Anniversary Honeywine

It was exactly one year ago today that I posted my first recipe story. That was 187 posts ago, not including my posts at Interculturiosity and Midnight Poutine. I made my own birthday cake from Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and the Art of the Low-Fat Dessert. Made = messed up but it was still delicious. This is the story of my life. This year I asked my aunt for rice pudding instead of birthday cake because it’s gluten-free (for her sake) and dairy-free (for both our sakes). We didn’t stick any candles in it and I didn’t make a wish, but it was completely delicious. She, of course, made it perfectly.

After 1 year, these are the cakes rules I’ve learned but obviously still don’t put into practice:

1) Room temperature butter
2) Real sugar unless it gets melted
3) Soft peaks happen before you think, get stiff quickly, and then go limp long before you would have hoped or expected. Thus egg whites, like life, can be very disappointing

Also exactly one year ago I went to the 18th Century marketplace in Montreal’s Old Port and bought my first honeywine. I took it and soaked and glazed a sweet loaf in it. So in honour of a year of blogging I decided to go back to the marketplace and find the same wine.

I know I can actually buy this blueberry honeywine at the Marche des Saveurs at Jean-Talon market year-round, but that wouldn’t be honouring the anniversary. I went and found the same vendor, tried the raspberry honeywine, the blueberry honeywine, and the cassis (blackcurrant) honeywine, and decided I didn’t want to make the same recipe after all. That’s not as fun. So I went with the gold medal winning cassis. The blueberry was better, but ah well.

My granola-making genius recipe-giver gave me the recipe for a lemon coffee cake she made as a bundt cake for a dinner party once. The cake was absolutely to die for. I figured I’d skip the lemon and use the cassis honeywine instead. I’d kind of put the two recipes together. Yeah, that was a disaster. Seems that one year has not made me a better baker.

I used a gluten-free flour mix, which would have been fine, except I used a sugar replacer (xylitol) that doesn’t cream. I bought fresh Quebec butter for the occasion, trying oh so hard to not mess this up.

I creamed the butter until it was pale and then added the fake sugar. It seemed fine. Then I separated the eggs and added the yolks, patiently, one at a time as instructed. Then you’re supposed to add the lemon juice, so I added the honeywine instead. The batter just didn’t come together. It was lumpy. the butter hadn’t been at room temperature. That was problem one. Then sugar didn’t dissolve in it. That was problem two. I know better. I’m just stubborn.

In a separate bowl I combined the flour, baking powder and baking soda, and then I cleaned the beaters and whipped the egg whites to stiff peaks with the salt. I couldn’t find the stiff peaks stage. They kind of got soft and then seemed like they were hardening and then just softened up again. So many women deal with this, I know, but I’m unforgiving. There was really no way to beat them again. So I gave up and just tried my best to follow the rest of the instructions.

Unfortunately once you mess up the creaming and the beating there’s really no hope. I added the flour to the butter mixture and it became kind of tough and chunky. Then I had to fold in the sad egg whites. Hopeless. Completely hopeless. There ended up being little pockets of egg whites in the batter. I tried to salvage it by squishing the egg whites a little. This sucks all the air out of them (if there was anything left to suck out of them after the over-beating). I used my hands to massage the egg white pockets into the batter. Maybe that was better than stirring the air out.

I couldn’t put enough love into those egg whites to keep them from giving up on life. I will never be a paramedic or a lifeguard.

I preheated the oven, stuck the pitiful dough into a loaf pan and resigned myself to bad loaf. Fortunately I could drink the open cassis honeywine to soothe my spirits. Then I remembered it wasn’t great honeywine and I didn’t really want to drink it by itself…not my day, apparently.

45 minutes later I had loaf…sort of. I got it out of its pan and a bunch of the topping crumbled off. It was kind of the consistency of properly kneaded uncooked, unextruded pasta…very much not a cake. I made a liquor soak of honeywine and sugar (the fake kind of sugar again that melts just fine, at least) and poured it over the loaf on a cooling rack over a plate. The plate catches the excess liquor and then you pour it back over the loaf again until it’s all gone. That was fine.

Then I made the glaze, a simple mixture of honeywine and icing sugar. I brushed it all over the crumbling loaf. Again, fine.

You know what? It actually looked okay. It tasted weird because the egg didn’t incorporate well, but it was just fine. I’d serve it with tea (or sweetened honeywine), or smother it in jam (blackcurrant). I destroyed the texture but there was nothing really wrong with it.

The moral of this story is that it’s good to know that I started this blog with the intent of telling all my recipe stories – both the successes and the disasters – and I stuck with it. If I’d actually gotten better would I be as interested in continuing? Sometimes the mistakes are more entertaining than the successes. I’m no genius cook or baker, but I’ll always have something to write about (and eat) as long as I keep trying different recipes…and maybe, just maybe someone who reads this won’t make my mistakes.