A Rose By Any Other Name

...would taste mostly like honey, as it turns out. TRUE FACT!

It's less than a week to my first finals due date, which means that I have to be on my A-game. In regards to procrastination, that is. And since I've realized that I'm not going to get anymore actual work done tonight on badass mysterious female Restoration playwright Mary Pix, I might as well do some catching up on the cooking. And just in case you were wondering, I'm not overstating the awesomeness here. Or the mystery. We only know when she was born because we know how old she was when she got married. And we only know when she died because there was a benefit performance for her estate. And we only know that she killed all the rabid wombats in London because London is no longer plagued by wombats, rabid or otherwise.

But, uh, I was probably talking about a recipe I did. Many moons ago (well, two weeks) I decided I should return to the dessert section of Shakespeare's Kitchen and try my hand at some baking. My various cookie attempts had all turned out strangely poorly, so I thought it would be a good time to try again with 1610 Rose Cakes. Despite the name, the Rose Cakes are actually cookies and the recipe only makes about 30 of them, not over sixteen hundred. Ok, the actual reason it's called that is because the recipe is from around 1610, from the personal cookbook of one Sarah Longe.

To make sugar Cakes 

Take a pound of butter, and wash it in rose-water, and halfe a pound of sugar, and halfe a douzen spoonefulls of thicke Cream, and the yelkes of 4 Eggs, and a little mace finely beaten, and as much fine flower as it will wett, and worke it well together then roll them out very thin, and cut them with a glasse, and pricke them very thicke with a great pin, and lay them on plates, and so bake them gently.
MISTRESS SARAH LONGE HER RECEIPT BOOKE

This is one of those recipes that I might be tempted to try from the original one day. Especially since, well, I wasn't terribly amazed by my results this time around. Not entirely sure who to blame for this one. I can sort of imagine Shakespeare trying them back in 1610. "Forsooth, Mistress Longe," he would sayeth, "these cakes seemed like a good idea at first, but alas, they were not. Verily, I am inspired to write Cymbeline."

OH! Almost forgot to mention: I picked up a new camera. My old one was a six year old point and shoot, and not exactly great at taking pictures indoors. The new one is already a million times more useful, and that's before I've actually gotten any good at using it. If nothing else, the pictures should have a lot less noise. Although you'll have to deal with me messing around with depth of field and trying to be all arty and out of focus and etc. Or at least, this is what I will tell you I was doing whenever I am forced to post a crap photo because it was all I had for an important step.

Segan's version of the Rose Cake recipe uses rose syrup instead of straight-up rose water. I didn't actually have rose syrup available, but the recipe contains a sub-recipe for a substitute: Rose water, non-rose water, and honey. It mostly tastes like honey.

Here we have Ariel just waiting to chow down on the main ingredients. Butter, mace, sugar, and some of the rose syrup. The rest is reserved for glazing later. Is glazing the right term? Brushing something syrupy onto a hot thing and letting it cool? Anyway.

Two eggs, separated and so yellow that they drained all the rest of the color from the world so they could be that much more yellow. Either that, or I discovered my favorite camera setting ever. My point-and-shoot used to do this as well, although it had the benefit that you could choose your colors as you went instead of choosing among the few pre-programmed into the camera. Ah well. Separating eggs is actually something that I'm pretty good at, and I was almost a little disappointed that the whites don't get used for anything. Because they were really, really separate.

Two cups of pastry flour lying in wait. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I purchased whole wheat pastry flour, which I guess makes my cookies healthy or something? I'm going with magically healthy.

WARNING: The images you are about to see are violent, and may disturb some viewers. That poor, poor butter. Taken from us before its time.

Here we have the results of the creaming. I know the safety section of my instruction manual says not to stick anything in the bowl while blending, but I find it so much easier to deal with this step if I use a spatula to  divert butter away from the walls of the bowl and back towards the beaters.

The eggs get tossed in one at a time, which isn't actually interesting enough to warrant a picture. I took one anyway because I wanted to take more pictures, so sue me.

The butter mixture mid-eggening. My butter diversion technique is unstoppable!

Once the eggs are taken care of, flour is next, one cup at a time. I get nervous about parts of recipes that say "until just mixed" or "just incorporated." I'm always terrified that I'll get to a point where I either have to give up and have clumps of unmixed ingredients or an overmixed mush that wasn't going to cook right.

Luckily, my mush just incorporated.

Here's where things get dicey. The modern version of the recipe calls for a flower-shaped cookie press. And I read that and thought "Oh, yeah, let me grab my flower-shaped cookie press, I keep it in the cookie-press drawer between the egg-shaped and gnu-shaped cookie presses." I know that cookie presses are a thing, but not something I had lying around. Lucky for me, the recipe also says you can just drop the cookie dough by the tablespoon. If the bakers among you are already slightly skeptical about a cookie dough that is equally at home being pressed out, cut, and dropped, this is because you are wiser in the ways of cookies than I.

