Baka Nana Mufn

Oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! There is too much going on for any one person to ever feel like they have a handle on it. You practically have to accept not knowing what is going on as a way of life to feel like you know what is going on. I worry about this because they say that people who feel they can understand life and accept it as a challenge live the longest. Apparently I want to live for a very long time. I am just waiting for the flying cars, really, and for restaurant equipment to go way down in price. Screw starting a bakery in ten years, I am going to start a bakery automat. Or wait! No! An automat bakery stand to take to farmer’s markets. Snowballing ideas. . . I am not sure where this is going. Why is it so hard to distribute baked goods to people? You practically have to sassy-bully them into eating something that tastes really good.

Want a recipe? Here’s a recipe for these suckers.

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Bourbon/Banana/Brown Sugar Muffins (vegan and wheat free)
Makes about a dozen in a standard muffin tin
NOTE: heap all spices but cloves
400 F oven

Dry:
2 1/2 cups spelt flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp cloves

Wet:
2 large or 3 medium very brown or frozen bananas
1/2 cup soy milk
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup brown sugar

Last:
2 medium or 1 very large ripe banana, a little freckly
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp bourbon

Brown Sugar for sprinkling

Whisk dry together.

Partially thaw frozen bananas by microwaving them in their peels for around a minute, or just peel your brown bananas. Smush with a fork until pureed.

Swirl apple cider vinegar into soy milk, it will thicken up as the acid denatures the soy protein.

Mix all wet together until emulsified.

Dry + wet, stir in a gentle folding manner three times, no more, no less.

Chop your ripe bananas into roughly 1/2 inch chunks, add to partially mixed batter along with the other last ingredients.

Mix until just moistened, you know, like for muffins.

Bake in a papered muffin tin, or in those stand alone papers, or in a cake tin, or in tin cans, or dutch oven it over a fire while camping. The world is your muffin-forming oyster. I think it might make a nice loaf. Sprinkle with brown sugar before baking, bake for around twenty minutes, give or take a bit depending on the shape and size of the finished muff.

Standard cake testing rules apply for checking doneness: "toothpick inserted in the middle should come out clean", but you might hit a banana chunk, making the "poke the top and it should spring back" method work better.

I don't work at The Rose Estb anymore. Sometimes it makes me cry a little and sometimes it makes me grin. The title of this post comes to you from when a dear coworker was trying to help me out of my panicked baking spiral by helping me schedule. On the bottom of the schedule it said "Only happy times". Boy howdy.

FOOD OOD OOD OOD

I take to things with single mindedness. I was thinking while playing and singing to Les Mis, “Gee, I can only do this because I have been in the show three times, I couldn’t read this music.” Then I realized that, my god, I was in that show three times and that is a bit harder than reading the music.

The hardest thing to do is not to worry about whether something is done well or poorly, but to shift to appreciating anything that is done. If it is, it is good. The only bad thing is nothingness, which isn’t felt as bad, but as a lack.

I am getting over a case of the yips. Being able to do things over and over and over again is like holding a bird on your shoulder that you are afraid might bite your ear or poop down your back. At first, once you get the bird on your shoulder, you try to tread gently and coo deliciously at the little dear, and you are super delighted when he nibbles your earlobe. After awhile, you forget that it is out of the ordinary to have a bird on your shoulder and one of two things can happen: you either forget the bird completely, do something too wildly, and there is poop and blood everywhere, or you keep the bird calmly in your periphery, internalize the calmness that keeps him calm, and he keeps kissing you on the earlobe. If I run around on autopilot at work I end up burning something or forgetting leavening at the worst, and just not remembering if I did my best at the best. If I stay calm I wouldn’t trade it for anything. There is nothing else to do with my time and nothing better.

