Diane Duane's Blog: Out of Ambit, page 22

The first Young Wizards reviews are in from France…

And they're good.  :)

From Phebusa.fr: "I devoured this book in two days..."

Pour terminer, je préciserai que j’ai dévoré ce livre en deux jours (j’accuse aussi les chapitres trop longs qui ne permettent pas de faire de pause…), ce qui témoigne de mon intérêt pour l’intrigue. Je regrette d’ailleurs de ne pas avoir découvert cette histoire plus tôt, notamment en VO, car ça se serait sans doute encore mieux passé si mon âge se rapprochait des héros (pas que je sois vieille non plus, mais bon !).

From Cpourlesados.com:

Wizards 1 : L'initiation est le premier tome d'une série signée Diane Duane, à qui l'on doit de nombreux romans pour ados, mais aussi pour la télévision. Wizards  a d'ailleurs toutes les chances de voir le jour au cinéma ou à la télévision dans les années à venir !

Un ouvrage qui a bercé beaucoup d’adolescents américains avant l'arrivée de Harry Potter, et l'on comprends très vite pourquoi . Ce tome 1, l'initiation, est très explicite. Cet ouvrage est fort bien écrit et addictif avec un sens du rythme maîtrisé et envoûtant. Le premier d'une série très prometteuse…

"Explicit?" Well, for certain values of the word. :) "Very well written and addictive with a controlled and mesmerizing sense of rhythm." Also: "...Likely to emerge on TV or as a film in the years to come." That's what you like to hear...

ETA: The first thirty pages of the book in French are here. (This is the electronic version of the chapter-1 promotional booklet that Editions Lumen did.)

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The “Amtrak Residency”: Why I Think This Is A Really Bad Idea For A Writer

I've felt sorry for Amtrak for a long time. Economic pressures and the unique problems of any rail system based inside the US (where automobile travel has too long been the be-all and end-all) have turned it into a faint shadow of the formerly great passenger and freight rail lines that helped define the 19th and early 20th-century history of the US.

But I'm finished feeling sorry for it as of now. It's no crime to have fallen on hard times. But offering people what seems to be something wonderful and then ripping them off the minute they start trying to take advantage of it? NOT GOOD.

On the face of it, it sounds like a lovely offer.

#AmtrakResidency was designed to allow creative professionals who are passionate about train travel and writing to work on their craft in an inspiring environment. Round-trip train travel will be provided on an Amtrak long-distance route. Each resident will be given a private sleeper car, equipped with a desk, a bed and a window to watch the American countryside roll by for inspiration. Routes will be determined based on availability.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and reviewed by a panel. Up to 24 writers will be selected for the program starting March 17, 2014 through March 31, 2015.  A passion for writing and an aspiration to travel with Amtrak for inspiration are the sole criteria for selection. Both emerging and established writers will be considered.

But then you read the terms and conditions, and the alarm bells go off big time. Go read them: I'll wait. I'm not going to reproduce them here: they give me the pip.

Clause 5 is where the trouble starts. Clause 5 essentially says: "When you turn in your application, gee, anything can happen to your original writing. Who knows? We have a billion PR people working for us whose work yours might be [airquotes] confused with [/airquotes]. By signing this you agree that should this happen, you have no recourse, and we never have to credit you or pay you one thin dime. [But you're so desperate, you won't care, will you?] #lol #loser"

Clause 5 by itself ought to be enough to make you walk away, it's so slimy. But then comes clause 6, in which you assign to Amtrak the irrevocable world rights to all the data in your application including your writing, forever and a day. And the day after that.

I learned the lesson long ago both from other freelance writers and at my agent's knee, and the lesson is as important now as it ever was -- in this day of the effortless digital ripoff, perhaps way more so. The lesson is this: Never give anyone world rights to any of your writing.  Ever. Ever. Because who knows if that one piece of writing is the one that would have made you famous worldwide and rich beyond the dreams of avarice? I wouldn't sell anyone world rights to a story for a million dollars and that necklace of flawless cabochon emeralds I saw in the window at Harry Winston that one time*. But give away world rights to something for a single lousy train ticket? I don't think so. They could plate the inside of that sleeper with platinum and lay on catering from Dallmayr and I still wouldn't do it if it meant they got to keep world rights.

Better pay the ticket price yourself and keep the rights to your work in your own pocket than swap those rights for the chance at a single train ride, sleeper or not. (And something else to note here. There is no declaration of who owns the rights to the material you produce on this train trip. There is no way to tell what paperwork you're going to be required to sign if you actually win. Oh, and did I mention the background checks they want to conduct on you first, to make sure you're not some kind of crypto-crook who's going to embarrass them? Clause 9.)

