Guess where the white stitch marker I place on my black laptop keyboard so it “won’t get lost” ends up 9 times out of 10.
The most important life advice I have to offer is this:
Never make a half batch of lemon curd.¹
“But I only need enough to smear on top of a cheesecake!” That leaves nothing to eat with a spoon, and you will taste naught but regret. Learn from my mistakes.
I made good on my threat to make the striped crumb cake in a chocolate and peanut butter variant, with both chocolate and peanut butter crumbs.
I probably should have started from recipes that already included those ingredients, but I freestyled it because I’m a chaos goblin. Notes for next time include “more cocoa” because this is German chocolate cake levels of weak. Also “either more butter or more milk” because peanut butter isn’t as loose as the butter it partially replaced and the consistency of the two batters didn’t quite match. That didn’t cause a problem with the finished product, but a slightly looser batter would have been easier to layer.
A decent start, but not quite ready for prime time.
Interestingly, crumb topping made with peanut butter stays soft after baking. It’s more like crumbled peanut butter cup filling, whereas butter-based crumb bakes into shortbread bits. Not a bad thing (potentially a great thing for cookies and brownies), just definitely serve the cake out of the baking dish or use a parchment sling to lift it out of the pan because flipping it out will make a mess of your hand and denude your cake. (Guess who didn’t use a parchment sling.)
“This is like a wizard’s grimoire,” said my child while flipping through the handwritten recipes covered with warnings, adjustments, documentation of experiments, and undecipherable diagrams, all stuffed at the front of a proper cookbook I never use.
The new manual dexterity fidget project is underway. I like color work but lack the attention span for something intricate, so I went with millstone stitch.
So far, I’ve shot past only one of the “bars” (one elongated stitch down into a previous row) and caught the mistake before I’d made so much progress the “do I frog back to that point or call it whimsically imperfect” debate became necessary.
The “grout” color is a little darker than I hoped it would be, but picking yarn online is always a gamble. (“Best of luck, especially, with any shade of green,” the chaos goblin says while ordering not one, not two, but three shades of green.) I understand the struggle of accurately reflecting meatspace color on a glowing screen (getting the above photo mostly correct left no slider untouched, and that pale green still isn’t celery enough), so I can’t be mad about it. Five of six colors were as expected or better, and “almond” that’s actually “tea with milk” isn’t egregiously awful, so onward ho.
Someone periodically pipes up in crochet spaces to declare “you can’t crochet without following a pattern.” That’s nonsense on a level with “you can’t cook without following a recipe.” Someone made those patterns. Someone made those recipes. And for every one person who shares the patterns and recipes they’ve made, there are thousands who are just quietly doing their own thing and enjoying the act of making something unique.
Instructions are a good way to learn new things. Instructions are a good way to reproduce a specific result. But if you want to experiment, flex your imagination and intuition, or cater to your own tastes like no one else can and are willing to accept the consequences of striking off on your own, you don’t need anyone else’s instructions or approval. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
¹ I use this recipe but simplified. (No double boiler necessary; just cook it in a saucepan on medium heat, whisking constantly. If you’ve thoroughly whacked the yolks and sugar, there’s nothing to strain, so don’t make that mess. If you don’t have fresh lemons, bottled juice and no zest work fine. Standard granulated sugar thoroughly dissolves, so don’t bother searching for “caster sugar” or whizzing standard granulated in the food processor.) Of note, this is for people who believe a proper lemon curd should make you shudder a little bit before you dive in for the next bite. If you prefer sugar goop that spent time in a room with a lemon but couldn’t muster the nerve to strike up a conversation, this version will probably kill you; however, you might try the technique with your preferred ingredients list to eliminate the hassle of tempering eggs. I do the “beat yolks and sugar fluffy, then add everything else” thing all the time now for pastry cream, pudding, and ice cream base because it’s so much easier.