Usually spilt milk on my stove is cause for tears, or at the least, grumbling of the largest magnitude. Especially first thing in the morning.
But not today. Today I would have cleaned my stove with the smallest implement imaginable since that spilt milk saved my pride.
Yesterday was Son#4's birthday. It would have been a very boring birthday apart from the fact he got to spend some of it with four adorable nieces. He had to work, a special friend was away, his dad was in bed sick, and for a while it looked like it would just be the two of us celebrating.
Not an exciting way to spend your twenty-sixth birthday.
Hopefully, today might change all that and we can all somehow make it up to him.
And so I made a cake. A mud cake. And mud cakes need ganache. And, for some reason, after only having six and a half hours sleep due to staying up to watch our election results and then having to put our clocks forward for Daylight Saving, I thought it would be a good idea to make ganache first thing this morning, even before my morning cuppas. (Have I ever mentioned that I do not function before the obligatory two cups of tea in the morning?)
So while the tea brewed, I made ganache.
And it split. And was all grainy. The really, nasty type of grainy. So bad that I didn't even take a photo.
Thankfully there is the internet and I learnt from this site that the easiest thing to do is warm skim milk and whisk it in to the ganache with a balloon whisk over low heat.
What did I have to lose? Other than a cup of cream and three blocks of dark organic chocolate?
So I tried it and it worked and the fact that I spilt half the milk over the stove is small price to pay.
Son#4 will have his cake. We'll eat it and (hopefully) enjoy it. And title of worst cook can go to someone else today. (On second thoughts, perhaps I'll retain that title. As you'll soon learn, there was more to come.)
However, despite saving the ganache, the cake went from bad to worse when the fat separated out of the ganache after it had been applied to the cake. Just take a look at this pictorial of disaster.
From this ...
to this (oh dear, the less said the better!) ...
to this (proof that cream can cover a multitude of sins) ...
Happy Birthday Son#4.
But not today. Today I would have cleaned my stove with the smallest implement imaginable since that spilt milk saved my pride.
Yesterday was Son#4's birthday. It would have been a very boring birthday apart from the fact he got to spend some of it with four adorable nieces. He had to work, a special friend was away, his dad was in bed sick, and for a while it looked like it would just be the two of us celebrating.
Not an exciting way to spend your twenty-sixth birthday.
Hopefully, today might change all that and we can all somehow make it up to him.
And so I made a cake. A mud cake. And mud cakes need ganache. And, for some reason, after only having six and a half hours sleep due to staying up to watch our election results and then having to put our clocks forward for Daylight Saving, I thought it would be a good idea to make ganache first thing this morning, even before my morning cuppas. (Have I ever mentioned that I do not function before the obligatory two cups of tea in the morning?)
So while the tea brewed, I made ganache.
And it split. And was all grainy. The really, nasty type of grainy. So bad that I didn't even take a photo.
Thankfully there is the internet and I learnt from this site that the easiest thing to do is warm skim milk and whisk it in to the ganache with a balloon whisk over low heat.
What did I have to lose? Other than a cup of cream and three blocks of dark organic chocolate?
So I tried it and it worked and the fact that I spilt half the milk over the stove is small price to pay.
Son#4 will have his cake. We'll eat it and (hopefully) enjoy it. And title of worst cook can go to someone else today. (On second thoughts, perhaps I'll retain that title. As you'll soon learn, there was more to come.)
(Look closely and you can see the evidence of the near disaster on the lip of the pan.)
However, despite saving the ganache, the cake went from bad to worse when the fat separated out of the ganache after it had been applied to the cake. Just take a look at this pictorial of disaster.
From this ...
to this (oh dear, the less said the better!) ...
to this (proof that cream can cover a multitude of sins) ...
Happy Birthday Son#4.
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