Challenge Update

For this past year, I gave myself an unofficial challenge (unofficial because I wasn't yet blogging, to make it official ;), to finally figure out how to make a delicious, light cake.  I'm a bakestress, and know my way around cookies of all types, yeast breads, quick breads and muffins, rolls, and many other confections.  Somehow I just couldn't wrap my head (or hands) around baking a cake that didn't turn out dense, heavy and unpleasant to eat.  My challenge then: learn how to bake a good cake by the time Snorzy's first birthday rolled around.  Up until late in February I didn't think I would be successful-- throughout the year, for every occasion and sometimes no occasion, I baked cake after cake, following all the advice I could find online and in books.  Still, each of my cakes turned out a bland brick.  Finally, I had a partial success with the Birthday Chocolate Cake from The Mom 100 by Katie Workman-- I made it for my father's birthday on February 19th, and it baked up perfect at first, and then got a little heavier when I put it in the fridge.

For Snorzy's birthday I made Zoe's Cupcakes from C is for Cooking (the Sesame Street cookbook), after a friend came over for dinner one night bringing those and they were the most delicious homemade cake I've had *ever*-- and from a kid's cookbook no less!  I think the secret to baking a tender cake for someone like me who just doesn't naturally have the touch with cakes is this: lots of dairy.  I used whole milk plain yogurt (the recipe called for a full cup, and this in addition to butter, not instead), and they came out soft and pillowy.  I also re-visited the chocolate cake from the Mom 100 (speaking of dairy, it calls for both sour cream and whole milk in addition to two sticks of butter) being even more careful to get all my ingredients room temperature and not over-mixing (my downfalls as a bakestress are absolutely over-mixing and over-baking), the cupcakes turned out lovely underneath but with overdone crunchy cookie-like tops, despite the fact that I baked them for 1 minute less than the minimum time given-- I think it's time to invest in an oven thermometer.  Overall, I was pleased with my progress, and now I believe that I can bake a yummy cake whenever one is called for (though I still would like to learn how to make a perfect butter cake, without all the added dairy).

All this by way of saying-- I can rise to a challenge, even when I don't do so well with it at first.

After a good start on my craft challenge, here have been my contributions to it for the past few weeks:
1. skipped, trying to believe that 'making' the list of curricula we'll use for the year really counts as making something
2. cast on and knit the first few rows of the right, front panel of Snorzy's rainbow sweater-- another case (as when I finished the back panel) of using my challenge to motivate a dull little piece of a project that otherwise would have caused me to stall
3.  used my craft time to send all the pictures in my phone to Walgreens so that I can print them and 'make' photo albums-- I don't know what other people do with their pictures, but I feel like I need an actual, paper photo record of every important moment (and some cute, less-important moments) of my children's lives

So now, I'm determined to actually, factually, un-ironically, make something in the upcoming week, start to finish, using yarn or fabric or art supplies.  Wish me luck and a visit from a muse, pictures to follow.