#hazelnut!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dduane · 4 months

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Okay, time to get on with this Nutella and crushed-hazelnut roll cake I've been plotting for the last couple of weeks. (One of our neighbors did us a favor just now and I want to bring them some of this to say Thank You.)

The recipe looks quite sound—no surprise, as this lady's website is full of great stuff. But I'm going to have to spoof it somewhat, as it's predicated on the use of a sheet pan size that wouldn't fit into our oven (the usual US-size-vs-European-size hardware- and appliance-size issue). Probably I'll wind up baking about 75% of the batter in the 10x15-inch pan I've got and the rest in a smaller 9x7-inch, so that the sheet cake doesn't come out so thick that it refuses to roll correctly.

...Got to toast the hazelnuts first, anyway. I'll add pics to this post as I go along.

ETA 1: The hazelnuts, just out of the oven. The aroma in the kitchen is fabulous. :) (We've got a tabletop microwave-cum-fan oven that has about a hundred custom cooking/baking programs built into it, and one of them is for toasting nuts.) (Oh look, @petermorwood got a shot of one of the special menus from the manual when he was posting about the microwave sponge cake.)

...Had I not had the fancy gadget, I'd have just put the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and toasted them at 180C/375ish F for ten or fifteen minutes, stirring the nuts around every five minutes or so until the outsides went nice and brown. The skins rub right off when the nuts cool down, if you don't want them. But I left some in so they'd keep their toastier flavor. These are a soft nut after toasting/roasting, so they crush really easily.

Meanwhile, while sitting still a moment before getting the mise en place together for the cake, and idly scrolling down through the menu on Sky Movies: wow, I really do need new glasses in a hurry. Saw the movie title "Fred Claus" and read it as "Fried Clams." (sigh) After the holidays, for sure. (It's the usual problem. These glasses are trifocals, you have to point-and-steer them to get the right results depending on what you're looking at, and sometimes you're distracted or in a hurry and can not be bothered to do the hunting-for-focus thing, and as a result you get comical results.) (sigh)

Now the mise en place:

...So typical. You're trying to have it be pretty for the photo and one of the egg yolks breaks. (eyeroll)

Anyway. Not shown here: running off to give the stand mixer's bowl an extra wash to make sure it's absolutely clean, because any grease getting into egg whites being beaten will inhibit how well they fluff up.

So, time to get on with that.

First thing, though: the baking pans need to be prepared while the egg whites and so forth are beating.

So the recipe suggests that you should butter both the pans and the parchment paper used to line them. And speaking as one who's writing this after rolling the cakes up, I can speak directly to its effectiveness. The cake sheets pretty much leapt out of the pans. As I can imagine all too clearly what having to convince them out would be like, better to go overboard with the butter at this stage. I buttered the pans with solid butter and then melted a couple of tablespoonsful and brushed the baking-parchment liners with them.

Lining the pans with the paper, btw, is much assisted by having buttered them first. You just press the paper down and it sticks. Then you go get the scissors and cut off whatever's hanging out.

And now comes the part where you make the cake batter.

First you beat the egg whites and half the granulated sugar to the stiff-peak stage. (Took my mixer about five minutes.)

Then in a different bowl you beat the egg yolks and the rest of that sugar together. Somehow I missed getting a pic of this: apologies. It's the usual "beat together until pale, light, and fluffy." Took about seven minutes for that.

Then: sift together the flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder, The logistics of the original recipe get a little complicated at this point—it sounds like a third bowl is being called for. But at that point I'd decided that I already had more than the usual number of bowls to deal with, not to mention the one I'd just sifted the dry ingredients into. And we don't have a dishwasher. So I just said "The hell with that", added the coffee and vanilla to the egg yolk mixture, and mixed it a bit more: then spooned about half the sifted dry ingredients in, and pulsed the mixer a few times: then added the rest of the dry stuff and mixed again, very slow, just wanting to make sure that everything was completely combined. (As usual with cakes at this point, the idea is to get everything well mixed without doing anything to develop the gluten in the flour. I never let the mixer go very fast.)

...Then comes the "folding in the egg whites" part of the operation. Always use the biggest spatula you've got for this.

Then, when you finish this stage (again, sorry, no pic, I was busy racking my brains over what tool would be best for this job) you spread the batter in the pans.