Sampled out pastries:

Vignette

One can sometimes find oneself in an interesting state of mind. Here are some things to think about:

“Workers produce value that is greater than the wage paid to them. This surplus value is retained by the owners of capital and contributes to their profit. In contrast to economic systems that strive for balance and stability in labor output and the benefits reaped, capitalist systems strie for continual increases in profits and rates of growth.”

Excerpted from my extravagantly expensive anthropology textbook, Cultural Anthropology by Nancy Bonvillain. (Ain’t her last name a trip?)

My desire to read Karl Marx has appeared now that I have entered the work force on a full time basis with no hope in sight. Stick it to the man!

Sticking it to the man is just not something you can do on a continual basis, though. You end up sticking it to yourself by being upset with every aspect of the culture you live in. You are the one being upset, after all, and you are only one crumb in the culture cake.

Here is where the Tao does a thing, gives me the will to turn it back on:

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Fill your bowl to the brim,
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife,
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

Closing Thoughts

I would like to do what I have always liked doing, and I would like to like it. Like like like.

I am going to make some shit with some pears. Put that pear shit on some other shit. It will be good.

Have a great need and desire to bake bread, grow vegetables, ride bikes, sew dresses, and cuddle babies. Springtime approaches.

List of Confusing Items

A list of things I find confusing:

1. Time
2. Space

That covers it.

On another note I just remembered that in blogs you talk about yourself. They are entirely for vanity. I need to get on that.

Lavender Honey Scones

My raison d’etre is scones. I make the best scones. I make my living making scones these days at, where else, The Rose Estb! Of course I finally work here. Somehow I luck into the best jobs. More than luck, I think it is my refusal to work jobs that I don’t like. I will work for very little to nothing if it is something that I love, but I find myself just not showing up after awhile if I hate it.

This job, I love. Even when I stay out so late the night before that I come straight to work without sleeping, I can’t stop grinning when I walk through the door.

The scone gods visited me last Sunday in the wee hours of the morning. They delivered this recipe unto me. (It was all very angel Moroni.)
If you don’t feel like baking these, you can literally pay me to make them for you.

Lavender Honey Scones
2 cups heavy cream
5 Tbsp culinary lavender
1/3 cup honey
4 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter, chilled and cut in 1-inch cubes

First we are going to make lavender tea with the cream, and sweeten it with the honey. You can feel very fancy, for at this moment you are infusing your scones with an herbal tisane. Heat the cream til just before boiling, then take it off the heat and stir in the lavender. Let it cool, then stir in the honey til dissolved. Chill.

Whisk all dry ingredients together. This is everything besides them butter cubes. Now rub the butter cubes in until you’ve got chunks the size of bubble tea tapioca balls. At this point we are doing two very important things: encasing some of the dry ingredient in fat so that they don’t absorb all of the moisture in the cream which needs to evaporate some while baking, and leaving chunks of butter that will melt and also evaporate, making flakey layers in the dough.

Pour in the chilled lavender honey cream. Get your hand in there and mix quickly and gently until you would need to knead in order to keep incorporating. Scrape your dough hands off (this is why we wash them) and let the almost dough sit for five minutes. We are letting the gluten relax and absorb the moisture.

Commence to kneading! The honey makes the dough lovely and tender, so you barely have to work it at all. You want to knead, though, just until the dough holds together so you can roll it out without the edges cracking very much. If it gets very, very soft and sticky, chill for 30 minutes.

Now the fun part, and the thing that makes your scones into high pastry instead of some shit quick-bread. We are going to complete three full turns, the thing you do to puff pastry to make individual layers that puff evenly. This gives our scones flakey layers with a good crumb that doesn’t dry out and disintegrate, and helps make them beautifully shaped.

Roll the dough into an 8×12-inch rectangle. Fold the top third down, then the bottom third up, like a letter! Turn it so the seam is on the bottom and the large fold on the left. Moosh it down and roll it out again! Fold, turn, repeat. One more time, Roll, fold, turn. That was three turns. Sometimes I forget which turn I’m on. It helps to sing an impromptu song about which turn you are on. Or just do another turn and call it good.

