bûche de noël

     Merry post-Christmas! I hope you had a wonderful time, wherever you were and whoever you were with. Personally, our family didn't really celebrate Christmas this year, which isn't that unusual considering that none of us are even slightly religious. We just came back from Leavenworth, which is a mock Bavarian town in central Washington. Even though Seattle is usually rainy and miserable during the holiday season (I think I've only had a "white Christmas" once in my lifetime), everywhere east of the Cascade Mountains always gets a ton of snow every year. We and some family and friends spent several days in Leavenworth, during which we went snowshoeing (fun, but bone-chillingly freezing) and ate hot pot three times in two days. Ironically enough, we did not eat any food that was remotely Bavarian or Christmas-related.

     I did, however, bake a bûche de Noël this holiday season. I'm in French 200, and the entire French class had a "fête de Noël" before winter break, on a Tuesday evening. There was a bûche de Noël contest - how could I resist? The Sunday afternoon before the party, a friend of mine (who will be known as C) came over and helped me bake the cake. I didn't have a 10x15 jellyroll pan, so we used a 12x17 pan and crossed our fingers. C sifted powdered sugar and the like while I whipped egg whites and folded Meyer lemon zest into the chocolate whipped filling (on a whim) and melted chocolate and butter for frosting. I usually don't bake with other people, finding it rather a pain, but I was really grateful to have another pair of hands in the kitchen with such an involved task. By about 4:30 PM, we had a decent-looking log, pretty but plain. We were pretty satisfied with ourselves, and I stored the cake in the fridge.

Chocolate mushrooms, which C bought from the Asian grocery store.

     After I came home from school on Tuesday afternoon, I quickly started on the decorating of the cake. I sprinkled cocoa powder for "dirt", and gathered some foliage from outside to adorn the pan. I melted chocolate to "glue" chocolate mushrooms onto the cake, because I decided that meringue mushrooms were way too much of a hassle to make. And, of course, I covered it all with a layer of powdered sugar "snow". 

     However, I had to go to my violin lesson, which was right before the party. I couldn't drive home to pick up the cake after my lesson - what should I do? So, of course, I had to bring the decorated cake to my violin teacher's studio. I looked a sight, with a giant tree trunk-shaped cake perched on my knees as I waited in the lobby. I explained the situation to my teacher, who then had to take a picture on his smartphone.

     I finally arrived at the French party, bûche de Noël in tow, and we sang French carols and had a white elephant gift exchange. There were seven or eight other cakes at the party, which everybody sampled and voted on. I was maybe not surprised, but still happy to find out that C and I's cake won "best tasting". Considering all that I went through for a mass of chocolate cake and frosting and whipped cream, the cake certainly tasted great to me.

scones

 

     I am in love with the concept of afternoon tea. Even though I've never actually had a tea party, being Chinese and all. The closest thing to "tea as a meal" we have in our culture is dian xin (usually referred to by its Cantonese name, dim sum), which is like a Western brunch and is absolutely wonderful and amazing and I could talk your ear off about all my favorite foods at that meal, but it's not what I associate with "tea". When the phrase afternoon tea comes up, I envision clotted cream and jam and tiny little cucumber sandwiches. All perfectly dainty, all so old-fashioned, all as romantic as the novels I read about days gone by. And, of course, one has to have scones.

      I've made scones in the past. They've generally been alright - palatable, at least, if not the light, tender ones of my dreams. I usually ran into issues when handling the dough. I had to mess with it too much, rolling it out and using a wine glass to cut out circles and having them stick to the wooden cutting board I use for dough (I don't trust our counter top). I didn't know what to do, until I discovered this guide.

     Using the recipe on Audax Artifex, I produced the best scones that have ever come out of my kitchen. Even though my previous recipe included one and a half sticks of butter, it didn't produce a scone nearly as tender as this one, which uses a fairly modest amount of fat. Most of my success is probably because of an improved technique. Audax went into the science behind a good scone quite exhaustively (which I, being my nerdy, science-y self, loved. There's a reason Good Eats is my favorite Food Network show!), which helped immensely. I read all of the tips and troubleshooting help at least twice. I froze my grated butter (leaving behind a very messy grater in the process - I'll definitely freeze the butter before grating next time), triple-sifted my flour and refrigerated it, used a light hand when dealing with the dough, and refrigerated the shaped scones. There was a lot of downtime in this recipe!

     One caveat was that the outsides of the scones were rather crusty and hard, but this was likely due to my using too much flour when rolling out the dough. I'll use milk to brush the tops of the scones before baking next time. Overall, I was very impressed with myself. I cut a scone in half, smeared it with some homemade strawberry jam, and spent my morning in a quiet bliss. The scones may not have lasted until tea time, but they were delicious nonetheless.

hello!

I'm Zhanpei, but virtually everybody calls me PeiPei in real life. I'm 15 years old, and currently a sophomore in high school, in a suburb near Seattle. I have a passion for art, classic literature, science, and Reddit. I play the violin. I want to become a physicist, and my dream school is MIT. I'm obsessed with Lord of the Rings, musicals (currently, Les Mis), Avatar: the Last Airbender (and Legend of Korra), and Fullmetal Alchemist, among other fandoms. But none of those interests are why I made this blog, are they? It's all about the food.

My torrid affair with the culinary world began when I was a young girl, perusing the nonfiction shelves of the public library. I was, for some reason, drawn to cookbooks. I still can't explain why, but I read them as if they were the novels I also loved to read. I especially loved dessert cookbooks and books about foreign cuisines.

The practical application of the knowledge I absorbed, though, was yet to come. I had dabbled in some baking throughout childhood, including an undercooked, cakey batch of chocolate-chip cookies and ladyfingers that were little more than globs of foamy egg whites crusted onto an aluminum pie tin. It wasn't until 8th grade that my obsession began in earnest. When I was 13, I made my first successful batch of cupcakes, with a recipe I found on Food.com. Immediately, I was hooked. I made dozens upon dozens of cupcakes: a batch of chocolate cupcakes with mint-green frosting and decorated with Andes chocolates; a batch of vanilla with chocolate chips; a batch that were more like muffins, with diced-up plums that turned into jammy pockets of fruit. I looked up recipes in my spare time, and I gradually began expanding my horizons into other baked goods.

Now, I bake on a pretty regular basis. I have also begun actually cooking, too - I make my own breakfasts and lunches on school days. Funnily enough, I didn't start food photography until I started thinking about creating a blog. Photography just wasn't "my thing", in my opinion. But then I actually picked up a camera and took some shots, and I discovered that photography, too, was incredibly rewarding. I recently started posting my food photos on Facebook, which has won me the (possibly one-dimensional) reputation of being "that girl who takes delicious-looking photos of food".

I hope you enjoy my blog! It will be more of a chronicle of my cooking adventures than a source of information and recipes, I think, but I hope it will be a rewarding experience for the both of us.