Sei & Maine Avenue Fish Market - Washington DC

Yes, this happened an entire month ago, but I never got around to posting about it. This was  the second Memorial Day Weekend we've spent in D.C. (see the first time in 2010 here and here - I'd like to think that I've grown up more since then?).

In a nutshell, food-related events included:

1. US Botanic Garden!
2. Teaism - my first bento box!
3. Hirshhorn Museum - giant butter!
4. Sei - fancy sushi!
5. Maine Avenue fish market!
6. Hot dog from a "70s hot dog" food cart that was bad.
7. National Museum of American History Food Exhibition

Now, in extreme detail!

US Botanic Garden

I love botanical gardens. I love them more than zoos. More than museums. I revel in looking at oddly-shaped leaves and brightly coloured flowers. I saw an avocado tree in real life! A pineapple plant right in front of me! This was fantastic! Sure, plants aren't cute or cuddly but it's so exciting for me to see the species that end up feeding me. Look! Marshmallow plant, even though modern marshmallows don't contain it.

Teaism
SP and I went to Teasim for lunch. I've never had a bento box before so this was exciting! The restaurant is beautifully decorated. In the basement, a constant, relaxing flow of water supplied the granite(?) pool in which carp swam around. So, this probably isn't authentic Japanese cuisine but it was still a neat, well, "fusion".
SP got the make-your-own-handrolls box. Unfortunately, the salmon was smoked. The nori was really crispy though, and I taught SP how to make the cone-shaped maki. The cabbage was pretty good, and I loved the mayonnaise.

I got the cooked salmon bento box. The cucumber was good but not as sour or spicy as usual pickled cucumber (though I typically eat Chinese pickled cucumber). The spinach was kind of astringent. I liked the salmon but I wish it were raw :(

Hirshhorn Museum of Art
Giant butter! I would love to have this as a bench or bed. My entire house in the future will have food-shaped furniture.

Sei Restaurant
For dinner, my family (minus my dad) and I walked around for a good hour before deciding on sushi at this nondescript sushi place halfway between Chinatown and Independence Mall. However, we then decided that we wanted to go to Chinatown to eat. While we were walking around Chinatown looking at menus, debating the authenticity of whatever the restaurants offered, my sister complained about having to walk so much. At some point, she exclaimed that we should just go for sushi. A guy walking past us stopped and advised "You know, if you really want good sushi, you should go to Sei."

Welp. After some walking and much confusion ("The map says it's right there!" "I don't see it. I just see the Spanish place." "It should be right there near the corner..." "..." "Oh! It's hidden!"), there we were, shuffling down some steps into the reception area of Sei, where they have posh business cards. From the outside, all you see is a small patch of white translucent glass with the word "SEI" written in thin letters.

We were seated at a white square table in the middle of the frustratingly dimly lit dining area. We sat on plush white chairs with no armrests ("modern", I guess). There was a candle at the table. I felt like I was in a lounge/club/bar type place. Young professionals were hanging around at the other tables, though I think there was one table with little kids. This place was possibly too classy for me.

They had interesting types of rolls. We ended up trying the fish and chips roll, a salmon roll with strawberry, a typical eel and avocado roll, and another one that escapes my mind (but possibly had scallops?). My sister only eats salmon nigiri or sashimi, so that's what she got. However, she was distraught with the fact that they had already put wasabi on the rice, under the salmon.

I enjoyed the salmon roll with strawberry. It was unexpected. As this occurred over a month ago, I've shamefully forgotten most of the details. The fish and chips roll wasn't greasy at all, so it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the food and experience!




Maine Avenue Fish Market!



The next day, SP and I were walking towards the paddle boat area, when he remembered that there is a fish market in DC. As I love visiting different regions' markets/grocery stores, we decided to check it out. Apparently, in the past, the fishmongers would sell the fish at the port. However, there was some rule that made it illegal to sell fish on the port. So instead, the seafood is now sold directly from the boats that are anchored to the port. Technically, they aren't "on" on the port. I lamented the fact that I was unable to buy fish to bring home (because it'd have to sit in my bag or the back of the car for 2 entire days). However, we did have some delicious oysters (2nd time in my life?) and shrimp. They have both ready-made and fresh seafood.
The oysters were dislodged ("shucked" is the word, I suppose) right after we ordered them. They were very tasty.

