The Good, the Good and the UGLY!

The Good
I finally made those cream cheese and chive biscuits this weekend.  They were much easier than I thought they would be; lots of rolling and folding and chilling (the dough I mean).  They are cut into squares rather than rounds and then they puff up a bit like little pillows.  The outsides were flaky and the insides a lovely soft bread-llike consistency.  I made fresh salmon burgers for dinner and we opened the biscuits up and used them as buns.  They were good.  Here is a picture:

I am now done with  biscuits and have moved on into the realm of muffins.  As you know I made those wild blueberry muffins last week and this week bought the ingredients for Plum Streusel muffins.  They look amazing in the book  and I can't wait to make them.

The Good
So while I was waiting for the biscuit dough to chill out I was rooting around the fridge and saw that I had almost a whole pint of wild blueberries left.  I had also picked up some white chocolate chips and found a recipe for Blueberry and White Chocolate Loaf.  I love loaf cakes(except banana bread - I detest bananas),  and know that they are really really hard to screw up -believe me I have tried!  So I thought I would quickly put that together and bake it before the biscuits had to go into the oven.  As expected it was delicious!  I added a tart lemon syrup I had made by poking holes in the freshly baked cake and pouring it over the top, letting it soak into the cake.  This gave it just the right tang and saved the cake from being too sweet.  This too was good.

The Ugly
When we had gone shopping earlier that day, I found one of these silicone loaf pans that seem to be all the rage these days. Everyone says that your food or baked goods just slide right out of them and they are so easy to clean as well. 

 I was really excited, about to see my loaf drop gracefully from the pan with nary a crumb sticking to bottom.  The timer dinged and I opened the oven door to see this:

UGLY!  Instead of rising up as the cake would do in a rigid loaf pan, it BULGED OUT!  And to add insult to injury (now I know what that phrase means) there were some little bits stuck to the bottom of the pan.  Now, as I said before, it tasted very good.  The cake was really moist and flavourful.  But so  U G  L  Y!!!

This disaster reminds me of one of the traumatic events of my childhood and quite possibly contributed to my F.O.B. (fear of baking). It was my parents anniversary and they were going out to dinner.  After finishing our Swanson's T.V. dinners, my sisters and I decided that we would bake them a cake for the celebration.  Looking through the one or two cookbooks in the house we found a recipe for chocolate cinnamon cake that looked easy enough.  (Who makes chocolate cinnamon cake)?  So we go ahead and mix up the cake and then bake it.  We take it out of the oven and realize that it really needs a good chocolate frosting.  We find a recipe for that and whip it up, oh....we don't have icing sugar (whatever that is), we'll just make it with regular sugar....what could be bad?  Okay, so it's a little grainy, but its chocolately and thick.  Hurry, we have to get it on the cake before Mommy and Daddy get home!  We slather it on top and then start to notice that it is melting into the cake!  What?  You have to let it cool first before you put on the frosting?  We are confident that it is going to taste good anyways so we proudly serve up when our parents get home.  It has to be the most pathetic cake ever.  It is sickly sweet because of the double whammy of sugar, the texture is wet and grainy from the melted frosting and the cinnamon and chocolate are an atrocious combination. 

Now do you see why I rarely baked in the last 40 years?