working on

I've got paid content on Substack (for my grammar crowd) through this coming Friday, which gives me breathing room to create content through mid-January. Right now, I need to add content to my main blog (this one) and work on photos and text for my walk blog. I'm currently finishing up the second of two Bundt cakes; the first was my family rum cake, and the second is supposed to be a death-by-chocolate cake, but I mistyped the recipe (I'll be correcting it when I finish here) and therefore messed up an essential part of the cake batter by not adding softened butter—a crucial fat that (1) adds moisture to the final product, (2) makes the batter a bit more liquidy (fat and water from soft/melted butter allows flour particles to slide past each other more easily, thus making the batter more pourable), and (3) allows the cake to rise a bit more as the water content in the butter turns to steam and helps form that spongy cake crumb we all know and love.

In my favor: the cake does contain chocolate chips (this is Death by Chocolate, after all), which have their own fat/water content; I also added, instead of rum, a mixture of chocolate heavy cream, which also contains both fat and water, and one of my four eggs contained a double yolk—yay!—which also adds extra fat. (I need to look up what double yolks mean for chicken eggs.) Will these ingredients compensate for the lack of 115 g of regular butter? I don't know. I have a chocolate-butter sauce for the finished Bundt cake standing by; that's going to add butter to the final product, but it won't be the same as butter incorporated into the cake batter. So I'm worried as to how the cake is going to turn out; I've cranked down the baking temperature a few degrees, but I've upped the bake time, so we'll see what comes of all that. I have no doubt the cake will come out chocolatey as fuck, but will it be edible?

I'm meeting my buddy Charles tomorrow evening for dinner at a local Five Guys up the street in Gangnam. The plan is to bring along samples of rum cake and chocolate cake for him and his wife, but we'll have to see whether the chocolate cake is even edible first. It might be a ruined mess, for all I know. Which means I'll have to eat a sample before I meet Charles. Oh, darn the luck. I'll be curious to see how melted or unmelted the chocolate chips will be after the cake has had a chance to cool. I'm also going to be adding a Magic Shell-style ganache to the cake (which needs to be chilled for the shell to be able to form). The recipe for the homemade Magic Shell is actually extremely simple.

Five Guys...  oy, gevalt. Another wasted blood-sugar day, but it's my choice. I'm going to have to full-on starve myself after Thanksgiving. I wonder how long I can sustain that. I used to be able to do a true water fast for seven days, but that went down to about four or five days, in recent years, before I started to become too weak and dizzy. Where am I now?

In other news: last week was basically a week of resting to allow my right big toe to recover. I didn't make it to the orthopede because, in my opinion, my toe is healing just fine with antibiotics, topical iodine, Epsom-salt baths, and regular changing of the dressings (plus a standard washing of the feet). This coming week, knowing that I'm no longer as strong as I was than when I started my walk, I'm restarting my resistance training as well as adding a staircase component. I don't know how much it can strengthen a heart succumbing to heart failure, but if the recent walk was any indication, exercising in a way that mildly strains the heart over a period of time is not a bad thing. I can simulate that mild strain by pausing between floors as I work my way up. I'll have to figure out the intervals: three floors, then pause; four floors, then pause; five floors, then pause (probably not)...?

rum cake, which came out perfectly, almonds and all

The rum cake puffed up high enough for the very top of the cake to burn since it was too close to the oven's topside burners. The chocolate cake also puffed up, but not as much, probably because of the butter issue I'd mentioned above.