...Now, I hear they're fixing clause 6 in some way or other (doubtless already having heard the first wave of complaints). That's all well and good. But I haven't heard a word about clause 5, which stinks to just as high a heaven.  And they tried to get away with clause 6 as it was. That says way too much about their concept of good faith as it applies to writing, and writers.

It's not worth it. This thing is poison. So please, I beg of you, step away from the very large diesel-powered vehicle. I too am passionate about train travel and writing... way more than most people might guess on the first count. But this is not the way to go about it. If they're willing to try to take this much off you before you even win, what happens when you actually get on board?

*I leaned my forehead against the window right there on Fifth Avenue in the twilight and moaned like a broken thing. Ah God those emeralds. They didn't have a single inclusion, not one of them. (sigh) ...Never mind.



Writing on the train on one's own nickel: the Belfast-Dublin Enterprise, 2004

(CC train image at the top from Jack Snell on Flickr)

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06/01/1854: Happy Birthday, Sherlock Holmes

06/1/1854

Happy birthday, old friend.

Your creator was the first person I consciously took as a tutor in the art of structuring fiction. I didn't do it because I loved him. I did it because I loved you... and because the way he handled you made you more real than a lot of the (allegedly) real things in my world.

You were the first fictional person to really change my life, and I've never forgotten it. Your incisive-yet-benevolent presence has been hanging over my work for a long, long time. I have repeatedly taken your name "in vain" both covertly and in the clear while writing for some of the world's larger fictional franchises, and (because there's no way I can keep you out of other things I love) in worlds of my own. And I doubt this is likely to stop.

I think it was Jorge Luis Borges who said some years back that there are only three fictional characters who're universally known. Of the three he cites, Tarzan has slipped a lot of late, and even Superman has been struggling a bit. But you just keep going from strength to strength, adding dimension with every new iteration. That's a tough row to hoe, with fiction being the essentially ephemeral art form it is. So few stories, regardless of the passion poured into their creation, will last more than a few handfuls of generations. An Iliad here, a Nibelungenlied there, and precious few more, survive to be retold repeatedly in every century after they manifest themselves. But your story, though young yet as such things go, is showing signs of real staying power. It'll be interesting to see where you are in a few centuries more.

Meanwhile, I raise a glass to you today, old friend -- and inevitably also to the companion who's always by your side, without whom you wouldn't be who you are -- and think of the streets of the great Metropolis where the two of you can always be found walking together: unstoppable Reason and unshakeable Fidelity, inseparable in search of Truth and (if sometimes only secondarily) in defense of the Right. This is a better world with the two of you in it, even if only in the realms of the imagination -- for they inevitably spill over into what passes for the Real, to all our benefit.

So... many happy returns of the day, my dear Holmes. Many.

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In the holiday baking department: Braunekuchen / “Brown Biscuits”

Sometimes you want something a little different from the usual run of Christmas cookies. These fit the bill nicely.

Germany has a long tradition of spice-based cookies / bikkies, the most famous probably being the ginger-and-cinnamon-based lebkuchen that first start turning up in recipe books in the 1500's and have since proliferated all over that part of the world in staggering variety.  (A very basic lebkuchen dough, for example, is what's usually used for the  construction of gingerbread houses.) And there are some times of year in central Europe when escaping from lebkuchen seems like an impossibility.

Yet there are cookies in the region that share the same general culinary DNA but diverge in interesting ways. These simple brown biscuits are one sort. There's no ginger in them at all -- which by itself is a touch unusual, gingerbread having so generally overrun the holiday-baking landscape -- but their spice quotient is very high, and their aroma gets significantly stronger over time. Opening a tin of them even after just a day or so sealed up lets a cloud of sweet dark fragrance into the air, after which it's impossible to walk away without eating two or three. Or more. If not quite a lot more.

This is not a same-day cookie: it requires a stay overnight on the kitchen counter, wrapped up, before it'll be ready to roll out, cut out and bake. Also, due to its northern heritage -- it comes from Scheswig-Holstein -- this recipe calls for treacle (a.k.a  molasses), for depth of flavor, and lard, for additional body and crispness. (If you have trouble getting your hands on lard, you can substitute other solid fats like [UK] Stork or "white fat", or [US] Crisco, or even butter: but lard works best.)

Ingredients and method under the cut.



