Category Archives: cake

Malcolm’s tree cake

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Tree cake

Our Malcolm is ten today! It boggles the mind! How did it happen? Where did the years go? *sniff* Of course I’m thinking a lot about the day that he was born, and the overwhelming joy of meeting him for the first time, with all its fear and exhaustion and hope and bewildering amounts of love. But I keep thinking back to a day a few years ago. He’d had a bad cough. I took him to the doctor to get it checked out. He hates the doctor! It’s one of the few things in life he’s afraid of. Well, the doctor said we should go to the hospital and get an X-ray. Horror! He was so anxious and reluctant. But we went, and he was calm, even cheerful when we got there. I was worried about him, I was trying to keep his younger brother happy. We were waiting and waiting. And then they brought us to see the X-ray. I was undone! He’d taken a breath, and held it for the picture, and you could see the air in his lungs. It was so beautiful! His small bones were so delicate and strong, and so gracefully formed. I nearly cried! It’s moments like that, and births, and birthdays, too, that hit you over the head with a wollop of all of the love you feel for someone that you see every day, feed every day, scold every day, clean up after every day. Our Malcolm is a bright, funny, sweet boy. He’s full-speed-ahead-on-to-the-next-thing. He’s a pack rat and an inventor. He tells wonderful stories about things he’ll make some day. He’s fearless in the ocean. He’s thoughtful and comforting when you’re anxious. He’ll teach you everything he knows. He makes me angrier than anyone I’ve ever met, and then mocks me in my anger. He doesn’t stay angry long, and will hug you and go right on with his schemes and plans in a moment. He breaks everything he touches, but he’s clever enough to put it back together again. He could swim in a puddle. He claims to be an outside-water-creature. He claims to be part dog, and he says he can hear dolphins when he’s underwater. He’s always up for a walk, and he’ll talk your ear off while you walk, as if his voice moves his feet, and he’ll say the sweetest funniest things. He never listens!! But he hears everything. You can’t get a thing by him. He’s savvy, he’s sassy. He’s wise. He’s decisive, and good at giving advice. I’m so happy to know him, so excited to see what he’ll do with all his energy and creativity and strength, as he gets older. I was walking with him the other day, thinking about how much fun he is to have around, and I realized how lucky I am to have him as a friend.

He wanted a tree cake with monkeys on it. He wanted the tree to stand up like a real tree, in three glorious dimensions. I was up for the challenge. We came up with a fiendish plan. We improvised as we went along, changing the scheme when we got to the candy aisle at the grocery store. And look at what we made! Martha Stewart eat your heart out! Doesn’t she wish she could make a giant messy lopsided tree cake? Doesn’t everyone! The trunk is made of brownies, and the two layers are held together with nutella. The cake itself is a chocolate chip cake. The frosting is a sort of buttercream. (That’s sugar and butter, people! That’s sweet!) We couldn’t find gummy monkeys, but we used spearmint leaves sliced in half, gummy flowers, a few gummy bears, and two little wind-up toy monkeys. It’s a mess, but I like it!! Here’s my philosophy about birthday cakes…I’m not the neatest decorator on the planet, but if you cover something with candy, it appeals. If you basically have a few giant chip cookies poised on top of brownies, you’re golden!!

Monkeys!

Here’s July Tree, by Nina Simone. We’ve always thought it was about Malcolm being born!

