scrubjayspeaks

All I wanted to do was grill some chicken. There had been a decent deal on chicken breasts, but they're bone-in, and normally we get boneless. I thought grilling would be a good way to prepare them, and it was a good weekend to do it on. Plus, hey, I get to use the new grill chimney my folks gave me over the holidays.

Despite smoking vigorously and showing every sign of being well on its way to lighting, after forty-five minutes, the charcoal in the chimney was entirely cold, in no way covered in grey ash, and definitely not going to be contributing to tonight's cuisine. I tried again, even though I didn't really have time to wait for it to burn down to a useable state, even if I got it going. I needn't have worried about that particular difficulty.

This is the second time I've had this problem. I tried to grill back in December as well. That time, I just made a pyramid of the newspaper and briquettes, to the exact same results. I thought maybe the charcoal had gotten wet or something, despite that...not really being a possibility. Now, having done it again with that bag, I thought maybe I somehow...got a defective batch of charcoal? Except then I tried with another bag that we had on hand, and it didn't want to light either. Two defective bags?

I checked all the websites and forums and the goddamn Quora answers (*shudder*), and I seem to be using the best method and doing it correctly. There's nothing wrong with the grill's cleanliness or ventilation. The weather is fine. And if the charcoal is damp, I don't know how it managed to be, considering it's been stored in an airtight container. But I guess that's the only possibility left.

Unless, of course, I really have somehow broken fire. Presumably, I'll discover I've defeated gravity next, and I'll cause a county-wide power outage as I grab at electrical lines on my way up to the stratosphere. All fundamental forces of the universe will eventually succumb to my ineptitude!

Right, nearly forgot to tell you about the cream pan baking. Again, I used this recipe from Cooking Tree, who is proving to be a really reliable source of usable recipes. I'm so glad I bought a digital scale, which saves me the hassle of needing to convert measurements. My one beef, such as it is, with their recipes is that they tend to make smaller quantities. Six rolls is not a lot relative to the effort (I'm looking at you, melon pan from last weekend.)

That being said, these turned out to be goddamn enormous buns, so the issue might be one of portioning more than total quantity. I could have turned one batch into eight or maybe even ten (might start having trouble filling them if they get too small) and had a more reasonable serving size per roll. But! I didn't know that going into it, so I made a double batch.

We won't talk about how I measured out double the flour for the rolls and then started adding single amounts of all the other ingredients. I realized before I caused myself A Mischief, so it's okay.

This meant I could make both the original vanilla cream and a chocolate variant. The chocolate was what I really wanted, as it would hopefully recreate the trashy packaged chocopan I used to be able to order online. For the chocolate filling, I just cut the vanilla extract in half and added 2.5 oz. of chocolate--I had an 85% one, so I didn't cut back on the sugar at all.

This turned out to be a stunning success. For one, I was amazed and delighted at how the creams turned out, considering they're made in the microwave. I was fully expecting this to be one of those situations where an online recipe is either lying or vastly mistaken about what process was used, because really? Microwave custard/pudding? I was dubious. But it came together beautifully. And it was so blessedly easy, when I expected egg-thickened custards to be an ordeal. Once chilled, it was perhaps a little rubbery as something to eat straight out of the bowl. But for filling a bun, you really want that resiliency so you're not trying to wrap up soup.

(The chocolate version tasted remarkably like the dark chocolate pudding I covet from Trader Joe's, so I'm totally going to make it again for straight-from-the-bowl face stuffing purposes anyway.)

The bun dough was, to use a technical term, a pain in my ass. Very sticky when I tried to transfer it from the mixer bowl to a proofing bowl. It got better after it had proved the first time and was positively reasonable to handle after the second rest. But I ended up with dough mittens when I tried to wrestle it out the first time.

I had a hard time judging how much filling to pipe out into each bun--ziplock bags with a corner cut off not being a standard unit of measurement I can easily divvy up. On the vanilla ones, which I made into half-circles with a few slices along the curve, they ended up somewhat underfilled. There's a lot of corner that's just bun. It's tasty bun by itself, so that's not the worst thing in the world, but.

The chocolate ones I made as just regular spheres, and they are so luxuriously stuffed with filling, it is almost overwhelming. They are, in fact, a much nicer version of my trashy chocopan, and I would happily live on them exclusively. I could definitely make them all smaller, though, so they are not each an individual chocolate grenade.

All in all, it took way less active cooking time than I would have expected and was generally less arduous. The results are extremely nommable. I have an excess of egg whites to deal with and an unfortunate lack of passion for making eight million meringues, though that may end up being my fate anyway.

Okay! As promised: yogurt report! Now with bonus maths!
( Under the cut because oh no, I wrote 2.6k about *yogurt*... )