Red Velvet Inspiration

As fellow fans will know, the popular 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein began his academic career, not as a philosophy student, but studying engineering at Manchester University. Whilst studying theoretical mathematics for the course, he stumbled across the works of Bertrand Russell. Inspired, Wittgenstein took himself straight to Oxford to learn from this great professor, who himself discovered philosophy through studying maths. Although their later theories of language and meaning radically diverged, Wittgenstein's early work on the nature of logic and language, the Tractatus, was heavily influenced by Russell's ideas. 

This is no unique case in the history of philosophy. Kant described Hume as 'awakening him from his dogmatic slumber': bringing to his attention the empiricist challenges to rationalist theories of knowledge. Socrates is probably the most famous example of a figure inspiring the philosophy in his followers, Plato, of course, being the one we know best; whom in turn inspired Aristotle.

As a philosophy student, I'm surrounded by people and ideas to be inspired by. As a baker for a hobby, my inspirations generally are limited to my few recipe books, Google, and reliance on my imagination. Besides this, I can only go out there and try the bakes the world already has to offer.

In the cupcake department, nobody does it like America. Luckily, I was there for a fortnight over Easter visiting a friend in Minneapolis. In the award winning Cupcake, Saint Paul, (they won Cupcake Wars, MTV equivalent of Great British Bake-Off) I tried my first red velvet cupcake. Divine. The cream cheese frosting was immaculate, one department where I failed in my own attempt. But I just had to try making some myself, and the sponge from this recipe, taken from the Hummingbird website, was pretty spot-on. An absolute winner with friends, many of whom hadn't heard of them. They look and taste great. 

- Red Velvet Cupcakes -

60g butter or marg
150g sugar
1 egg
20g cocoa powder
40ml red food colouring
½ tsp vanilla extract
120ml or 1 roughly cup buttermilk - which you can make by mixing a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice with milk in the cup and leaving aside for a few minutes
150g plain flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1½ tsp distilled white vinegar (white malt works)

for cream cheese icing:
300g icing sugar
50g butter
125g cream cheese

Cream the butter and sugar until fluffy, then add the egg and continue to slowly beat until well mixed. 

In a separate bowl, mix the cocoa powder, vanilla extract and red food colouring into a dark red paste. Mix this into the other bowl. Then add half the buttermilk, and continue mixing slowly, then half the flour, then repeat this process for the other halves.

Finally, add the soda and vinegar to create a fizz to ensure the mixture will rise, and mix until the batter is smooth. Two-thirds fill 12 or so cupcake cases (I always use silicone ones) before baking for 25 minutes in an oven preheated to gas mark 5. 

For the cream cheese icing, you need to beat the above ingredients. I did so with an electric mixer as before but this rapidly descended to a runny white goo, and hence a failure. Do not follow this! In this instance, I actually have no tried-and-tested instructions, so I'd advise using previous butter-cream recipes or slowly working icing sugar into the butter, then the cream cheese, with a fork alone.

Someday I will make perfect cream cheese frosting; for now, its nothing a few sprinkles won't mask!

The Remix

Not every new bake need be an original idea; in fact, it very rarely ever is. We recycle old thoughts like old recipes, adding something new in, changing what didn't work last time, gradually improving through experience as we move towards better results. A good example can be seen in the works of Anscombe, MacIntyre, Foot and Hursthouse, who all contributed to a 20th century revival of virtue ethics. They put prevalent utilitarian and Kantian thought aside, and resurrected Aristotle's character-based ethical system, with some ideas of what counted as virtuous traits swapped (as we're no longer inherently sexist, elitist Ancient Greeks. Well, most of us at least!). 

On those lines, here's a new spin on the trusty old flapjack.

Cranberry, ginger and dark chocolate flapjack.