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Banana, lime & coconut bread

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Banana, lime, and coconut bread

In which Claire goes on and on about a word she has a crush on.
Today, friends, we’ll be extraordinarily etymological. I love this word: “selah.” It’s a word of ambiguous history and meaning, and the mystery only adds to its beauty. It’s a Hebrew word found frequently in the psalms, but it’s also a word in modern Arabic and Syrian Aramaic, and I’m fascinated by all of the ideas about what it might mean. (I haven’t done very scholarly research on this, but when you’re dealing with ambiguous words, precise meanings and careful citations are not desirable, I think, and in my case, they’re just not possible, because my brain is a vague and muddled place!) The psalms (also a lovely word!) were apparently sung and accompanied by music, and it’s possible that the word “selah” was a notation to the choir master, possibly to take a break in the music, to pause and reflect on what’s been said, to change the rhythm to signal a change in thought or theme. It also means to lift up, or hang, or to measure. So perhaps it means the person singing the psalms should lift up their voice, in pitch or volume. Of course, things were measured by being lifted and weighed against something else, so that’s part of the meaning, as well. (I wish I could express my thoughts more clearly – Isaac is having a distracting and inexplicable melt-down about strawberry chewing gum. He never gets to do what he wants! Never!) Back in the day, when I was in school, I read a lot of feminist film theory, and I found it very thrilling. It was difficult to understand, but it was frequently about language, about the language of film, and the language of vision, as well as the language we speak with. I think the authors used purposely obscure language, but I found this funny, it was a sort of joke, and it was a pleasure trying to decipher their meaning. Many writers spoke of the necessity of using the spaces between words or between shots to tell the story. To inhabit the silent moments to tell a more interesting story than the words or actions could tell. That’s what “selah” reminds me of – at least as I understand it. It’s about the words that have come before – it gives them more meaning and value, because you’re measuring them, and pausing to think about them. But it’s about the pause itself as well. I can picture meaning hanging in the air, floating just above our grasp, before it’s set down again and we can reach it. Apparently in Arabic and Syrian Aramaic, the word means “praise,” and specifically praise beyond expression or understanding. It’s a word to describe what can’t be described in words!!

Of course, I came to the word through The Ethiopians’ song The Selah. Because “selah” is also a word used by rastafarians. It gives weight and importance to the words that have come before, and it “seals them up.” I love the Ethiopians for their sweet voices and sweet melodies, and I love that I can’t always understand what they’re saying, which makes them mysterious and full of meaning. It’s funny how when the meaning is obscure or indefinable, it feels more like somebody is talking to you, or expressing your thoughts. Selah!

If you’re like us, and you’re having a hot patch of summer, all of your fruit is ripening faster than you can eat it. So you have some extra mushy bananas. Here’s a banana bread with tropical overtones for our tropical heat wave. It’s flavored with ginger, lime, and coconut. It’s very subtly sweet, and the ginger and lime add a little zing. Yes, it’s too hot to bake, but we’re baking anyway, because we can’t not!

Here’s The Ethiopians’ The Selah

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Chocolate gateau basque with apricots, cherries & cassis

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Chocolate gateau basque

I made a cake on my birthday, and it provoked a minor existential crisis. Making a cake for somebody else on their birthday is easy. You just arbitrarily decide that they like something (based, say, on a piece of cake they ordered at a restaurant a decade ago, which they might not have particularly enjoyed) and you make them the same kind of cake for every single special occasion ever for the rest of time. Easy! But to make a cake I like, on my own birthday, well…that raised all sorts of questions. I like chocolate, sure, but do I like chocolate cake? Not really. But I like brownies. What’s that all about? I love fruit, but what kind of fruit, and should it be fresh? Do summery fruits taste good when they’re baked in a cake? I like apple cake, but this isn’t October, for heaven’s sake. Good lord…DO I EVEN LIKE CAKE?!?!?!?!

I decided to make a cake with chocolate in it, but melted chocolate, not cocoa. And fruit, but with apricots and cherries baked in, and fresh fruit and ice cream coming in over the top of it, at the moment of ingestion. I decided to make it like the gateau basque I’d made a while back, because I loved that. I’d put apricots in, because I really like them, and I know Malcolm isn’t crazy about them, but that would be the selfish It’s-my-birthday-and-I’ll-bake-with-apricots-if-I-want-to part. I love cassis, so we’d be having some of that. And, of course…chocolate chips, because everything in life is better with chocolate chips. The boys helped me make the cake, and it was a lot of fun. Malcolm decorated it with my initial and my age, which looked much nicer than the pattern I would have made with the tines of the fork. We ate it with vanilla ice cream, and lovely fresh strawberries, blueberries and, as a special treat, rainier cherries. It’s a nice cake, because it keeps for days, so you can look forward to some with your coffee in the morning as a reason to get out of bed.