Ingredients:

Heated ingredients:

65g butter
65g lard or other solid shortening
125g treacle / molasses
125g sugar (brown sugar if you prefer: I used demerara when baking these and it worked very well)

Dry ingredients:

225g plain / all-purpose flour
50g corn starch / cornflour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Additions:

Grated rind of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon candied orange peel, finely chopped
40g blanched almonds, finely chopped or ground

First of all, warm the butter, lard, treacle and sugar together over a low heat until all the fats have melted and the sugar has dissolved in them. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove the mixture from the heat and allow to cool for a few minutes.

Assuming that you're using a mixer for this process, when it's a little cooled pour the melted fat / treacle / sugar mixture into the mixer's bowl and leave it to its own devices for a little longer. Meanwhile sift together the dry ingredients into a different bowl. Start the mixer going and add the dry ingredients to it a spoonful at a time. Then stir in the additions.

Depending on the liquid absorbent qualities of the flour you're working with, the result at this point may be anything from an extremely thick batter to an extremely soft dough. The recipe we're working with here states that "the dough will be very soft but should not stick when handled. If it is sticky, add just enough flour to keep it from sticking." This was the case when I baked this first, and I had to add nearly another 100g of flour to get it to the non-sticky stage where it actually resembled dough. So don't panic about needing to do this. On the other hand, if you find that your result is too dry, add warm water tablespoon by tablespoon until you get a soft dough.

When the dough is the right consistency, form the dough into a flat round and wrap it in plastic wrap. Leave it overnight at room temperature: don't refrigerate. (Doing so will impair the cookies' rise.)

The next day, preheat the oven to 350F / 180C. Divide the dough into two pieces, Lightly flour your baking surface and roll the dough out very thin (1/8 inch thick is about right: much thinner than that and it'll start to tear.) A note in passing: this dough can get fairly tough if you've added much flour to it past what the recipe officially calls for. Don't panic about this either. By the time I got mine out to 1/8 inch think, it looked and felt like a sheet of leather, and regardless of this, everything turned out fine.

Cut out the rolled-out dough into festive shapes, using whatever cookie cutters you prefer (shapes like hearts, stars, crescents , rounds and pretzel-shapes are favored on these biscuits' home turf). Place on buttered and floured baking sheets. (If you're working on a silicon baking surface as I was, you needn't bother with treating it any further.)

Bake for about 12-15 minutes or until the edges of the cookies have shrunk and rounded a bit, and the biscuits have just begun to change color. You're going to need to keep a close eye on the first few batches to evaluate how long your oven takes to get them to this point. The baking temp is a bit low to start with, in order to keep the high sugar content from predisposing them to burn, but the about-to-color point in the baking process can sneak up on you pretty quickly, so keep your eyes open.

Remove to a wire rack to cool. When they're finished cooling, get them into a biscuit tin or tightly sealed container as soon as you can. The original recipe suggests that you bake these as much as a few weeks in advance and store them tightly sealed to allow the fragrance and flavor to intensify. Judging by how this starts to happen within just a couple/few days of a bake, this seems like a great idea if you have the time.

Enjoy!

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In the holiday baking department: Speculatius / Speculaas

If you’re in the Netherlands (I don’t say Holland, because you might be in the Netherlands without necessarily being in Holland) and you’ve ordered coffee after a meal or a snack, odds are strong that this is the cookie / biscuit that will come along with it. They seem to be everywhere over there.

For most of us who make it at home, this would be a cookie-cutter cookie, but on the Continent they’re likely to turn up in quite ordinary shapes — rectangles or squares — that are ornamented with designs that have been pressed into them with special Speculaas molds. (Very ornate and seriously huge Speculaas biscuits used to be given to children in the Netherlands on St. Nicholas’s Day [December 6th], but I don’t know if this is done any more.)

The flavor is something special. It sounds a little odd to describe a bikkie’s flavor as “fresh”, but this is, and the cardamom used in its spicing is what’s responsible. A lovely fragrance comes off a tin of these when you open it up, and the cinnamon and cloves that are also part of the recipe add a very holidayish scent. So this is nice to bake around this time of year for when you want something just a little different from the cookies you’ve probably been eating since the week before Christmas or thereabouts.

The only frustration about making these at home is when you go looking for a recipe on the Net. The best ones are all German, it seems, but they all seem to call for “spekulatiuswurz”, or “Speculatius seasoning,” which is a big help especially as it gives you no idea what’s in it. Fortunately there is a good scratch recipe in that bible for those interested in central European holiday baking, <em>Festive Baking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and this recipe comes from there.

Ingredients and method under the cut.



Ingredients:

140g butter, softened
140g granulated sugar (you can substitute brown sugar if you like)
Grated rind of one lemon
1 egg, lightly beaten
50g ground almonds
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon powdered cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon baking powder
240g plain flour
65g flaked almonds (for decoration)

A note about the cardamom first. If you don’t have a source for ground cardamom, you’re going to have to buy it in the pod (an Asian grocery can most likely help you with this if your local supermarket can’t accomodate you).

