Do you bake?


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I bake... always been into cooking. My mother wouldn't let me cook when I was growing up, so when I moved out I tried to recreate her plain and bland dishes, and then began experimenting and moving past them. Of course I didn't realise that she was trying to raise two growing boys as a single mom, so what I mistook for a lack of talent was just frugal cooking. Still, my cooking improved greatly when I began trying to see what I could do. And I'm no master chef. I don't really watch real cooking shows much, but it's amazing what they can do. And then there's the anime Food Wars!, which just got its second season translated to English (third is out in Japanese only), and yeah, I'm not on their level. I'm not even sure their food is real. I'd love to see a real cooking program go behind the anime and try to do what the anime does, in real life, and see if the results can be replicated.

 

For the past couple Saturdays, I've actually been living a cooking dream I've had for years. To play Dungeons & Dragons as the Dungeon Master, and to cook for my players. I thought I'd have to wait until we had a bigger place to do that, but I said F it and started doing it anyway. The chili was a resounding success, but I burnt my sausage and rigatoni casserole. I also forgot the tomatoes I usually use to stretch the sauce. But everyone said it was good. This Saturday, I'm making soup in the slow cooker. What I do is... I have 9 signature dishes I'm rotating. Three soups (two are chili), three casseroles, and three rice skillet dishes. I pick one from each category, and make a poll 2 days in advance on the group's Facebook page. I let my players choose what I cook. When I choose something, that thing is blacklisted until all dishes have been prepared. They chose chili first, then the pasta. Now soup. The other chili (white chicken chili) will be the only soup choice until they pick it, and then the options go down to 2. If they go through all the soups, it'll either go to 2 choices, or I'll nominate 2 from one category. Now, if they tell me a dish in particular just does not interest them and never will, I'll take it out of the rotation. Also, I don't charge them anything for the food or the game. I only have two players, my best friend and a mutual friend of ours. The truth is, I'm just starting out as a DM, and my skills are not that good. The food makes up for some of that. But we do have fun. If I had a bigger place, and I was more confident in my DMing skills, I would consider opening my table to more players, though if it's gonna be strangers, I would ask for a small fee, just to cover the ingredients. I'm talking like $5 a person. I wouldn't be making a profit. Four players would be $20, and that would pretty much cover the ingredients. I'd be breaking even.

 

My wife's the master baker (not really master, she's just really good). Her claim to fame is the Rockband drum kit cake. Basically, her best friend from high school got us all into the Rockband games (like Guitar Hero, but with drums and vocals). He became our drummer. So she made four round cakes and decorated them, and a fifth cake made the pieces that connected the drum pads and the controller part in the middle. On top of all that, she made a kick pedal out of graham crackers covered in melted chocolate, and true to form, she snapped it in half (the first kick pedals were all plastic and prone to breaking). I took pictures the whole way, and wrote it up on WikiHow. WikiHow featured it, and it got tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of views. People all over the world were attempting this cake. It got so big that, I guess to protect our anonymity, WikiHow took our names out of it, and replaced our pictures with drawings. I'm not bothered, nobody "owns" anything on that site. It's like Wikipedia in that regard. If you search "Rockband drum cake" I'm quite sure it (and imitations) will come up. Hers is the best looking I've seen, but I'm sure someone's done a better one by now. She's made a ton of cool gaming-related cakes, including one for Portal 2 — just to celebrate the game's release. It's your basic black forest cake, except she cut it in half and put the halves up against mirrors, and smeared blue and orange icing to sort of make portals on the mirrors. When placed side by side, since the mirror made the cake look whole (it really did), it made the cake look like it was sitting inside a portal. And she could have taken the easy way out and cut between the puffs, but she didn't.  She went puff to puff, even cut the cherries in half, pressing them right up against the mirror. It was perfect. If only she could have delivered it to Valve. They would have loved it. I think Epic has a studio a couple hours from us, here in North Carolina, but I'm not sure what they make there, and I'm sure it's nothing we play.

 

But I've gotten some baking jobs, too. Where my wife excels in design, I excel in flavor. My takeaway from the Rockband drum kit cake was that while it looked amazing on the table, it just tasted like chocolate cake. There was nothing special about the taste. So I got his daughter (who has been a niece to me since she was 2) and asked her what kind of cake I should make their family for Christmas. I showed her all my flavor combinations. She loves mint, so she said chocolate mint. I'd never had a chocolate mint cake, and she hadn't, either (she was 12 at the time). So I said, I'll do it. I'll make a chocolate mint cake. The cake itself was just chocolate, but for the frosting, where the Wilton's buttercream recipe calls for vanilla extract, I used peppermint extract instead. I was careful not to overdo it, because extracts are all concentrated, and that one especially. I got the mixture just right, frosted the cake (two 8" layers), and then topped it with the peppermint M&Ms. For the first year, I separated the red and white, and then made alternating concentric rings. For the second year, I just dumped the bag out over the cake and let them fall where they landed, more or less. (It looked better actually!) For the third year, we couldn't find the peppermint M&Ms, so we just went without. This year I think I will do Bundt bombs. Bundt bombs are a cake concept I did for my wife for her birthday a few years ago. I wanted to do chocolate covered cherries, but couldn't find them that time of year, so I used Ferrero Rochers. I'm allergic to hazelnut, so I flagged them. (I was going to use cherry frosting for the cake, but ended up using caramel frosting.) Bundt bombs are easy. Make your Bundt cake, and then take a spoon and dig out a hole. Just stick a teaspoon in three times to make a triangle, and pull the wedge out. Break off the 'cap,' put a candy in, and cover it back up. Then frost. Now your cake has a candy in it. Bundt cakes are good for this because they have those ridges, and if you tell people it's a Bundt bomb (or whatever you want to call it), they'll cut the cake by the ridges. So next year I'll probably put the mint truffle Hershey's Kisses in a Bundt cake.

