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lumine-no-hikari · 4 months ago

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Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #310 (Part 2)

Okay!! I'm back!! Here we go...!!!

So, before I could start baking a cake, I had to wash the dishes from breakfast. So I did!

...And then I sat down for a second, and Hoshi promptly decided that I am a bed:

...As you know, it was illegal for me to move until he was all done. So I sat around for some happy cuddle time, which is just as well, since I probably could have used a break by then in any case.

J's favorite cake is a tres leches cake. It's a very spongy cake which is then soaked in a mixture of evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and heavy cream. It's obscenely delicious. And even, better, it's ridiculously versatile! You can flavor it with chocolate, with matcha, with banana, with coconut... pretty much whatever you can think of!! Heck, you could even probably flavor it with-

......!!!!!!!

Oooooh. You know what? Actually, I think I'll keep that particular idea to myself until the solstice; it'll be a surprise for you for your birthday!!!! Oooooh, I think you're gonna love it!!!! Just you wait...!!!! 🤩🤭😁

...Anyway!!! So you start with 60 grams of flour. We weigh our flour instead of relying on cups, because flour is super squishable; you can get wildly different volumes of flour with the same damn measuring cup because it compresses with pressure. So just save yourself the headache and weigh it.

To that, you'll add 3/4ths of a teaspoon of baking powder (I think about 6 grams...?) and 1/8th of a teaspoon (I think about 1 gram...?) of salt. I dunno if your world has measuring spoons; most of the rest of my world uses the metric system like sane people, and I'm not sure why my country hasn't gotten with the program. So my country still uses pounds and ounces and cups and teaspoons and tablespoons, and it's VERY annoying. But that's what we have, so... yeah.

Anyway, set the bowl of powdered ingredients to the side for now. We have to separate the yolks from 3 eggs. I like to use my slotted spoon for that, like this:

We're gonna put the egg whites to the side for now, and stick the yolks into our handy-dandy stand mixer (because I cannot whisk things that fast; maybe you could...???), along with 3/8ths of a cup of sugar (or 82.5 grams).

You'll whisk it on high until everything is combined and it gets pale yellow, and a little fluffy from air getting whisked in. Like this:

You'll add 2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons (or 40 grams) of milk to the beaten egg yolks and sugar, as well as half a teaspoon (or about 2.5 milliliters) of vanilla extract (or vanilla paste, if you like that better). Mix it up, and then sift your flour/baking powder/salt mixture, and slowly incorporate it into the yolk mixture.

Once the flour mixture and the egg yolk mixture are combined, it should look like this:

From here, you'll need to transfer it into another bowl. And this is another great thing about a rice cooker; you can use the bowl that comes with it for ANYTHING, because it can hold a lot of stuff!

...As for the stand mixer bowl, you're gonna hafta wash that, because we gotta whisk those egg whites we left to the side with some sugar until they make stiff peaks. But egg whites won't do the chemistry properly while we're whisking it if there's ANYTHING in the bowl with them other than sugar, and I know from experience that simply rinsing out the bowl with water isn't enough to get rid of any residual egg yolk. You HAVE to wash the bowl, and the whisk, too, with dish soap; hand soap will either leave some kind of moisturizing residue, or it won't be strong enough to get rid of all the food residue.

Soap for hands is different from soap for dishes!! Dish soap is too harsh to use regularly on hands!! Hand soap isn't strong enough to do a good job of cleaning dishes!! The chemistry and purposes of these soaps are different!! Don't forget!!

Here's our egg whites before whisking; you'll whisk it on high until it starts to get foamy. Egg whites do a chemistry thing when air is incorporated into them quickly. I'm not sure how the mechanics work; I used to know, but I forgot. I'm sure you can find out how it works if you're interested, though!

Here it is at firm peaks; you can tell because inside the bowl, the pointy bit is kinda (but not fully!) flopped over when you take the whisk out; this is the part where I added the sugar:

Here it is at stiff peaks; you can tell because the pointy bit in the bowl doesn't flop over at all:

...This might just barely be a bit overbeaten, actually. But that's all right. It'll do.

So now we have a cake batter in two parts. We have to combine it into a single cake batter, but WITHOUT popping the delicate bubbles in our whisked egg whites. So we (gently!!!) plop our egg white foam into our egg yolk mixture:

The idea is to slowly fold the egg yolk mixture over the egg white mixture, and keep doing that until everything is combined. But you have to do it very gently, or else the foamy bubbles in our egg whites will collapse, and it won't be airy or foamy anymore - it'll go all flat.