You don’t want the outer covering of the pods, just the seeds inside. Crush the pods (ideally with a mortar and pestle) until they crack open, pick out the little black seeds, and crush these to a powder. It may take a while, as they can be tough, but the lovely scent is your reward. (You may want to put them through a sieve to make sure they’ve been rubbed small/fine enough.) Six to ten of the pods will provide the amount of ground cardamom you need.

Using an electric mixer, cream together the softened butter, the sugar and the lemon rind. When they’re light and fluffy, beat in the lightly beaten egg, and then the ground almonds. While this is going on, sift the spices into the flour, along with the baking powder, and mix all the dry ingredients well together. Then while the mixer operates on low speed, add the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/almond mixture, a spoonful at a time, until all mixed together. The dough will be pretty soft. Scoop it out onto some plastic wrap, pat it into a flat round, and refrigerate for at least three hours. (Longer won’t hurt, but don’t leave it overnight: it won’t bake as well if left so long.)

When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 375F / 190C.

This next bit gets a touch complicated in terms of logistics, as for best results the cut-out biscuits need to be baked “from cold.” So you need to prepare enough baking sheets / baking surfaces for the whole amount of dough, load them up, and then stick them all in the fridge until you’re ready to start. (The recipe makes between four to five dozen cookies, depending on how large you’re cutting them: just so you know.)

Leave as much of the dough cold as you can while you’re working on cutting out a given batch. Roll out, say, about a quarter of that flat round, to a thickness of about 1/8 inch, and cut out your first batch. Decorate them with slivers of almond. Quickly reknead the scraps, roll and cut again until that chunk of dough is all used up: then stash the baking sheet(s) in the fridge and repeat the rolling and cutting process until all the dough is ready to bake.

Bake each filled cookie sheet for 10 to 15 minutes until the point where the biscuits are just lightly golden and starting to darken at the edges. (Check that first batch at the 8-minute point to make sure your oven’s heat’s not too high.) When you get the baking sheet out of the oven, if your biscuits are small, remove them immediately with a spatula to a cooling rack. If they’re large, give them a couple/few minutes on the sheet before removing them with the spatula (the big ones tend to be a bit soft initially*).

When you’re finished baking these and they’re completely cool, put them right into a sealed tin, as if left out they go stale with great speed. They are wonderful with coffee, as you might imagine. And as dunking biscuits they work surprisingly well.

Enjoy!

*Insert innuendo here if you really feel the need.

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In the holiday baking department: Ginger Nuts

Ginger nuts are a favorite store-bought biscuit in most parts of the UK and Ireland, but homemade ones are way better. And somehow or other I seem to have made these three times in the last week and a bit, so I think I’ve acquired some expertise.

If you want to make some holiday-ish biscuits/cookies that aren’t a lot of trouble, especially for gifts, these are an excellent bet. They're crisp and flavorful and very more-ish. They’re also a good sort of bikkie to make if you want to let children or those who are normally a little baking-challenged assist (meaning it’s the kind of thing you can do sitting around the table with a bunch of adults and a bottle of wine, gossiping while you do the slightly repetitive work of getting them ready to bake).

Making the dough takes twenty minutes or a bit more, depending on how long you spend creaming the sugar and butter and flour together. After that it’s just a matter of how quickly you feel like assembling each baking sheet’s worth of cookies / biscuits. The dough refrigerates nicely for short periods, but because ginger nuts are raised only with baking soda / bicarbonate of soda, I wouldn’t keep the dough unbaked for more than 4-6 hours. The recipe makes between four and five dozen gingernuts, depending on how large you roll the pieces.

Recipe and method under the cut.



The ingredients and method:

200 grams / 7 ounces caster sugar / granulated sugar (extra fine if you’ve got it)
1/4 teaspoon salt
150 grams / 5 ounces butter, cubed and slightly softened
1 egg

Cream all these together with a beater until light and fluffy. This is the most labor-intensive part of the process if you don’t have a mixer, but whether you do or not it’s worth while taking your time over it until everything is as fluffy as it’s going to get. Do the sugar, butter and salt first, and then when they’re well creamed, add the egg and beat like crazy until everything goes very fluffy.

