delay missions

ok i'm writing this after finishing a whole night of baking with only one hour of sleep. the nature of the baking process simply prevented me from being able to get a long rest.

first, i took out a page from the desperate housewives cookbook i borrowed last time, and made the mrs o'leary's spiked baked custards. it's really easy - because there is no cooking involved in the custard-making process - and you should try it too!
simply whisk together a few ingredients: 2.5 cups mixture of heavy cream and milk, 2 eggs, 2 yolks, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 2 tablespoons bailey's irish cream liqueur. well, when i was making this, i was so happy at the fact that i could separate two eggs (by hand) without breaking the yolk that i forgot to use two more eggs, but used one instead. but never mind, this gave my custard an even more ethereal form.
the recipe calls for you to divide the custard into four ramekins, but i didn't have the real ramekins, neither did i have small pudding moulds. so i settled with two bigger ones. bake the four ramekins of custard in a bain marie at 160°C for about 35 minutes, by which time only a one-inch circle in the centre of each ramekin jiggles slightly when gently shaken. turn off the oven, take out the bain marie and leave the ramkens in it until completely cool. then refrigerate for at least four hours, or up to two weeks.
unmould and serve the custard. the end result is a voluptuously smooth cream, with a delicate form that falls apart immediately in your mouth, and with a mellow flavour from the bailey's. just look at the shiny smoothness/smooth shine of the baked custard.

then i did the brioche from nigella's forever summer, which was the thing that stopped me from sleeping last night. having eaten a brioche à tête at dempsey, i was quite excited to try making this bread.
plain white bread doughs contain just yeast, flour, salt and water, but the brioche is a bread enriched with eggs and butter. this gives the bread a very rich flavour and soft/moist texture, to the point that we can't really classify it: it's not like other breads, but it's not a pastry, nor a cake.
the idea is to use cold ingredients, because once the dough is formed, you begin tossing the butter in cube by cube. you don't want the dough to be so warm that the butter melts and turns the dough oily (and using an electric mixer generates a lot of friction that heats up the dough). at this point in time, my bloody mixer died on me. omg there was a loud 'click' and suddenly there were black fumes coming out. maybe it's time to buy a kitchenaid!
so i took the dough out onto the table, and manually worked in the rest of the butter. naturally, this was much slower than using the machine. and more and more of the butter melted as i worked the dough.
this resulted in a very oily dough. you can see the oil around the perimeter of the dough. nevertheless, i went on with the baking to see what i would get.
after one folding and a three-hour rest in the refrigerator, the dough grew nicely, and the greasiness seemed to disappear.
i divided and shaped the dough. nigella's instructions were to divide the dough into fourteen pieces to make small rolls, but i wanted to try making some brioche à têtes, and a brioche loaf, so i estimated the portions of the dough. the thing is, as you would see later, my dough pieces were way too big.
after one hour of proving. you can already see how much they have swollen. wait till you see how much they swelled in the oven.
these are the brioche à têtes. in case you don't know, 'tête' means 'head' in french, refering to the shape of this brioche roll: a flower base with a bob (head) on top. anyway, i didn't seal the têtes on properly, so they kind of slid to the sides. and i didn't bake the bread long enough; the insides were a bit doughy still. and i couldn't remove the roll completely from the mould, because the centre was too tender and tore easily. well, my first time working with a brioche dough!
i tried to do better with the loaf. (actually a brioche in loaf form should have an additional ridge on top.) as you can see, the dough rose way out of the pan. i baked this one substantially longer to make sure the insides were cooked. again, i had trouble removing it from the dough pan. next time, i'll need to line it with parchment. but i don't know how to overcome the problem for the brioche à têtes. i love the shine of the brown crust.
and so this is it: a brioche loaf. a shiny crust that hides under it a soft, moist and tender interior. eat this plain or with jam. or with ice cream, as suggested by nigella.