How do you overcome that food failure to find success?
Press on.
And ask for help if you need it. That’s how I got over that hurdle. It’s a frosting recipe that has kicked my hiney for years. Well, no more of that.
This is about my success, which pleases me, and also about how you can find your own success. Then the next one.
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Test from the episode
It’s 2024. That’s not news now, but this is the first show of this new year.
Pretty much for the duration of this podcast, I’ve made the point that procedure matters.
I was a guest on Mike Maharrey’s GodArchy podcast a few years ago and we talked cooking. I am pretty sure even on his show I mentioned procedure as the thing that makes or breaks a cook’s efforts. I cited the much-used line in Escoffierr prepare in the usual manner.
Any cook who knows what that means already understands what those 5 words mean. They mean to use the experience you, as the cook, have gained over many efforts to make that same dish or dishes cooked in the same way and apply that to this.
Restaurant cooks have their own lingo and it can change from place to place depending on the crew and what is on the menu. Any cook familiar with the jargon knows exactly what’s expected and how to execute that task.
I’ve even kinda beat up on chef and recipe authors who don’t provide good procedures. I’m pretty certain the reason so many people insist they can’t cook or bake is at least from crappy procedures.
And so it is with this recipe I am going to tell you about.
But first, a story.
Marcel Proust wrote volumes of books. Maybe the single best-known passage was the short paragraph about a Madaline cookie and the spectacular ability of food to make the eater travel through time to the best memory of that food. For the character in Proust’s book that simple, well-executed cookie transported him to his childhood. Such is the power of food.
My wife’s grandmother was, by several accounts, an amazing cook. I never met her. My wife’s birthday cake from granny was a white cake with fudge icing. So, of course, years ago I was tasked with making that cake. What wasn’t then known to me was the immense power this memory had.
Even then I was decorating cakes and doing pastry work. Icing a cake. How hard can that be? Ha ha ha.
Fudge icing, at least this one, is a cooked sugar icing. Then the hot compound is placed in the mixer bowl and slowly paddles to let out some of the heat.
Now, here’s the first thing. If you’ve ever iced a cake, there’s a superior chance that the icing you used was at least room temperature. It is room temperature in those tubs at the grocery store and buttercream icing has to be room temperature. So does cream cheese icing. This is icing so it must be room temperature based on all my previous experience.
There’s a note on this recipe that reads the icing may need to be thinned a bit with heavy cream to make it spreadable. So I added cream. Way more than a half a cup. And it spread but was far far far from what the memory expected.
I don’t remember if I did that for our first year together. We will celebrate our 20th anniversary this year and I’ve not yet gotten this right for her birthday.
I am going to read the recipe. It’s short. See if you hear where some pitfalls might be. I’ll also tell you it is a photocopy of a typewritten recipe using all caps.
(read recipe)
Beat until creamy—what is that author’s definition of creamy?–and to the right consistency. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is that?!
One daughter had her birthday recently. She asked for a white cake with fudge icing. There was the expected chortle from my wife. Of course, I agreed. I love my daughters and will certainly attempt fudge icing. After last year’s fondant iced cake, this should be easier. She wanted a fondant cake when she was 3 or 4 and I put her off. She remembered every year until it was time.
I was determined to get this right this time. I checked the YouTube. Holy crap. Fudge Icing was an avalanche of hits. Fudge icing southern style. Hardly any fewer hits. That’s not gonna help. None of them seemed to be exactly mine and if they aren’t this then they don’t help.
As a last resort and with a three-hour time difference I texted my mother-in-law. I even sent her a short video of the icing in the bowl asking if that was how it was supposed to look. It was.
Epiphany number 1. The icing is hot, or at least pretty darned warm, when it goes on the cake.
There was only 1 epiphany but a few insights. The icing goes from just right to fudged up in about 2 seconds. No kidding. It goes from yeah, I can spread that if I work kinda quick to an asphalt machine can’t move that fudge.
I did it. When I presented my wife with her piece she agreed that was as close as I’ve ever gotten. I’ll take that as a victory. Between at least a dozen fails and an amped-up memory of what was, that might be all I can expect. And, this year she’ll get her white cake with fudge icing for her birthday.
Insight number 1 is to make at least a batch and a half. To call this icing is to compare it to all the other icings you know. It isn’t like anything you know. Probably. You can coax and goad buttercream to move a bit here or there. Fudge icing sets up fast and sits right down and ain’t goin’ nowhere. You ain’t coxing that no how no way.
After 40 or so years of working with food, I’m still learning. And, procedures matter.
I know this was written by someone who knows for others who know. It was not intended to end up in one of my recipe binders. It was not meant for a chef who doesn’t know what the usual manner is for this cooked fudge icing.
It’s good. Real good. Sweet as can be but fun to eat. If you like to pick out the cake part first and leave the icing for last, this will cooperate completely. And with some ice-cold half and half, or milk, it’s a few moments of childhood all over again, even for the guy who didn’t have this as a kid. My birthday cake preference was angel food cake with chocolate icing. I doubt very much my mother made this fudge icing.
If that Proust Madeline cookie reference seems obscure to you, perhaps the movie Ratatouille will help. The food critic, Ego, at the end of the movie, eats ratatouille and we move to his mind and see him as a child at the kitchen door and his mama feeding him a bowl of ratatouille. I had one customer, 1, tell me the bouillabaisse reminded her of her childhood. You can’t ever plan to do that, but it was the best possible compliment I could have.
There’s nearly a year ahead of us so go make food memories and be kids again.