Category Archives: dessert

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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Peach and chocolate crisp with almond topping

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Peach, chocolate and almond crisp

In our first house together, we had a peach tree in the back yard. The peaches never ripened. They would fall to the ground, hard little stones, and rot into oddly beautiful, decadent green velvet balls. Steenbeck was a wild little puppy, then, and she’d play with the rotten fruit, throwing it around the yard and chasing it. I always wondered if the moldering green peach fuzz gave her strange dreams. I had such an odd dream this morning. I know it’s boring to read about other peoples’ dreams, so I’ll keep it quick. Like all the best dreams, it was a dizzying mix of anxiety and joy. It was dark, and we were in a strange town, on an empty lot. I was worried about Steenbeck, alone in one of the low houses that ran in rows off the lot, so I went to find her. Somebody told me she’d been taken somewhere safe, with people that would look after her till I could be with her. I turned back to see my family, playing at the edge of the lot. Then waves started crashing towards them. Gentle at first, and then higher and higher, as high as the buildings. They knocked the telephone poles down into the houses. I waited till the wave subsided, and started across the lot, and then a larger wave came. I wasn’t scared. The water was clear and golden green-grey. I felt that I could breathe, even in the water. And then I heard the waves singing. They each had their own bell-like tone. I was lifted higher than the buildings, but I didn’t worry. And then I woke up.

I love peaches! So plump and juicy and summery. The boys like them, too, and they like to choose them at the store. They’ll pick hard, unripe peaches, and then take little nibbles of them. You’ll say, “they’re not ripe yet, you have to wait.” An hour later, “Mom, are the peaches ripe yet?” “NO!” And then by the time they’re actually ripe, the boys have forgotten all about them. I had a few large, beautiful peaches, in danger of turning green and squishy, so I decided to make them into a crisp. This was so simple, and turned out so tasty, that I’m very pleased with it. You cut the fresh peaches, without even peeling them. Spread them onto a pie plate. Sprinkle some bittersweet chocolate chips over. Peaches and chocolate is not an oft-used combination, but they’re very good together! You divide two eggs (you’ll use both parts!) The yolks become a very simple custard, with rum and vanilla, and the whites are whipped stiff, and mixed with almonds to make a sort of amaretti-type of topping. It’s humid as hell here (I imagine hell would be very humid!) So the crisp didn’t stay crisp for long, but the almonds kept it nice and crunchy. You could put this in a pate sucree crust, and make a pie, but I liked the simplicity of it baked as it is.

Here’s Elmore James with Rollin and Tumblin. I love this song so much! I can hear the first chords from several rooms away, and it’s still thrilling. And if you don’t want his peaches, don’t shake his tree!
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Blueberry pie & honey ice cream with smoked sea salt

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Honey ice cream

Honey is lovely! Sweet, amber-colored, the product of all the busyness of the buzzing golden bees – it’s like the distillation of summer light. The promised land will be flowing with milk and honey; it’s a symbol of the new year and of hope; it’s one of the Hindu elixirs of immortality. It soothes a sore throat better than any medicine I know. It’s so strange to think about where it comes from, and to imagine people discovering that it was edible, and tasty, and salubrious. I find it humbling to think about the mysterious process of honey-making and pollination, the complicated, social, important life of bees, so vulnerable to our clumsily destructive way of life. There’s been a decline in honeybee populations lately. To quote wikipedia, “In early 2007, abnormally high die-offs (30-70% of hives) of European honey bee colonies occurred in North America; such a decline seems unprecedented in recent history. This has been dubbed “Colony collapse disorder” (CCD); it is unclear whether this is simply an accelerated phase of the general decline due to stochastically more adverse conditions in 2006, or a novel phenomenon. Research has so far failed to determine what causes it…” I remember reading about it at the time! I had recently finished War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy was a beekeeper (that’s totally going to be the name of my next album!), and there’s a succinct, remarkable chapter towards the end of the book in which Tolstoy compares war-torn Moscow to a decaying bee colony without a queen.

“…he sees the skillful complex structures of the combs, but no longer in their former state of purity. All is neglected and foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about the combs, and the short home bees, shriveled and listless as if they were old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers, having lost all motive and all sense of life…In place of the former close dark circles formed by thousands of bees sitting back to back and guarding the high mystery of generation, he sees hundreds of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of bees.”

