Chocolate covered caramel cake and salty toffee ice cream

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Magpies

I was ridiculously excited this week to learn that a person can log into the OED online using … a library card number! I’m so tickled to think of my library card being as useful and valuable as a credit card – the key to uncovering unknown riches!! I think it’s awesome! (Full of awe, profoundly reverential. He did gie an awesome glance up at the auld castle.) I’m a logophile! I love words, I always have. The sound of them, their weight and flavor in your mouth, their shifting meanings. I’m a vague, blurry sort of person, and I’m more than comfortable with the instability and ambiguity of meaning – I’m delighted by it! I’m not clever enough myself to play with words, but I have endless admiration for those who do. My idea of a good time is to discover the hidden meanings behind language, and to see how much fun the author is having as they set you their riddles. Nabokov’s subject matter is often disturbing and depressing (to me) but his playfulness with language (with three languages!) is thrilling. “Haze, Dolores…What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (“Dolores”) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is “Mask” the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling…” Or fellow polyglot Tom Stoppard who bemoans the complexity and insubstantiality of language with loving relish…”Rosencrantz: What are you playing at? Guildenstern: Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” And of course Stoppard is playing with the words of the writer most seemingly in love with words, one William Shakespeare. ““Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?/ Hamlet: Words, words, words./ Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?/ Hamlet: Between who?/ Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.” I wish we gave words more weight and thought today, and didn’t devalue them as we sometimes do. Well, I wish that I did, anyway, to speak for myself!
I have to admit, though, that sometimes I find words overwhelming. I was going through some boxes in the attic the other day, and I found decades worth of notebooks and journals from every stage in my life. What a lunatic I am! Scribbles and notes and nonsense and sketches. Screenplays I filmed, screenplays I will never film. Stories I started, fell in love with, fell out of love with and never finished. Ideas for stories, random thoughts I penned while not trying to think of ideas for stories, usually in increasingly frantic and illegible handwriting. Little asides directed at whoever was sitting next to me as I wrote. Words words words!! No method, all madness! And why do I keep them? Why do I keep this dusty spider web of ink? I don’t know!! I should start a giant bonfire, and set the words free, to float into the air around us. If you’re a scribbler, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about! And it’s not just my nonsense that overwhelms me, it’s other people’s words, too. In a bookstore or library, the sight of all of these collections of words, so carefully crafted and combined, so ardently arranged, now sitting quietly on some shelf or another, bursting at the bindings with stifled words. It wears me out to think about it! But it’s beautiful, too, these worlds of words, so easily misunderstood, so accidentally powerful, so tricky, so musical, so full of life. Words words words.

toffee ice cream

We live in the “Used bookstore district” of our small town, which means that there’s a bookstore next to us and one across the street. I love them both! I love the smell of paper and ink and dust. I love the very old books – gorgeous stately objects – I love the trashy paperbacks with crumbling pages and lurid covers. And I love the soft caramels they have in a bowl by the register at The Phoenix. Wrapped in gold foil, so creamy and buttery and ridiculously good! I’ve been in a few times in the last week or so, and I take one every time. I decided to try to recreate their deliciousness in different forms, because that’s what I do. So I started with a small jar of condensed milk, and the rest is history! I made this cake, which is chewy, crunchy, buttery and, yes, caramelly. The boys loved it! And then I decided to try the ice cream – I made it a tiny bit salty, and it has a wonderfully buttery quality, though there’s no actual butter in it. It tastes a bit like praline ice cream without the nuts. I’m addicted to it! It’s nice and creamy and melty, too.

And that’s more than my fair share of words for the day! Here’s Word Play by A Tribe Called Quest.

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Spicy honey ice cream and almond coconut ice cream

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Magpies

Spicy honey ice ceam

We watched Akira Kurisawa’s Ikuru the other night. It’s so beautiful – mournful and hopeful, discouraging and life-affirming all at the same time, and it seems to me to portray certain tenets of Ordinaryism. In English the title means “To Live,” and the film tells the story of Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged, middle management bureaucrat.