Roll your dough out unti it is three quarters of an inch thick in a long rectangle. I can’t remember the exact size, but 9×14 sounds about right. Trim the short, non folded ends of dough off, for even rising action, then cut the dough into 12-16 triangles. Our goal is to chop the dough without smooshing the layers together, again, for even rising action.

Lay out six to eight on a half sheet, brush with egg wash,(which is a beaten egg with a little cold water in) cover with plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour, or up to three days. The chilling relaxes the gluten, which makes everything go your way.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees, then pop in the scones. they will take anywhere from 15-20 minutes, and they are especially good slightly burnt, but this is just my opinion and the way they inevitably turn out in my baby oven at work. The goal, though, is golden brown on the edges, and an internal temperature of 200 degrees.

Let cool, then brush with honey glaze (honey thinned with enough water so it is brushable) and sprinkle with a teeny bit of lavender, for beauty. There you have it.

Scones. To say it correctly, the, the “-on-” must be pronounced like the word “on”. I was taught this by a Brit.

Portland

When you’re alone and life is getting you lonely, you can always go:
TO PORTLAND! Cut off all your hair, buy some very expensive loafers, and have a damn lovely time.

At the beginning of August I went to Portland for a week all by my lonesome. I thought of going on Tuesday morning and by four that afternoon I was sitting in the lovely courtyard park in front of the Fox Towers movie theatre. Nordstrom in front of me, the art supply store to my left! Behind me the pasta restaurant where I left my umbrella three years previous. My old dorm is up the street! Off to lovely old Safeway by the art museum to buy a toothbrush!

I managed to secure a room at the Ace Hotel. I would live here, like an impractical, hipsterish Eloise. (Aren’t I cool mentioning Eloise?) Second floor, the room at the end of the hall, with a view of the Italian import store and NOUN: A Person’s Place for Things. I even got a room with a clawfoot tub. I can barely believe how happy that thing made me.

Why can I walk around Portland for a week and make more friends and have more pleasant interactions than in months in Salt Lake City? I am told that it is because when I go to Portland I am on vacation, and in Salt Lake City I am living real life, but this cannot be. I have lived in Portland. It really is that friendly all the time.

Walking down the street in Portland I met a girl named Rosie who was signing sponsers up for Children’s International, and now I sponser a girl in India named Biuti! Walking down the street in Salt Lake City I get told by a middle aged fellow that I look sweaty, and he likes it.

Two extreme examples, but the truth.

This blog post went the way of all my attempts to talk about my splendid Portland jaunt. Salt Lake City against Portland. I’d better knock it off. You don’t have to hate Salt Lake to love Portland, I tell myself.

Nervous!

Blogging makes me nervous, too nervous to do any of it, most of the time. But it shouldn’t!  So I am going to think of blogging like hanging up art projects in the hall when you are in elementary school.  Everybody’s project is hanging next to everybody else’s so that you can barely see that they are individual, but when you get up close to look at them, you can figure out the personality of every kid in the class, and you have an enjoyable moment in your day doing so.  My blog is so similar to hundreds of other blogs, but of course it would be!  No point in being upset that it is.  I am just as much a part of my age group as I was in kindergarten.

I resolve that blogging shall not make me as nervous as it does, for it is simply the more grown-up version of hanging your macaroni-glitter art project on the wall outside your classroom for the whole school to see as they pass by.  And that’s kind of fun.

 

 

UPDATE:

LOOK AT THIS!  I found this by way of a button I had never clicked on Mel’s blog.  I am so happy!  It’s like construction paper Christmas trees with glitter and cotton balls!  Her blog is FANTASTIC, and it makes her nervous too!  Isn’t it funny how this is sitting here under my nose this whole time, on Mel’s blog that I visit numerous times a day, yet I couldn’t find it until I figured to look for it?  I am delighted.