For those not in the know, there are (generally speaking) two main types of cookie dough. One, most commonly encountered in sugar cookies, requires rolling out (often after refrigeration) and cutting. The cookies swell a bit in the oven, but don't change their shape terribly much. The other kind, usually referred to as drop cookies, is what you get when you make chocolate chip cookies. You drop a glob of cookie dough onto a baking sheet and it puddles out into the cookies we all know and love. So when the recipe says "You can either shape this beforehand or drop it," I should have been on guard. And I should have taken a look at the original 1610 recipe before cooking. If I had, I probably would have rolled out the dough and cut it with a glass. Instead, I used a tablespoon to make lumps, expecting them to flatten out in the oven.

Here are my cookies, eagerly awaiting the closing of the oven door. Witness the majesty that is my fancy new oven thermometer! If that thing is correct, then my oven has a propensity to be about 100-150° hotter than I actually set it. Whoops. But this is good to know.

Ok, so this picture isn't all that great but I was really proud that I managed to trick the camera into focusing on the oven contents instead of on the dots on the oven door. On the other hand, you can tell fuck all about the state of the cookies, which I guess is an accurate representation of sitting through the cooking process.

One tray of cookies came out a bit more done than the other, but everything was within acceptable tolerances. Of course, since I used two different baking sheets in two different places in the oven, I have no idea how to control for the correct results. Or even which results were correct. But you can see that the cookies' only real concession to drop-cookie-style melting was that they all adjusted enough to touch the cookie sheet.

I brushed the cookies with the remaining rose syrup while they were still hot, and then waited for them to cool. Quick shoutout to Dancing Bull Wine for giving me a free bbq brush at the 2010 BBQ Battle. It's been really useful, except never for bbq. Anyway, this is the final product, and it is kind of good looking.

But not exactly what I call evenly cooked. You can see that the inside wasn't quite as done as the outer part of the cookie. Probably wouldn't have been an issue if I had rolled them out, although then I would be complaining about how quickly they burnt.

Verdict: They taste like honey? The rose doesn't come through terribly well - if I did this again, I'd use less regular water and more rose water when creating the rose syrup. And maybe spring for a cookie press so I can see how they were supposed to turn out shape- and consistency-wise. All in all, they were nothing special. Although people did keep sneaking back for more of them even after deciding they were nothing special and certainly no one needed to eat more of them. So there is that. But I chalk it up to any cookie vs. no cookie. The recipe was pretty simple, and I'd take a shot at it again except for the minor detail that there are billions of recipes I haven't tried yet and no pressing need to revisit this one.


Happy Classical Theatre Fundraising Day!

Does The World Go Round?

I finally got around to making the Inside-out Pie, thus completing my delayed attempt at celebrating a Renaissancey version of Pie Day. But since a pie isn't technically a meal, I needed something to go with it. I thought that the protein-to-vegetable ratios of Grilled Tuna with Carrots and Sweet Onions would make it a passable dinner (it's in the Sallets chapter), so off I went.

The first step was making a simple vinaigrette, which was simple. I wish I had a better camera, because things floating in oil/oil floating in things is always a great image.

I was supposed to whisk the balsamic (my substitution for sherry vinegar) and the olive oil together, but discovered many and many a year ago that it was much faster to put them in Tupperware and shake.

Here is my fish! For the first time, I got it at Safeway instead of Whole Foods. I thought I should at least give them a shot. More importantly, they had exactly the correct amount of tuna hanging around. No more, no less. Although I'm a little concerned about the fact that they apparently caught it in Colorado.

Here are my tuna steaks. Perfectly good color for previously frozen tuna, and perfectly non-fishy smelling. If I had any problem with them, it was picking them up and realizing they may have stayed slightly frozen on the surfaces that were placed directly on ice at the counter. But nothing that seconds on heat wouldn't cure.

Here's where the presentation in the cookbook becomes an issue. Look at what we're apparently aiming for:

So we've got slices of tuna, cooked at the edge, and then the onion and carrots being all decorative. Now, the instructions for the recipe tell you take a pound of tuna, cut it into slices, and then grill them. Seeing the disconnect? Slices of tuna don't cook around the edge when you place them on a grill. Clearly there are shenanigans involved here. You get to the picture by grilling then cutting. I decided all by my lonesome that I would aim for picture true rather than following the recipe. Not sure if this was a good idea or not, in the end. That meant marinating the tuna in whole pieces as opposed to slices. Into the fridge for an hour, which lets me work on the rest of the ingredients.

Not that there are a lot of ingredients. There's half an onion, thinly sliced.

Which leaves me with half an onion. I was playing around with my shiny new apple corer earlier, and practicing on apples. And I thought, "What does it do to an onion?"

This is the answer. It's... not all that impressive, really. You mostly get the same effect by applying a knife. Except for the little circular bit in the middle.

