100 pages! Plus, cake.

So, yesterday? I reached the 100 page mark! As in, 100 pages written — the actual WIP was 53 pp when I picked it up on May 16th and reached 158 pp yesterday. Go, me!

Plus, the proportion of the plot that is still a mystery is shrinking. A few days ago I had about 2/3 of the plot, but now I would say it’s more like 9/10. Of course, the tenth that I don’t have? That is kind of the crucial “And then the good guys win after all by . . .”

The good guys are just reaching the part where things will start going totally wrong. They’re going to do something sensible, which will work but produce unexpected (and very bad) side effects, after which they will do something else sensible which won’t be sufficient (I know what that is), after which they will find out JUST how much trouble they are really in and do something to pull their chestnuts out of the fire (I have no idea about that).

Plus, this WIP is YA, so what’s really going on is that the adults in the story are doing sensible things that ought to work, but won’t. The kids will then save the day, but not because the adults are stupid or clueless. I hate stupid adults in YA.

I’m expecting to hit pretty close to 200 pp or the halfway mark by June 4th, which is when the summer session starts and I will suddenly lose four or five hours a day. Which I’m not complaining; part-time jobs are fabulous! I don’t know how anybody gets anything done when they also have a full-time job.

Anyway, at that point I’ll undoubtedly slow down, but I don’t want to stop. I want this book finished by the time school starts in the fall (late August). Then I’ll go through and cut — I always overshoot any reasonable page limit — and take a break and then look at it again to see if it seems to flow. And then cut again, I expect, and finally send it to my agent. So that’s the plan.

Meanwhile!

I got moderately stuck last night, and you know what I did? Well, I stopped of course, to let things work themselves out in the back of my head (they did, everything sorted itself out and I figured out the whole next chapter or maybe two chapters when I woke up this morning but before the alarm went off, which is my best thinking time. So that’s all good.

But what’s really important here is, last night I finally started watching the Battlestar Galactica DVDs I’ve had sitting on a shelf for, like, years and years. (How long ago did that come out?) I have the initial miniseries and the first couple of seasons after that and I figure a tv show will be less distracting than reading fiction. I hope.

Didn’t I read a warning on some blog way long ago that B G jumps the shark someplace in the middle? I wonder if I should be planning to get the other seasons? Anybody got an opinion on that one?

Anyway, I’m at the part where it looks like Apollo got blown up. I’m pretty sure he is actually still alive, but it was well past my normal bedtime and the dogs don’t let me oversleep, so I went to bed. So I don’t know how he and the new Madam President — I like her, btw, a great combo of hesitancy and decisiveness — are going to have survived what looks like a ground zero nuke.

And what’s with that human-woman-cylon? She sort of seems like a ghost, what’s with that? Is that idiot who hacked her into the defense net hallucinating or what? My guess is “or what”. Don’t tell me, btw. Those are rhetorical questions. I like the whole “God told me to do it” thing. What, the cylons are all into religion? Because what a neat idea, if so.

Okay! Also having time to cook, of course, because you can’t work on your laptop 24/7. At least, I can’t. And now that the upstairs (main floor) is all clean, I find it hard to bother with the downstairs. The spring cleaning is suffering from an out-of-sight-out-of-mind thing. Though I have almost another week to finish, so there’s a pretty good chance I will get to it. Or most of it.

But anyway, I like baking a lot more than dusting, and I had this extra 8 oz of sour cream that needed to get used up, so I made this cake:

Double-Ginger Bundt Cake

This recipe is from the April 2009 issue of Bon Appetit, in case you want to track down the original, which involves ginger-infused strawberries, which I didn’t make.

1/2 C raw (Demerara) sugar
2 1/4 C all-purpose flour
4 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda (my addition, the recipe didn’t call for it, but hello, we’re putting in sour cream? So of course baking soda is an expected ingredient and I don’t know why it wasn’t in there.)
1/2 tsp salt
1 C butter, room temp (I always microwave it for a few seconds because I never remember to take it out of the fridge beforehand. No, it is not okay to melt it, that will really change the texture of baked goods, so be sure you pay attention and just soften it.)
2 C sugar
4 eggs
1 egg yolk
2 tsp vanilla (I used 1 tsp of double-strength vanilla, but that’s just me.)
1 C sour cream
1 C crystallized ginger, chopped (which if you don’t have a handy supply, I will tell you how to make.)
Ginger syrup (my addition, so it’s optional, but you automatically have it on hand if you make your own crystallized ginger, so why not?)