Death by Chocolate (that is not the Magic Shell coating)

The Death by Chocolate cake is not quite ready, so it's in the oven another few minutes, during which time I hope the oven's heat will liquefy the chocolate-butter sauce enough for it to sink into the cake, and the cake will have a chance to bake a bit more thoroughly. Not that it matters much: I could tell the cake was at least 90% baked, and the addition of the chocolate-butter sauce is only going to make it softer, so a second cake-tester exam is probably not going to reveal anything. (Normally, after a regular cake has baked, you stick a tester—like a chopstick—into it, and if the tester comes out of the cake covered in wet batter, then you know the cake isn't fully baked. My "tester" was a metal chopstick that I used to poke holes into the cake in preparation for pouring in the chocolate-butter sauce, and it came out of the experience fairly stained with cake, so I knew the cake's interior hadn't totally baked. I'm giving the cake another six minutes at 163ºC to help firm it up ever so slightly. The rum cake had baked at the recommended temperature of 163ºC for fifty minutes; the chocolate cake, by contrast, had baked at about 150ºC for sixty minutes. We'll see whether adding a few minutes at a higher temperature helped the chocolate cake at all. I can say this: the cake is as black as Darth Vader's soul. Or maybe the Emperor's.

Both cakes, after cooling down, will be flipped onto plates to assume their right-side-up positions. The chocolate cake will be chilled in the fridge, and tomorrow, I'll make and apply the homemade Magic Shell icing to it and eat myself a sample. If you're gonna have a cheat day, you might as well say Fuck it and go all the way. But penance must follow.

If I remember to, I'll take photos of both cakes once they've been plated and before I've had a chance to cut out sample pieces for Charles and his Missus. I expect the Missus to throughly hate both cakes, which are unapologetically American in their sweetness and richness. Koreans like punch-you-in-the-face spiciness, but they're weird when it some to things that are fatty and/or sweet, especially if those things are foreign. There are native Korean foods that are plenty sweet—cloyingly sweet—by American standards: ho-ddeok/hotteok is one; yak-gwa is another. But when Koreans eat Western desserts like cakes and cookies and éclairs, they'll hypocritically complain that the Western version is too sweet and too buttery or fatty, then they'll make their own, dumbed-down version of American desserts with much less in the way of eggs, butter, and sugar—to the point where the Koreanized version of the Western dessert, now somehow tolerable to the Korean palate, has become boring and dry and milquetoast. Of course, there are plenty of "legit" bakeries in Korea staffed by people who have trained overseas—Kim Young Mo bakery down the street comes to mind—and who take seriously the idea of providing an authentic Western-dessert (or -bread, or -pastry, etc.) experience, so it's not as though Korea is some kind of food desert. It's definitely not. But this change to doing Western food in a legitimately Western way is, relatively speaking, fairly recent. For the longest time, Korea was happy just fucking up Western recipes and passing them along to normal citizens as if they were the real thing, i.e., this was just "their take" on Western desserts (and other foods like hamburgers, steak, Tex-Mex, and so on).

To be fair, the West bastardizes foreign food all the time (look at Chinese food, but it could be argued that the Chinese have altered their food themselves to suit what they think are foreign tastes), which is why some Americans end up shocked when they visit the Old Country (Italy, France, China, Greece, Egypt, India, etc.) and discover, for example, that Italian pizzas are all thin, simple, and personal-sized, not loaded down with obnoxious quantities of cheese, pepperoni (itself an Italian-American invention), and twenty other toppings; or that the European idea of a salad is a maximum of three fresh, simple ingredients and a very simple dressing that might only be melted bleu cheese (as I found out one time in France; melted bleu makes for a great dressing) or a splash of balsamic vinegar—no oil, even. And sometimes, the bastardizations that come out of various countries and cultures can be arguably better than the originals from the Old Country. The best example I can think of is the Vietnamese bánh mì, which beats the hell out of most American sandwiches.

Anyway, I've been leaving my keyboard periodically to tend to my cake, which is now out of the oven and re-doused with chocolate-butter sauce (the first round of sauce did indeed sink nicely into the cake). The cake will now cool for an hour before I stick it in the fridge to chill. Tomorrow morning, I'll make the homemade Magic Shell ganache and pour it over the chilled cake, which will by that point become intolerably chocolatey—albeit not to me since I have an unhealthily high tolerance for sweetness and richness.

Again: photos of both cakes tomorrow when prep is all done.