It all seemed mysteriously connected, at the time, to our own country at war. We’d been in this hideously complicated conflict for years. It seemed as if it would go on forever – for as long as people would profit from it. It felt as though we were numb – we’d grown capable of tuning out the news until the news stopped being reported. A strange connection that only the honeybees might understand!

Blueberry pie

Well, I’m rambling on about Leo Tolstoy’s bees. I blame the heat, it’s really hot here! Let’s return to honey as a hopeful symbol and an endearment! And as the main ingredient in a recipe for honey refrigerator ice cream I found in my mennonite cook book. I knew I had to try it! I used one cup of vanilla-maple pastry cream and one cup of heavy cream, instead of 2 cups of cream, as the recipe suggested. And I decided to add some smoked sea salt that I’d bought at the lovely Savory Spice Shop on my birthday. I like the saltiness with the sweetness of the honey. If you can’t find smoked salt, you can use regular salt. The smoky flavor is very odd and distinctive. I love it, but it might not be for everybody!! On the way to Cape May, we drove through the blueberry capitol of the world! Rows and rows of lovely short shrubby bushes laden with beautiful blue berries. David said he had a craving for blueberry pie, so I made one. I made it as simple and traditional as I could muster. I used a sweetish shortbread-type of crust, because I like that with fruit pies, but you could use a more traditional and easier to work with butter crust. I made a lattice top! Fun!

Here’s Muddy Waters with Honey Bee.
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Blackcurrants and black oxen

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Blackcurrants

School’s out for the summer! This was the last week (well, 2 short days) of school. As Isaac said, we’ll be together every minute from here-on-in. And I’m genuinely happy about that! Last week was a funny week. The boys had field trips and mostly goofed off during the day, but they were wound up. They were exhausted. They couldn’t fall asleep on the light-late nights. They woke up through the night thinking they were late for their field trips. They were fragile. David and I agreed to give them plenty of space, and recognize their status as volatile substances. Malcolm had a few meltdowns. You’d ask him to tie his shoes. He’d give you a (ridiculously, unfairly adorable) sticken look, and then he’d lie on the floor and wail that nobody liked him. I never react well in these situations. I get impatient and yell, and worry, and make everything a thousand times worse. One evening we decided to cool down by picking blackcurrants. I have one blackcurrant bush. I’ve had it three years, and it’s just now starting to produce lovely lovely fruit. It’s laden!! I’m so thrilled. Malcolm was still in a serious, reflective mood, and as he picked the fruit he said, “starry night.” “They look like a starry night?” I asked, in my slow way. “A galaxy somewhere in space that you could never go.” Malcolm replied. “Doesn’t space seem awfully dreamy?” He asked. And then we talked about space for a while, and darkness, and dreams. And we both felt calmer and happier.

One thing I love about Malcolm is that he’s game. If you want to go for a walk, any time of the day, he’ll pop on his shoes and come along with you. If you have to go to the grocery store, he’ll push your cart, and only ask for two or three treats you wouldn’t ordinarily buy. If you want to go for a jog, he’ll come with you, and you’ll discover a secret path on the other other side of the towpath, and running along it will be like flying with ewoks, and he’ll chant “fun fun fun fun,” the whole time you run. And if you want to go take photographs of oxen you’ve been admiring for months – he’s your man! There are these oxen that live in a field up the road. They’re gorgeous! There’s a black one, a grey one with a white face, and a blue roan, which is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen! I’ve had a crush on them for some while, and I’ve nearly driven into oncoming traffic innumerable times, trying to get a better look at them. ONE OF THEM HAD A BABY!! THE BLUE ROAN DID!! Holy smoke! (They look like holy smoke!!) On hot days they wander in this little wooded section of their pasture, and the sight of three giant oxen in a lovely dapply little patch of trees just kills me. And then there’s the baby!! Phew.

Blue roan &baby ox

Another way that Malcolm is game is that he’ll try anything I make. He really loved this blackcurrant, white chocolate, dark chocolate chip ice cream. It’s kind of a frankenstein ice cream. I picked a bowl of blackcurrants – a scant cupful, and I couldn’t wait to try them. So I cooked them with plenty of sugar (probably equal parts to the currants, in the end, I kept adding more) to make a syrup. I strained it, mixed it with some leftover white chocolate pastry cream, stirred in some chocolate chips and some (unwhipped – Malcom’s idea!) heavy cream and froze it in the old donvier. It turned out a lovely texture, but the blackcurrants do have a little bitter kick – even under layers of sugar and cream.