Meanwhile mix together:

150 grams cream flour / cake flour
150 grams strong white flour / all-purpose flour

(You can use just all-purpose flour if you don’t have both kinds. The mixture, though, produces a slightly more delicate / crisper cookie.) Add to the flour/s:

1/2 rounded teaspoon bicarbonate of soda / baking soda
1 rounded teaspoon ground ginger
1 rounded teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 rounded teaspoon ground cloves

If you’re a real ginger fan, kick it up to a teaspoon and a half. However much you use, stir until the spices are blended all through the flour.

When you’re finished creaming the butter, sugar and egg mixture, slow the beater right down to a crawl (assuming you’re using one) and start adding the flour and spice mixture in large spoonfuls until it’s all combined. Stop the mixing process and scrape down the bowl once or twice if necessary, rather than mix any more quickly: you don’t want to take the chance of toughening up the dough.

When the dough is ready, stick it in the refrigerator for half an hour or so to make it easier to work with (as it's fairly soft when it's initially finished mixing). Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180 C / 350F and start preparing your first cookie sheet by lining it with baking parchment. (It seems likely you could use a baking-silicone mat for this, but I didn't have one of the right shape and so haven't tested that.)

Ginger nut dough is one of those kinds of cookie dough that likes to run all over the place while you’re baking it, so all the next steps are about controlling that tendency. Get ready:

A little bowl with four or five tablespoonsful of granulated sugar to roll the cookie dough balls in
A drinking glass to flatten them with (a heavy-bottomed one is best. We use a Pernod glass for this, but any tumbler will do.)


There are two schools of thought about ginger nuts. Some people like them big enough to dunk in tea. Others prefer to be able to eat them in one bite. (There’s something to be said for this approach, as these are quite crisp when baked.) You can make these either way, or both ways, depending on how large you roll the individual pieces.

If you want the dunking-size biscuits, start scooping out the slightly chilled dough from the mixing bowl with a teaspoon and rolling it between your hands into balls about the size of a big “shooter” marble (usually just shy of an inch in diameter, though who knows, your marbles may vary). After rolling each piece, drop it in the little bowl of sugar and roll it around until covered: then place it on the baking sheet. For smaller pop-in-your-mouth ginger nuts, roll each piece to the size of a small ordinary marble (about 3/4 inch in diameter), roll it in sugar as above, and sit it on the baking sheet. Whichever size you go for, this is the part of the process in which  small children, or idly gossiping adults, can be enrolled to best advantage.

Once all this is done, use the bottom of the glass to gently flatten each of the balls a little bit. Don’t overdo this: they just need to be flat enough to stay put on the baking sheet.


Slide the baking sheet into the oven with some care (because the little flattened discs will still slide around on the parchment if you let them) and bake for between 5 and 6 minutes until the edges are just starting to go a little brown. When I was baking these I found that 5 minutes 30 seconds was the right time for our oven. Yours obviously may differ, so when you’re doing your first batch, check them at 5 minutes and see how they look.

Remove the baking sheet from the oven and move the baking parchment off the sheet and to a heatproof surface for five minutes or so. After about that long, use a spatula to remove them from the baking sheet and let them finish cooling on a rack.

Repeat the dough-rolling, sugar-rolling and ball-flattening process on another parchment-lined baking sheet, and keep going until all the dough is shaped and baked.

Once baked and completely cooled: immediately put the biscuits / cookies in a paper-lined tin or other airtight container and seal them up. They’re really hygroscopic, and will quickly go soft if you leave them out. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Otherwise: enjoy!

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Cyber Monday? Yeah, we’re doing this too (till Friday!)

For Cyber Monday at Ebooks Direct, everything in the store, everything in our catalog, is 50% off from now until 1 minute before midnight Hawaiian Standard Time on Monday Friday night, December 6th.

Just use the discount code CYBERMONDAY at checkout.

"Everything" includes our newest offering, the complete 9-volume set of the revised and updated New Millennium Editions of the Young Wizards series -- an amazing bargain at the one-time sale price of USD $27.50, just a shade over $3 per ebook!

There are all kinds of goodies on offer -- from Diane Duane's standalone fantasy novels like the urban fantasy / police procedural Stealing the Elf-King's Roses and the historical fantasy Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South, to Peter Morwood's "Clan Wars" prequels Greylady and Widowmaker (out of print for a time from their UK publisher, but now available exclusively here in updated versions) and his classic "Tales of Old Russia" series, both in individual volumes and the new 3-volume omnibus ebook.

All our books are available in the major ebook formats, all are DRM-free, and many are available in multi-format bundles at no extra cost (because why should you have to pay extra just because you have more than once device?) All you have to do is use the discount code / coupon code CYBERMONDAY at checkout. (A walkthrough showing how to use our discount codes when checking out is here.)