When I finished with this task I was very glad that I had an offset spatula, because if I'd attempted this with a regular mixing spatula, I don't think the result would have been anything like this even. This batter is light but it's also moderately firm... and with the best will in the world, no amount of shimmying the pans around on the work surface is ever going to even that batter out. As for its thickness in the pans: we're talking about a centimeter at the most.

And then: into the oven for ten minutes, while setting up the pieces of cocoa-powder-dusted baking parchment meant to receive them. I don't have pics of them in the pans when they came out, because the get-them-out-of-the-pans stage is kind of a time-sensitive thing (like immediately). So I got on with it.

They fell straight out onto the prepared sheets with no trouble at all. The small one fell out by itself: the large one fell out with the baking parchment still clinging to it, but not so desperately that it took more than gently lifting it away between finger and thumb to get rid of it.

And then came the rolling. I did the little one by myself, to get a sense of the technique: then asked @petermorwood to video the rolling of the larger one.

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...So now they get left to their own devices until, oh, tomorrow morning, I guess. That's when I'll move on to the next stages.

My plan is to unroll the little cake as a test: brush it inside with warmed/semi-liquid Nutella: sprinkle the Nutella with crushed hazelnuts, which theoretically/please gods will stick to it if gently assisted; and then contrive a filling that will taste at least somewhat of Nutella but not be too sweet to bear. Then the ganache will be made using that fabulous Belgian chocolate that came in a couple of weeks back, and when the whole cake's put together and has had a little time to rest, Peter and I will test it and see if it's something we feel confident enough to offer to other people.

So we'll see how it all goes. Tune in again tomorrow for more hijinks... :)

ETA 2, December 23: When we last saw our cake rolls, the two of them (the one baked in the Euro-size pan, and the smaller one where the spare batter went) were sitting innocently on the counter, waiting to settle enough to be unrolled.

Now's the time. And guess what?

DIsaster! (-Ish. As you'll see.)

The first small sheet of cake was just too small to deal with this treatment without immediately cracking into one-inch slices upon unrolling. I therefore won't waste your time with that video. Instead, you should have a look at the video of the bigger-baked sheet as it gets unrolled, and watch it crack in pieces! (This was either due to the baked sheet being too thick, or too thin. More diagnostics are needed before we come to a verdict.)

But first: the buttercream filling, which worked just fine.

This is the recipe I used:

This recipe worked perfectly. There's zero reason to inflict a long video about this on you, as I was working in a cold kitchen (with three stone walls, two external...) and the butter and sugar took something like half an hour to get friendly enough so that the Nutella could finally be added.

One thing I will show you, though. It's been a long time since I bothered buying confectioners' sugar / icing sugar, because when I need it, I make it myself... in the (very old and beat up-looking) coffee grinder. The sugar's grind comes up finer than that of a lot of commercially made icing sugars... and unlike too many confectioners' sugars in North America, there's no cornstarch in it (which they put in to keep it from caking with storage).

If you try this, make sure not to forget to brush the grinder out well afterwards, and wipe it clean with a damp paper towel. Otherwise the sugar, which is very hygroscopic, will go solid, glue the blade to its spindle, and be a real nuisance to clean out after the fact.

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Meanwhile, here's the Nutella buttercream frosting after it's done. Just a very quick clip here, so you can see what the texture should be like when you pull the beater out of the mixture. (Volume down on this, please: it's really noisy.) If it's not soft enough, do as the recipe recommends: add a tablespoonful of milk or so and beat well until things soften up a bit. Add another, and do the same again, if you need to.

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So now we come to the baked-cake unrolling. (Apologies for the black bars at the top and bottom of the video. For reasons best known to itself the phone insisted on recording in 9:16/portrait format, and the bars are an artifact of flipping it back into landscape...)

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...So after all that, both cakes, the big and the small, are in the fridge now, stabilizing. And there we'll leave matters until tomorrow.

#cake #baking #Nutella #chocolate #hazelnuts #experimentation #FOR SCIENCE #that's the excuse anyway #Youtube

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cthulhusstepmom · 10 months

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Evidence that Sergeant John "Soap" MacTavish is not what he seems-Lt. SR:

Soap smells like rain, it took a while to put it together because it's not Soap himself that emits the odor, it just follows him. It's less potent inside and when it's sunny outdoors but if you concentrate it's always there.

