Baking by Flavor

You know, I don't think I am a cake person. Cookies, sure. Brownies are great. Pies are magnificent. But I think there's a reason that I gravitate away from cakes when baking on my own. They're among the easiest thing to bake; as often as I'm exhausted when baking, you'd think I'd make them more often. But no; when I want to not put much effort in, I go for a very simple and unadorned brownie recipe.

What instigated a cake, then? I wanted to try out Baking by Flavor, and Mathfriend absolutely loves chocolate cake and lives with people who aren't super into it. (And he expresses preferences so rarely that I try to go along with it whenever he does.) Thus we made Heirloom Chocolate Cake, chosen from the many recipes in the "chocolate" section purely on the basis of requiring me to go hunt down the fewest ingredients.

The recipe is well-written. The instructions are clear and straightforward, although we did halve it because it was for a two-layer cake and I have only one cake pan. It's... fine? It's cake. We didn't leave it in quite long enough and so it collapsed a little in the center, but it's perfectly serviceable cake.

However, I think this does confirm once and for all that I am Not A Cake Person (though I do still want to try one of the ones like Mud Cake that has cream in it and see what that does to the texture).  Therefore we should try one of the brownie or pie or sticky bun recipes; there are a lot of tasty-looking recipes in there. Some of them are on the complicated side, but it's because they're complicated things, not because the cookbook is making them more complicated than they need to be.

I got what was allegedly precooked chunks of ham but it didn't look cooked and it didn't have the "ready to eat" label the hot dogs come with, so absent other ideas I just baked those in the oven. Next time-- assuming there is a next time; I think these might be a seasonal special-- I'm going to try to come up with a pie recipe before defrosting them.

It's too bad I can't have eggs and have yet to find a way to make custard I can eat, or I'd be really interested in For the Love of Pie's "Hay Custard Pie in a Chocolate Crust" for the sheer unusualness of the thing.

Prepping

So I ordered a bunch of laptop chargers from eBay. They're "ships from California", which I take to mean they're probably not as snarled up in the current supply chain mess. Normally I try to have one spare one on hand, and then order a new one as soon as I've needed to start using the spare one.

I would like to not break a laptop charger every few months, but I have not yet figured out what I'm doing that causes this-- although I did figure out that I need the straight ones which are slightly more likely to break because they are much less likely, in the process of breaking, to break the laptop's pin. Chargers are replaceable; it's a lot harder to keep spare pins around. And then benign_cremator has to open up my laptop and it's completely out of commission until he has time and the part gets here. Having done it once, we'd both like to avoid having to do it again. So I'm using slightly more fragile chargers.

But why I am ordering a bunch now? Well, if supply chains are going to keep getting worse that's going to make it harder to get them; I want to have more on hand. (Which is to say, once they all arrive, I'm going to keep ordering a new one as the old one breaks-- it's just I'm going to have more than one spare one in the house at any given time in case that ends up taking months.)

I'm also making some effort to build a pantry, although that keeps getting foiled by things like not being able to go grocery shopping because of COVID exposure. (I suppose that would have been worse if I didn't have the half-built pantry to draw from.)

Other prepping: I am going to order a ruggedized cell phone now rather than in several months, which would be fine except that means I have to sit down and try to puzzle out which ones have the ability to run a GPS app-- they tend to focus more on the kinds of sensors you'd want on a job site and less on processing power. It's just I want one that's built to last, which is kind of the major selling point of a ruggedized phone. (And I have a strong desire for a Titan Unihertz-- not the Pocket, which doesn't exist yet, but the original-- because PHYSICAL KEYBOARD but I honestly can't tell if it can run a GPS app or not. The long Reddit analysis of it I found was more focused on whether it had the correct kind of tactile feedback as opposed to various models of Blackberry and apparently the camera is terrible. Which I care much less about.)