Baking Bad

I couldn’t let Breaking Bad finish without some kind of celebration.  It has, after all, been one hell of a ride these last few years, and I have no idea what I’m going to do with my Monday nights now it’s all over.

Stage one: the cake.

It’s a blue (well, more aquamarine to be honest, damn you Todd!) and white marbled two layer cake.  This layer did a bit of a chestburster inpression as I tried to bash coax it gently out of the tin, but as you can see the cracks where it was reattached are barely noticable.  Or at least, it’ll all be covered in piles of icing soon, so frankly who cares.

And here it is, possibly the most dangerous Breaking Bad cake in East Anglia.  The ‘crystal meth’ is rock candy (see previous post) and while not as dangerous as the first lot I made I’d still recommend removing the big shards before taking a bite!

The second batch of cake mix I made into cupcakes for my fellow BrBa obsessed colleagues. I made about 15 and they disappeared pretty quickly, so I’m glad I kept a few aside for the actual episode later that night!

I had a little of the candy glass left over, so… dangerous cake happened.  This one was later carefully deconstructed and eaten by trained professionals.

By the time I’d finished baking, I was on a bit of a sugar high so of course Breaking Bad Chocolates seemed like a brilliant idea, never mind that I already had half a kitchen’s worth of washing up to do.

Dark chocolate with blue-tinted white chocolate filling and candyfloss-flavoured crystals.  Nom.

Monday evening finally came around and before viewing commenced we ate (no rumbling stomachs would dare interrupt this episode!): the boy had cooked us Pollos Hermanos chicken in a basket, complete with Cap’n Cook’s Special Ingredient fries.  An awesome surprise to make the night complete!

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Breaking Bad Rock Candy

With the finale just around the corner I decided it was about time to try making THIS blue meth inspired Breaking Bad Cake. The gloriously blue sparkle on top is blue rock candy and while I’m sure I could probably have ordered some online, I figured trying to make my own was a little more in the spirit of the show.  Candy making takes some exact measuring and temperature control after all!

I used this recipe by SugarHero though for my first attempt I tried using a dodgy thermometer which, predictably, didn’t work out and I ended up with a sheet of goo that slowly crystalised over a period of 3 days…

Sufficed to say I obtained a proper candy thermometer for the next batch.  And now I’ve got it I’ll obviously have to make it worth buying by making vast amounts of candy.  That, and it’s great fun!

As the initial batch had clearly not reached a high enough temperature to set, I overcompensated with this lot resulting in a slightly greenish tinge from caramelisation (I really should have just renamed it “Todd’s Slightly Dubious Aquamarine Meth” instead) and a very rapidly hardening batch of candy.  The dregs did a pretty good impression of candyfloss as I tried to pour it out into the waiting tray:

Still, I ended up with a lovely glassy sheet of Breaking Bad inspired candy which solidified within a couple of minutes.  Then came the fun part- smashing it!

It really does look like broken glass…  And it’s sharp enough to do a good impression by touch as well, most likely because I cooked it to a higher temperature than was needed rendering it more like hard boiled sweets than a softer cracked candy. This probably makes it a pretty dangerous cake topping so I’ll use this batch to accessorise my Heisenberg Candy labels (designed last week), and have another go at the weekend.

And the final result, smashed, bagged, and tagged: Heisenberg’s Blue Sky Crystal Candy.  That distracted me for a bit, now back to waiting for the final episode…

Baking

I had a day off and a birthday to bake for, so I treated myself to a copy of the Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook.  I love the idea behind the book: groups of strangers would meet in secret locations across the UK to bake on a theme, eat, and talk about cake.  The website is well worth a look: clandestinecakeclub.co.uk though unfortunately there don’t seem to be any in my part of East Anglia.

The book is rather lovely too.  I was initially attracted by the fact that the recipes didn’t look too complicated or require huge amounts of ingredients, and yet the resulting cakes all looked delicious.  I’m a sucker for cookery books with gorgeous photos.  In fact, I would have had great trouble choosing which recipe to try if the recipient hadn’t been someone who dislikes chocolate!  I decided to go for the Dorset Apple Cake:

It was delicious (especially still just warm, with a dollop of cream) and went down a treat!  My cake tin wasn’t quite the right size, so I opted to make a mini version to use up the excess and perform the very important task of test cake.  I totally had to eat most of it before deciding that it had definitely passed.  You can’t be too careful…

As well as wanting to make every single cake in the Clandestine Cake Club Book, I discovered another good reason to bake more often.  Our house is cold enough that the butter was tough (and I wasn’t organised enough to get up early to leave it in a warm place), so my arms were pretty tired by the time the mix resembled anything like ‘light and fluffy’.  A workout that results in cake?  Don’t mind if I do.

(also for the Design Every Day Project, which I’m just about keeping up with…)