Still Life, With Cats

So. The kouign amann (link takes you to the recipe I used).

I have been intrigued by this weird little pastry ever since I saw it show up as a technical challenge in the most recent season of Great British Bake Off. I’ve made lots of interesting baked things over the years and really enjoy it when I get to play in the kitchen with flour and butter and sugar and yeast. But I am also really just an amateur baker (much, of course, like the contestants on GBBO) and some things I have always been a little hesitant about trying. Laminated dough is one of those things (the dough that’s used in making items like croissants and kouign amann and other similar types of concotions). It always seemed so unbearable *fussy*, having to chill and fold and chill and fold and so on ad nauseum, and every time I have seen it discussed (usually on some sort of competition show), it comes across as the sort of thing that only a really experienced pastry chef would do.

But then I reminded myself that hey, self, you have built not one, but TWO crouquembouche (with homemade caramel strands, no less), and you made strudel dough from scratch not once, but TWICE, with the dough so thin that you could, quite literally, read *through* it, so what’s a little laminated dough among friends? How hard could it possibly be?

As it turns out, it wasn’t actually hard at all.

Okay, granted, making this kind of dough *is* fussy. There’s no getting around the fact that if you really want the classic flaky layers, you have to be willing to put in the effort and time. You *do* have to pay attention to the clock and be mindful of your measurements (my baking improved tremendously the day I started measuring by weight instead of by volume. A kitchen scale is the home baker’s very best friend), but if you follow the recipe, it’s really pretty simple. The dough is pretty straightforward – just flour and yeast and water and salt and little bit of melted butter to get things started. Then you let it rise for an hour and in the meantime you smash a giant hunk of butter into a square with your rolling pin, and wrap that up and stash it in the fridge. And then when the dough has risen, you roll it out, plunk the chilled butter square into the middle, fold it all up, give it a go with the rolling pin, and another fold, and pop it back into the fridge for a rest. Do that two more times (the fold and roll, not the addition of the butter – once is plenty of butter, trust me), and then one more time, except this time you sprinkle it liberally with sugar before you fold and roll, sprinkle liberally with sugar a second time, and then you cut it into squares, gather the corners, pop them into a muffin tin, let sit for a bit, bake, and poof – done. You have made kouign amann.

The tops of mine got just a hair over-browned – I was glad I thought to check them when I did, because if i’d left them in the full 40 minutes they would have been burnt – but otherwise, they turned out beautifully. Biting into one is a messy experience since the outer layers are delicate and tend to flake into bits as soon as your teeth hit them, but the inside is lovely and soft and buttery, with a little bit of caramelized sugar to sweeten things up. I freely admit to doing a fair bit of giddy squealing as I pulled one apart and saw actual layers in my dough. I was so worried I’d screw it up, but I didn’t- not at all! Bonus, they’re incredibly delicious (so much better than the ones I’ve bought from bakeries). This is a pastry I’ll definitely be making again.

*****

Back to the knitting, now that we have gotten our pastry squeeing out of the way. To make up for the boring garter stitch square from yesterday, today’s pattern – Portcullis – uses 2 colors, and a wee bit of lace.

I am not quite sure how I feel about the color combination here. It looked better side by side in the skeins than it does when knit up. I suppose if I cared enough I could have ripped it out and picked something different. Clearly I did not.

So it’s been all kinds of exciting (and by ‘exciting’ I mean the type of excitement that makes me want to smash things) around here the last few days. Yesterday I was dealing with some comments on the most recent entry and discovered that my site wasn’t working – a 500 error was all that would pop up. Gah. I couldn’t figure out what might have happened – the only thing I ever do on it these days is post entries here, so it’s not as if I’m mucking around in the backend files or the underlying database. Bizarrely, the WordPress admin side was working, sort of, but the main blog site – kaput. Nothing.

Throughout the day I checked in with Richard to see if he’d had any luck getting any feedback from the support ticket he submitted for me (it being hard for me to deal with that while in a meeting). Finally, last night, my site was back up again, with the rather cryptic explanation that somehow a specific file had been edited, but they’d fixed it, and oh by the way they also checked all our other sites and they were all fine. Hmm.