Chocolate basque cake

Here’s Black Sheep with The Choice is Yours. Sometimes it’s hard to be the decider! I love this song!
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Red velvet apricot & cherry upside-down cake

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“ONLY CONNECT”

E.M. Forster

Apricot cherry upside down cake

Following on this morning’s post of quotes, (yes, it will be on the test, children!) I’ve been thinking about how the quotes connect in my head, when I think about them all together. I think about how they relate to each other in unexpected ways. And then I think about how it’s in our nature, as humans, to make connections. If you give us 3 random facts, we’ll put them together to make a story. That’s how we watch films – we connect still pictures (somewhere in the upside-down back of our brain) to make a coherent, fluid movement. And then we’ll connect those images to make a narrative, to give them meaning. Of course, Forster was talking about connections between people, and I love that idea as well. But I’ve been thinking lately about how a connection with a person becomes more solid when we share some random connection of ideas or images, and when they make sense to both of us. For instance…the other day we were listening to the Pogues in the car, and Malcolm asked if they’d written the theme to Sponge bob. (Which my boys don’t actually watch, as it happens.) I had a chuckle, thought “Who lives in a feckin pineapple under the sea, boys?” We came home, I told David about it, as a cute things the boys said. Then, days later, David took that funny connection, drew this picture… And I felt really grateful to have somebody to share silly things with.

So, when I showed David this cake, and he said, “bloody stumps,” I knew exactly what he was talking about! There was a show called Home Movies. We loved it!! It was about an eight-year-old that made art house films. Classic! One of the characters, McGurk, is possibly the worst soccer coach ever. When one of the children on the soccer team won’t run down the field, he threatens to cut his legs off. “Bloody stumps!” he yells. (It’s not a kid’s show!) Well, one night, after the boys were a-bed, we had a chuckle about McGurk witnessing the hand-cutting-off-scene in Star Wars, and yelling… (tee hee hee) “bloody stumps, Anakin!” The point is…this might not make sense if I explain it in this long and tedious fashion, but sharing some odd connection that makes you laugh, with another human being, is the best way to connect. And we’re passing the craziness along to our boys!

Another nice way to connect is to share food. I have a friend-mom at school named Jamie. She had a son in Isaac’s class. She’s a vegetarian, too! She gave me these beautiful red velvet apricots, and I thought they were so pretty, I’d bake them upside-down. I put them in a cake with cherries. And I’d read that they were apricots crossed with plums, which made me think about plum pudding, which made me think about cinnamon and ginger and spicy black pepper. So I put those in the cake. And I love cherries and chocolate, and apricots and chocolate, and sweet spices and chocolate, so I thought I’d throw some chocolate chips in as well. And these apricots are known for “bleeding” red into gold. And then…well, I’m going to stop talking now or nobody is ever going to want to make this cake.

Here’s Niney the Observer with Blood & Fire I love the surname “the observer.”
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Coconut, almond, & cherry cake

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Coconut, almond & cherry cake