He works at city hall, a kafkaesque maze of offices, hallways and stairways. Every surface is covered with teetering piles of paperwork, which threaten to cave in and bury the (mostly) men who work there. They keep their heads down as they do their monotonous work, and seem to do just enough to get by. A group of women complain about a disease and mosquito-infested cesspool, and they’re driven from department to department in a sort of hopeless joke that everybody is in on but them. Everybody knows that nobody is going to help them.

Watanabe, a quiet man with huge, expressive frightened-rabbit eyes, learns that he has stomach cancer, and realizes he has less than a year to live. He’s not ready to die, because he’s never really lived. The next few days unfold in great detail – he meets a novelist, and they hit all the nightspots. He meets a young woman from his office who needs his help to quit her job. And then in an odd but oddly effective twist, the film shifts to six months later, and is told in a series of flashbacks by Watanabe’s co-workers.

So that’s the story. And you should know that it’s visually beautiful – full of graceful, thoughtful space and movement. As Watanabe is consumed with self-reflection, as he examines his life, we see him through windows, through waving panes of glass, in mirrors, through gleaming rows of glasses. The film itself has a pale, cloudy light that washes over you in waves as you watch.

And now to the Ordinaryism. From the first, Watanabe is established as an ordinary man. Nothing about his life is glamorous or even all that interesting, until we learn that he’s going to die. And here’s the beautiful extraordinary ordinary part…in his search for some understanding of what it means to live, he doesn’t become a less ordinary person, he doesn’t have a fling with a celebrity or go on an extravagant shopping spree or hang glide over a volcano. (As he might do in a Hollywood film.) He goes back to work! Back to his same job. He finds his way after spending some time with the young woman who recently quit her job. She represents life to him. She’s brimming over with it, she laughs, she chatters, she eats. (Everywhere they go, she eats her food and Watanbe’s as well, because he has no appetite. I love the fact that her hunger and her obvious enjoyment of food is one of the things that marks her as bright and vital.)

something.”

.”

And do you know what she does that makes her so happy and glad to be alive? She works in a factory! Making toy rabbits. But she loves the toy rabbits, and she says that while she makes them she feels as though she’s playing with every baby in Japan. She tells him he should make something. And that’s when it all becomes clear to him, and he goes back to his job and pursues it with a passion, and uses his office to make something good. Because, like everybody else in the world, he’s been extraordinary all along. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

almond coconut ice cream

Holy smoke! I’ve gone on so much longer and more tediously than I intended! I apologize. I would like to tell you about these ice creams though. I was seized with a desire to make ice cream, as one usually is the coldest week of the year! I wanted to try something a little different. The first ice cream is sugar free. It’s made with honey!! I’ve made honey ice cream in the past, but it had sugar, too, and this one doesn’t. It does have cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and cayenne. I thought it was so good! It had such a lovely hot and spicy zing to go with it’s cool creamy sweetness. The second ice cream had no eggs. Instead of a custard, I thickened the milk by cooking it down, the way one would make dulce de leche or ribadi. I also cooked it with ground almonds and coconut, and then I added a bit of cardamom. I thought it was lovely as well. It had a nice texture, with the coconut. I might try the same method again without the coconut and almonds, though, just to see how it turns out!!

Here’s Takashi Shimura (as Kanji Wantanabe) singing Gondola No Uta in his haunting voice.
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French cake a week – Gateau Alsacien or le schwowcbredel