...I'm not very good at this part. This requires a level of precision that I typically struggle with. Most of my previous attempts at making this cake have fallen flat because I either overmixed it or mixed it too quickly, or mixed it too roughly.

...I'm a little nervous. But the only way out is through...

....!!!! Oh!!! Oh!!!!!! Sephiroth!!! I think it worked this time!!!! LOOK!!!

Ooooooh, that's so exciting!!!!! I've not had it turn out this well before!!! Oh my gosh!!!!

...Anyway!!! So I used an 8 inch by 8 inch (or 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters) cake pan. I lined it with parchment paper, because I know from experience that it doesn't matter how much butter you coat the pan in; this cake sticks to everything.

We pour in the cake batter, and we put it in the oven at 350 degrees F (or about 176.7 degrees C) for 30 minutes!

We can use the parchment paper to take it right out of the pan, and let it cool! Look how beautifully it turned out!!!

In the meantime, we'll mix together 1 can of evaporated milk, 1 can of sweetened condensed milk, and 1/4th cup (or about 59 milliliters) of heavy cream!

Putting in the heavy cream is very easy; you just dump it in there and it's fine. Evaporated milk is easy, too; you just dump it right in. But sweetened condensed milk is very goopy and very sticky; you'll need to use a tool, preferably a silicone one, to get it all out of the can:

...This is our "three milks". Tres leches is Spanish for "three milks". We have heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk, and evaporated milk - these are all milk products. So, figuratively, that's three "milks".

Now for the cake; we'll turn it upside down and stab it full of holes with a toothpick! You can't see the holes very well in this picture, but I promise you, I did stab it full of holes:

We stab it full of holes because we're going to let the cake absorb our "three milk" mixture. We're gonna slowly pour it into the cake pan with the stabbed cake.

...Yes, Sephiroth, I know it seems like a lot, but we're going to pour all of the milk mixture into the cake. All of it. It'll all get absorbed, trust me. It'll be okay, I promise! Let's go...!!! 🤩🤩🤩

...We do it a little at a time and wait for it to absorb, so it doesn't spill over the sides of our cake pan.

...And just like that, it's all done! Nice job!

...But we're not done yet!!! We gotta make the whipped cream frosting!!!

I'm using 1 cup (or about 236.6 milliliters) of heavy cream and 1.5 tablespoons (or about 18.75 grams) of sugar.

We'll whisk it on high speed...

...Beautiful.

And then we put it on our cake!!! But first... do you want to lick the whisk? Everyone should get to do that at least once, if they want to:

Okay!!! So now we cover our cake in the whipped cream, and then we cut it into slices!!!

Here's how it looks after taking a few slices out of the pan...

I made myself some tea to go with it!

It's a pale yellow when it brews, and it smells exactly like lemon cake! We had a little bit of whipped cream leftover; can you guess what I used it for? Hahaha...

...I wish I could give this to you:

...There are so many delightful things I wish I could give to you, but... all I can do is write these silly little letters... 🙁 I'm really sorry about that... 😞

...Well. Maybe by the time you get up out of that crater, you'll have read enough of my letters to know how to do some nice things for yourself. If you ever make yourself a tres leches cake someday, you'll have to show me, all right? Promise me, okay?

...I guess that's it for today. It's going on 1am, and I did lots of things today, so I should probably stop writing now so that I can go to bed.

I love you. Please stay safe out there so that someday, you can make a tasty breakfast and bake a delicious cake with someone who cares deeply for you.

I'll write again tomorrow. I hope you'll look forward to it.

Your friend, Lumine

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lumine-no-hikari · 4 months ago

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Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #310 (Part 1)

I've decided that today's letter is going to be about rice cookers and making snacks. Why? Well… you remember that acquaintance that I can trust about as far as I can throw? He has been asking me about basic life skills every so often, and the other day, he got a rice cooker so that he can make some basic meals for himself. This is a very good thing.

Unfortunately, his parents did not teach him even the most basic of kitchen and housekeeping concepts, like for example, why we don't use hand soap to wash dishes (because some hand soaps will leave residue, and it's designed to wash without damaging the skin oils too much, which makes it ill-suited to removing grease and baked on foods from dishes), and why we don't use metal or melamine foam pads in non-stick pots and pans (both of these things will scratch the non-stick surface, which will lead to cancer-causing chemicals leaching into your food). At this point in time, he is unable to differentiate between a regular sponge (made of plastic or cellulose, which does not scratch most surfaces) and a melamine foam pad (basically sandpaper in foam form; abrasive as hell; mostly used to get tough stains from walls, counters, stoves, refrigerators, and aluminum or ceramic cookware/utensils; not good for anything with a finish you need to preserve).