When I was twenty I went to school in England. I was supposed to be there three years, but after a year I was completely miserable and I came back home. Maybe I should have stuck it out, but it didn’t feel like an option. Three years is such a long time, when you’re twenty. Besides, I wouldn’t have met David and had my boys. It’s hard to regret former decisions, once you have children!! Anyway, I’d never been very patriotic, but a strange shift occurred, and I started to be very defensive about America, and very nostalgic for it. Not the way it actually was at the time, though, but for some myth of simplicity and pioneer spirit. I devoured the Little House on the Prairie books, though I hadn’t really liked them when I was little. Laura’s dad made a big blanket pancake, to keep all the little pancakes warm! I loved that! During a holiday, we stayed at the mennonite center in London. I found a cookbook – The Mennonite Community Cookbook. I can’t tell you how comforting I found this odd little book. It was compiled by Mary Emma Showalter in 1950, but many of the recipes are much older than that, I think. They’re contributed by women from all over the country…Mrs. D.D. Driver, from Heston Kan contributed the Salmon Roll with Egg Sauce recipe. The Pansy Cake was the work of Mrs. Henry Brown, of North Lima, Ohio. The Chicken Relish Mold was provided by Mrs. Lillian Wought of Cullom, Ill. The back of the book contains extensive lists of helpful information. When wrapping a package for mailing, dip cord in water to moisten. The cord will shrink as it dries, and will make a tighter package. Save the empty adhesive tape spool to wind your tape measure on. This will save trying moments caused by a jumbled sewing basket. Boiled rice water makes an excellent starch for dainty collars, cuffs and baby dresses. It’s like the hagakure for housewives! I liked to read these women’s names, and locations, and recipes, and think about them having lives and passions just like mine. I can’t quite explain why this book appealed to me so much, but it did, I read it like a story book, and I bought it, and I still consult it from time-to-time, for baking basics.

This cake reminds me of one that could be in the oddly dark little pictures in the book. It’s a simple, flavorful tea cake. I like almond and coconut together, and I like the texture that they give to a plain cake. After making the gateau basque, I wanted to experiment with a layer of cherry preserves baked right into the cake. It sorta sunk to the bottom. Not quite what I had in mind! Good, though – it reminded me of a fruit-filled danish, somehow. You could just as easily bake this cake, and then slice it in half when the cake cooled, and spread jam on then.

Here’s The Carter Family with Single Girl, Married Girl. A remarkable, subersive song that gives me the same feeling as my Mennonite cookbook. What were these women’s lives like?

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Apricot almond cake w/ apricot-cassis cream

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Apricot almond cake

I love the idea of a cake with apricot glaze – I always have. It’s strangely associated with some childhood notion of sophistication in edible form. Strange, because I can’t remember the actual moment that I ate an elegant cake with an apricot glaze. I can remember plenty of battenburg cakes, wrapped in plastic like the block of modeling clay that they resembled. They had a layer of apricot glaze under their oddly chewy marzipan layer. I loved them! But I’m sure I never thought of them as elegant. The truth is, whether sophisticated or not, a layer of apricot makes sense in a cake! It adds a pleasant fruity tartness that offsets the sweetness of whatever else happens to be in the cake. This cake happens to have almonds – a classic match with apricots – and bittersweet chocolate, which adds its own version of bitter-with-sweet, to complement the apricots.

Inexplicably, I became semi-obsessed with making apricot-cassis cream. I thought about a million different things to make, but I kept returning to this. So I turned to my new BFF, the pastry cream, and I added a purée made of apricots and cassis, and then folded in a little lightly whipped cream. I thought it was very nice with the cake – I don’t think I’ve ever had pastry cream or any of its subsidiaries alongside a cake before, but I thought it was a lovely combination of textures. You could easily eat the apricot cream on its own as a mousse, with some crispy cookies!

I just can’t not share this! It’s a song called Apricot, by the Armenian Navy Band, and it has my Malcolm dancing around the room in his pjs.
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Banana, peanut butter, chocolate chip cake

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Peanut butter, banana, chocolate chip cake

