People have told me that I'm not too shabby with the mixing and the cooking and I let it go completely to my head and I thought I needed to challenge myself a bit and while watching Amelie for the hundredth time, it came to me. Amelie's Famous Plum Cake. I need to make that. And it will turn out lovely and my post will be so charming and sweet, just like the movie.
I did some research. Turns out that people have already done this. Obviously. Who wouldn't want to make something out of that movie. By the way, if you haven't seen Amelie, then get that baby on your Netflix queue or run to your nearest Blockbuster. Watch it. We can talk about how it changed your life afterwards.
Heather at Wisk, Flip, Stir did most of the heavy lifting on this one and figured out that it's a Kouign Amann or Butter Cake. She also pointed me in the direction of David Lebovitz because, if you're going to make a buttery french confection, he really is the man with the plan.
So, I gathered my ingredients. Farmers market, Trader Joe's, Gelson's.
I made sure my yeast was fresh. Doesn't it look like it would be fresh with you?
David suggests you use the best quality butter you can find. And I said, "But of course!" (insert cheesy french accent here)
I used the Fleur De Sel I actually bought in Paris when I was just a little baby foodie.
And things actually were going pretty well.
Things were rising when they should be rising.
And resting when they should be resting.
While my little plummy butter cake was resting in the fridge, I thought I would make some pizza dough. I like to make it ahead of time and then divvy it up and put it in the freezer for future use. It's ridiculously easy to make pizza dough, or so I thought.
I just picked up Jamie Oliver's cook book at the library.
He's lovely and his recipe's are lovely too.
Except for his pizza dough recipe. It calls for all 7 cups of bread flour to be dumped on the counter with a deep well in the middle to pour the wet ingredients into.
No bowl.
No pan.
No containment unit what-so-ever.
I was okay with this because 7 cups is a lot of flour.
Then I got to how much liquid should be dumped in the well.
2 1/2 cups.
I tiny little read flag went off in my head.
My inner safety child said, "Elizabeth Ann, that's a lot of unharnessed liquid to be pouring out onto your counter".
My inner Julia Child said, "Be fearless in the kitchen. On Wisconsin!"
The real Julia didn't ever say, "On Wisconsin!", but the Julia in my head did and that's the kind of pep talk I needed.
Well, as the 2 1/2 cups of liquid started to slowly seep out from the bottom of the pile of flour and started to quickly spread out over my counter, I was cursing both Jamie and my internal Julia.
There was a lot of cursing. K came to the rescue.
We stood there frantically scooping armfuls of yeasty doughy goo back onto the counter.
Alas, there was some major collateral damage and any kind of redemption was sadly a lost cause and the whole thing got scraped off the counter and into the garbage.
And scrubbed from the floor.
And wiped from the cupboards.
And rinsed from our forearms.
And clothes needed to be thrown into the laundry.
Mega, super, epic fail.
K asked if the cake was going to be a bigger success. I assured him it would be.
At least I thought it was going to be. Until I pulled this out of the fridge...
This is after the second and final rise in the refrigerator.
What the hell is that syrupiness oozing from it? David didn't say anything about that!
I was now supposed to ROLL it out to the size and shape of the pan.
That was not happening. I kept it on the plate and used my fingers to kind of squish it into the right shape.
Remind you of something? Yeah, things were looking a bit dodgy.
And then the recipe called for me to lift the dough off the plate and transfer it to the pan.
That was also not happening.
So, I just put the pan over it on the plate and did a little flip-a-roo.
A little better. But still highly questionable.
I added the plum conserve that I previously made and slices of fresh plums.
Much better!
Kind of almost looks good, right?
Into a 450 degree oven it went. I had high hopes.
Let's flash back to all butter. There was a large amount of sugar too. Sugary syrup.
So this all started leaking out of the pan and I did put a pan under it but it just started burning and smoking. And smoking and burning.
I had the hood vent on and all the windows open and the ceiling fan on.
After 30 mins of highly skeptical looks from K and swinging the back deck door to help with the ventilation I pulled this out of the oven:
Oh, well, that's pretty good right?
And was it fantastically delicious?
Um, yes. Every single buttery, sugary, delightful bite.
What was the biggest lesson from this whole thing?
Nothing is really as big of a failure as you think it might be.
And as long as you feed boyfriends the successes they will help you clean up the failures.
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