Fast forward to this morning when I decided I was going to see if they really *did* check all our sites, and hey, what do you know, more 500 errors! This time the site impacted didn’t have a WordPress install (at least not as the main page) so it made me feel a bit better about maybe it being something I’d done inadvertently, but again, it took them most of the day to get it fixed. I also went in and checked every single subdomain I could think to check – found a couple more that clearly hadn’t been fixed like the support ticket claimed, and then we sat back and waited. Impatiently. And also very annoyed.

Things seem to be working fine now, and curiously, another issue that’d been vexing Richard on another of our sites has also been mysteriously fixed. Oh, and it turns out that there were some updates to the back end server (by our hosting company). I am SURE that had nothing whatsoever to do with why everything suddenly broke at exactly the same time. Ahem.

Yes, I know, #FirstWorldNerdProblems. Doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

*****

Today’s dishcloth is another one with no linked pattern (yet) due to me making it up off the top of my head. I’ve charted it up though, so at some point I’ll publish it on Ravelry or something. Maybe. Some day. Don’t rush me!

I took the train down to San Francisco today, for work. It takes longer than driving, but one cannot knit while driving, and there is far less stress when one is not trapped in rush hour traffic, so that nearly always makes the extra trip time worth it.
Found a bakery on the same block as my meeting’s location (Anderson Bread, for those of you in the area), and picked up a kouign amann. I am highly amused by the fact that these things have been popping up all over the place since last year’s Great British Bake Off aired. They are still on the list of items from the show that I need to try making at least once. Thanks to the GBBO, I also know how to pronounce it correctly (it sounds like ‘queen amahn’, even though the spelling of the first word would likely not lead you anywhere remotely to that conclusion).

Today’s dishcloth – Ridge Stitch – was picked for ease of knitting while riding on a train. It’s a 4 row pattern so was super quick to memorize. I am…not sure if I would ever make it again, although that could be due to the fact that it’s got a garter stitch border and I much prefer the dishcloths without that extra edging.

Pictured atop Sherman primarily because I felt like it (and because he didn’t really care one way or the other).

Today’s dishcloth was the result of me not finding anything that jumped out at me, so just casting on some stitches and playing around. Ta da – it’s a diagonal stripe. Whee.

I will write up the pattern at some point and upload it to Ravelry, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something already out there that’s similar. There are only so many things you can do for a dishcloth, after all.

The Harry Potter movie saga is now done, and overall, I’m mostly happy. Of the remaining four, I think I’d only seen the first Deathly Hallows before, so the others were brand new for me.

I know that when they turn a book into a movie, that things have to be cut out, and in some cases I am fine with it (see yesterday’s comment regarding the hacking out of most of the Quidditch Tournament). But there were a lot of things that popped up in the movies that were never actually *explained*, like the fact that Harry keeps peering into a piece of glass. In the movie, no one ever explains why he has it, or what it is, or how it works – it’s just some random bit of glass he pulls out from time to time. Considering that it’s fairly central to the plot, that was a big disappointment. Oh and let us not forget that all along Harry’s been convinced Snape is evil, yet when he’s lying there dying, Harry is right there to take his memories and do exactly what Snape says.

And some things that were left out entirely. Removing the entire subplot with the house elves? Okay, that’s fine – it didn’t detract from the story. Ignoring the fact that Neville Longbottom was *also* part of the original prophecy – that I’m not okay with. By the end of the last movie I’d all but convinced myself that they were going to change things and Neville wouldn’t be the one to kill the snake, so when it finally happened I cheered. Neville, of all of them, deserved that glory.

I do feel as if the second half of Deathly Hallows addressed that whole tangle with the elder wand more successfully than the book, so at least there is that. And like I said, overall I’m pretty happy. And anyway, it doesn’t matter because now I have finally seen them all and that was the whole point of this exercise in the first place.