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Magpies

In which Claire, who speaks no French, bakes her way through the cake section of a French cookbook from 1962.The other day we talked about Jean Renoir’s use of windows, and the way he creates scenes with an intimate yet public space, theatrical yet moving (in two senses of the word). I mentioned the film Boudu Saved from Drowning, which stars the remarkable Michel Simon. Well, as it happens, I’d never seen the whole movie all the way through – just a few scenes in film class. But it’s available on DVD, now, so we watched it last week!! It was so good! Thought-provoking, and beautifully acted and filmed. Full of wildness and grace and beautiful space. And the special features! O! The special features!! In recent American movies they’ll have a “making of” featurette, or a few interviews with the actors, and it’s always the same thing. “It was such an honor to work with [fill in name of major star}. She’s so…in the moment…she never does the same thing twice…it’s thrilling just to watch her work.” And then there will be a segment on the costumes, “It was just an honor to dress [fill in name of major star]. I mean she’s not even human! She’s like a mannequin. Just like a mannequin come to life. It’s just thrilling to watch her work in her clothes.” And then there’s a little segment about how much fun they had on the set. “The hi-jinks!! The practical jokes we played. What a good time we had making millions of dollars! Don’t you just wish you could be me! Don’t you want to get my face tatooed on your face?” But on Boudu Saved from Drowning, the special features are wonderful! There’s an interview with Michel Simon and Jean Renoir. It’s black and white, from 1967. They’re sitting in a cafe. Renoir is drinking a glass of wine, and Simon seems to be eating berries from a small, stemmed glass bowl. It’s so beautiful. Okay, maybe they are talking about how nice it was to work together, but I believe them! Their memories are so gentle and affectionate. (Maybe I do want to get Michel Simon’s face tatooed on my face!) And then there’s an interview with a filmmaker who has lots of fascinating things to say about the film, which makes you want to watch it all over again but pay attention this time!! And my favorite part is an interview with Eric Rohmer, the filmmaker, and Jean Douchet, the critic. This one is in black and white, too. The men are sitting side-by-side in a theater, facing the camera. They both seem nervous, they don’t know where to look. They fidget and cast sidelong glances at one another. Douchet has wild hair and a world-weary air, and he seems to have a cigarette glued to his fingers that he rarely smokes. Rohmer is delicate, with a slight beard and a shy, earnest air. And they hold forth on the film. They have so many ideas about the film, so many observations on the way it sounded and looked. They discuss sweeping themes and they remember each small, intimate gesture of the actors. They find significance in a bag of groceries hung in a window, in the summer heat, in salt spilled on a tablecloth. It’s beautiful to watch the way that they form grand, mythical theories about the film, and then shape their experience of the film to fit this mythology. They’re trying to seem cool and blasé, of course, this being the 60s, but they’re jumping and beaming with love for the film, so pleased with themselves for having discovered it as it unfolded before them, full of gifts that Renoir has hidden for them to discover. Wasn’t he clever to have made a simple film that’s about so much? Weren’t they clever to figure it out as they watched? This is the way to watch a film! This is a way to go through life! Noticing everything, maybe even things that aren’t there! Joyfully forming grand theories, talking about them with a friend, and building on them as the days go along. At one point they’re discussing sound in the film, and Rohmer says, with a shy glance at Douchet “…and we hear all the sounds of nature – the singing of the birds and such, which is wonderfully rich and well-worth analyzing.” This kills me!! Is he talking broadly about Renoir’s use of sound? Or is he talking about the singing of the birds – each bird with its own song, full of meaning that we can discover and share?

Gateau alcasien

I like the way my French cookbook talks about cookies as if they’re cakes. I’m so confused by the recipes that I never know how they’ll turn out even as I’m making them, and it’s a joy to see them shape into this kind of cookie, or that kind of molded fruit and cream, or that kind of actual cake that I’d call a cake. My cookbook is very dry, each recipe is about 5 lines long, and they don’t take a lot of time to describe each step, let alone to editorialize about the recipe at all. And yet this particular recipe is full of charming asides. The cookies are to be cut in “bizarre and childish shapes.” It doesn’t go into further detail, so it’s really up to you!! And it finishes thus, “Et voila le gateau Alsacien, which one munches while watching the colorful candles on the Christmas tree.” Lovely! And I love the word schwowcbredel – talk about bizarre and childish!! We have some animal cookie cutters, so I decided to use an elephant, in honor of Babar, a lion, in honor of Duvoisin’s Happy Lion, and a balloon, in honor of The Red Balloon. The cookies contain marmalade, cinnamon, and orange flower water, which I’ve never cooked with before. It’s nice – floral but light and unexpected. I wasn’t sure the boys would like it, but they gobbled these down.

