Baking on Location: New Orleans

It's been five days. I graduated from San Francisco State University five days ago and I'm already bored out of my mind. I'm not surprised though, because I already knew that I'm the type of person that can never relax. Even when I go on vacation, I always have to be doing something. Take spring break, for example. I went to New Orleans to visit a good friend of mine. Before I left, I had asked her, "should I bring my piping tips?"

I'm going to back up a bit and explain what the past two years have been like for me. It's been a constant barrage of projects, videos, scripts, club meetings, essays, and everything in between. I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: baking was my escape from school. Blogging was my way to connect the two. Now that I'm left without one of those (the larger of the two endeavors, I might add), I don't know what to do with myself. I guess the answer is clear: I need to bake more.

Now that I have what seems like an endless amount of free time (woo, being virtually unemployed!), I guess I should get to that backlog of blog posts I've been meaning to write for ages.

The Journey Begins

I never really learned how to color in the lines.

A few months ago, I spent a week in the most amazing city I have ever seen. I had never been to the south (or anywhere, really), but this California girl had heard a thing or two about southern hospitality. Since my dear friend was kind enough to let me stay in her guest room, I knew I couldn't arrive empty handed. You should know by now that I love me some cupcakes, but they aren't exactly the easiest to transport. If they slide around in my car whilst driving, they were going to be damn near impossible to transport via flying sky tube. So I had to think. What's relatively small, easy to put in a carry-on, and won't get confiscated by TSA? Cookies. But I couldn't just show up with circular cookies. How pedestrian. If I were going to bring cookies, they had to be good cookies. Louisiana-appropriate cookies. What's more Louisiana-appropriate than cookies that are shaped like Louisiana? Nothing.

Remember how I said that I was really busy with school? And remember how I said I went during spring break? And if you're ever been in college (or high school, even), you know how teachers like to assign a bunch of work before a break? Yeah, I was really down to the wire with these. I was frosting them Saturday morning. Four hours before my flight.

Since I don't have the eyes of Medusa (yet), staring at the cookies wasn't going to make the icing harden any faster. I just had to put them in a box and hope for the best. I grabbed an old Amazon box, lined it with wax paper, put down some cookies, another sheet of wax paper, more cookies, and so on. Here's where I should note that the picture up there was taken in my kitchen. Not my friend's kitchen. Unsurprisingly, on the long flight over, the icing had stuck to the wax paper then subsequently dried, causing it to turn into one giant cookie-wax-paper-hybrid lump. I guess the good news is that since it was wax paper, it peeled off easily. They weren't nearly as pretty as they were pre-flight (top left cookie notwithstanding), but they were still delicious. They made a great midnight snack, which was when my flight finally arrived (thanks Southwest and your awful delayed layover flights).

"Can You Make Lemon Bars? Oh, and Tiramisu Too?"

These look like cocoons of some sort. Gross.

A week before I had left, my friend was browsing through my Facebook page and stumbled upon the (somewhat unappetizing) photo of my lemon bars and tiramisu. She politely requested that I make both, since her favorite dessert is lemon bars, and her husband's is tiramisu. I'm just going to dive head first into the tiramisu (coincidentally, that's also how I choose to eat it, too) because I've made lemon bars five times in the past six months. That's four times more than I'd prefer, but baking helps pay the bills, so I can't complain too much. Because I've made them so many times, I was kind of over it and didn't take any photos. Just know that I love my friend, and since she had asked, I obliged.

A few days before I had left to go see her, she asked what ingredients I needed for making the lemon bars and tiramisu. I rattled off a list, but paused when I got to the lady fingers. I told her that the recipe called for two store-bought packages of the cookies, but that's not the way I operate. In the past, I had used store-bought, but I left it up to her to decide. She told me, without skipping a beat, "homemade." This is why we're friends.

T'was a Dark and Stormy Day

Well. The whipped cream looks good. 

I didn't get to make the tiramisu until half-way through my trip, mostly because it took so long to find all of the ingredients. I feel kind of bad, she sent her husband to three different stores to find mascarpone. I didn't think it would be such a rarity in New Orleans. If I recall correctly, he finally found it at Whole Foods. Just a heads up in case you're in NOLA and have a hankerin' for some Italian cheese.

Anyway, since the weather was so nice when I got there, I didn't want to spend any valuable sight-seeing time in the kitchen. It was gloomy one day, and the rain didn't seem to let up, so I used the time I was quarantined indoors to make the lady fingers. Let me just say, lady fingers are freaking finicky. They went from underdone to crispy in less than a second, then they teamed up with the wax paper to stage a revolt. Pulling the cookies off the paper was reminiscent of my childhood eating those awful Candy Dots. No matter how careful you are, you're going to be eating some paper.

I had made three different batches of cookies, and I started to get the hang of it after the first. I made way more fingers than I needed, so I had my pick of the litter for the tiramisu. At one point, my friend must have thought I was insane (not that she didn't before, she has known me for over twenty years), because I had started talking to the cookies. She could hear me coercing them, "turn over beautiful, show me your brown bottoms." Luckily I was able to find a good amount that weren't burnt to a crisp. The rejects were set aside and deemed "lady toes." Worry not, they weren't wasted. Her son inhaled them by themselves, so they mustn't've been too badly burnt.

Tiramisu, Assemble

"That really looks like fried chicken." "Well, it is the south."

Now it was assembly time. If mascarpone was difficult to find, I wasn't about to go on an espresso hunt. Strongly-brewed coffee would have to suffice. The only issue was that neither my friend nor I know how to operate a coffee pot (what is wrong with us?). After carefully studying the machine's many buttons for close to five minutes, we realized that her husband had left a nearly-full carafe of coffee in the machine. Apparently, in addition to being pretty inept, we're also both blind.

After the tiramisu had been carefully and lovingly layered together, I said that it was best to let the tiramisu set overnight. This would allow all the flavors to marry, and the rum and coffee to really soak into the lady fingers. I think we made it about four hours before we caved and cut into it. It did get better the next day, but it was still pretty good unmarried. Even her picky two-year-old son loved it. Adult tested, toddler-approved.

Overall, my trip to New Orleans was amazing and incredible in every way. I got to see a lot of rich history, eat a lot of great food, and spend a ton of money shopping. On my way back, Southwest overbooked, so I took a credit to take a later flight home. This means I'm definitely going back next spring. This also means that my friend has a little less than a year to decide what our next baking project is.