There’s a flea market just down the road from us. It’s not the kind I remember from childhood, with fake leather boots, airbrushed t-shirts, rows and rows of new, cheap shiny things. This one is an antique flea market. You can find anything there. Any strange object that you can imagine, will one day show up at this flea market. The sellers always seem so Dickensian. I wonder about their lives – how far they’ve travelled, how they’ve come across all of these treasures, how much of their history is packed into their vans and pick-up trucks. And every object could tell a story. From old happy meal toys, two for a dollar (my poor boys aren’t ever going to go to an actual McDonalds) to super-8 cameras, ottomans, settees, paintings, scooters, antiquated medical equipment, old woodworking tools, beads, baubles, entire family photo albums, magic lantern slides, daguerreotypes… And of course, vintage military supplies. Knives, uniforms, binoculars, shell cases, canteens – all camouflage and olive drab and khaki. It always makes me think of Tom Waits’ Soldier’s Things…

A tinker, a tailor
A soldier’s things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
And this one is for bravery
And this one is for me
And everything’s a dollar
In this box

When I was little I wanted to write a story that juxtaposed scenes in a museum, of armor or weapons, with scenes of those weapons being used – the actual story of the people that killed with them, or died by them. Maybe I will some day!

My favorite thing to find at the flea, lately, is china. Mismatched, cracked, beautiful plates and bowls. Well, on mothers’ day, David bought me a cake plate! I’m so excited! I’ve never had one, and this one is a beauty. From the fifties, maybe. Lovely, milky translucent form, with a foot, and a sweet silvery-gold polka-dot fleur-de-lis pattern. Of course I had to make a cake! We had two extremely ripe bananas. I wanted to do something a little different with them. I thought about one of David & Malcolm’s favorite sandwich variations – banana and peanut butter. And the rest is history!!

Tom Waits – Soldier’s Things
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Nutella cake

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Nutella cake

I was shelving some books in the boys’ room (their preferred method of storing books is heaping them in a giant pile on the floor, as if in preparation for a bonfire) when I came across a book from my childhood. My Learn to Ride Book. It was from the period in my life that I saved up every penny to buy myself a horse. Looking at the pictures – clean line drawings and simple colors, I recalled vividly what a keen pleasure the book had been for me. I can’t really explain why that would be. There was something so hopeful about it, maybe…the book goes from choosing a horse to jumping over giant hurdles on your horse in about twenty pages. It makes it all seem possible. I never did buy that horse.

Somebody asked me to bake a cake! For an occasion! I felt so honored. I decided to make a nutella cake – everybody likes nutella, right? So I added dark cocoa and ground hazelnuts to the batter, I put a thick layer of nutella in the middle, and I coated the whole thing with bittersweet ganache, just for kicks. While I was making it, I thought about a picture from My Learn to Ride Book. The picture shows the kind of horse you should avoid at all costs. The poor thing has so many problems, one of which is a sway back. Well…my cake didn’t get all puffy and round on top. It wasn’t meant to, I tell you! It was meant to have a dense but tender, cakey-brownie-like texture, with little crunchy hazelnut accents. It was all carefully calculated! But the people at the event might not know that! They might think my cake looked like an undesirable old horse! Sigh. I made myself a tiny version of the cake to be sure that it was edible, and let me tell you, people, it was delicious!! Firm on the outside, light and soft on the inside, with lovely lovely hazelnut taste and crunch. You really can’t go wrong with nutella!

This might seem like sort of an odd connection, but here’s Big Boi’s The Rooster. It was the PTA that asked me to bake the cake, and he talks about going to a PTA meeting on this track, which just kills me, somehow. I love this song!
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Millionaire shorbread with sea salt, rum, and meyer lemons

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Millionaire shortbread with sea salt

