[Shenzhen Diary 27] Daughter makes West Point.

Wang Hanwen

When my daughter got married, I had a big doubt: she had never been in the kitchen. How will she cook in the future?

However, my doubts seem superfluous. My daughter took my mother away from me less than two months after she got married. As many people joke: marry a daughter and have a mother.

This time I came to my daughter's house in Shenzhen for the New Year. Unexpectedly, I met an epidemic in COVID-19. Wuhan closed the city, Hubei closed the province, and many places in the country closed the city, villages and districts one after another. Although Shenzhen has not announced the closure of the city, it is similar to the closure of the city. There used to be six doors in the neighborhood where my daughter lived. Because of the epidemic, five doors were closed, leaving only one door in and out, and each family only issued two access cards for going out to buy food and rice. Therefore, the courier that could have been delivered home can only be delivered to the door of the only open guard.

When I first arrived at my daughter's house, I saw a microwave oven on the dining table. I think: maybe my daughter and son-in-law came home late from work and cooked food? But a closer look shows that it is much larger than the microwave oven used in my home, with different door opening directions and buttons, and its internal structure is much more complicated. I asked my daughter what this is. She said it was an oven. I said, why do you need an oven at home? She said baking bread and making cakes! I smiled and said, you can't even cook, and you can make cakes, bread and cakes?

One afternoon after a nap, I heard a motor stirring in the kitchen. I walked over and saw three people crowded in the small kitchen: wife, daughter and grandson. The daughter is beating the egg yolk with a brush, the wife is stirring the egg white with her hand, and her two-year-old grandson is pestering her, reaching for tools from time to time and shouting: Let the novel (grandson's nickname) help! Whether the grandson can really help or not, the wife will satisfy his wish. He picked up the eggbeater and told his mother to stop. Then he shouted: ready, let's go! The two men will be mixed up and compete again.

This is a very warm scene, but whether it can be made into a cake still needs to be questioned.

When I was a reporter 20 years ago, I dealt with many food factories in Huangshi. Those food factories only produce traditional foods such as Hong Kong rice, moon cakes, lard cakes and dough twists, and basically do not produce cakes. The cake belongs to West Point, which is specially made by the cake shop. There seem to be no more than ten cake shops in Huangshi.

After the egg white and yolk are stirred separately, the daughter puts them together again and adds flour, sugar and milk. Stir again, then pour the mixed cake paste into the round mold box and respectfully send it into the oven.

Ten minutes later, the room was filled with the sweet smell of cake, just like when I walked into the food factory, cake shop and Yuxiang Lane in the Cultural Palace-the smell was fragrant and refreshing!

I can't help watching it. My daughter sat beside the oven seriously, staring at the changes of the cake in the oven through the transparent glass door. I said, the cake is bulging. Should it be baked? Daughter said: not yet, the exam always takes 70 minutes! I was puzzled and said, how is this possible? It takes 70 minutes to bake a cake. How many cakes can a cake shop make a day? The daughter disagreed and said, that's what the video tutorial said. You don't understand.

My daughter refused to give up. She parted the thick black skin on the cake with chopsticks and suddenly smiled. She said, look, it's still yellow inside! She picked up a piece of yellow core and tasted it: well, it's quite delicious. Grandson immediately ran over: I want to eat, too. The daughter put a little into his mouth, and he ate it, saying, I want to eat more.

The baked cake is thin and hard. I picked up a piece of black skin and ate it. I said, well, like chocolate, you can eat it. The son-in-law also came to eat a large piece of black skin and said, delicious. How can the food cooked by my wife not be delicious?

A few days later, the son-in-law went downstairs to find the doorman and brought back several boxes of express delivery. When she opened them, she saw all the tools for making cakes and cakes, as well as the electric dough mixer for making bread and steamed bread. I said, are you going to open a factory? Do everything yourself. Can others eat?

My daughter likes eating cakes since she was a child. The best thing about Yellowstone cake is Rosa cake, and the daughters of other cake shops don't eat it. When she was studying, my wife or I would go to Rosa cake shop every weekend to buy a small cake or buy some egg tarts to treat her toothache.

