I'm not naming which celebration this was for, because I think the internet at large already knows quite enough about what I celebrate when, thank you very much.
Do you ever get a taste-thought in your brain? I think that the closest word for it in English is "craving" (and no, I don't know of a word for it in any other languages), but craving implies that you are at some level obsessed with consuming the thing, and what I'm describing is more like when you close your eyes and see a picture in your mind, or when you are walking along and your brain plays music for you, and if you like it well enough, you try to draw it or describe it or write it down or in whatever way you can realize the idea which has come to you.
Anyway. Today I was thinking about whether or not to make cake for (un)said celebration, and the thought came to me: caramel. And then I remembered how I am wealthy enough-- unlike much of the rest of my life before now-- that I have REAL maple syrup to play with, culinarily.*
So this is what I did. I looked up a recipe for maple syrup caramel, and decided to "use" this one: pinch of yum magic vegan caramel sauce. And by use, I mean that I only used two of the four ingredients she lists; I substituted one, and left one out. (But I linked to it to give credit where credit is due, and besides which, if I could have those ingredients, I would have just gone with them). In my situation, though, I used a teacup in the microwave and put in 2T of maple syrup, 2T of oil, and 1/16t of salt, and microwaved it for a minute. And at the end of that I had a delicious tasting syrup at the bottom of a bunch of oil, so next time I'll be reducing the oil by half and deciding about further modifications from there.
But boy howdy did I mention how good it is?
OK. Next, I used Paula Deen's 7-minute frosting recipe, which I modified this time just because my eggs are oddly small (and which I usually modify by putting in 1 cup of sugar instead of a cup and a half) BUT the modification that matters this time is that instead of vanilla-- which never does taste good to me in frosting-- I put in two teaspoons (as in the kind you eat with teaspoons-- sorry I didn't measure, but I think they were pretty close to a standard teaspoon?) of the maple syrup caramel stuff. Every time I've tried to flavor this frosting recipe before, the flavoring has come out too strong, but not this time! Probably because the flavoring can be eaten straight up on its own. But this part of the recipe is definitely getting made again, especially since three ingredients in the microwave for one minute is my kind of recipe.
I dished out some frosting for Mom to eat (of course snitching as much as I myself wanted). Then I took the leftover oil-and-syrup, and mixed it in with the egg yolks, and then mixed that in with some cake mix, and then folded in the frosting that I thought would not be needed for the top of the cake, and then I put the whole shebang in the oven.
I'll tell you in the morning how it went.
IN THE MORNING: After tasting my cake experiment, I decided to eat my frosting with some pancakes I had made earlier. The flavoring which was just right for the frosting was too weak for the cake, which was also just a little dense. Meh. I never make cakes, partly because I've never liked them that much, partly because my body doesn't like ingredients that allow them to taste good: butter, milk, almonds, any form of coconut. I'll survive. Next time, maybe I'll just make meringues. Or pavlova.
*If I didn't have real maple syrup, I would definitely make some simple syrup by boiling 2 c. sugar** with 1 c. water and then adding a flavoring like mapleine or almond extract or something. It doesn't taste the same as maple syrup, but it tastes good enough that it's sometimes just what I'm in the mood for, over real maple syrup. I'm never in the mood for corn syrup faintly flavored with maple, though.
**OK, fine, most days I'm only cooking for myself and I haven't made a 2 cup batch of simple syrup in at least a decade, but what I DO do is put one tablespoon of sugar and one of water in a teacup and then microwave it for 30 seconds at a time until the viscosity gets to be syrupy-looking. This makes enough for me for one meal's worth of pancakes, and then I don't have to worry about putting leftover syrup in the fridge or whatever. The water boils off much more quickly in the microwave than on a stove, which is why after a couple of tries in which I ended up with crystallized sugar instead of syrup, I changed the proportion for the tiny version of the recipe.
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