Tortas en Puerto Rico

While Valerie enjoys the outdoors back in Columbus, Ohio, it is oppressively hot here in Puerto Rico. Today, the heat index hit 102 degrees, and you can feel it. The tradewinds have stopped, and my apartment feels like a giant humidifier. So what to do? Turn on the oven, of course!

I've decided that with my remaining free time, I'm going to try to become at least proficient at making cakes. For those of you who have seen my cooking style, you likely realize the challenge here. Baking is a fairly exacting science - things are measured precisely, added in the right order, and never modified. On the other side, my presence in the kitchen usually evokes the tasmanian devil or "Pigpen" from Charlie Brown.


To say the least, there is some incompatibility.

That being said, I tried my first cake tonight. I decided to start easy - using Rose Levy's Cake Bible as my basic text, I tried making a yellow cake with classic buttercream frosting. The cake turned out well enough, but the buttercream was a bit of a problem: neglecting to read the directions the full way through, I added the butter before the sugar syrup mixture had fully cooled, leaving my frosting somewhat runnier than desired. However, I threw in an extra 1/3 stick of butter, a little more sugar, and for good measure, about a shot of Cointreau (this was actually for flavor, not for texture). In the end, I came up with something workable, and here are the results:

(apologies for the blurry picture - Valerie is really much better at this)

The rose on top is made of marzipan - this was another, somewhat more successful experiment of mine. Marzipan is somewhat easy to work with - it's a bit like the plastic clay I played with as a child, and is quite easy to blend with food coloring to get the right hue.

Anyways, this cake is going to some pretty tough critics (my coworkers) tomorrow - so hopefully I'll get some good feedback. I'm not quite sure what next week's cake will be - but I'm shooting for something more challenging. Perhaps a genoise.

Next: How will Adam get sunburned this weekend? Stay tuned to find out!