*****

I freely admit today’s dishcloth is totally phoning it in. Cast on 36 stitches, knit until done. Voila. Boring garter stitch dishcloth. Let’s just say that I’ve got a lot of variegated yarn in the stash and I didn’t feel like trying to find another pattern to deal with it.

We watched the 2nd Harry Potter movie yesterday. Alas, not even the adorableness of Emma Watson could save that one. Such a relief to know they got a new director for all the remaining ones, or this franchise might have been doomed to fade slowly away. I spent the majority of Chamber of Secrets sitting on the couch cringing and reminding myself that I just had to grimly get through it in order to move on to the next one. I think the problem is that the first two movies feel as if someone decided they were actually making an action movie, but with magic (!!). And that isn’t what Harry Potter really is.

Thankfully today’s Harry Potter movies were significantly better. I know I saw Prisoner of Azkaban before, when it first came out (ten years ago), because I remember how much I loved David Thewlis as Professor Lupin (surely I am not the only one who thinks it might be kind of fun to have a boggart in the closet, right?). However, I’m pretty sure I never managed to go and see Goblet of Fire (although interestingly, Richard *did* see it, so maybe I was out of town or something – who knows), because I am sure I would have remembered the great relief I felt upon discovering that at least in the movie, the script writer had the desperately needed foresight to hack out all extraneous fluff about the Quidditch tournament and get right to the actual plot.

*****

Today’s dishcloth doesn’t have an official pattern. It was inspired primarily by a test knit I’m currently working on (because yes, I am knitting other things beside dishcloths this month; it’s just that the dishcloths are the only things for which I can show you pictures), which includes swaths of double seed stitch. Considering yesterday’s issue with the variagated yarn, I decided to give something a try, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. There’s pooling, of course, since that’s the curse of the variagated yarn after all, but the texture of the pattern makes up for it.

Because I know someone’s going to ask, here’s what I did. I cast on 36 stitches, and then I did 2 rows of k1, p1, followed by 2 rows of p1, k1, and just repeated that until it was roughly square in shape.

I’d been hearing low rumbles for half an hour or so, but I didn’t pay them much mind. They could just have easily been one of the neighbors moving their garbage cans back into their yard, or dragging something around. But then a flash of lightning caught my eye through the window, and a few seconds later, the loud BANG of thunder, followed shortly thereafter by the frantic skittering of all the cats in the house as they reacted to the noise. And I looked through the window and thought, ah, *there’s* the storm they’ve been saying we’re going to have.

For those of you who might not be aware, California is in the middle of a serious drought (of the ‘once-in-500 years’ level of severity). We got a lot of rain in December, but it was only a drop in the bucket when compared to what we need to end this thing, and January was the driest month in recorded history (going back to the 1800s). So any mention of possible precipitation gets everyone around here anxious and hopeful and crossing all their fingers and toes.

It dribbled on and off for most of the day. But by the time I had to leave the house this evening, it was pretty steady.

The group in which I sing recently found ourselves a new home for both practice and performances – at Beatnik Studios in downtown Sacramento. It’s a wonderful space -the acoustics are terrific, and since there’s no fixed seating, we’ve got a lot of flexibility in how we perform to make the most of it. It also means we occasionally get to collaborate with other artists.

The reason I headed out into the rain tonight was to take part in this, which blended music, blessings from a Shaman, and so on, into a really amazing experience. I was one of the singers in the quartet so we were downstairs, letting our sound come up from below. Plus we found a huge piece of plastic so two of us (amusingly, the two shortest in the group) turned it into a thundersheet during the latter part of the ceremony.

Driving back home after the event, I noticed that some of the roads and off ramps are starting to flood. I am torn between being thrilled that enough rain has fallen that this is a problem, to being concerned that someone is going to get hurt when they hit one of those huge puddles. But at least it is raining. Finally. And hopefully there will be a lot more where it came from.

*****

I started this dishcloth with a different yarn, but about 3 or 4 pattern repeats in, I ripped that out and started over with the solid green (and yes, it’s really green, although the color didn’t come out so well in the picture below). Variegated yarns always look so pretty in the skein, but they are *such* a pain to work with later on. Pattern is Diagonal Check.