He has never been observed touching a gun or grenades without gloves. Almost every other explosive he handles with no regard for his own safety gloves.

HE EATS WEIRD SHIT. While he doesn't eat much of the food on offer from the cafe, he does eat consistently when outdoors, usually plants or flowers. Things he has eaten: dandelions(edible), garlic(edible), thistle(edible but he ate it with the thorns), foxglove(toxic, showed no adverse reaction), Several unidentified flowers and berries, grass(technically edible?) Etc.

Will sometimes refuse to enter a place before abruptly going in. The data is not consistent between different buildings or locations. Further research is required.

Sharp teeth.

Groups things in nonsensical ways. He will only fill a magazine with bullets that total a multiple of 7 or 3. The same for what weights he uses in the gym. When drawing or eating he sorts by 4s. He traded his room to get #13 (right next door, coincidence?).

Cameras will not focus on him, whether photo or video he is never in focus regardless of distance or conditions.

He has never once been in medical for more than half an hour, usually much less. Even though his hands have light burns on them almost constantly.

Dogs hate him. He seems ambivalent towards them and he's never been bit that Ive seen. Cats adore him as do birds.

John MacTavish does not blush. Not for lack of trying even when genuinely flustered or hot, his skin does not flush.

Ghost sets down the small notebook with a minute sound of frustration. The evidence is all there but looking at it, what does it really say? Other than that he's an obsessive creep. A series of quirks and coincidences compiled by a paranoid son of a bitch into a fucking stalker journal. But still, Simon can't help but feel like he's right and he'd be dead a million times over if he simply disregarded his intuition. Even if it is something batshit insane.

At this point however it seems that it'll drive him mad far before it yields any answers. After scouring what little resources were comprehensible on the internet he'd started growing out his hair, intent on tying it in knots to prevent charms. Leaving him with a problem he'd not encountered since he'd first donned the mask: unruly curls and balaclavas don't mix well at all. He'd also kept a piece of stale bread in his pocket for days as he'd read it was a repellent to- and he can't even believe he's considering it-fairies. It backfired, if anything Johnny had been more attached to him and even more touchy than usual. He'd left a small deli cup full of coffee creamer outside his door overnight and found it neatly placed upside down where he'd left it with not a drop left. Ghost chalked that up to some wise guy playing a joke or an exceptionally dextrous cat and firmly shut the door on any other possibilities in his mind. His next test had been a gift of clothing mixed with complements, he'd read that both were likely to drive away any Other. It hadn't been a very extravagant gift, a new pair of gloves and a gruff "well done Johnny" but at the time it had seemed to be the final nail in the coffin as Soap had gone white as a sheet(he can do that but he can't blush???) and scurried off. A quiet dread had filled his stomach the whole day until Soap turned up at dinner, a little quieter than usual but wearing his new gloves and eating more than usual(a scoop and a half of mashed potatoes with 4 packets of butter and 2 packets of sour cream as well as a cookie. The main course of spaghetti and meatballs went untouched though Gaz snapped it up before it could truly go to waste). Though when Ghost returned to his room late that night after trudging through hours of paperwork he found a pile of tiny, aromatic, pink flowers on the floor in front of his door and on top of them a shiny metal comb. Simon's tired brain hardly stopped to think of any of the dire warnings he'd found on forum posts and folklore sites alike, crouching and tenderly retrieving the piece from its bed of flora, careful not to crush any of the tiny blooms. Well... With all the knots in his hair-purposeful and otherwise-he's going to need a sturdy comb anyway.

#fae!soap #superstitious bastard!Ghost #little does Ghost know that Scottish fairies actually favor bread instead of being repelled by it #meanwhile the whole clothing trick would have totally worked if it weren't for the fact that Soap took as a courting gesture #also the idea of Ghost leaving out two ounces of hazelnut coffee creamer and Soap just feeling his heart beating out of his chest #but he doesnt want to be presumptuous so he waits until hes got absolute confirmation that Ghost wishes to court him #and he gives him gloves...so he can touch him and not be burned by the iron #Soap is simultaneously three steps ahead and six steps behind #cod mw2 #ghost x soap #ghostsoap #john soap mactavish #simon ghost riley #fae!au #and to think i wanted to upload this to ao3 😑

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