We took the shrimp to the park/pathway near the paddle boats to eat. It was a really sunny day although it was a bit breezy, which gave a mild chill. Also, I like cocktail sauce.

National American History Musem - Food Exhibit
We got a pretty bad hot dog at a food cart on Independence Mall. It was supposed to be a "Mexican hot dog", with cheese and guacamole. We were given a hot dog with Cheez Whiz and diced unripe avocado (or maybe it wasn't even avocado. No avocado flavour). That was a letdown.
However, the Food Exhibit was alright. I wish they had more original documents rather than printouts of posters, though.

 I think this would be funny to sell nowadays.

I really liked this one, even though I haven't had a Frito in about 4 years.

 A pringle container!

I have never seen this for sale before, so that was cool.

Who knew there were so many shapes?

I forgot why the pins say this.

 Taco maker.

Crêpes

Today I found out that I am bad at flipping crêpes. Here is a picture of a crêpe with a rip in it, beneath the fold.
I got a French crêpe recipe from here (it's in French--my French is useful! Okay, I could've used Google Translate, but it has glitches-- it translated "1 tbsp butter" to "1 cup butter")! I made about 6 pan-sized crêpes from the recipe. Crêpes are really thin.


I used whole wheat flour, which I guess isn't traditional... but oh well.

My first problem was that the butter wouldn't melt when I was mixing the batter. Well, duh, it's something like 15 degrees C in the house! So, I ended up having really gloopy batter, but the crêpes turned out intact.

 Another problem was that I would flip the crêpes over before the bottom side had been thoroughly cooked, and I couldn't flip the crêpes correctly with my spatula. I'm sure there is a more efficient way of making crêpes...but no one has ever taught me. I ended up picking up opposite edges of the crêpe with my fingers (hot? No...compared to fresh coffee, not really) and the spatula, and somehow maneuvering it some 180 degrees.

Taste? Well, nothing burned, the crêpes were moist, milky, soft, and gooey and... crêpe-like (yes, they tasted like crêpes! Except, chewier due to the whole-wheat flour). They were more oily than I would've liked... I guess I should use melted butter next time (but I hate the smell of microwaved butter)? They were a tiny bit sweet, which I have a problem with; I guess I would just prefer to have really sweet crêpes, or non-sweet crêpes. Eating tiny-bit-sweet-crêpes is like drinking water with a tiny bit of sugar - not plain ol' thirst-quenching, and not delicious-sugary-drink either.


Maybe I just prefer the pancakes that I used to eat in Australia? I don't even know how those were made, but they were poofy (not American pancake poofy, though), dark brown, the size of a coaster, and full of holes on one side.

Fairy Cakes

As a reward for being less of a whining brat than usual (she's "only" cried twice in the past 12 hours!), I taught my sister how to make fairy cakes. Basic fairy cakes, without creative fillings.

I got a... mini fairy cake recipe here but I modified it tolerate a stick of butter. I ended up with 10 really buttery fairy cakes, though I did make them in egg tart containers so they were slightly bigger than the conventional fairy cake. And, yes, fairy cakes are essentially cupcakes but the phrase "fairy cakes" sounds better.

My sister followed the recipe, weighed out ingredients (with my help), mixed everything (with my help), and went to read when I stuck everything in/out of the oven.

If an 8 year old can do it, you can. Don't ever revert back to those putrid cake mixes!!

To me, the recipe looks like it's for pound cake.

INGREDIENTS FOR 10-12 FAIRY CAKES
120 g butter
120 g caster sugar
2 eggs
vanilla
120 g self raising flour
METHOD

0. Let butter sit outside fridge for a (few) hours.
1. Cream butter and sugar.
2. Beat in eggs and add vanilla.
3. Fold in flour and drop a huge tablespoon into a paper case.
4. Bake at 177 degrees C/350 degrees F in an un-preheated oven, on the second-top shelf, for 22 minutes. I usually use the bottom shelf but today I had potato bread baking down there. The bottom shelf calls for less cooking time, obviously.

5. The top of the cakes should be cooked and a fork stuck into cake should come out with no crumbs or goop. (The fork test always prevails!!) The cakes may look a bit soft and gooey when you take them out, but once they cool, they harden a little but still remain moist (due to the butter).

Usually I'd be done now, but my sister wanted to put icing on four fairy cakes so she made the despicable butter-sugar mixture (with my help).