200g rolled oats
55g plain flour & a sprinkle of ginger
120g butter
3 tbsp golden syrup
90g dark brown sugar

as many dried cranberries as you please - I put in loads

8-ish standard squares of dark chocolate - the better quality, the nicer: of course

As with before, melt the butter, sugar and syrup gently on the hob, then stir it into a mix of the dry ingredients. The chocolate is best roughly chopped, but as it'll melt anyway, add how you feel best. Press the flapjack mix into a square tin, I always use my trusty silicone version for a smooth finish. Bake for up to twenty minutes on gas 4, but to be honest, I was short of time so only did ten minutes and it was fine, it's just to crisp it up.

Sweet dreams are made of icing

As a firm believer that there is no afterlife, I sort of resent sleeping as stealing valuable hours of consciousness. Its salvation, in my mind, is (besides how insanely comfy beds can be) the presence of dreams. I find them, sometimes, far more entertaining and hilarious than reality itself. The only afterlife I'd want is that which H.H. Price discusses. He proposes that a life after death could be like an everlasting dream. Unfortunately, if you believe, as I do, that you need a working brain for any level of conciousness, you'll agree that this is implausible, despite it's tempting ideals. 

During our waking hours, as students especially will know, beds are a great place to spend time anyway. My house mate in particular is a great fan of her bed, which I replicated here in a sponge for her 21st, with digestive biscuits in butter-cream for pillows, and a tad too much blue icing. Luckily for me, pictures can't yet convey flavouring.

Absolute idealism, and unexpected greatness

I always advocate trying new things, with the aim of packing as wide a range of experiences possible into this life. Not necessarily going skydiving or any such radical activity, but taking on small challenges within my day-to-day tasks can throw up attempting the unknown. In the second year of my degree, I'm being made to read Hegel. Notoriously hard, I didn't expect my first reading of his Phenomenology of Spirit to throw up wonders.The only baking task on par with this had to be my first ever go at cheesecake. I adapted a New York baked vanilla cheesecake recipe from the M&S Recipe Keeper to use less cream cheese, and used a vanilla pod instead of essence, another first. I don't even like cheesecake myself this much, so as with when I picked up my Hegel reading, I didn't have the highest of expectations.

Ingredients:

3 large free range eggs

lemon juice

100ml single cream

40gg cream cheese

1 vanilla pod

150g digestive biscuits

100g butter

1 tbsp granulated sugar

100g plain flour

200g caster sugar

For the base: Crush the digestives; my preferred method is bagging them then bashing the bag angrily with a rolling pin. Melt the butter and add the initial tablespoon of sugar and the digestive crumbs. Press the mixture into the base of a greased or silicon cake tin, smoothing with the back of a spoon. Bake this for ten minutes only on gas mark 4.

Beat the scraped contents of a vanilla pod (or essence) into the cream cheese. 

Whisk the eggs, lemon juice and cream in a jug.

Add half of this to the cream cheese, followed by the flour and sugar, then the other half of the jug mixture. Pour carefully onto the pre-cooked digestive base. It is key that the base has had time to cool and set. mine didn't hence half the base floated to the top (which is less of a disaster retrospectively, but not as aesthetically pleasing as the half where all the base stayed where it should).

Bake for 15 minutes only on gas mark 6, then turn it down to gas 1/2 and leave in for about 40 minutes. Allow to cool, then refrigerate the cheesecake for 2 hours to let it set.

Okay. so it ain't beautiful, but I'll concede without any modesty that it actually tastes great, and I never like cheesecake in restaurants, etc. Baked cheesecake having been conquered, time to return to Hegel, still having no idea what on earth he means by the Absolute.

Another post-festive pragmatic bake.

Sticking with yesterday's theme, I found a way to put to use the eight frozen crust-end bread slice I found in the freezer.

Post-festive bread and butter pudding - with cinnamon and cranberries

These flavours would also be good at actual Christmas time! (well it technically still is...)

I defrosted, buttered and quartered the bread, and arranged half of it in the oven dish, then poured over half the leftover dried cranberries.
I then layered on the rest of the bread and fruit.

