Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Sarah can't bake.

I must have been absent that day of Kindergarten math class when they taught us how to measure.

I was just in the kitchen, in the bubble of solo baking, unaware of the fact that time was passing outside of my little 3 X 6 cubicle. (It just took me over an hour to get that cake in the oven.) I was covered with flour and batter, standing over bowls and measuring cups and spoons, laughing and laughing and laughing about how much time I was wasting on this cake which, when the buzzer dings (right, like I use a buzzer), will be gross cake.

Literally. Back in my Cambridge days, Dee (one of my roommates at the time and also one of my very best friends) and I used to make dinner together. We’d pull out our secret weapon, cake mix, and the accessories, egg whites, applesauce, and Splenda (wait, had Splenda been discovered yet?). We’d mix our cake (or cookies) with one goal in mind: fat free. It would be chewy, too sweet, and kinda gross; it would be dinner. We called it Gross Cake/Cookies. “What do you want for dinner tonight? Gross Cookies?” “Sure!”

FAT FREE FAT FREE FAT FREE, the words would haunt me, back in my obsessed with fat free food days (pre low carb revolution—so we must’ve used real sugar rather than Splenda).

So…back to the kitchen. I started out deciding that I would be extra careful with my measuring for this cake. But I just couldn’t give up my substitutions. So I substituted Splenda for sugar (but I measured!), some whole wheat flour for regular (measured!), 1.5 jumbo eggs for 2 large (leaving out part of the second yolk), and, of course, apple sauce for oil. (Those who know anything about dieting will know that I’m mixing diets and mixing diets means canceling out the benefits of both. Y’see, applesauce has the sugar of the sugar I omitted—so I’m mixing low carb (i.e. Splenda) with low fat (i.e. applesauce), and, quite frankly, that’s dumb. And the whole wheat flour in a cake—yuck.)

So I’m following the recipe just as it’s written. (Well, not mixing the dry and wet ingredients separately doesn’t count because we all know that’s just a hoax.) (Oh, cranberries are really hard to chop, so I put them in whole.)

But then it says to pour the batter into tins. Batter (b'lilah raka)? I’ve got thick, thick dough (b'lila avah); it’s practically bread (it's got an entirely different halachic status--I'm taking a whole class on the laws of bread). So I took out some and made scones. And then I added water to the rest to make it into batter. And I added a drop more applesauce. I would’ve added more orange juice, but I had drunk it already. But then this new batter tasted kind of bland, so I added more Splenda (unmeasured).

And now…the cakes! (drumroll please)

The scones are….quite good!

The cake is…well, YOU probably wouldn’t eat it. But as one of the co-founders of Gross Cake, I’m looking forward to my low fat low car treat!

3 comments:

Menachem said...

wow, you really got me in the mood for some gross cake...

hey ben, what's grosser than gross cake? half a gross cake! hahahaha... not funny..

Anonymous said...

Sarah:

If you can find a way to make gross cookies without eggs, I'll try some.

David Sands

Sarah said...

Dave, where there's a will, there's a way! I'm sure it can be done. --Sar

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