Recipes

Have you noticed that the recipes that have the fussiest needs--desserts--tend to be the ones with the least detailed directions?

I admit, desserts are a bit like Russian Roulette for me--sometimes they're good, sometimes they're frightening--so this is not my strong suit, but I do actually cook quite a bit and I'm generally good at following recipes, but the zucchini chocolate cake recipe just about did me in. First, it said to beat the sugar and butter together until "light." I don't know what that means. Color? Texture? Floating? I texted a friend who didn't know either. I opted to just leave the mixer running for a couple minutes and see what I ended up with. It turned into a sort of grainy substance that looked remarkably like Splenda, but I think the flakes qualified as "light" and nothing else seemed to be going to happen, so I called it good. Second, it said to melt the chocolate and oil in a saucepan. Fine, I can do that. We have to use powdered cocoa instead of baking chocolate squares, but the cocoa tin has instructions for that, so I diligently heated it up. AT NO TIME did the recipe say to do anything else with this chocolate sauce! Now I went on the assumption that it was indeed meant to be added to the batter & wasn't just a side project like they often do for kids (Hey kids! Let's try melting chocolate to see what happens), so I mixed it in with the zucchini--which was technically supposed to be "folded" and not "mixed" but I don't really have a separate "fold" technique--except for laundry. The directions explicitly stated to not overmix--apparently this would form gluten strands which is good for bread and bad for cakes--but if it had told me to add the chocolate syrup, say, before I added the flour/cocoa/salt/baking powder (which had to all be mixed into a different bowl before adding because I just wasn't making a big enough mess as it was), then I wouldn't have needed to stir as much as I did. I at least didn't use the mixer after the butter/sugar episode, so maybe that will help.

This is why I don't like making desserts. If pasta sauce isn't good, you can add stuff. If soup isn't good, you can add stuff. If you happen to like garlic, you can add extra garlic. If you want less salt, you can add less salt. Even bread doesn't need "exactness." But change something in a cake, and I end up with a chocolate frisbee. That seems a little rigid to me.

So far my cake looks good, and the frosting is good, so that should help redeem it if there was a gluten or chocolate syrup issue. Now I just need to frost the thing. I dug out one of the cake servers we received for our wedding nearly 3 years ago, and which hadn't even been opened. It's usually a few years inbetween my attempts to frost two-layer cakes. I'm sure it's not as hard as it seems, but no matter how many toothpicks I put in the darn thing, I generally have one layer sliding off the other within about an hour, and crumbs everywhere. I've even passed a cake off as having "chocolate cookie" frosting because of all the crumbs I had lodged in the frosting, but I thought a zucchini chocolate cake was a good reason to try again. Once you've put squash in a cake, you've lowered the bar so far that nothing else is going to matter......