Happy Blogoversary!

Believe it or not, Zinkthink turns 1 today!  I know it feels like only yesterday that I was an angsty youngster griping about how work didn’t challenge his creative side, and all of a sudden, I’m an angsty dude, one year older, boring handfuls of people with frighteningly verbose accounts of what I’ve cooked recently.  In the interim, I vacillated about what I wanted this blog to be, debated giving the thing up entirely, set varying obtuse rules for myself, and finally got to a point where I’m pretty satisfied with the blog.  That’s not to say I won’t suddenly get the urge to change things up again – give things another year and we’ll see what this space looks like.

Now, don’t worry, I won’t dredge up my old posts in some contrived “best of” montage.  But since I’m an engineer by training, here are some fun numbers.  In one year, I’ve written 45 blog entries, which amounts to a startling average of 3.75 posts per month, almost one a week!  That might not be interesting to you, but it’s neat for me to see, especially whenever I get the bizarre urge to set goals of X posts/week.  Max was 7/month, min was 2 on a few occasions, which gives us a lovely standard deviation of 1.45, whatever that means.

Wow, that was boring, even for me.  Anyway, since this blogoversary is so momentous, it certainly warrants celebration.  And in the Zink household, we even have a cake to mark the occasion.  Well, okay, it’s really a cake I made on Saturday for no real reason, but there’s a lot of it left, so it can be used for the 1-year party too.  Plus it’s a homemade cake, which is exciting and also a bit strange.  For you see, as much as I love to cook (you knew that, right?) I have never been able to get excited about baking.  Any time Stacia tried to get me into it, I’d end up getting bored and she’d bake the whole thing herself.  This time, the tables have turned.  But why?

Inspiration, it turns out, can come from unusual places.  Back when I was home over Christmastime, my family and I made sandwiches for lunch.  Now, other people may be able to throw baloney on a slice of white bread and call it good (which I can, sometimes), but when I really get going, my sandwiches end up elaborate, huge, and I dare say delicious, with pretty much any ingredient you can think of on them.  At the time, I modestly made a comment about how great I was at making sandwiches, and that I should quit my job and open a deli.  My sister then opined that she should open a bakery next door to bake bread for my sandwiches, so she could always have fresh-baked bread around.  We laughed, tried to think of companion stores for the rest of the family, and eventually shrugged it off.

Then I get back to Des Moines, and suddenly everyone’s blogging about baking bread.  SJ posted a challah that she made, and Sarah, who I don’t even know but found on my wife’s blogroll has had a new baked bread all year!  With the thought of fresh bread already in my mind, and pictures of it now showing up all over the place, I absolutely wanted to bake something.  I didn’t have any time, but I sure wanted to.  Then Stacia gallantly offered to go to a bachelorette party with her friends on Saturday, leaving me a whole evening with nothing to do but bake.  Go time!

Better Homes and Gardens’ plaid cookbook seemed like a good place to start for a first-time baker.  I was initially tempted by the phenomenal looking banana bread jelly roll thingy, but it sounded pretty hard to make, so I opted for the carrot cake.  It had a “best loved” emblem or something by it, and hell, who doesn’t love carrot cake?  No yeast to kill, so I even stood a chance of succeeding.

Baking a carrot cake turned out to be surprisingly easy and a lot of fun.  It was, if you’ll pardon the pun, a piece of cake.  Even a total novice can measure flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and canola oil.  Shred up a few carrots, beat some eggs, and mix the whole mess together, and you’ve got the makings of a carrot cake.  Then it only took half an hour to bake, which was great since I started the project at 10 PM.  I got the cakes out, and they looked great!  Usually I find a way to burn the crap out of the bottom of the cake or bread, but these came out beautifully golden-orange.

Making the frosting was a bit more challenging, but only just.  Cream cheese frosting has but three ingredients: cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar.  The trick is sifting powdered sugar into the mixture, a bit at a time, and beating it together with a mixer without somehow sending the sugar flying everywhere.  I was pretty careful, but you’re bound to lose some of it, and that’s fine.  I even ended up with a very baker-like patch of sugar on the front of my shirt.  In the end, I used up all the powdered sugar we had making that frosting, layered and coated the cake, and even threw some crushed pecans on top.  It wasn’t gorgeous, but it was done.

And, spoiler alert, it was delicious!  Granted, I followed a recipe that BHG has probably had for 50+ years, but it was my first time baking and I made a kick-ass cake!  Sweet, carroty, nice and fluffy but with a slight crispness to the edges.  I did manage to get almost every single mixing bowl dirty, made a fairly sizeable mess in the kitchen, but it was a lot more fun than I’d been giving baking credit for.  Now I just need to finish this cake at tonight’s celebration and decide what to bake next.  And that whole bakery-deli concept sounds pretty tempting now, too.  At least we can have carrot cake.

Finally, happy blogoversary to me.  I’ll eat a piece of carrot cake for you, dear reader, to celebrate.  :)