I made 1/4 of the icing recipe listed here, which was enough to liberally ice 5 fairy cakes.

So, my sister loved the cake. Obviously.

Ma Lai Gao (马来糕) (Malay Cake)

My mum used to/still does buy these cute round little yellow (not natural cake-type yellow. I mean Spongebob-style yellow) cakes from the freezer section of Kamman, the Asian food store. They're called ma[3] lai[2] gao[1] (马来糕). It literally means "Malaysian cake", and for a cake so small, I wonder how it's so succulent (yes, out of all words, I believe that "succulent" is the most accurate adjective). All you have to do is stick them in a microwave for a few seconds, and they end up so spongy and chewy and pillowy.

When browsing through food blogs, I found a recipe for ma lai gao, and I tried it out today. Since I didn't have white flour with me, I used 100% whole wheat flour (whoo!). Evidently, it didn't end up looking Spongebob-yellow. It didn't taste much like the store-bought one either. It was much more buttery and had irregular air bubbles. The store-bought version had perfectly uniform batter, and has a really distinct taste that I couldn't replicate in this version.

This version is still amazing though, but I really wish that I could copy the store-bought version instead, even though I think it used shortening and other random stuff (I'll check next time). The whole point of making the ma lai gao from scratch was so that we'd never have to buy plastic-covered, made-six-months-ago ma lai gao from Kamman anymore!

Unfortunately, since I'm now back in Philadelphia, I won't have access to a steamer, brown sugar, or my tasters (my brother and sister, since they're the ones who eat the ma lai gao), so I guess I'll have to wait until August.

However, this is the quest I've been waiting for! I'm gonna replicate the store-bought ma lai gao!

Pie Crust!

I made pie crust today because it has to sit overnight for the apple pie tomorrow. I've already figured out a design for the top! No, it will not be a crumble top.

I looked through my old photos to see if I ever took a picture of the pie I made 5 years ago, and unfortunately, I didn't.

I guess the rules for this pie crust are that it's made with patience and whole wheat flour. I know it's rare to see whole wheat pie crust, and it's even rarer to see pie crust made with chunks of butter (not melted) without the use of a food processor.

I found a pie crust recipe here and I altered it specifically for whole wheat flour and apple pie filling.

Ingredients for a 9- to 9.5-inch pie base and top

2.5 cups whole wheat flour

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp cinnamon sugar or just plain sugar (more if you want)

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter cut into chunks

5 to 7 tbsp apple juice (or water)

Method

1. Sift flour. Add everything except juice/water into bowl.

2. Cut butter using a metal spoon. I suppose a plastic knife would work well too.

3. Cut butter. Now, the dough starts smelling phenomenal. For some reason, my dough smelled like cheesecake-graham-cracker crust, or just pie crust in general.

4. Cut butter. The dough looks browner, the butter pieces are smaller, and ... I smooshed some butter too because cutting butter took a lot of time. In retrospect, though, leaving a few lumps may not have made much differenc.

5. Add juice/water until you can form a ball.

6. Stick in fridge overnight. I didn't wrap it in plastic wrap... I just stuck it in a container. For cookie dough, at least, it doesn't seem necessary to wrap stuff in plastic.

Well. Let's see what happens tomorrow!

Taste of Penn Part I: Overview

In order to generate student enthusiasm/democracy in choosing the vendors for next year's Penn Dining program, Bon Appetit (our caterer) decided to sway all the current people on a dining plan with this huge food-free-for-all. To the typical student, it was just a mountain of samples. I noticed that a lot of students actually were paying attention to the vendors' speeches, although most just walked around, picked up samples, and left. Of course, it was a subtle advertising gimmick because JT, who complains about Commons food--okay, don't we all--, said that "this would be the only reason I'd get a dining plan next year", which of course is a hyperbole, but it still shows how stealthy/skilled businesses are at manipulating us.

The theory was that students would sample food from vendors and choose the ones that they wanted in next year's dining halls. Because I have connections went to a "student focus group/give your opinions of the dining plans" dinner a few months ago, I had the marketing manager's email, so I contacted her about the list of caterers because I really couldn't remember them all. She emailed me back with this list:

Against the Grain, Applegate Farms, Organic Beef Stadium Hot Dogs, Barilla, Dr. McDougall's Right Foods, Flint Hill Farm, Food Should Taste Good, General Mills, Jack and Jill, Kegel's Produce Incorporated, Kellogg's, Kiss My Face Corporation, Lundberg Family Farms, Market Access Culinary, NuGo Nutrition, Pulmuone Wildwood, Inc., Rockland Bakery, Smithfield, and Springfield Creamery/Nancy's.