Here’s Jurassic 5 with Monkey Bars, because Malcolm likes them and he’s such a little monkey!

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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Apricot & pistachio tart

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Apricot & pistachio tart

Sometimes I think my fun-O-meter is broken. Lots of things I’m supposed to think are fun make me anxious, and things that other people dread as chores (making dinner!) are what I live for. For me, tonight was a fun night! Hooooo boy. First of all, we made vegan veggie burgers that were grillable! They got brown on the grill, they didn’t fall apart!! We made them from scratch! We grilled flatbreads, which we made from scratch as well! I’ll tell you about them eventually, with recipes and everything, but for now let me say that I felt so happy about it, and had so much fun doing it that it was just ridiculous. Then we went for an after dinner walk on the towpath (love it!) and we played tag. But not the kind of tag where you have to run all the time, because that wasn’t an option (sooooo full of grilled veggie burgers). The kind of tag where you could hold hands with someone, or give them a hug, giggling maniacally the whole time, and that would pass along the “it”ness. Good times!!

I also think it would be fun to live in Greece and go to lunch with friends in Paris. And that’s the origin of this recipe. My friend Sandy, (who lives in Greece and goes to lunch with friends in Paris) sent me this “non-recipe” for a dessert she had. She described it thus…

…dessert one of those fabulous french tarts (er tartes) – tart dough, then a pate of crushed or somehow pated pastichios – may have had another ingredient in pate, i don’t know. maybe a bit of a liquer or rose water or something. (it was from a pastry shop so i couldn’t ask). and on top apricots. in a sense it was like a tarte with pistachio pate instead of custard under the fruit, but the apricot was not raw – it was baked.

Well! With my obsession with frangipane, and making frangipane out of hazelnuts or other non-almond nuts(which makes it no longer frangipane!) OF COURSE I had to try this!! I made a simple paté sucrée crust, with a hint of cardamom. I made a pistachio frangipane (an imaginary beast!), and then I just sliced very ripe apricots, and sprinkled them with sugar because they’re quite tart! I liked the resulting tart very much indeed, but I have to admit that my boys wouldn’t try it because they don’t like apricots. And the apricots were tart. It was a tart tart. This appealed to me very much! I think it would be nice with some lightly whipped, lightly sweetened whipped cream. The tart won’t last for days in pristine form, because the fruit softens the crust. So eat up!!

Here’s Noah and the Whale with Five Years Time. They’ll have FUN FUN FUN!! This does actually look like fun to me, but it’s also a critical reexamination of past ideas of funness.
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Strawberry tart with white chocolate pastry cream & hazelnut cocoa crust

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Strawberry white chocolate tart

According to family legend, my mother ate a quart of strawberries each day when she was pregnant with me. One of the nice things about a June birthday! To this day I love strawberries, and so do my boys. I could bring home two quarts of strawberries, and they’d eat them before I even had a chance to wash them, if I let them. So I don’t get to make fancy strawberry desserts very often. There’s something so plump and rosy and youthful about strawberries, that it’s no wonder Ingmar Bergman employed them as his time-travelling device in Wild Strawberries. I’m fascinated by the idea of food as a trigger of memory, and I love films that explore memory and dreams, so this scene is one of my favorites. I love his quiet, gentle voice. He’s telling his own story, so he can slow time, and move through it with dream-like ease. And with the odd logic of dreams, he can’t speak to the people that his memory conjures, though he can witness scenes he missed in real life. I love that he’s dressed in dark clothes, and stands in a quiet, darkened hall, but the glow of whitewashed memory washes over him from the bright, busy room he’s looking into. Beautiful! Perhaps this tart is one they might have made for somebody’s name day, on a lovely summer day by the sea. It’s quite simple…a cookie-like crust with dark cocoa and hazelnuts (nutella combination!) is filled with white chocolate pastry cream, and fresh, unsweetened strawberries. It’s like a white-chocolate covered strawberry in tart form. It was fun to watch the boys eat this – the pastry cream is soft and slippery, the crust is a little crunchy, and the strawberries plump and ripe. An alternative preparation would be to fold some unsweetened whipped cream into the pastry cream before you spread it into the tart shell, which would make it like the pretty pavlova cakes I used do dream about as a child!