…This is not a failing on his part. These are not things that one can know unless they're taught, or unless (like me) you're forced to learn them the hard way via trial by fire and getting punished for making mistakes.

There's no such thing as "common sense", because everyone has had wildly different upbringings with wildly different levels of engagement and attentiveness from their parents. This person is not "pathetic", as many people in my world would describe him. Rather, he has suffered a specific form of neglect by which his parents couldn't be bothered to teach him the basics, so they just took care of it for him instead.

I cannot stress enough that this is not "coddling"; this is NEGLECT. This is not him being "spoiled", this is, "teaching my kid how to do things is too hard because I either feel guilty about them doing work, or I have the patience of an angry nest of hornets, so instead of bothering with teaching and doing the emotional work to get over my shit so I can teach kindly and effectively, I'm just gonna do everything for them and disguise it as 'love', 'doting', and 'self-sacrifice' so I can pretend like I can still call myself a good parent and maybe lord it over them later if I feel they owe me something or if they try to hold me accountable for how I treated them. They're not gonna know how to be an adult by the end of it, but I'm just gonna hope they get a spouse who will either tolerate their lack of skills or pick up my slack and teach them for me."

...Related, when a parent fails to set appropriate limits for their child's behavior, this is also neglect; for some reason, though, people like to frame this, too, as "spoiling", and people wanna think that "being spoiled" is a failure on the child's part rather than a failure on the parent's, for reasons I really don't fucking understand, outside of the notion that children are yet another marginalized group of people that everyone seems to hate in my backwards-ass fucking society. And so rather than help the child shore up the skills that their parents failed to teach them, most people, when confronted with a "spoiled" child, will default to despising, shaming, and punishing them, as though the circumstances they were born to are their fault. It's absolutely fucking bananas.

When parents do not establish reasonable, natural consequences for harmful behavior, and when parents do not establish reasonable limits for the child's behavior, it forces the child to try to ascertain those limits and consequences on their own, which is a psychologically stressful task that they are literally not equipped to do, because the relevant parts of the brain have not grown in yet.

And if a child is forced to do this for a long time, guess what? It floods their little brains with adrenaline and cortisol, because a young child needs established limits, and so a lack of limits is tantamount to a lack of safety. Adrenaline and cortisol are neurotoxic, and when a child is chronically exposed to these things, it breaks down several key areas of the brain on a cellular level - like the parts responsible for empathy, cause-and-effect, emotional regulation, memory retrieval, and lots and lots more.

Unfortunately, lots of people think that the only way to establish limits and consequences with children is via violence, fear, dehumanization, and abusing the power dynamic between parent and child. Often enough, people who fail to set limits are people who don't want that for their child, but haven't the skills necessary to set limits in non-violent ways.

So people tried to find a middle ground between using coercion and force to discipline one's children, and letting them run amok. And one way to create that middle ground is via gentle parenting.

One of the common misconceptions that people have about "gentle parenting" is the notion that it means you let your kid do whatever they want, and that's not at all true; that is called "permissive parenting", and that's a completely different animal. Gentle parenting just means that you don't dehumanize your child or use fear and violence in order to discipline them.

Instead, you treat the misbehavior as a lack of skills on their part, or as a problem to be solved, and from there, you're supposed to teach the relevant skills or work together to solve the underlying problem, NOT shame or terrorize them until they fall in line, and NOT throw your hands in the air with a nervous chuckle and say "oh well; kids will be kids, lolz!"

...Anyhoot. In an attempt to explain the context of why my acquaintance needed help to use the rice cooker, I've digressed much. Let's get back on track...

I imagine that you are similar in that you weren't permitted to do much for yourself in the way of cooking or whatever else. So I will explain a few basics today, because when you finally get up out of that horrid crater so you can live a normal life (please don't give up!), there's a lot you're gonna need to know.

This is a rice cooker. Or... it's one example of a rice cooker, anyway. This one is mine:

...As you might see from the settings, it can do a lot more than just make rice. It can make porridge, steam things, and even make cakes! I've used the cake function a few times; it's not the greatest, but it's certainly not bad!