It's entirely possible that someone will need these little onion circles one day, so take note.

You may have noticed a theme so far, with way too many macro photos. So I tried to keep it up. Here's the carrots after skinning them. I could have kept at it to make carrot ribbons, but I had a faster method.

Caliban has blades, but also teeth.

And then there are lots of carrot bits, huzzah!

The carrots and onions sit around, and then it's time to cook the fish. It's supposed to get grilled, but I only had a skillet. Close enough. One side.

And the next.

That wasn't going to help with the sides, however, so I used a super-fancy technique I learned to deal with steaks.

And then repeat everything for the second piece of fish.

The recipe says to arrange the carrots and onions (soaked in the rest of the vinaigrette) in the shape of an oak leaf on a platter, with the tuna slices on top. But I didn't have a platter big enough to really do that, so the hell with it.

And there were bits of tuna on the second piece that were done to perfection (see picture below). Most was rarer.

Verdict: I'll confess, I like my meat bloody. The rare end of medium rare. I want my burgers dripping on the plate, and I tend to look the other way if that means they're literally raw in the very center. I had a bistecca in Italy that was basically blackened on the outside and raw meat in the middle and my biggest issue was that it was way too difficult to chew through the muscle. When I walk through the meat section in the supermarket, I look at the really red stuff and wonder what it would be like to just eat it. And sushi, of course, is a great goodness. That picture of the tuna up above? Any more and it would be overdone.

And yet, I couldn't eat the tuna. I tried, I really did. But for the first time in my life I thought "There is raw meat in my mouth, and I really can't deal with that." Maybe it was the quality of the fish. Maybe it was because I don't trust my cooking yet. Which is silly because I got what exactly what I wanted, but I'll happily eat undercooked meat when it's given to me by a stranger even if they didn't mean to do it.

I threw out all the food, and moved on to dessert.

The Inside-out Pie starts with a lot of bread. Look, I've got bread! Nine breads.

And just like any petulance powered project involving bread, the crusts need to come off.

Some lightly beaten eggs, camouflaged in their natural habitat.

The recipe calls for chopped pitted dates, and I thought I'd skip over the pesky chopping step by buying chopped dates. They're very much hard and candied, though, which will probably give a different texture to the end product.

And then here's the problem with freshly grating nutmeg. I mean, how do you measure this stuff?

The weird ingredient! A quarter cup of prosciutto, minced. I just rolled the slices up over themselves and started, well, slicing.

It worked out pretty well, and there were leftover pieces to save eat.

Everything in the bowl.

Oh yeah, and then there's cream. Forgot to mention that.

And this is what it looks like stirred together.

But what about that bread? Cubing it would have been easier with a bread knife, or at least I think it would have resulted in some less squished cubes.

Bread cubes go into the wet mixture and, I can't really pretty this up, it looks like vomit.

The vomit has to settle for a while, which means it's time to get the apples involved. If you're any good at Where's Waldo? you noticed some butter hanging out in the springform pan. It was nice and melty at this point, and I used it to grease the pan. Next come thin apple slices, shingled in a spiral. I didn't really know what that meant, so I guessed. The recipe calls for a single apple, but look what that got me.

Luckily, I was clever and bought a whole bag of apples. Couldn't get them to go up the sides very well, though.

And here is the mixture dumped into the apples, ready for baking.

...yeah, still looks like vomit.

This is what it looks like in the end. It's supposed to be golden brown, but the parts that were golden brown now were going to be black by the time that the rest was correct. Anyway, this isn't the side that people see.  The whole thing gets inverted.

The springy, formy bit comes off.

And then I use an exciting technical maneuver to flip the whole thing over.

Ta-da! Oh, no, hold-on.

Ta... da?

It's not exactly as impressive as I thought it would be. There's a dusting of powdered sugar that goes on top. Apparently you can broil the whole thing to caramelize the sugar, but I didn't bother. Mostly because I didn't want to deal with transferring it to yet another plate.

And this is what a slice of it looks like.

Verdict: It's decent. It's secretly a bread pudding. It's a pretty good breakfast since there isn't really any sugar added. But it's not the best bread pudding I've had, or the best apple/dessert/breakfast thingy (so far that might be this, or some apple cakes I don't have convenient links to). I'd say something like "next time I'll be more careful about where I pour the batter because you can see the heavy stuff settled in the middle," but not sure there will be a next time on this one.

But more importantly, how is this inside out? What is inside-out about it? Ok, normally you have a thin layer of crust on the bottom, then lots of filling, and maybe a thin layer of crust on top. But this ends with a layer of crust on the bottom, and then filling on top with maybe a little bit of the crust stuff. That is not an inside-out pie! That is regular pie! Regular pie with horrible ratios! Bizarro Pie, possibly, but certainly not inside-out. I want my inside-out money back. It's exactly like regular money, except it's exactly the same.

The last episode of S2 Doctor Who was a poor choice before bed. I am inside-out sad.