So relax and explore what our store has to offer! You don't even have to move from wherever your computer or mobile device is (that's got to be a relief...). And you can also sign up for our general mailing list in the footer at the bottom of the page if you'd like to be kept informed of new releases across the bookstore.

Whatever interests you, thanks for dropping by, and have a super Cyber Monday! (And all week until post-Cyber Friday. Or indeed, as it was called earlier, the Feast of St. Nicholas.)

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Black Friday sale? Yeah, we’ve got one.

For Black Friday 2013 at Ebooks Direct, everything in the store, everything in our catalog, is 50% off from now until 1 minute before midnight Hawaiian Standard Time on Friday night.

Just use the discount code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout.

"Everything" includes our newest offering, the complete 9-volume set of the revised and updated New Millennium Editions of the Young Wizards series. -- an amazing bargain at the one-time sale price of $USD 27.50, just a shade over $3 per ebook!

There are all kinds of goodies on offer -- from DD's standalone fantasy novels like the urban fantasy / police procedural Stealing the Elf-King's Roses and the historical fantasy Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South, to Peter Morwood's "Clan Wars" prequels Greylady and Widowmaker (out of print for a time from their UK publisher, but now available exclusively here in updated versions) and his classic "Tales of Old Russia" series, both in individual volumes and the new 3-volume omnibus ebook.

Also on sale in our store for the first time this year are Gift Cards... and your 50% discount is good for those too. Spend $25 and give a friend $50.00's worth of holiday reading to enjoy at their leisure!

All our books are available in the major ebook formats, all are DRM-free, and many are available in multi-format bundles at no extra cost (because why should you have to pay extra just because you have more than once device?) All you have to do is use the discount code / coupon code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout. (A walkthrough showing how to use our discount codes when checking out is here.)

So relax and explore what our store has to offer! You don't even have to move from wherever your computer or mobile device is (that's got to be a relief...). And you can also sign up for our general mailing list in the footer at the bottom of any bookstore page if you'd like to be kept informed of new releases across the store.

In any case, whatever you do, have a super Black Friday!

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In the Afterlife After-Hours Bar

You know the place. It's where deities and divinities and avatars go when they've clocked off when they need a glass or a stiff one or some casual conversation with their peers before going home to the family.

So Christ is sitting there nursing a nice Pinot Grigio (he gets so tired of red wine, you have no idea) and he's saying to the gods and near-gods at the bar with him, "You know what really gets to me, though? The tat. The kitsch. The dashboard ornaments, the endless dodgy art -- "

"I saw that doll," says somebody down the bar past Mithras and Izanagi: a god with his hood pulled up and a long cloak that looks and flows like shadow. "With the puffy sleeves and the crown."

"The Infant of Prague, yeah. Take my advice, do not do apparitions after hours in Prague, it's something about the beer they brew there, what those people will do to you after the fact just does not bear considering. But you know what's worst? The 'Sacred Heart.'" He actually does the air quotes, which leave little traces of (appropriately) red fire. "On the front of me, like I've had some kind of bass-ackwards transplant. Usually with rays of light coming out of it. Aorta and vena cava and wobbly bits all aglow. There is nothing that does not appear on. Lunch boxes. Key chains. Night lights, do you believe that? How many kids' nights have been ruined by having that thing glowing at them like a refugee from a Bill Cosby skit? You should see some of the stores at CafePress. I'm amazed they haven't done My Sacred Spleen yet. Except probably none of them can figure out where it would go." He rolls his eyes. "I have it way worse than any of you."

Mutterings of agreement run up and down the bar. Then a voice speaks up.

"I got that beat."



Heads swivel. Down at the far end of the bar, past Odin (brooding into his mead again, there's just no cheering that one up sometimes), everyone is surprised to see that it's the Bodhisattva who's spoken. Normally he's not one to put himself forward quite this way: normally when he joins in it's some pithy and Zenlike observation that doesn't hit you with its full meaning until three in the morning.

"What?"

"I," says Gautama, hitching the belt around his ample self as he turns around on the bar stool, pushing his soma away, "have that beat. Because I..." He pauses for effect. "Have..."

"What is this, MasterChef? You have what?"

"A butter dish."



Looks of shock and amazement and then rueful commiseration run all up and down the bar. "Oh, my dear God." "Holy cow."

Christ shakes his head, disbelieving. "Now that," he says, astounded. "I mean, there are ones with quotes from me on them, sure, that's kind of unavoidable. But this. Why would they even -- "

He shakes his head again and reaches around behind Odin and Loki in Gautama's direction. They fistbump. "I stand corrected, my god," Christ says. "What're you drinking again? Let me get you one."