 

Sorry I don't have pictures... hope the descriptions were adequate...

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On 16/2/2018 at 1:55 AM, dragontology said:

I bake... always been into cooking. My mother wouldn't let me cook when I was growing up, so when I moved out I tried to recreate her plain and bland dishes, and then began experimenting and moving past them. Of course I didn't realise that she was trying to raise two growing boys as a single mom, so what I mistook for a lack of talent was just frugal cooking. Still, my cooking improved greatly when I began trying to see what I could do. And I'm no master chef. I don't really watch real cooking shows much, but it's amazing what they can do. And then there's the anime Food Wars!, which just got its second season translated to English (third is out in Japanese only), and yeah, I'm not on their level. I'm not even sure their food is real. I'd love to see a real cooking program go behind the anime and try to do what the anime does, in real life, and see if the results can be replicated.

 

For the past couple Saturdays, I've actually been living a cooking dream I've had for years. To play Dungeons & Dragons as the Dungeon Master, and to cook for my players. I thought I'd have to wait until we had a bigger place to do that, but I said F it and started doing it anyway. The chili was a resounding success, but I burnt my sausage and rigatoni casserole. I also forgot the tomatoes I usually use to stretch the sauce. But everyone said it was good. This Saturday, I'm making soup in the slow cooker. What I do is... I have 9 signature dishes I'm rotating. Three soups (two are chili), three casseroles, and three rice skillet dishes. I pick one from each category, and make a poll 2 days in advance on the group's Facebook page. I let my players choose what I cook. When I choose something, that thing is blacklisted until all dishes have been prepared. They chose chili first, then the pasta. Now soup. The other chili (white chicken chili) will be the only soup choice until they pick it, and then the options go down to 2. If they go through all the soups, it'll either go to 2 choices, or I'll nominate 2 from one category. Now, if they tell me a dish in particular just does not interest them and never will, I'll take it out of the rotation. Also, I don't charge them anything for the food or the game. I only have two players, my best friend and a mutual friend of ours. The truth is, I'm just starting out as a DM, and my skills are not that good. The food makes up for some of that. But we do have fun. If I had a bigger place, and I was more confident in my DMing skills, I would consider opening my table to more players, though if it's gonna be strangers, I would ask for a small fee, just to cover the ingredients. I'm talking like $5 a person. I wouldn't be making a profit. Four players would be $20, and that would pretty much cover the ingredients. I'd be breaking even.

 

My wife's the master baker (not really master, she's just really good). Her claim to fame is the Rockband drum kit cake. Basically, her best friend from high school got us all into the Rockband games (like Guitar Hero, but with drums and vocals). He became our drummer. So she made four round cakes and decorated them, and a fifth cake made the pieces that connected the drum pads and the controller part in the middle. On top of all that, she made a kick pedal out of graham crackers covered in melted chocolate, and true to form, she snapped it in half (the first kick pedals were all plastic and prone to breaking). I took pictures the whole way, and wrote it up on WikiHow. WikiHow featured it, and it got tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of views. People all over the world were attempting this cake. It got so big that, I guess to protect our anonymity, WikiHow took our names out of it, and replaced our pictures with drawings. I'm not bothered, nobody "owns" anything on that site. It's like Wikipedia in that regard. If you search "Rockband drum cake" I'm quite sure it (and imitations) will come up. Hers is the best looking I've seen, but I'm sure someone's done a better one by now. She's made a ton of cool gaming-related cakes, including one for Portal 2 — just to celebrate the game's release. It's your basic black forest cake, except she cut it in half and put the halves up against mirrors, and smeared blue and orange icing to sort of make portals on the mirrors. When placed side by side, since the mirror made the cake look whole (it really did), it made the cake look like it was sitting inside a portal. And she could have taken the easy way out and cut between the puffs, but she didn't.  She went puff to puff, even cut the cherries in half, pressing them right up against the mirror. It was perfect. If only she could have delivered it to Valve. They would have loved it. I think Epic has a studio a couple hours from us, here in North Carolina, but I'm not sure what they make there, and I'm sure it's nothing we play.

