Blueberries of Discontent

[ladysprite]

One of the things I miss the most during the summer is baking. Don't get me wrong; I love summer food - I adore fresh vegetables and good tomatoes that don't taste like cardboard, and BLT's and stuffed cucumbers and pasta salad, but I miss actually using the oven and the stove. Summer cooking is almost entirely a matter of chopping and stirring. The alchemy of heat applied to food, and tweaking and tasting and watching as flavors change and develop is entirely missing, as are the amazing smells that fill the house when your food is more than just a bowl of cold ingredients tossed together.

So, since today was slightly cooler than anything I've experienced since returning from Hawaii, I went a little crazy. Breakfast was cinnamon chip scones, dinner was homemade stromboli, and, since blueberries were on sale at the grocery and actually looked fairly good (unlike the last batch of semi-sour squishy greenish blueberries I bought), I decided to make blueberry lattice cookie bars for dessert.

They sound easy, don't they? And they should be. The entire recipe consisted of a fairly simple flour, butter, sugar, and egg crust that was pressed into the pan, a cooked blueberry filling, and some more of the crust woven into a lattice on top. Simple. I've made enough lattices that they no longer intimidate me, and I've prepared more complicated recipes than this when I was fifteen. Simple.

At least, it's simple until you take into consideration the fact that "cooler than anything in the past two weeks" still meant that it was over 80 degrees. And that, by the time I was working on the top crust, the oven had been on and heating the kitchen for about an hour and a half. And that, due to the specific nature of this recipe, the crust had a window of approximately two degrees in which it was workable - anything cooler and it was a crumbly, streaky brick; anything warmer and it melted into a thin smear of goo on the cutting board.

Add to this the fact that I was overheated, slightly dehydrated, and frustrated beyond belief, and the inevitable outcome was me throwing (empty) mixing bowls across the kitchen, beating the recalcitrant dough with my fists while cursing its very existence, and generally insulting every possible detail of the recipe, the berries themselves, shortbread-style crusts, myself, the cutting board, and anything else I could think of.

I finished the lattice, out of sheer stubbornness and a deep desire to punish the ingredients by throwing them in a scalding hot oven and laughing while they sizzled - and I must admit that it was the ugliest, lumpiest, patchiest, lamest lattice crust ever to disgrace the face of the earth. But I won, damnit, and while it may be hideous-looking enough that I would never allow it to be seen by the general public, I'll also admit that it's almost impossible to make anything consisting mostly of berries, butter, flour, and sugar to taste actively bad.

However, I think it'll be a long, long time before I'm willing to go anywhere near a recipe involving a lattice again. And I think in general I may have to just put my baking addiction on hold until it's actually cool outside, instead of merely 'not fatally hot.'

Comments

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this would make a difference, but when baking lately I've been putting on a minimum of lights in the kitchen - I find that when all the lights are on, the room heats up much faster.

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

I got faked out by the weather Sunday, too. I had to pop the flour-paste pie crust back in the fridge a couple of times to keep it workable, and some of the butter in it started to melt before I had finished cutting it up to put in the mixing bowl. The weather felt cool to me, but I guess the butter had a different opinion.

I'm glad we both managed to get something edible out of our exertions. :-)

[wren13.livejournal.com]

Cheesecakes, woman, cheesecakes. You only have to bake them for 40 minutes, they aren't temperature sensitive during construction, and you serve them cold. Yumm! And they totally fill that 'need to bake' urge.
I made blueberry cheesecake last weekend that was absolutely awesome, if I do say so myself.