Here's what it looks like when you press the big grey button to open it up:

...As far as I know, this kind of rice cooker can only make raw rice into cooked rice; partially cooked rice (or "instant" rice) will get weird. That's because the rice cooker works by having very precise settings programmed in for the rice type, the amount of rice, and the water levels inside. If you try to use partially-cooked rice, it messes with the water content (because partially-cooked rice already has absorbed some water), and because the balance of rice-to-water will be weird, the resulting rice will be weird, too.

...Anyway. The silvery thing is the inner lid, and it comes off so it can be washed:

...Don't try to cook the rice without the inner lid, or else things won't turn out right. Make sure you wash the lid and replace it every time you use it. It's important.

The rice cooker comes with little lines on the inside of the bowl:

...These lines show you how much water to fill it with after you put the rice in. You'll see that the levels vary based on the kind of rice and consistency you want. We'll focus on the white/mixed rice meter for this.

To reiterate, because this is important: rice first, THEN water.

A rice cooker comes with a rice cup. In my experience, the rice cup is slightly different from measuring cups. Don't try to use measuring cups in place of the rice cup.

So you'll take the rice cup and scoop some rice out of your bag of raw rice. I get big ones from the nearby Asian grocery store, because regular grocery stores don't have giant bags like these, and it's cheaper to get it in bulk and store it properly than to get small amounts:

...You scoop it out like this:

...And then you level it off; this is important:

Then you dump it in the rice cooker bowl. My rice cooker can make a minimum quantity of two rice cups, so I did this twice:

...Some people wash and rinse the rice. I don't. I like it to be nice and sticky when it comes out. So what I do is I just take the the bowl out of the rice cooker...

...and fill the rice bowl (NOT the cooker itself!!!!) with water a little bit of the way, until some of the rice grains float, like this:

When I see that, I kinda shimmy the bowl around a little to get the rice to stop floating. The rice cooker works best when all of the rice has settled to the bottom of the rice bowl.

Once the rice is settled, you'll fill the bowl with water precisely to the white rice line that corresponds to how many rice cups you put in. I used two rice cups, so I fill the bowl with water until the meniscus reaches the "2" line:

From here, you'll put the rice bowl back into the rice cooker, close the lid, and press the "menu" button until the little arrow on the screen highlights what kind of rice you want.

...In this case, we'll set it to white/sushi:

Then we press the start button; it'll take about an hour for the rice to cook:

I had bacon in the fridge. And also eggs and natto, and some mushrooms I wanted to use up. So from here, I decided to make the usual thing I like to make for breakfast, when I have the energy to do it!

I started with preparing the bacon. I like to make it in the oven. You get the same results as with a frying pan or a griddle, but... with better consistency and less mess. You'll need a baking sheet lined with parchment paper so things don't stick.

...But as you can see, parchment paper doesn't stay on a baking sheet very easily. So we'll use a physics trick. We just sprinkle a little water on the baking sheet, in little droplets, with an even distribution...

...And then it'll stay on.

I got two kinds of bacon - hardwood smoked and applewood smoked. I wanted to try each to see which one I liked better:

...So I prepared two baking sheets with parchment paper. Then I arranged the bacon on it, changing the orientation for each slice so that it's more likely to fit on the sheet:

We set the oven for 400 degrees F (204.4 degrees C), stick the bacon in for 15 minutes, then swap racks, and stick it in for 15 more minutes. I'll probably opt for 12 minutes and 12 minutes next time, though; the bacon wasn't burnt, but it was very dark. I like it that way, because then it's really nice and crispy! But not everyone likes it like that.

Anyway, I also prepared eggs on the griddle. I used some rendered bacon fat that I've been saving in the fridge:

Once the eggs were done, I cooked the mushrooms on the griddle, too, because there was still some bacon fat leftover. Mushrooms soak up the flavors of whatever you cook them in quite nicely:

Once the rice was done cooking, I flavored it with a little of the chicken juices leftover from the last time I made baked chicken leg quarters:

The heat from the cooked rice melted everything quite nicely, and then I added natto:

I then made myself some tea. I combined that rose tea that I like with the vanilla bean macaron tea:

...Here; you can have some, if you want...

...The different bacons taste different. The applewood one is definitely sweeter. But I couldn't decide which one I liked better; they're both very good!

...But this is not all I did today, no. I had A LOT of energy today, for some reason; I was in very little pain today. So I decided to finally bake J a birthday cake (even though his birthday was in August; it's more than a little late, I know...)!!!!

...I've run out of space for pictures, though, so I'll include the rest in the next part of this letter.

I love you, and I'll write more in just a little bit!!

Your friend, Lumine

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