 

But I've gotten some baking jobs, too. Where my wife excels in design, I excel in flavor. My takeaway from the Rockband drum kit cake was that while it looked amazing on the table, it just tasted like chocolate cake. There was nothing special about the taste. So I got his daughter (who has been a niece to me since she was 2) and asked her what kind of cake I should make their family for Christmas. I showed her all my flavor combinations. She loves mint, so she said chocolate mint. I'd never had a chocolate mint cake, and she hadn't, either (she was 12 at the time). So I said, I'll do it. I'll make a chocolate mint cake. The cake itself was just chocolate, but for the frosting, where the Wilton's buttercream recipe calls for vanilla extract, I used peppermint extract instead. I was careful not to overdo it, because extracts are all concentrated, and that one especially. I got the mixture just right, frosted the cake (two 8" layers), and then topped it with the peppermint M&Ms. For the first year, I separated the red and white, and then made alternating concentric rings. For the second year, I just dumped the bag out over the cake and let them fall where they landed, more or less. (It looked better actually!) For the third year, we couldn't find the peppermint M&Ms, so we just went without. This year I think I will do Bundt bombs. Bundt bombs are a cake concept I did for my wife for her birthday a few years ago. I wanted to do chocolate covered cherries, but couldn't find them that time of year, so I used Ferrero Rochers. I'm allergic to hazelnut, so I flagged them. (I was going to use cherry frosting for the cake, but ended up using caramel frosting.) Bundt bombs are easy. Make your Bundt cake, and then take a spoon and dig out a hole. Just stick a teaspoon in three times to make a triangle, and pull the wedge out. Break off the 'cap,' put a candy in, and cover it back up. Then frost. Now your cake has a candy in it. Bundt cakes are good for this because they have those ridges, and if you tell people it's a Bundt bomb (or whatever you want to call it), they'll cut the cake by the ridges. So next year I'll probably put the mint truffle Hershey's Kisses in a Bundt cake.

 

Sorry I don't have pictures... hope the descriptions were adequate...

Wow thanks for the lenthy description! Everything reads amazing... But you know, this is teh interwebz, so we needs pics or it didn't happen. 

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18 hours ago, Draconian Guppy said:

Wow thanks for the lenthy description! Everything reads amazing... But you know, this is teh interwebz, so we needs pics or it didn't happen. 

Read you loud and clear. I don't photograph my dinners, so I don't have any of those. I used to photograph food I made like that, but nothing current. No one wants to see that anyway. I don't cook dinners for presentation, so let's just skip all that.

 

Cool thing about Google Photos, I can just search cake, and anything Google thinks is a cake, it serves up. It's not 100% accurate, but... so many pictures. I'd just make it an album and share that, but... lots of family photos. So... here's an Imgur album. Though I misremembered about the cherries. That may have been another cake... or an idea that we had that didn't pan out. I don't recall. Anyway, that's a lot more cakes than I mentioned. Basically, she started out making dinosaur/dragon cakes from this guide, you cut up two round cakes a certain way and decorate... they don't look good, but they'll impress a toddler. She got into cutting and started making Guitar Hero guitar cakes. I'd post pictures of those, but she always personalised them with the nephew or niece's name. (The niece who got one also got a real one I painted the same way the cake was frosted. Brand new GH guitar, I got GH3 with the guitar at Family Dollar for $5, tossed the game (her stepfather and I both already had it), took the guitar apart, painted it, and put it back together.) Then when Rockband came out, she did the Rockband guitar for our friend. Then the drums for our niece's stepfather. And she's been doing them since, getting better as she went. I've only started in the last few years. Baking them is not hard. Making the frosting is not hard. Decorating isn't that hard, but decorating and making the cake look good... that takes patience and practice.

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55 minutes ago, firey said:

I get baked... does that count?

Do you get baked and bake? :D Or did you bake then get baked? :iiam:

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  • 2 months later...

@Brys   showing off my 1/3 of italianness  , balls in your court mate

 

 

 

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Cornicione!

 

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I don't remember what this is, but was on my camera roll:

 

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ahh I remember, coffee + cocoa + paprika dry rub

 

 

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my gods lunch:

 

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0aw2FEW.jpg

 

Sfogliatelle 

 

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Sausage, sweet corn and ricotta !

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15 minutes ago, satukoro said:

All of your baked goods look awesome!

(ps. hit the side of your fridge with a mr clean eraser or some windex)

uh oh ?

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2 hours ago, Draconian Guppy said:

uh oh ?

I just realized the picture that shows the side of your fridge is from december lol (op)

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Just now, satukoro said:

I just realized the picture that shows the side of your fridge is from december lol (op)

Valid comment though ? 

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17 minutes ago, Draconian Guppy said:

Valid comment though ?  

I guess, it depends on whether or not your fridge needs a good windexing on that side closest to the camera.

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