There was also a Danish bakery (with a Danish name that I can't recall) that didn't have its name on the list.

The ones in bold are the vendors with whom I talked (yes, discussions happened.). The ones that are italicized AND bold are links, meaning that I'm going to make a separate blog entry about them, because I spent more than 5 minutes talking to them, and they showed me some interesting perspectives in the food marketing world (why am I a Biology major? Why am I not transferring into Wharton?).

I didn't bother talking to every vendor because

1. Applegate Farms, Organic Beef Stadium Hot Dogs, and Smithfield had animal flesh products.

2. Barilla sells pasta. There is always Barilla pasta in my house for some reason. It's not that novel for me.

3. Food Should Taste Good's representative wasn't present at the table so I just grabbed some chips and moved on.

4. Jack and Jill had one representative who was occupied with scooping ice cream for other people. Jack and Jill is currently the ice cream vendor in all of Penn's dining halls. A few months ago, I checked the ingredients list on its website and pretty much every flavour has HFCS (speaking of which, I will blog about my Nutrition paper later) and, again, ice cream like this isn't exactly novel.

5. Kiss My Face Corp. isn't a food company. I just took the free lip balms and soaps.

6. Kegel's and Market Access Culinary... I know one of the vendors in the list is responsible for making the fries at our dining halls, and I suppose it's either of these two, but I can't remember. I did ask how they make waffle fries, and the representative said something about using a special type of potato cutter, but it was pretty vague.

So now, I will talk about the vendors in bold.

1. Against the Grain - gluten-free bakery products.

Using tapioca and other flours as a base, the gluten-free baked goods by Against the Grain were amazing! The quality of the raisin bagel and cheese pizza were really high, and honestly tasted like wheat flour bread! Sure, it was a little dryer, dense and glutinous, but the overall flavour and texture was strikingly similar to wheat flour baked goods; there were holes, the bread was squishy, and it could be toasted! While I was chewing my bagel piece, I listened to the representative talk to two other girls about gluten-free baking. One of them asked whether a gluten-free diet was healthier compared to a gluten-including diet. This was the moment I was waiting for! I wanted to see how the representative would answer this question. Would he lie and say that gluten-free foods are healthier, in order to sell his product? Would he claim that gluten makes us fat? Would he say that gluten is a nasty chemical?

No!

He said something along the lines of, "Well, celiacs are allergic to gluten. You know, some people say that gluten-free is associated with [certain health stuffs], but there really isn't enough scientific evidence to say for sure".

Now that's what I want to hear.

2. Flint Hill Farm

The representative showed us a video of cows and fed us some cheese and buttermilk. I don't think that I like buttermilk (I've never had it before)... The mozzarella was pretty good, and Flint Hill Farm apparently supplies the mozzarella in my sandwiches when I get Express at the dining halls. I don't recall much, but there was a lot of clutter on the desk advertising the farm...

3. General Mills

I was unaware that I was at the General Mills table when the representative offered me some oat bars. There were two types; the original soft-baked one, and a chocolate chip one. Both were pretty standard. I asked him what made his company stand out, and he said "well, all the brownies in your dining hall come from us, using this brownie mix here, and these bars come premade; all you have to do is bake them."

So our dining halls don't actually make the desserts from scratch. Not cool, in my humble opinion.

4. Kellogg's

Apparently Kellogg's makes the black bean burgers at the dining halls. I ate a sample of quesadilla with a mashed-up-black-bean-burger-patty filling, which kinda defeats the purpose of it initially being a burger patty. The representative offered me a recipe that I declined.

5. Rockland Bakery

To further ruin my impression that the dining halls make their own desserts, I learned that Rockland Bakery basically makes all the baked goods beforehand, and our dining halls just bake/defrost them. Also, apparently Rockland Bakery makes cherry cheesecake and lemon bars, which I have yet to see in our dining halls! What is it with feeding us hard sugar cookies instead of cherry cheesecake!? In response to "What makes your company cool?", the representative told me, "Well, we supply all of your desserts". Sigh. I did tell her that I loved the key lime pie that they make, but she looked at me skeptically and said "Uh huh." and offered me more dessert.

