Georg had to work, and I'm still sick, so this wasn't much of a holiday for us. I stayed inside all day, marveling at the fact that I have nothing bad to say about refrigerated air. And I cooked. Ribs with bourbon barbecue sauce for dinner. I followed this recipe for the sauce but went my own way for cooking the ribs: I braised them for 3 hours at 275° with a bit of the marinade, then put a rack over the roasting pan, took off the lid and roasted them for another hour, basted every 15 min. with sauce. Then at the end, while Georg was grilling vegetables, I poured the sauce into the roasting pan with the braising liquid and cooked it down, scraping up all the brown bits. It turned out great if I do say so myself. You might wonder why we didn't grill the ribs, since Georg was using the grill anyway. Well after 3 hours of braising, the ribs were falling apart and I was afraid they'd fall into the charcoal.
The other thing I made today was our wedding cake. Well actually, I made it over the past several days: made the filling over the weekend, baked the cake yesterday, and put it all together today. It's a white chocolate and lemon cake and it's a winner. The recipe makes a 3 tiered cake that serves 50, and it was a bit tricky to reduce it for just 1 small cake. Luckily the recipe had enough details about volume to help me figure it out.
I don't make cakes very often, and I must say I was pleased with how this one came together. Everything happened like it was supposed to. (it's pretty rare than I can say that about an elaborate baking project like this one!) The lemon curd thickened without curdling, the egg whites beat up nice and fluffy, and the cake rose to the very top of the pan without cracking or pulling away from the sides. The icing could be prettier if it had been done by someone more experienced, but it is delicious (I like cream cheese icing so much better than buttercream). And of course we had the Corpse Bride cake topper. It's actually a pair of Corpse Bride action figures, because do you have any idea how expensive wedding cake toppers are? I swear, you add "wedding" to the name of anything and its price goes up by a factor of ten. The action figures were nicer anyway, and they came with the dog too. I actually bought the figures months ago, and had planned to surprise Georg with them at our wedding dinner at Olive's, but I forgot to pack them! D'oh.
Hiding the cake-in-progress from Georg was honestly easier than I had expected. I explained away the cake ingredients like cake flour and buttermilk, and the lemon mousse, by pretending that I had a hankering for blueberry shortcake with buttermilk biscuits and lemon mousse instead of whipped cream, and the massive amount of extra mousse was an accident. Then I baked the cake while he was at work yesterday, and it's a good thing our fridge is so crowded that he didn't even notice a cake in the back of it. I couldn't hide it once it was iced though, and he saw it when he got home today.
1 Comments
that cake looks and sounds delicious!