Strawberry tart

Here’s Shuggie Otis with Strawberry Letter #23
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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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Chocolate covered cherry cookies

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Chocolate covered cherry cookies

We don’t go out to dinner very often, because I enjoy cooking dinner so much, and because we’re poor as church mice. (Not really, but I like that phrase. I can just see the church mice. Why are they poorer than other mice? Why?) But we went out the other night (thanks mom and dad!) for our anniversary. I think I enjoy going out to dinner more because we don’t do it very often. I love the space that we make sitting across from each other at a table. A little private pocket in a room filled with other people. I love the conversations we have when we go out to dinner, which always feel a little different from conversations we have any where else. We went to Sprig and Vine, a vegan restaurant, which I would recommend to anyone, be they vegan, be they meat-eaters, be they whatever. We ate fiddleheads and ramps and baby artichokes and castelvetrano olives. Yum. Then we came home and put the boys to bed and sat in the backyard by a fire, eating these cookies. Which is just what I’d hoped we’d do! I’ve told the story before of our courting days and my ingeniousness with wrapping chocolate ice cream around cherry ice cream. Well, ever since those days, I seem to be stuck in a rut with the cherries and the chocolate around valentines day and anniversaries. But they’re so perfect together! In any form! Such a perfect pairing. These particular cookies take a little while to put together, they’re a labor of love, which is exactly what I wanted them to be. They’re fun to make, though, and not difficult. You make a shortbread-type cookie. You roll it out and cut it into rounds. You cup a round of dough in your palm. You put a spoonful of good cherry jam in the center. You fold the edges up and seal them. You bake the cookies, and then you dip them in melted bittersweet chocolate. Good, messy, fun and delicious!

Here’s Soul Food by Goodie Mob because everyone in town is out at the restaurants, and they say “looking to be one of those days when mama ain’t cooking.” I love this song so much in every way.
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Pastry cream ice cream

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Apricot – cassis ice cream

I’m absurdly excited about this! I feel like it’s a major culinary breakthrough! I’m sure that either people have been doing it for centuries, or there’s some reason they haven’t that I’ll discover eventually, but for now I have a new medium to explore. As I’m sure you’ll recall, on the last episode of As The Ordinary Turns, we made apricot cassis pastry cream to accompany a cake. Well, there was quite a bit left over, and the mad scientists of The Ordinary developed quite a fiendish gleam in their eye. They headed into the kitchens with their bowl of pastry cream, ready to hit it with their freeze ray!! I love ice cream, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s my favorite. My first and longest lasting job (to this day!) was as a soda jerk. I recall, back in those days, I noticed something interesting about the various brands of ice cream we carried at the ice cream parlor. Some turned nice and creamy and smooth as they melted, some melted into a weird sticky jelly-like substance. Since those days, I’ve made my own ice cream, many a time, and I’ve always had trouble making it thick and creamy. It always melts into something like milk. Well, here was a conundrum. How to thicken it without adding guar gum or carageenan or whatever else commercial companies add? A few months ago, when I discovered pastry cream, and developed a little admiring crush on the creamy substance, I began to ponder the possibility of freezing it. When you make ice cream, you generally start with a custard, and then you add unwhipped heavy cream. (At least that’s how I’ve always made it.) What is pastry cream but a thicker, more substantial custard? Why shouldn’t it freeze nicely? And why not lightly whip the cream before you add it, for an even creamier texture? So that’s what we did. It worked!! It’s thick and creamy. You can actually scoop it with an ice cream scoop, and it stays in a little ball!! I’ve never been able to do that with home made ice cream!! I use an old donvier ice cream maker, but I wonder how this would work on a more fancy one. I’ll have to try it some day and find out – there are so many different flavors to try!!

**update** We tried this again last night, but we didn’t whip the cream before we stirred it in (Malcolm’s suggestion). It might have turned out even creamier. If you whip the cream it’s like a frozen mousse, which is nice, but if you don’t, it might feel more like authentic ice cream. Nice both ways!

Here’s Ice Cream Man by Jonathan Richman.
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