stretching on

in a recent nightmare, i was taking the motorbike test again, and the roads changed somehow, so i didn't know where to go.

it is indeed the end of february already. the payslip this month is $1362.25. and all of it will be gone soon. i felt quite awful these few days, but something fell into place today, and hopefully everything will turn better.

tant pour tant

in a bid to finish using up the glace cherries, butter and almonds in the refrigerator, i made stollen again. so not christmas, but what the hell.
the butter makes the dough so silky and smooth. i seems to threaten to break, but if well-kneaded, the dough is quite elastic.
making some in the cups, i actually managed to finish using up the liners that were bought way back in 2007! the remaining dough i put into a savarin mold. there was too much dough, so it rose way over the top, but whatever; still edible.

i fear now that i've lost the ability to make pie; i haven't practised in so long.

the punishment light

beejuan's cake took over four days to make.

the cake layers were a chocolate genoise, which i made first and kept refrigerated.
genoise is very rich in eggs. (the cake used 5 eggs and 5 yolks.) the eggs and yolks are whisked with sugar over simmering water until warm, then transferred to a mixer and whipped until triple in volume so that thre is a lot of air inside.
after folding in the cocoa and the flour and the fat, the batter had deflated by a lot. but i think it was okbecause he cake stll rose a lot. i think the tripling in volume was meant to compensate the air lost during the folding.

the second component was the chocolate ganache.
chocolate, butter, cream. so smooth, so thick, so luscious. i portioned a small bowl out of the large pot for use as the crumb coat.

layering the cake took place on the second night of chinese new year.
i sliced the genoise into thinner layers and set the first one on the cake board, enclosed in a cake ring, and brushed with sugar syrup.
the filling was the sabayon, which used fifteen egg yolks. and getting fifteen egg yolks out of fifteen eggs was so difficult; i broke abot four yolks, so those were not usable. so you can see: a whole bag of egg shells, a bowl of fifteen yolks, bags of egg whites, and a bowl of broken yolks with whites.
the fifteen yolks were whisked with sugar and orange juice over simmering water until tripled in volume (like the genoise), just that because the whole process had to be over simmering water, i couldn't use the stand mixer. so i used the handheld, and the walls were splattered all over with blobs of sabayon.
the sabayon is mixed with melted chocolate, and then whipped cream is folded in to lighten it. then gelatin is stirred into it and then everything was poured into the cake ring, topped with the second cake layer, and brushed with more syrup.

after overnight refrigeration i took the cake out to finish the icing. it was done in m bedroom, because i used the air conditioner.
the gelatin in the sabayon helped it to set firm. and it looked nice. so i took out the small bowl of ganache and made the crumb coat. the crumb coat is a thin layer meant to glue crumbs to the cake, so that they don't show up in the final icing.

while the cake returned to the refrigerator for the crumb coat to firm up, i made the marzipan bees.
cute, no?

back to the final icing of the cake.
the ganache was whipped until lightened, though it looked like it was going to separate. in my cold bedroom, the icing remained creamy, and so i slapped the icing onto the cake. sides and top.
marzipan bees on top, and then the parchment paper was slipped out from under the cake to reveal a nice clean cake board.

there was too much icing i think. and the sabayon was quite glottally thick, but maybe because the cake slices were too big. anyhpw, this new year was characterised by learning to feed melanie.

the punishment light is the traffic light which is utterly useless; it stops you for five minutes to look at no other cars passing by. but you just cannot move on - yet.

so colourful, so complete.

boulang-guan

every CNY gets progressive less meaningful/fun. i got blisters after one hour of cello-playing. and then i ate three pieces of KFC today, and licked off an emptied pot of chocolate ganache.

the last try

today i'm mailing out two scholarship applications. and i will make just one more.

'entirely not your fault'

tonight is the first time in a long time i looked up at the night sky. i realised it because i saw orion, and couldn't remember the last time i saw it. but i recall the night i was on a bicycle and i looked up and i flew.

tonight was supposed to be happy. and sometimes it's ironic that the more you love something, the more you realise you don't understand it at all.

回中原

suddenly, jurong west and bukit batok and choa chu kang don't seem so far away anymore. the train rides are really just less than 20 minutes long. thanks to sam, i can comfortably solve one cube between even the closer stations now.

still, pasir ris is very far away, and so is the honeydew snow shake. and the punggol area is like unchartered waters.

how to get there?

today is the first day in quite some time where i had some free time for myself. so when i got home, made a hollandaise sauce. the egg yolks were a few days old: you can reeze egg whites for like forever, but to store egg yolks, you can only submerge them in a bowl of water and refrigerate for a maximum of 3 days.
the first step is to melt a lot of butter. about one stick for every 2 egg yolks.
then beat the yolks with a tablespoon each of water and lemon juice, and a pinch of salt. add a tablespoon of soft butter and put over very low heat.
stirring constantly, the butter will melt and the mixture will stay watery for a while until suddenly it thickens, and your whisk leaves a trail as you stir. immediately remove from the heat, add in one tablespoon of cold butter and stir; this will stop the cooking.
then you beat in the melted butter drop by drop. if you add too much at first, the egg yolks will be overwhelmed with the butter, and you can see that the butter doesn't emulsify but stays in large globules. but keep beating it, and it will emulsify eventually.
the finished sauce should be kept warm, not hot, and stirred occasionally until serving time. it can be refrigerated for atmost 2 days, or frozen for longer, which is what i've done.

then i was reading mark haddon's a spot of bother:

maybe the answers weren't important. maybe it was the asking that mattered. not taking anything for granted. maybe that's what stopped you growing old.