Sometimes, I don't like you very much.

I have this colleague, "M," who I consider one of the people I am closest to at school. Ze is a year or two younger than me, outspoken, opinionated. I respect hir knowledge and abilities a lot. We've worked well together on a number of projects, large and small, over the years. Maybe because I'm mostly passive and ze is more aggressive, I get quite upset when we disagree or when I feel ze is acting like a jerk. The few times I've objected to something, ze has just shrugged and refused to budge, so I usually don't speak up. I guess I feel a little betrayed when this colleague doesn't live up to my expectations or doesn't act within what I think are proper boundaries. I know that's ridiculous, of course. Ze is an adult and acts in whatever way ze pleases; it has nothing to do with me. Still.

This summer, I've been working with a local high school teacher to find research internships for some of her students with our summer research teams. I actually thought it was a great opportunity for everyone involved and a good way to foster connections with the high school. The response from my colleagues has been disappointing as it took several prods before any of them grudgingly agreed to consider participating. M was one (of two) who finally met with a couple of potential students, and eventually committed to supervise one high school student for a few weeks. I was grateful for that, but I felt that M could have been a bit more gracious. Ze acted like it was a huge imposition to bring another person into "the M lab" as ze called it, where ze was working with a single undergraduate. That pretentiousness rankled ("the M lab" seriously? It's just an instructional lab they're using for the summer, not like it's M's personal space), but I tried to ignore it.

As soon as the high school student was accepted, ze sent me a series of emails. These were related to hir ancient complaint, repeatedly voiced every summer, about student access to the building and labs. Could the high school student get an ID card for access to our building? If not that, could the whole building be left unlocked all day, every day? Because it would be tedious to have to meet the student at the door to let him in each day.

Ze already knows the answers to these questions are no. It is not hir first time through this. It's annoying that ze keeps asking even though nothing has changed and I do not have any authority to change it. The campus safety department will not just leave the buildings unlocked all day. I won't even ask for that, because I actually prefer that the building is closed to random passers-by during the summer months. Our building is on a relatively busy city street and neighbors often walk through campus with their kids and dogs, but absolutely anyone could do the same. There are times when I'm the only person in the building and I don't want to suddenly run into some stranger on my way to the restroom (which has happened). I've talked about this with our administrative assistant, who is alone on the ground floor much of the time, and she agrees she feels much safer with the exterior doors locked in summer. Safety might be willing to issue an access card to the student, though I doubt it, but because this colleague brings up this access issue every. single. year (usually when complaining that we don't give interior room keys to students) I'm not even going to ask. The selfishness of the request rubs me wrong. I just say that non-employees and non-enrolled students do not get cards.

So it's the selfishness and the pretension, but also the lack of consideration for other people that irritates me. In many other ways, I think M is pretty cool, but when this side of hir shows I don't want to know hir. I feel bad about that, as if I'm letting M down by feeling let down myself. It takes me awhile to recover my equilibrium and to want to be around M after an episode like this. Plus, I kind of think I'm right about this issue.

I worry that I might have such a high standard of behavior that I'm not able to make or keep friends who don't measure up. I don't know if other people feel the way I do, or if there are ways to deal with the feelings more competently.

Chocolate Mousse Cake, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for February

This week, I went back to February for the Bakealong recipe. It was Chocolate Mousse Cake with Raspberries, a wonderful-looking layer cake filled with chocolate cream and raspberries. Yum!

I needed some ingredients and was too lazy to shop on Friday or Saturday (plus there were things scheduled, like a graduation party and a horse race), so I didn't start until Sunday morning. Making the cake batter was not too difficult and I thought I could do the baking while working on some other chores. I only have one round cake pan, as it turns out, and I needed at least three layers. The recipe says not to worry because the batter will be fine waiting its turn in the bowl. And it was!