"I can't believe it's not Buddha," says somebody down at the other end of the bar.

A package of salted peanuts sails through the air (divinely guided) and catches Zeus right in the chops.

The post In the Afterlife After-Hours Bar appeared first on Out of Ambit.

“Molly’s Chocolate Pie”

Azriona started a new fic entitled Mise en Place, and AU-cast Sherlock as a sort-of-Gordon-Ramsay, of course I was interested. In this scenario, John is the co-owner with his sister Harriet of a superannuated, deeply indebted and generally ailing family restaurant on which abrasive-celebrity-chef Sherlock descends to either fix it or put it out of its misery. During the initial assessment meal, for his dessert Sherlock's served a piece of chocolate pie made by Molly (once waitress, now occupying the position of cook under duress) and finds it not only the only edible thing he's been given but actually worth finishing.

Now, I enjoy baking, and really like a good cake or pie (as this might indicate). So when Azriona put up the recipe for Molly's pie, I said, "Hmm, okay, let's give it a shot and see how it turns out." Obviously this was going to imply a conversion of the ingredient quantities (as well as some substitutions) for cooks on this side of the water, where -- in modern times anyway -- recipe measurements, at least of dry ingredients, are routinely done by weight rather than volume.

So here it is, under the cut.



From the bottom up...

The crust:

The closest readily available UK/Irish equivalent is the "digestive biscuit," a The Food Network crumb crust recipe is as usual slanted toward the US market and uses US measurements and concepts. Well, fine, they're playing to their major market. But here we run hard into one of the more annoying problems for the UK-Irish-European-based cook: There are no graham crackers here.  (Well, okay, there are some... in specialty stores that cater to expats... but you do NOT want to pay what they're going to charge you.)
slightly sweet wholemeal / whole wheat "cookie"/biscuit with a slightly different texture. To the right is one from one of the better-known brands, McVities:

Overall, in terms of flavor and performance, it's an OK substitute. But now we run into a problem: how many of these do you need? Because here we run into another difficulty: the Food Network recipe is calibrated in "graham cracker sheets". This means the longer one of these, to the left:

...So we need to know what one of those "sheets" weighs. The trouble is, go Googling to find out and you get a lot of different answers, not to mention people arguing more or less fruitlessly about what constitutes a serving. I went off to the Nabisco site to try to pull data from the nutritional info panel of the brand I remember best from my US childhood, Honey Maid grahams, but they weren't incredibly helpful. Calories? Yes. Weight of sheet? No. ("Serving Size: 31 g. Serving[s] per container: About 13." [eyeroll] "About"? Seriously, guys, if you don't know, who do we ask? Sheesh.) Worse, this site suggests that a serving is two sheets "weighing about 28g". Yeah, but is that 28g per sheet, or per the whole serving? Is it too much to ask these folks to write clearly? (Other people have been having this kind of problem as well. This makes me feel slightly better. But only slightly.)

Anyway: somebody over here has actually specified weight (and also appears to have put the graham crackers through a bomb calorimeter, which is scientifically interesting if not culinarily germane). THANK YOU GUYS. A sheet weighs 14g.

Moving along: a single digestive biscuit weighs 14g on my scale. A perfect 1:1 correlation: something I'll never need to waste time thinking about again, all Gods be praised.

Onward. The Food Network crumb crust recipe converts this way:

Makes 1 9-inch pie crust

14 digestive biscuits (196g), finely crumbed (I put mine through the food processor, but stuffing them into a Zip-Loc bag and bashing them mercilessly with a rolling pin would certainly work as well)

3 tablespoons / 48g sugar (Irish cooks / cookbooks have a tendency to assume you're rounding/heaping your spoonsful, where US cooks would routinely level. I split the difference here and rounded slightly.)
6 tablespoons / 72g unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 175C. Process the biscuits and sugar together until finely crumbed. Add the melted butter and pulse until moist (or stir in well with a fork if you couldn't be arsed to mess up the processor for this).
Press the mixture into a 9-inch pie plate and bake until firm, 18 minutes or so. European cooks, please note! -- While the original recipe says "18 to 22 minutes", if you leave this version of the crust in for 22 minutes, it will have burnt itself black. The digestive biscuit crumbs are (I think) denser than graham cracker crumbs, and a bit more heat-absorptive. Also, if you're using a fan oven, that will speed things up as well. I'd start checking the crust at about 14 minutes -- 12 or 13 if you've got a fan oven -- and yank the thing out as soon as the top edges start to get seriously brown.
A note in passing about making this crust: Normally I tend to fight shy of graham / crumb crusts because they can be fairly uncontrollable (not to mention difficult to make pretty). It's like making a sandcastle, but the sand is greasy and you're working in a pie pan. Push down in one spot, it pops up in another and tries to escape over the edge. While I was making this, I found myself muttering "Next time I'm doing this damn thing in a springform." ...Maybe I will.

