Okay, so it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the Cookwise Project was a bit of a flop. It’s a great book, but my original concept wasn’t all that suitable to my lifestyle. I manaaged to do fairly well with the bread chapter (I love to bake bread). What did it in was the fat chapter (which features pies, cakes, frying, etc). I thought it wouldn’t be that hard, but when it came down to baking several cakes and pies in a weekend I knew it was not practical to actually go through the book chapter by chapter (and would actually be quite detrimental to my waistline). Rather than going through each chapter, I’ll be posting interesting tidbits that come from the contents of the book and my own cooking experiments.
All that said I did bake a cake, completely from scratch, without a real recipe. This is the type of baking that I never would have thought was possible. I know I can follow a recipe, but building a cake recipe was something that I never would have attempted previously. It’s actually quite easy. Cookwise includes a great set of rules for balancing a cake recipe. Cakes are 100% science: balance sugar to flour, eggs to fat, and liquids to flour.