Apparently there’s a woman who successfully sued nutella because they made her believe their product was healthy. She fed it to her daughter daily, with dangerous results. Well! I feed nutella to my son on a regular basis, but I don’t kid myself that it’s healthy! I know it’s got lots of sugar and fat. But I spread it on a sandwich made with unsweetened peanut butter and whole wheat bread. And I know those are good for him. I believe it’s important to find a balance. A little bit of sugar is okay if it’s part of a relatively healthy combination. Sugar whipped together with chemicals in candy is a very rare treat. Chocolate in a cookie, on the other hand, is a good reward for a meal well-eaten. Especially if it’s a cookie that we make together! I’m suspicious of processed foods. Even “healthy” processed foods. I’m not a fan or margarine, low-fat cheese, or sugar-free anything. These products remind me of the saying, “Americans will try anything to lose weight, except eating less food.” And the food companies will try to sell any kind of diet that involves products they can market to people trying to lose weight. Which, let’s face it, is probably a majority of Americans. I’d rather have a small amount of real butter or real sugar than a large amount of a substitute that tastes like chemicals. Everything in moderation. As long as you have lots of vegetables and fruits and foods with protein and vitamins, it’s fine to have something special and sweet once in a while.

Which brings us to millionaire shortbread with sea salt, rum, and meyer lemons. Let’s see. There are ground almonds in the crust! That’s good for you, right? A little? Well, you wouldn’t want to make these every day, but they’re ridiculously delicious, and I think we need to eat sweets like this every now and again (health permitting)! I cut them small, and I almost think of them more as candy than cookies. Let me tell you about them…they have an almond shortbread crust with some rum in it. They have a layer of caramel with meyer lemon zest & juice and a bit of rum and sea salt. And they have coarse sea salt sprinkled on top. I had fun making the caramel, but it was a slightly anxious time. I’ve made caramel in the past to spread over a cake. I wanted this to be a little harder, but not hard enough to crack anybody’s teeth. I thought I might have made it too hard, so I added an extra tablespoon of butter and milk. And it turned out perfect! I’ll have to try it again and see if I can repeat the feat.

Here’s Mississippi John Hurt with Shortnin Bread. He’s the best!

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Gateau basque (with quince & black currant jam, and chocolate covered cherries)

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gateau basque

My mom recently gave me a book called Cuisine moderne et vieilles recettes. She bought it in Belgium, when she was an au pair there. I’m having such a nice time reading it! I don’t speak French at all, really, but I studied it in high school and college, so I recognize some words, and then I’ll use google translate to try and understand the rest. (“Put a bead on the mold of lacking, in the basement, before boiling the under wall?!?” Okay, I’m on it!! Sounds delicious!) My mom wrote some notes, in french, on some of the recipes. It just kills me! It’s the same handwriting she has today. I’d like to be there making the recipe with her! I admire my mom so much. She’s so brave and thoughtful and full of energy. She went from Kansas to Belgium, and she’s been more places since than I will ever visit in my life. And she travels with curiosity and empathy. She seems fearless, sometimes (but I know she’s scared of loud bangs and high heights) .

I’ve had to skip over some passages (and pictures) in the book, that talk about rabbits and livers and tongues (it’s a lot like reading Mrs. Beaton, actually!). But I was very taken by a picture of Gateau Basque. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of anything Basque since I read Bridle the Wind, by Joan Aiken. (The best children’s book author ever!) One character, a Basque girl, was fiercely, stubbornly independent, and so appealing. I love the idea of a region between Spain and France (both plenty fascinating on their own!) with its own language, its own music, its own history, and its own food. So I had to make this gateau basque – at least my poorly interpreted version of the recipe! It turned out dangerously delicious! It’s like a giant butter cookie or jam tart! It’s rich and dense and sweet. You had the choice, in the recipe, of filling it with pastry cream, but, it said, “…ou mieux, avec de la confiture de cerises (ce gateau se prépare géneralement avec de la confiture…)” So I was going for the jam, because that was better. I decided on a very Claire-y combination of quince jelly, blackcurrant jam and … Chocolate covered cherries. I was worried the whole thing would be too sweet, but Malcolm rejected his piece because it tasted bitter to him. And David said he’d like this cake for his birthday! Done and done, my love!!

I’ve just been doing some reading about Basque music. This is amazing! Martxea Albokeagaz, by Maurizia, Leon eta Basilio & Fasio. Smokes! It sounds gaelic, arabic… wild and beautiful!! I’ll be learning more about this!
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