Now to the filling:
Here again, the measurements are slightly less problematic than the ingredients.
Not until relatively recently have there been good dedicated baking chocolates on the UK market: and none* of the best ones are local. In particular, until quite recently there's been nothing at all locally available that corresponds to the "Baker's" brand cooking/baking chocolate familiar to most serious US cooks. A lot of UK-based cooks, if they don't have access to something patissier-specific like the lovely Belgian Callebaut, will routinely reach for Cadbury's Bourneville when baking something that calls for semisweet. But this isn't an ideal solution, as that bar of Bourneville you get from the Tesco is a confectionery item rather than a baking ingredient. It contains additional vegetable fats, and more sugar than is strictly necessary.

Nonetheless, I went with the Bourneville (which comes in at only 40% cocoa mass or thereabouts) for this first pie, simply because it's affordable and there's sort of a cultural bias towards it. If as a casual cook I wanted to goose the cocoa mass percentage in this pie up to the recommended 60% or thereabouts, I would pick up a bar of Lindt Excellence 70% or something similar and split the total chocolate weight about half and half between that and the Bourneville. Or I'd look around the shops for something from Green & Black's. (When I take another run at this, though, it'll be an all-Lindt production, since I'm staring at two bars of the 70% Excellence at the moment.)

In any case, the cooked chocolate custard that results even when you've only used Bournville in this approaches a pot-de-crème-like consistency and smoothness. Very nice indeed.** (I'd also think seriously about making this pie with Green & Black's Maya Gold instead of plain semisweet chocolate. Mmmmm.)

So, onward! The ingredients:


450ml milk
92g sugar
30g cornflour / corn starch
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 large egg yolks (at room temperature)
2 tablespoons / 30ml brewed coffee, cooled
1/2 teaspoon / 2.5ml vanilla extract
115g semisweet baking chocolate, chopped (21 of those little blocks in the large 200g Bourneville bar will take you just over this, to 121g. You may as well eat the rest. The angels weep if you waste chocolate.)


As per Azriona's recipe:

1. Heat the milk in a large saucepan until hot but not boiling.

2. Whisk the sugar, cornstarch and salt in a large bowl; then whisk in the egg yolks, coffee and vanilla. Whisk half of the hot milk into the egg mixture until smooth, then gradually whisk the egg mixture into the pan with the remaining milk.

3. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens, 3 to 5 minutes. (If you have a thermometer, the mix should be at least 160F to ensure that the eggs are cooked and you’re not going to kill anybody. Sherlock would be disappointed, but your friends and family won’t be.) Note that this produces an extremely thick and tight custard, very very quickly. Don't turn your back on this one, and by no means stop whisking during the cooking period or the whole business will burn. Also, turn that heat right down as soon as it starts boiling. You need to keep the cooking process gentle, as the custard's consistency damn near approaches that of magma as it tightens.

4. Remove from the heat and whisk in the chocolate until melted. Transfer to a bowl and cool slightly, stirring a few times to prevent a skin from forming. (You might do this over cold water if you like, but just make sure you stir it quite regularly until it hits the just-before-lukewarm stage.)

5. Pour the filling into the crust; press plastic wrap directly onto the surface and chill until set, at least 4 hours. (Just because it's something I do in these cases, I buttered the plastic wrap first.)

6. Cut, top with whipped cream and shaved chocolate, and serve.

A couple of notes in passing:

I left the pie alone for six hours before cutting a test slice. It had set well at that point, but it's still a soft set. In the morning, after a total of about 14 hours, it cut more cleanly but the set was still on the soft side. If you're one of those people who wants their cut pie to stand perfectly upright even at the pointy end, you may not get that here.
Softly whipped cream seems to suit this better than very stiff cream. Your mileage may vary.
This is a REALLY GOOD PIE. I may take another run at it in a day or two and tart it up a little. But still. REALLY GOOD. I just now had it for breakfast and I suspect I'm going to have it for lunch as well. The rest of it is going down to our local to be shared with our neighbors before we make total pigs of ourselves.

So go make this pie.

*As far as I know.

**Peter thinks that this would make a good cooked-custard-based ice cream mix. GTFO, Mr. Husband. (Actually I think it would need to be a thinner for the ice cream machine's sake, but the flavor would certainly work.)

The post “Molly’s Chocolate Pie” appeared first on Out of Ambit.