6. The Danish Bakery

I'm not super fond of danishes with jam in the middle, but the one I had was ridiculously buttery and flavourful. The jam was pretty tart too, and everything was so flaky I was scared that I'd end up having to eat the pastry with a spoon. When asked "What makes your company cool?", the representative told me that all the butter comes from Denmark (pastries are shipped here frozen), where the cows are fed a ton of grass and such and are therefore super fat. All that milk from the cows also comes from the winter, when the cows are even more fat, making the butter super fatty, flavourful, and nutrient dense (compared to other butters, of course). I don't know how truthful this all is, but the danishes were definitely pastry, not bread. Rockland Bakery danishes taste like smooshed dense white bread with glaze and jam. This company's danishes taste like flaky pastry with a nice crispy sugary touch on the exterior, and more airy pastry in the interior.

The other vendors will be the topics of other blog entries.

If I ever become a food writer/critic/socialite, this is what I envision my job to be: going to trade

shows/expos/food sample events and just taking free stuff. However, chances are that I'm just gonna be working in a lab.

Victoria Sandwich Cake

I decided to tackle the Victoria sandwich cake again. This time was NOT going to be a half-baked attempt to recreate something that I knew worked 7 years ago. This time, however, I creamed the sugar and butter first, and I used bleached flour. The result? The second-best Victoria sandwich cake, ever! [The best one was the first one I made, because it was less burnt and more jammy].

Ingredients

150 g caster/granulated sugar

150 g unsalted butter

150 g self-raising white flour

1 tsp baking powder

3 eggs

JAM OF CHOICE!

Powdered sugar!

Method

1. Cream sugar and butter. This takes a long time, but it is extremely worth it. I suppose softened butter would be easier to cream, but I'm guessing the butter I used was around 18 degrees C.

2. Add 3 eggs and mix. You will get a lumpy mixture. The original recipe called for the use of an electric whisk, but I don't have one. I don't have many sleek kitchen utensils... so I just mix. Please, Victoria sandwich cakes were invented wayyyyy before electric whisks were [Victoria = Queen Victoria, right?]

Yes. Lumpy.

3. Add in flour one tablespoon at a time. By the last three tablespoons, you will have a really thick batter. The batter should ALMOST be cookie-dough-dense batter. The batter will have little lumps.

4. Separate batter into two pans. The whole point of the Victoria sandwich cake is its sandwich-ness. It is perfect for females to make for males, as it is a sandwich, but offers all the cakey goodness that men crave [ JUST KIDDING!].

5. Anyway, bake at 355 degrees F [or, 180 degrees C, as the original recipe says] for:

8 inch/20cm pans: 25 minutes [says the original recipe] on...the middle rack

9.5 inch pans [the pans I used]: no more than 20 minutes!! on the lowest rack

For me, I used the lowest rack and after I baked the cakes for 20 minutes, I let them sit in the oven for another 20 minutes. When I took them out, one was perfect and the other was a tad burnt. Ah well. Next time I'm putting them in for 15 minutes and letting them sit for 30 minutes.

6. Spread with jam. Warm jam is more easily spread, but cold jam is good too. Then, SANDWICH!

Victoria sandwich cakes are usually thicker, and the recipe I had was meant for 20 cm pans. So, my Victoria sandwich cake was rather thin. However, the taste, texture, and smell were not lost! It was rich, crumbly [big big big big big crumbs!], buttery, crusty on the circumference but spongy in the center, pure, fresh, and mouth-watering. It was not vanilla-y, small-spongy-holes, artificial, super-sweet, or like any of those yellow cake mixes at the store.

You will NOT find a cake like this in a box or frozen in a tin in a store in the U.S. You won't even find this in the bakery section! It doesn't taste moist like Boston cream pies-cakes, and it doesn't taste at all monotone like those *ahem* various "just add half a cup of oil and 3 eggs and mix and bake!" cake mixes. Victoria sandwich cakes are delicate, flavourful, and clean-tasting. One interesting aspect of it is that when you first bite into it, the cake doesn't feel that great; it's dry and crumbly [but not crunchy]. However, as you chew, you feel a bit of "juice" flow out of each thick crumb. Yes, this "juice" is sugary butter. How succulent.

