained gritty (which means the sugar was added too fast) and refused to un-liquid (which means they were contaminated with a bit of yolk somewhere), so we decided the only way to save the ingredients was to make them into a cake. (We didn't know why they failed yesterday; I just looked for a video that explains meringue failure today.) Wax's favorite miniature cake (/cake in a mug) recipe uses equal quantities of sugar and flour, so she put the same weight of flour in as the sugar (we later realized the recipe is the same volume so this resulted in a cake much less sweet than her mug cake). Then she consulted our cake recipes to pick how much oil to put in and added some cocoa as well. Full of whimsy, we baked the cake in a spring-form bundt pan, and the result turned out... sort of halfway a brownie, but halfway a cake? The top got all wrinkly like a brownie, but with a dramatic fallen-in bit where the outer edges stuck to the pan. They were sort of crystallized. After breaking them off, we turned the cake over and it's sort of brownie height. A bit fluffier. And not as sweet, but it's got coffee in it too and it's a sort of mild coffee cake. Edible.

Anyway, we thought about the semi-ASMR videos we've been watching on youtube of professional Korean pastry chefs making desserts (the algorithm showed them to us presumably because of the America's Test Kitchen and Epicurious stuff), J'adore and Joconde's Baking. We've seen Joconde in particular explaining about the ideal temperature and texture of butter for cake using a laser infrared thermometer, and that reminded us we want one. In fact we don't have ANY thermometer but an oven thermometer, because Wax used to use a glass one for bread and it broke years ago. We tried to buy an electric one and like... I guess we never got it to work? Or it ran out of batteries like right away. Anyway! I checked the Ridiculously Posh Finnish Kitchen Store Whose Invoices Look Like Classy Wedding Invitations (Eiring, trilingual fi/sv/en) that we found one time by accident, and they have one of course, which enabled us to doublecheck the Finnish name for them. Theirs costs a hundred bucks, but they are typically used in construction and Wax found one by Bosch for fifty bucks from Motonet.

UNRELATED: we bought two raised bed boxes today so we will have somewhere to grow vegetables later! Last year everywhere in town sold out of them well before planting time for vegetables and herbs, so we made sure to go early this year.