Misadventures in baking

Have you ever read a recipe and thought "Dang. This is too easy to possibly ever work."? I did that twice this weekend. Once worked beautifully and the other failed so miserably I almost cried.


Let's start w/my total failure. Angel Food cake cupcakes. This is the recipe I used:

• 1 cup cake flour {spooned and leveled}
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 12 large egg whites, room temperature
• 1 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 375°.  Place flour and salt in a sieve set over a bowl; sift into bowl, and set aside.  With a mixer, beat egg whites on medium-high until foamy, about 1 minute
2. Add cream of tartar; beat until soft peaks form.  Continue to beat, gradually adding sugar; beat  until stiff peaks form, about 2 minutes.  Add vanilla; beat to combine.
3. Gently transfer egg-white mixture to a large, wide bowl.  In four batches, using the sieve again, sift flour mixture over egg-white mixture while turning the bowl, use a rubber spatula to fold in the mixture by cutting down the center and coming up the sides.
4. Gently spoon batter into the cupcake papers-no need to spray with cooking spray, the cupcakes will not stick.  Bake for 15 to 20 minutes-until cake is golden and springs back when lightly pressed.  Cool cupcakes on racks.

Sounds easy enough, right?

NOT.

I think my fatal error was in the egg whites. I'd read on some food blogs that you could easily swap out egg whites for the Egg Beaters egg whites. Saves some $ and saves some time. Win win. Again, NOT. I carefully measured 36 tablespoons (3 tbsp per egg white) and folded (with success!) and made the batter. Baked them 15 minutes and they looked like this:

And they tasted like egg. Nothing but egg. Guess who HATES eggs? Me. So that was a total and complete failure. Well, wait. I take that back. It's not a total failure because Al LOVES EGGS and thought these were okay. I sent them to work with him this morning to eat with some jam. Not gonna let them go to waste!

But want to know what wasn't a total cooking failure? No Knead Bread. There are tons and tons of blog posts written about it so take the time to Google it and be amazed. It's very hands-off but you have to baby sit it a little. Not so much, though, that I won't be making a loaf every week now. I got a little side tracked visiting w/friends last night so we got home late. Which means I baked my bread late. Which means at 1am I was slicing off a piece of bread to eat b/c there was NO WAY I was going to be up at 1am baking bread and not eat a slice. It's perfection. So so good and reminds me a little of sourdough bread. I can only assume it's b/c of the fermentation of the yeast. Anyway. You have to try it b/c it's awesome.

And look how pretty it is in a dark kitchen w/a cell phone camera:

I cannot wait to get home tonight so I can eat more!