The powdered sugar isn't necessary, but it adds a nice touch to the sandwich cake. Notice that the sandwich cake is not "yellow" or "white" or one uniform colour; it is composed of beautiful shades of caramel; it demonstrates elegance and hard work. Yes, I'm being dramatic, but this cake was definitely the most meaningful cake I've ever made [I'm... bad at making cakes...]

My sister started taking chunks out of it from 11am to 1pm. I told her to just take a slice already! She loved it.

SHE LOVED IT.

This is going to be her birthday cake! It's going to be better than last year's! It's going to be eight layers tall! [Maybe?]

Victoria sandwich cakes are also really photogenic in sunlight. Look at these pictures! No flash! Perfect!

Chocolate Chip Cake-Cookie Puffs!

I thought that it was a good idea to make a Victoria Sandwich cake. I weighed the sugar and butter and flour according to a recipe that I used around 7 years ago in Food Tech class, and I started mixing...

And then I realised that this was NOT going to work out because

1. The "batter" was the consistency of cookie dough.

2. The butter was globby.

3. The "batter" was brown, not yellowy-creamy-white, because I had used whole wheat flour instead of bleached flour.

4. I didn't have an electric whisk.

I'm not really sure why the batter worked out right 7 years ago, but completely failed when I tried to make it again. The method said to add the butter into the flour and sugar, rather than cream the butter and sugar first, which is what I'd usually expect to do.

So I added 3/4 cups of milk and then realised that the globby, pungent butter [Okay, the butter wasn't pungent, but I've decided that I don't like the smell of butter by itself. It needs to be creamed with sugar to smell good] was not going to somehow melt and homogenise into the mixture. I did not take a picture of it because it was terribly ugly.

So I added another 250 grams of flour... and make chocolate chip cake-cookie puffs!

It doesn't look like the dough is airy and not-dense, but it actually is. When you poke it, it should feels soft, and a hole should be easily made.

[Note the usage of my pie pan from "Santa"!!]

They aren't that sweet, which is good.

Ingredients for 45 cookie puffs:

1. 400g 100% whole wheat flour, or basically enough to make a dough that you can mould into balls with your hands - just keep adding flour by the tablespoon

2. 150g butter [about 1.5 sticks]

3. 3/4 cup milk

4. 3 eggs

5. 170g sugar

6. vanilla and chocolate chips, however much you want!

7. 1 tbsp baking soda

8. 1 tsp baking powder

9. Numbers 7. and 8. aren't that well tested out. Straight after baking, I could taste the baking soda, but after letting the cookies sit for two days, the taste of the baking soda is... gone...

Method:

1. [Don't do what I did, and mix the flour with the the butter...] Cream butter with sugar, and add eggs and vanilla. Add milk.

2. Add flour by the tablespoon.

3. Use hands to roll a dough. The dough SHOULD NOT STICK to the hands. Sift dough if you feel like it.

4. Add baking soda and baking powder.

5. The dough should be light, airy, NOT DENSELY PACKED, gooey, and feel plasticky.

6. Add however many chocolate chips you want.

7. Make balls the size of meatballs, maybe with a 3cm diameter.

8. Bake [see below]

I baked two batches. The first one was on the middle rack at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes.

The second batch was on the bottom rack at 360 degrees F for 6 minutes, and then left in the oven for ~10 minutes.

They should be done when a fork stuck inside the centre of the cookie comes out clean. They will appear soft when taken out of the oven, but they harden.

Both batches turned out basically the same...The cookies do not spread in the oven. In other words, you can make them into any shape you'd like.

The image above includes both the first batch and the second batch... and they look the same. They also taste the same; cakey, airy, dry-ish, not bland, textured [due to the whole wheat flour] and not too sweet. They don't taste greasy or rich or saturated with chocolate chips. Actually, maybe they're more muffin-y than cakey. You decide.

My mother likes them. She thinks that they look like meatballs! They are quite 3D, due to the baking powder and baking soda, of course. These can totally be cakes...except that they don't require a cake pan or paper baking cups.

So, how are my baking skills? I can turn a failed cake recipe into a cookie recipe... I guess that shows that I'm not a complete neophyte, right?

And now to actually make a Victoria sandwich cake...