More green, less glowing

Hello, and welcome to the ______ post, wherein I show off pictures of ALL OF THE THINGS which have been languishing in the pile of wool I call my brain. And also some actual piles of wool. Or are these wool? I actually don't remember the fiber content of this shawl, but it consists of two contrasting skeins of Yarn Love: Marie Antoinette in the Paper Flowers colorway and Mr. Darcy in the Vitner Green colorway. I picked these up on an impulse shopping trip at the Renegrade Craft Fair almost exactly a year ago, as I recall, intending to make this pattern. And then, well, stuff happened. Like knit-300s and such. Even the short rows were...not short. So after a lot of being intimidated and whining and moaning and knitting a glow-in-the-dark beret, it was finally back to this.

To celebrate, I decided to recreate a melon bar. Just kidding. Except really, I decided to recreate a melon bar.

See, I'm in the midst of moving almost all the way back east for work, and to do a sort of cross-taper between leases I put my crap in storage, bundled up the cat and a few weeks' worth of supplies, and dropped in on Mad Scientist Boyfriend. His kitchen is...interestingly stocked (read: what is this flavoring and is it even edible?). While snooping around, I came upon a vial of melon flavoring that smelled just like the melon bars of my youth, and a challenge was born. Probably best not to leave me alone too long...

Now, for those of you who don't know what a melon bar is (um...it's not technically whitesplaining if I'm Asian, is it?), it's basically like a very dense and buttery Fig Newton flavored and filled with some sort of green melon confection. Like most sweet things I grew up with, it ain't very. Feeding it to my American friends was basically playing food roulette.

Not wanting to mess up a perfect re-creation, I decided to go the homage route.

For the cake, I wanted something relatively dense and buttery but not terribly sweet, so my immediate thought was Victoria sponge. Actually my immediate thought was "what are those Victorian tea sandwich cake thingies that you spread jam between the layers and I tried to make one once and ran out of cake pan?" I chose Mary Berry's Perfect Victoria Sandwich recipe because the name says it all. Except who the crap keeps self-rising flour around so I substituted AP flour and added the requisite 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt per approximately 6 oz of flour, taking the grand baking powder total to (gasp!) just over 4 tsp (trust me on this one, it works!). It took approximately 20 drops of melon flavoring folded into the batter to achieve that perfect green buttery flavor, but I had to restrain myself from licking the bowl, so that's good, I guess? Also, the batter is incredibly scary-thick (think more like Creature from the Black Lagoon meets cookie dough), so imagine my surprise when 5 minutes into the baking I had two tins of the most gorgeously rising cakes! P.S. They come off the edges nicely if you remember to butter said tins, so cleanup is surprisingly painless.

For the filling, I decided to improvise a honeydew melon jam. Now, have I ever made jam from scratch before? Nope. Do I have a clue how to use pectin? Also nope. So a quick intarwebs search turned up tips for how to make your own pectin-less preserves and I went for it. Hint: it involves a metric crap ton of the ingredient I don't like to overindulge in. Ever. One plastic tub of honeydew chunks (chopped to within an inch of its life), a half tablespoon of white vinegar, and 3/4 of a cup of sugar later, and I had a saucepan of low-boiling green goo. Speaking of lagoon creatures, amirite? Spike in as much Midori as you dare without messing with the texture, ladle your sweet sweet slime into a refrigerator-safe container, cover, and let chill until assembly. It might be alive come show time.

For the cream, I splashed about a tablespoon of Midori into 300ml of heavy whipping cream and gave my arms a workout. Now, you may ask, "why the crap does this cake have a cream top? No self-respecting Victoria sandwich has a cream top!" My friends, that is because I am a blithering idiot. Not having a wire rack to cool my cakes on, I decided to cool mine, FACE-DOWN (*facepalms*) on sheets of wax paper. Goes to peel off wax paper, strips off top of cake. Never fear, we'll just use a bit of cream to fence in the jam in the middle, and then use the remaining cream to cover our mistakes. Everybody likes a foam top on a naked Victoria sandwich, right? Right??? That's not sun tea in the jar behind the cake: why are you asking?

Still, Mad Scientist Boyfriend informs me that not everyone can make a Midori-spiked honeydew melon jam with no pectin on their first try, so at least I did that right! I give you a few moments to admire my layers. Behold them! Be-hold them!

In other news, there were frozen cranberries and pecans in the freezer this morning and I wanted to get some more baking out of my system, so I made a giant muffin. Alternatively it's a baked Christmas pudding. Either way, perhaps it's time to put a loaf pan in this place.

Until the next time, when stir-craziness sets in and I (finally) decide to revisit another yarn project!