Come to Shenzhen this time. Besides the Chinese New Year, there is one more important thing to celebrate the grandson's second birthday. Before coming, I made a gesture. It's my grandson's birthday, and I'll buy a cake. But now there is an epidemic, all the shops are closed, and there is no place to buy cakes. Besides, I was transferred from Wuhan during the epidemic, and I was the object of surveillance and isolation, so I was not allowed to go out.

Seeing that February 14' s grandson's birthday is coming, I am a little anxious and ask my daughter if she can order cakes online. My daughter said no, she made it herself. I said, didn't you fail last time? She said it was the first time, lacking experience and tools.

My daughter is a science student with one track mind. No matter how I joke and attack, she doesn't listen at all and only does what she wants. She is a very careful person.

In the next few days, my daughter tried to make cakes every day, and my wife also helped. My little grandson also joined in the fun and often made a table of flour.

/kloc-On the morning of February, 0/4, my daughter began to fiddle with utensils, containers and raw materials. The dining table is occupied, and so is the kitchen for cooking. I said: how to eat at noon? How to cook? The wife said: the big deal is to eat some noodles at noon today and make a birthday cake. At noon, we ate a bowl of noodles hastily, and then went to rest separately. Only my daughter and wife are still busy in the living room and kitchen.

It's almost four o'clock when I woke up from a nap, and I smelled a thick sweet fragrance as soon as I opened the door. I went to the living room and saw that the cake blank was ready, golden, straight and interesting. Then my daughter cut the two-inch thick cake blank into two pieces, put the sliced ebony, grass plum and other fruits in the middle layer neatly, paste the cream, cover the top layer, and then spread the cream to decorate the whole cake ... After six or seven hours of preparation and production, the first cake made by my daughter finally succeeded. It's not as delicious as a cake shop, but it tastes really good.

I said: I didn't expect you, a person who can't even cook ordinary dishes, to make cakes! Daughter hey hey satisfiedly smile. The wife cheered her daughter up and said, just kidding, what can your daughter do? I asked my daughter how much it would cost to make such a cake. The daughter said three or four hundred yuan. I was surprised and said, it's so expensive! I bought a cake of the same size in Rorschach, Huangshi, which is more beautiful and delicious than yours, and it won't exceed 200 yuan! The wife said: the materials are different. Your daughter bought the best raw materials and the cream was imported. The son-in-law also came up to speak for her daughter: this is Shenzhen, and everything is more expensive than Huangshi!

My daughter is a person with high IQ. Even if she is placed in a noisy crowd, she can calm down and study without any external influence, so when she studies, her grades are always among the best. But she is also a person with low emotional intelligence and poor living ability. Not only can she not do housework, but she even follows the rules in many aspects, keeping up with the times and not thinking quickly.

For example, the mobile phone video said that there can't be water on the cake container, so she kept wiping it with paper towels, hoping to clean all the paper towels; For example, the video says how many grams of dough does it take to make a steamed stuffed bun? She can't be more than one gram, and she can't be less than one gram. If she has more than one gram, she should pull it down and weigh it on a small electronic platform scale until it completely meets the gram. When baking, she was more serious. She took a bench and sat in front of the oven, staring unblinkingly at the inside of the oven for an hour, at most just looking up at the small clock on the oven.

There are many funny videos and jokes on the internet: in this epidemic, many people who can't cook have learned to cook; Many people who can cook have become senior chefs! My daughter, who has never been in the kitchen, has also started cooking, and all of them are western food.

From the end of 1 month, she cooks western pastry almost once a week: cakes, bread and steamed bread, doughnuts, peach cakes, apricot eggs and cookies, and pasta that I have never seen or tasted before. Although it is not perfect, it is not as neat and beautiful as it is sold outside, and even failed many times, wasting a lot of materials ... But in the past few months when the epidemic was grounded, almost all the breakfast and snacks eaten by grandchildren were made by girls themselves, and grandchildren liked it very much.

The wife said: No matter how well the daughter is, it is good to be able to do it. At least I have time to rest, so I can put them and my grandson down properly and go back to my hometown to see the scenery!

2020.4. 17