An Ode to a Cocktail

I'm in love. With a cocktail.

Barcelona Wine Bar recently opened a location in the Northwest of the city near the cathedral, and we stopped in for drinks and desserts the other night. Though their churros with hot chocolate sauce and crepas (crepe-like desserts filled with whipped cream and drizzled with a spicy chocolate sauce) were fabulous, the real star was the Bourbon Spice Rack, a whiskey cocktail. 

Bourbon, lemon juice and cardamom and lavender bitters served over ice.  Floral and balanced, but without outshining the bourbon.  The whiskey was definitely still the main player in this cocktail.  It'll run you $11, which disappointed me a bit given the size of the drink, and it certainly isn't winning any presentation awards, but it might have been the most well-balanced drink I've ever had.

9/10, would definitely order again.

White Cake

White cake is a little less sweet than your typical vanilla cake, but it's a great jumping-off point for angel food cake, your standard vanilla cake if you substitute whole eggs for egg whites, shortcakes, and more!  For example, adding eggs will help with rising, but adding too many (not realizing, for example, that two egg whites are the same ass one whole egg) can make your batter too runny so it won't set up right.

My favorite white cake recipe is a tweaked version of the Betty Crocker recipe, made slightly sweeter for my own tastes.

To start:

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup shortening
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 egg whites

1. Heat your oven to 350 degrees. Always. This is, unless otherwise noted, the temperature you bake at.
2. Grease and flour your baking pan.
3. Add all your ingredients (except the egg whites) to a large mixing bowl and beat for 2 minutes on high speed (though maybe start slow if you don't want to wind up covered in flour). Add your egg whites and beat for another 2 minutes.
4. Pour your batter into the pans and bake for 30-35 minutes (or 17 minutes for cupcakes).

Then cool your stuff if you want to frost it.  Really cool it to room temperature, not just like five minutes.

A Break from Breaks

Before I begin, I'd just like to send a huge shout-out to Simply Banh Mi in Georgetown for checking us out and commenting! 

"Grad Student Eats" has spent the summer transitioning to "Grad Student Eats (And Works A Lot)," which has led to a bit of a lull in posting.  

In all of this chaos, I've been reminded of a great love of mine, and something that always makes me feel better: baking.  Now, baking gets a bad rap, because a lot of people find it daunting.  I, for one, find it induces a pseudo-zen state where the only concerns I have are measurements, my oven, and my mixer.

There are two things that most people won't tell you about baking. The first is that baking is chemistry, plain and simple.  You take ingredients (reactants), and excite them with heat to create a chemical change that leads to the difference between cake and glue (both of which contain flour and water).  This means that baking, like chemistry, requires focus and precise work to insure the reaction works properly.  I like this because it removes the ability to get distracted.  I recognize not everyone shares this belief.  To learn to tweak your recipes, you need to understand the way different agents react and the way adjusting them impacts your output. 

The other secret is that baking, once you master some basic recipes, is really easy. Most cakes, for example, are just variations on the same chocolate and vanilla base cakes, adjusted to change the texture or bring out new flavors.  

In the spirit of these two secrets, I will endeavor to share with you, over the next three weeks, some of my base baking recipes, along with some of the underlying food science, as a way to share some of my love with you.

Hope you enjoy!