Illustrated life lessons from 18+ months of cooking experiments — Part 2.
A doughnut, a toroid and a cat
Doughnut in Italian is “ciambella”. It comes from Latin — surprise! — and originally defines a soft cake baked with a hole in the center (like a Bundt cake, if you are into baking. If not, high five for reading my post!). Nowadays it also refers to a small, fried dough with that same shape — the one that usually comes with American policemen jokes.
To get the best of both worlds, I make small non-fried ciambelle, sort of mini Bundt cakes (yes, by now you should google that cake.)
FUN FACT #1: we have a saying that goes, “Not all the donuts come out with a hole in them”, meaning that the result of your actions doesn’t always mirror your intentions. That’s deep, isn’t it? We orbit around food. all. the. time.
FUN FACT #2: we even made a verb from it, “acciambellarsi”, which is what cats do when they curl up in a fluffy purring doughnut.
Alright, but what the heck is a Toroid?
Well, you googled Bundt cake but didn’t search Toroid? I’m disappointed. Anyway, a Toroid forms when you take an Italian girl like me and let her happily orbit around food. Replace food with an axis (sigh!) and me with a circular or squared surface, held in vertical position. Now record the movement (revolution) around the axis and you get a geometric solid that strongly resembles a doughnut. It’s the blue thing in my sketch above.
For the scientists out there who miss math class like me: you don’t wanna meet the equations of a Toroid. Trust me, your brain needs a shot of sugar for that. Luckily I have a recipe for you in the next paragraph!
FUN FACT #3: I made that drawing in a few minutes from my imagination. After I sketched the Toroid, I realized that I had unconsciously taken the doughnut in Sausage Party as a reference. I got fairly traumatized by that movie. Great animation techniques but…don’t watch it.
We didn’t ask for opinions, we asked for recipes.
Oh I forgot to mention, ciambella in Italian can also mean lifesaver, the one that poor Leo Di Caprio didn’t have in Titanic. Or the one you won’t throw me when you leave me with the sharks if I don’t share this ciambella recipe asap.
Alright, here it is. Quick & easy, like telling a joke or a short story. In fact, that’s how I’d like to present my recipes. There are zillions of great bloggers out there who post professional photos with accurate measurements. It’s okay because they enjoy it and I’m the first to drool on their websites. Instead I’m impatient and love to write, so it will be more like the written version of those brilliant 2-minute cooking videos that show you the idea, the ingredients and how they transform in a yummy result. I’ll make cheat sheets and visual recipes. I’ll tell stories from the kitchen. Sounds good?
So sit down kids, I’ll tell you a story. It starts with a girl who runs out of milk and bakes a small batch of soft donuts with 5 staple ingredients (plus 2 extra that can be twisted). Adapted from an Italian popular cake (torta di pere e cioccolato).
Margarine woke up in a mixing bowl and found Sugar raining on her head. It felt so good that they combined in a fluffy foam. Meanwhile, a poor Egg who got beaten decided to join and create more bubbles in the wet mixture.
It was all fun, until the jealous Sifted Flour crashed the party and brought dry mood to the whole batter. Baking Powder, always doggin’ around Flour, dived in too. The situation got sticky: no lumps of hope were to be seen.
Only then, a courageous small Pear gathered a gang of Chocolate Chips to the rescue. The Pear got rid of its peel and diced itself in sacrifice. The atmosphere turned heated over the batter-field. But in the end, six soft hills had risen, all studded with brown and fruity pride.
Moral of the story: Chocolate always saves the day. (But Nuts or Cranberries will do too! Zooombie.. zoombie..)
Cast — in order of appearance
50 g Margarine (can sub butter or equivalent amount veg. oil)
60 g Sugar (or sub sweetener of choice, hey we live in a free world)
1 Egg
100 g Flour (I used AP and a pinch of wholegrain, to cut the guilt)
1/3 table spoon Baking Powder
1 small Pear
1 handful Chocolate Chips (your fist hast roughly the same size of your heart, so be kind and you’ll get more chocolate. Can sub basically anything from nuts to olives... just kidding.)
FUN FACT #4: I finished this post at 02:18 a.m. but I feel full of energy. Thanks to everyone who reads my content and fuels my passion! Let me know if you baked ciambelle or solved Toroid equations. Here’s an healthier doughnut version, featuring banana & plums (hint: the glaze is NOT chocolate).
I’ll tell this story in the next post, together with some of the much awaited life lessons (I haven’t forgotten — I’m just overwhelmed with ideas that take time to develop into readable content, ahem.)
A presto! — Sweekly
