high-bar baking

I bought Mary Berry’s recipe book specifically because she’s British. I was new and naive and thought that would guarantee the book would have weight measurements instead of volume. Lo and behold, there is a US version of the book. Sans grams. That I purchased. So that was annoying. I’ve tried a couple of recipes from it, but when I’m making something as complicated as a Swiss Roll, I’d really like you to say more. Right now. 

She has a decent recipe for lime bars, which are a sheet cake/bar of plain vanilla cake with lime frosting on top. I remember it being good, if you don’t mind doing the complicated math of figuring out how to make your own self-rising flour at home. (It isn’t that complicated, I’m just salty at three-years-ago me who decided to write out all the math but not leave the answer for herself. How dare she! …how dare… I?) But when I went back, I realized there was no lime in the cake itself. And since I went down this road to get rid of some limes, I decided to try and do better. I settled on adapting this snacking cake to be lime instead of Meyer lemon, and I was quite pleased. Plus, I got to use up some crème fraîche that I had no concrete plan for. Win win.

The cake collapsed a tiny bit, so I’d probably bring the leavening down a little next time. But it was no big deal. Overall, I was very happy with this one.

As I write this, I had to step away for a second to add a koi pond to my dream house diagram. My friends are drawing their dream houses, and I finished twenty minutes ago because I cannot draw. And also didn’t get the memo about how much detail we were going into. Now I’ve committed all the sections of my paper, and there isn’t enough room to go back and add more labelled boxes for my additional dreams. But there was absolutely enough space to add a koi pond. Throwing all the way back to my childhood-home-at-two-years-old for that one. In Dreamland I’ll add one of those little bridges, too. Next to the pizza oven and outdoor patio twinkly lights. Obviously.