Thoughts on recreational reading.

So on Friday night I finished Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. You might have heard of this book as it's a few years old by now. Julie Powell started a blog after she decided to make all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I in a single year. She had quite the challenging experience doing so in a small loft kitchen in Long Island City, and apparently also quite the supply budget given the cost of some of the ingredients.

I'm no Julia Child, nor even a Julie Powell. But I would like to up the number of recipes I can make without a cookbook, and I decided that my next refinement project is going to be a tasty sour cream chocolate cake. It's a "refinement project" because, for those of you who don't live at 5280 feet, fine-tuning any baking recipe means you're going to have to make and adjust it at least three times before you get even close to the substance it's supposed to resemble. The high-altitude bakers' advice:

1) First make the recipe as it is, and note what goes wrong.
I completed that step today. The center of the cake sunk, unsurprisingly given the typical high-altitude baking experience, and by the time the center of the cake was done, the edges were a bit dry. This is standard cake-baking here in CO; it's how most bakers roll. Many Colorado children spend their entire pre-flatland lives believing the indentation in every layer cake is just a frosting reservoir. Here's myself and my sous-chef, working on the project:


2) Adjust to add more liquid and less leavening (read: baking soda). Also, consider baking at 15-25 degrees higher than the recommended temperature.

This will be cake 2.0, in a few weeks once we polish off the first semi-failure and I get through tech week of the show I'm stage-managing. I'll let you know how that part goes in a future post.

3) Find a frosting recipe that doesn't totally suck.
I want a nice, thick frosting (no 'glazes' or 'icings') that is not sickly sweet and still maintains a good sour-cream taste. I tried Nigella Lawson's today and it was too darn sweet. The Best Recipe cookbook one produces a thin icing, not a frosting, and there's no sour cream in it at all so I'm throwing it out before even trying. If anyone out there has a good chocolate sour-cream frosting recipe, could you please throw it my way? I want the next cake to be a step forward in all respects.

Although I must say, even this first version was clearly enjoyed by all: