怎么放弃

i made some brioches à tête from the american book. compared to the previous nigella brioches, these had a lesser proportion of butter.
butter, milk and eggs: these are the ingredients that tenderize the otherwise lean dough. the butter is a lot, but instead of weighing down the dough, you get this light feathery product.
the dough is formed first before the butter is added. adding the butter seemed to overwhelm the dough initially, as you can see in the photo; the butter was outside the dough for quite long. i think brioche dough is going to be very hard to knead by hand, so do it by machine.
after a sufficiently long knead, the butter becomes all incorporated, and it pulls away from the bowl easily. i think i might have overdone it and heated it up too much: there was butter beginning to leach out.
after a long overnight rest in the refrigerator, i divided the dough into 12 pieces and preshaped them into rounds. it was surprisingly easy to combine the scraps of dough into cohesive balls, and they weren't sticky.
after a quick refrigeration to firm up the dough again, i did the final shaping, which wasn't that easy. first create a head - the tête - and then make a dent in the main body to sit the head inside. initially, the shaped rolls were quite promising, but as they were proofing, it wasn't easy to keep the head centred; many of them slipped to the sides. during baking, even the nicest ones lost alignment.
uncentred brioches à tête, but nevertheless pretty. i'll probably be making this recipe time and again, because who can resist a nice, rich, buttery bread roll. so, i'll be practising shaping them again.
brioche, the bread behind the brouhaha. it's so light and fluffy inside, and so rich it'll give me pimples again.

i also made a sourdough chocolate cake for mothers' day. the recipe comes from here. yes, it involves sourdough. my starter has been sitting dormant for a long time. even when i took out a pinch to make the vermont sourdough, i didn't feed it. the thing is, i've accumulated too much of it now. but still, i had to feed it for this recipe. luckily, then, the recipe used up a lot of it too.
so, there are two parts: the sourdough mixture, which has milk and flour; and the cocoa mixture, which has fat, sugar and eggs. folding the two together, i might have left the mixture not combined well enough. some whitish bits turned up in the cake eventually, and these were the remnants of the white sourdough - but no more live yeast!
so i overfilled the cake tins and ended up getting big domed cakes, which i had to slice and level. they smelled very richly chocolate though.
cooked the espresso icing, which set up too quickly, and was too sweet. i think i'm just not fated to decorate and ice cakes. every attempt just fails.
so i quickly spooned the icing over the cakes, but still got very fugly-looking stuff. oh well. the taste test? the icing was cloying. but the cake had this interesting flavour dimension which i think no one would be able to tell what unless they knew it had sourdough in it. but yes, a hint of bread in the cake.