For the pouring mixture:

300ml milk

150ml cream

2 large eggs, or three medium-sized

50g sugar

Beat the eggs first, then whisk in the rest.

I then poured this (diligently) over the bread and left it to soak in for quarter of an hour (while pre-heating the oven to Gas 4).

I then sprinkled ground nutmeg, a pinch or two of cinnamon (depending on your bravery) and three sachets of brown sugar (coffee-sized).I pressed in the cranberries so they didn't burn, and it was ready for the oven!

Pragmatism: ethics, politics...kitchen

William James, as son of a theologian, brother of novelist Henry James, and diarist Alice James, had a lot to live up to. Luckily, he went to Harvard, studied the sciences, and wrote several influential works including a comprehensive study of miracles (providing probably the strongest case against Hume's argument that they do not exist) and 'Pragmatism'.
In Pragmatism, William James offered a pragmatic approach as a solution to reconciling the claims of science with those of religion and morality, and altogether as a 'new way of thinking'.
In the spirit of New Year's resolutions, I'm going to try and be more pragmatic in several ways: Combining the time of my baking so it doesn't interfere with, but compliments my degree work; being economic with ingredients by trying, as much as possible, to use up what we already have rather than buying new products, and substituting accordingly where I can.

To start off with, here's a possibility for New Year's leftovers:

Not-Eaten Mess

Gather leftover chocolate-cakey nibbles i.e. mini rolls, mini millionaires shortbread, mince pies (but don't combine with chocolate unless its dark). Heat on medium for a minute r two in the microwave, or until warm and beginning to melt.

Dish into milkshake or wine glasses so it feels like a dessert.

Add dry nibbles that you don't want to melt down such as dried fruit, peanuts (become non-savoury here, but no cheese bites please!), chocolate coins/orange segments, after eights, marshmallows and so on.

Pour over single cream (or use up squirty cream if you have a can).

Ta-da, a dessert with minimal effort and no ingredient-buying.

Leftover Quiche

Using the quiche recipe below for the pastry cases (but scaled to half), I made one compiled of various fridge/cupboard items found.

1 onion, chopped, fried in margarine, balsamic vinegar (yes, in our student house) and two sachets of sugar to caramelize

a few teaspoons of leftover pesto paste

1 egg beaten

100-ish ml milk

herbs, pepper and salt

grated cheddar cheese

They looked much better cooked!

I also have so just out-of-date vanilla pods rescued from home which can be used it several ways such as to flavour sugar, to counter-balance the tang in cinnamon dishes, for crème caramels/brulee, or to flavour peaches or cream for cakes. We will see what I do with them later this week!   

Happy New Year!

New Years Eve and Aesthetics

On my train journey back to York, being the geeky student again, I read up on Aesthetics in A.C. Grayling's Philosophy 1, a huge compendium of comprehensive introductory essays of just about everything you need to know (over two volumes).
The current prevailing thought on aesthetics is essentially down to the works of Hume and Kant on the subject. Their arguments can be loosely summarised in two keys points: 1.) that all aesthetic judgement presupposes taste, by which they meant a special mental faculty for making these judgements; and 2.) that aesthetic qualities such as 'beautiful' are subjective.
I definitely agree that there is a large degree of subjectivity involved. Looking out of the train window, even on a gloomy, overcast day like today, I find the flat fields and scattered farms beautiful. Even in winter, with no green grass, flowers or leaves on the trees. To me, the Norfolk countryside brings instant memories of my later childhood. Yet, parallel to this aesthetic judgement of my own, I also recognise that objectively, it is not beautiful. A sunny, summers day on rolling hills, I think, would be judged objectively beautiful in a comparison of the two contrasting scenes.
Does this recognition of mine highlight an objective level of aesthetics?

Looking back over the year of bakes I've posted, I pick what I think will be the pictures most universally judges 'pretty' or whatever. There is a clear degree of aesthetic selection going on here. So against this, here's some of the less pretty photos that didn't make it onto the final presentation, and a reminder of some of my favourite bakes.