Saturday doughnuts

With no time for a yeast-based concoction tonight, we went for a sour cream cake doughnut with a vanilla frosting. While yeast doughnuts will always be my favourite for their lighter texture and a flavourful but not-too-sweet dough, these are a good quick treat (quick for me, at least, when I come home to dough that's already chilled and ready to go!)

The recipe is found here, but various people take ownership of the same recipe on multiple websites.

We previously used Crisco to fry yeast doughnuts as Dave read somewhere that it leaves behind less flavour.  I think this is  true, although this batch was prepared in Canola oil.

Glazed while hot, immediately after patting down with paper towel to remove excess oil

Some were double glazed for a thick vanilla frosting

My third doughnut of the evening!

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Yolk eggs...only a few months late!

I was absolutely thrilled to see this message on the window of the West Vancouver Lululemon store a few months ago:

You know those Purdy's cream eggs that most people seem to find far too sweet? Well, I can eat three in one sitting and still crave more! They are perhaps my favourite sugary candy. And when it comes to running...well, this window posting highlights one of the major reasons why I run: so that I can eat more treats!

Dave and I have made a few attempts at Purdy's cream eggs but haven't been able to reproduce the wonderfully smooth, gooey centres surrounded by crisp dark chocolate...until now!

We used this recipe from food.com (although note that having grown up in BC I feel that Cadbury cream eggs just cannot compare to the Purdy's version. Our final product didn't taste like either but was far superior to both!):

There are a few important modifications:

1. Add only as much icing sugar as you like - 3 cups makes them a bit dry for my liking. 1-2 cups yielded a much creamier result.

2. We had a bit of a fiasco on our hands when we froze the yolks, then tried to cover them with whites, then tried to get them into chocolate molds. If you don't add all the icing sugar, they are VERY difficult to work with. If you have a chocolate mold, I'd suggest working with the filling while it is still in paste form, then freezing before completing the egg (or top of the mold, depending what shape you use).

3. I like salt, probably a little more than I should - but I did think that doubling the salt really enhanced the flavour and provided a nice contrast with the chocolate.

4. You must use very good chocolate or they're not worth eating. We buy Callebaut chocolate in bulk from Superstore and try to temper it first.

We used flower-shaped molds, which are very convenient for chocolate-making...so this was in fact a bit of a variation on an egg. Interestingly, some recipes suggest using invertase to liquefy the filling - but this takes about 5 days, which means you can't eat them right away, and I just don't have the patience for this technique. I thought this filling was the perfect consistency once the icing sugar content was adjusted to my liking.

If eating the cream egg by itself isn't for you, the Huffington post has some excellent cream egg pairing suggestions.

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Motivations of an MD/PhD student

In the past few weeks I have encountered some common misconceptions about the dual life of a clinician-scientist in early training, mostly among my very well-intentioned medical classmates. These include the following:

1. You get to travel to exotic places, which must be the major highlight of this type of training...where are you going next? Actually, while several international meetings have been incredibly worthwhile experiences in my training thus far, it wasn't the exotic nature of the location that determined (1) my participation or (2) what I took away from them. Many of these experiences have involved going to conference sessions during the day and watching medicine lectures or writing DPAS papers at night, or flying home early to supervise students, keep up with experiment end-points, run a research forum, or write final exams. That said, I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to learn from some of the world's top experts in my area of interest, and indeed to have spent at least enough time in cities to which I otherwise would not have traveled to know that I would like to go back (in a non-academic capacity)!

2. You have lots of free time to party with other beer-drinking grad students. This is true only when I am a full-time graduate student, which is not often - and even then, we have the equivalent of three years for the PhD component (out of the seven year program), so for me this means that it's usually necessary to take advantage of any full work days I can get (ie. days without medical or graduate classes). UBC has an integrated program format during which the second year of medicine is spread over three years. Consequently, for the first four years of the dual degree, most of us are always doing some medicine and some research, to varying extents. I miss the grad student beer sessions because I'm in clinical skills classes, and I miss the med student wine sessions because I'm in the lab (and I'd like to clear up another apparent misconception - most graduate students I know in the sciences work days that are just as long and focused - sometimes heavier on the focus!). That said, I think it is an incredible privilege to spend time with 3-4 different years of medical students and to develop lasting friendships with fellow graduate students and lab colleagues.

3. You aren't in "Doctor, Patient, and Society" so you must be skipping class just like everyone else. I often start my work day at the lab on Mondays and Wednesdays once morning lectures are finished. Every MD/PhD student has arranged his or her curriculum in different ways, but many of us (especially during the core second year medicine blocks) are also trying to maintain some sort of semblance of productivity at the lab bench. We either took the classes already or will do so in the future...and I guarantee you, if you tease me about skipping a class I'm not enrolled in after I've been up all night trying to get our Live Cell microscope to focus properly, my response might be less gracious than you would expect!

My point? I think this dual training program - and in particular the integrated format - is incredibly rewarding. It's not merely an excuse to travel, take a break, or get out of clinical training. None of these would provide nearly sufficient motivation.

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