Butter or spray the Bundt pan. Put in the raw sugar and swish it around to generously coat the pan.

Whisk together the dry ingredients.

Beat the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and beat two to five minutes (longer is better if you’re using a handheld mixer.)

Beat in eggs one at a time. Beat in egg yolk and vanilla.

Add a third of the flour, then half the sour cream, and repeat until you’ve added all the flour and sour cream.

The batter will be stiff. Spoon it into the pan, trying not to dislodge the sugar more than strictly necessary.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out with a few small crumbs attached. Cool in the pan on a rack for 15 minutes. Turn out onto a cake plate.

Now, when I made this cake, I didn’t put enough Demerara sugar in the pan, and the cake didn’t come out as glittery and pretty as the picture showed. So I brushed the cake with ginger syrup and then sprinkled more raw sugar over it, and that worked fine. So that’s an option to keep in mind.

This cake is really good, with a creamy crumb and a surprisingly crisp crust (from the raw sugar in the pan). I wasn’t sure how people who aren’t gingerophilic would feel about this cake, but the people I offered it to for a taste test (the staff at my vet clinic — believe me, we’re on a first-name basis) liked it a lot. So did I, but with all that ginger, that goes without saying.

Crystallized Ginger and Ginger Syrup

14 oz fresh ginger root
3 1/2 C water
3 1/2 C sugar, plus additional sugar
A candy thermometer or instant-read thermometer

Peel and slice the ginger into pieces that are . . . oh . . . about an eighth to as much as a fourth of an inch thick, and up to three inches long or so, which means you can slice the root lengthwise and make fewer but larger slices, which will make your life easier later.

Stir the sugar into the water. Add the ginger. Bring to a boil. Boil gently until the mixture reaches 220 degrees. This will take at least one and a quarter hours and actually for me it always seems to take nearly an hour and a half. I know this seems unbelievable, but I am not kidding. The temp rises fairly fast to begin with, but those last five degrees just take FOREVER. The ginger syrup will be thin but usable if you get it to a mere 216 degrees, but I want it thicker, so I sit there with a book for the last bit, checking the thermometer periodically.

If you do this without a thermometer, then plan to boil the ginger (fairly gently) for an hour and twenty-five minutes, and I expect that will work, but watch the syrup like a hawk for the last fifteen minutes and get it off the burner the instant you see it starting to show the least trace of color. If you caramelize the sugar, you’ll have made ginger brittle, which is perfectly edible but not the plan.

Let the ginger cool in the syrup just to make everything easier to handle. Strain the ginger slices out of the syrup. Store the syrup in a glass jar in the fridge. It’ll last for a good long time, possibly until the heat death of the universe, so don’t worry about it going bad if you shove it to the back and forget it for a while. However, it doesn’t last that long for me. It packs a powerful ginger kick and it’s really good on lots of things. I like it with yogurt and bananas. Or drizzled over ginger pancakes. Whatever.

Meanwhile, lay the ginger slices out in a single layer on a wire rack. (This is why it’s easier to make larger slices.) Let the slices air dry for a while. Toss them in sugar. Let them dry on the rack overnight. Store in an airtight container. I personally store crystallized ginger in the fridge because I once had a batch mold, which was really disappointing. It’ll get harder and drier with time, but there’s no great rush to use it up. Although making the above cake twice would probably do it if you were worried about that.

So . . . there you go.

Incidentally, I just realized that not only do I have ordinary powdered dried ginger and crystallized ginger and ginger syrup on hand, but also fresh ginger; frozen ginger; pickled ginger; and ginger peeled, sliced thin, and preserved in sake (by far my favorite way to preserve ginger, you use it identically to fresh (you can use sherry or vodka or whatever instead of sake (the alcohol does not seem to contribute anything to the taste of the ginger))).

But I honestly think you’ll love this cake even if you’re not the ginger fiend I am.

Okay! Back to REAL writing now.