But (and boy-howdy!), I messed up the baking. Since the recipe is written for people who have multiple round pans (read: sane people), it suggested baking times for different numbers and diameters of round pans, but not exactly what I had. I ended up guessing how long to bake mine, and I was wrong by about 20 minutes. My cake had started to pull away from the edge of the pan, and I only had a few crumbs stuck to the tester when I tried the center, so that seemed all right. The second thing I did wrong was not let the pan cool long enough before trying to get the baked cake out (remember, I only had the one pan so I was kind of in a hurry to get on to the next layer).

The first cake was really hard to get out (should have been a clue) and then only the top finally flopped out, missing the cooling rack by about half and leaving the bottom still in the pan. A not-quite-cooked chocolate cake makes a mess when it falls pretty much in a heap on the counter.

With the second cake, I baked it a little longer (it looked the same as the first when I took it out) and again failed to cool it enough, so I had a second flop. The third one I finally did correctly, with a baking time almost twice as long as the first cake and I remembered to cool it a full 15 minutes before attempting to extract it. That used up all the batter, so I washed up and had an hour or two of distraction, feeling pretty unimpressed about this cake.

I almost threw in the towel at this point. Stupid cake!

However, the flopped cake still tasted good, and I had all those other ingredients - especially the fresh raspberries which were hand-picked by virgins at $4 a half-pint. So.

I started over and made another batter. I used up all the granulated sugar in the pantry, of course, and substituted some powdered sugar for the 100 g or so I was short. That seemed fine. This time, I baked three cake layers for the proper time and cooled them properly before attempting to remove them, and all three came out nicely (duh, the way they were supposed to all along).

After cooling, I made the fluffy chocolate whipped cream filling and started building the cake. One layer of cake, a layer of filling, then hand-sliced raspberries.

Repeat this for two more layers (since I had four useable cakes) and put the top on.

Another thing I noticed while baking six cake layers is that our oven is not level. The cakes came out thicker on one side than the other, so after the first three I started rotating the pan in the oven about half way through the baking time. This helped a little, but I still had to arrange the layers carefully to compensate so that the whole stack didn't tilt. You're supposed to refrigerate the cake to make it firmer, so I left it in there overnight. It was early-evening on Sunday by this time and I felt like I had done nothing all day but bake cakes (and wash dishes).

Monday after dinner, I made the frosting. First you do a crumb coat, which is a very thin layer all over the cake, to hold down the crumbly cake bits. I refrigerated that again and then put on the final layer. 

Since I also don't have one of those narrow frosting spatulas, I applied this with the spatula from the robot culinare, and it left some striations and isn't quite perfect. But I'm well satisfied with the result.

It tastes amazing.

Butterflake Herb Loaf, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for June

This week, a new recipe was released in the King Arthur Flour Bakealong so I made it. This recipe makes a kind of pull-apart bread in which the pieces are stuffed. I made a savory loaf with butter herb filling, and a sweet loaf with cinnamon sugar butterscotch filling. 

The King Arthur blog suggested a couple of modifications of the original recipe. One was to use the tangzhong technique for increased bread softness. You cook part of the milk and flour into a slurry before adding the other ingredients (butter, salt, sugar, yeast) and adding the flour. I did that, but I was confused by the next step and accidentally poured the rest of the milk into the four cups of flour first. Then I realized what I should have done and poured most of the milk out again. It seemed okay, but the instructions could have been clearer (specifically, after doing the tangzhong step, the note should have said to continue with step 1 of the original recipe).

Secondly, the original recipe called for cutting biscuit rounds of dough and stuffing each of them with filling before placing in the loaf pan like a monkey-bread. The revised recipe makes rectangles of dough that are stuffed and then cut into little square "sandwiches". I didn't get my dough quite long enough before stuffing, so I only had six sandwiches instead of seven, and that didn't quite fill up the loaf pan. It was fine, but the last sandwich sagged a bit while cooking, so the loaf isn't as pretty as it might have been.

Overall, both loaves are delicious. We at most of the sweet one for breakfast today. I'm not sure I enjoyed the process enough to make this again.