Here’s Edith Pilaf singing La Lulie Jolie
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French cake a week – Gateau de pommes “A la Danoise” (and simple spice cookies)

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Magpies

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak French, bakes her way through the cake section of a French cookbook from 1962.Yesterday we shared some poems and passages about windows. “But Claire,” I heard you saying, “You know what else is beautiful? Photographs of windows, and film scenes that involve windows!” “Of course!” I reply enthusiastically. “Two things I have long loved!!” It’s true, I do love photographs of windows. I find them so inviting and mysterious, so suggestive of the story of a person’s life, and yet a little melancholy and lonely at the same time. I’ve mentioned Eugene Atget before, in these virtual pages. Many of his photographs involve windows – store windows and tenement windows – windows with the ghost of a person in them, a whirl of light that represents movement, a row of grinning dummies. Or simply an emptiness or a shadow, a hollow that holds the secret movements of the people who live there. Jean Renoir, Atget’s compatriot, adds movement and depth to images of Parisian windows to create a poetry of light and shadow, a shifting frame within-a-frame that allows him to play with interior and exterior space. Renoir is famous for employing a large depth of field, so that objects in the background and middle ground are just as sharply focussed as those in the foreground, and frequently he’ll use a window to frame the action, so that two stories occur at once in the shot, distinct but related. In Grand Illusion, the soldiers’ exercises in the background create a source of mounting tension in contrast to the genial conversation inside of the window, and when the camera pulls back at the end of the scene, so that we’re outside the window looking in, it casts the men as characters in the story about to unfold. In Boudu Saved from Drowning, the parlor drama on the inside is contrasted (in a gorgeous tracking shot) with the world of the parisian streets outside the window, as observed through a telescope. And this passage from Le Crime de Monsieur Lange is beautifully busy with activity in and out of windows, dividing people even as it connects them, in a drama that illustrates the power of people working together. The murder scene, seen from across a street, entirely through windows and doorways, sets the frames of windows almost as the individual frames of the film itself, in a masterpiece of life and light and shadow – a sort of love letter to the pure joy of watching a story unfold. Beautiful.

Spice cookies

French cakes seem to often involve crushed cookies and cream. You really can’t go wrong with crushed cookies and cream! This particular cake combines layers of a thick apple compote with layers of cookie crumbs and butter. I misread the recipe, or, I suppose, I mistranslated it. It said “biscottes,” but I read “biscuits.” A small amount of lazy research suggests that “biscottes” are actually melba toast. BUt it was too late! I’d already made some spice cookies to crumble for crumbs. And I think it was a happy mistake, because the spice cookies are perfect with the apples!! You could probably use digestives or graham crackers with equally pleasant results. These cookies are worth making just to eat, though, because they’re very tasty, and you only use 9 or 10 in the recipe. My finished cake wasn’t the prettiest, because I don’t have a means to pipe the cream in attractive patterns, but it tastes absolutely delicious, so who cares how it looks?

Here’s Listz’s Totentanz from Rules of the Game.
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Mocha mousse cake

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Magpies

Mocha mousse cake

I was sewing some felt owls the other month, as one does. The seams flying through the machine, somewhat sloppy and uneven, brought to mind a phrase my mother uses. “Loving hands at home.” The phrase, taken as a whole, is an adjective, and it describes work that is not technically perfect, but that is made with love. It’s such a nice expression, particularly if used by a mother, because a mother’s hands can be so magically comforting. When my boys were little I could soothe an achy belly with a tummy rub, and Malcolm still asks me to put cool hands on his forehead when he’s feverish. The exact shape and size of your mother’s hand seems to be imprinted in the memory of your own hand. My mother’s hands are calloused from cello-playing, but they’re always very soft and warm. I have a vivid memory of a train ride to Washington DC. I must have been in middle school. It was just after Christmas, and the train was very cold, but we all sat close together in the cramped compartment two facing seats make. My mother’s hand rested on my knee for some time, and the warmth of it felt good. When she took her hand away, it was as if the whole train became a little colder – not just the place where her hand had been, but every place.

I’m grateful to have grown up in a home that celebrated a loving-hands-at-home aesthetic. If the expression is taken not as an absolution of mediocrity or a justification for lackluster effort, but as an appreciation of the imperfections that make something unique, it becomes very freeing. I find that I’m raising my own boys this way. We color outside the lines. Sometimes, we don’t even make lines first! We find more beauty in lack of symmetry, in less-than-clean lines. An irregularity in fabric or wood is not a flaw but an opportunity to make something distinctly lovely. By hand, with affection for the work and the object that it produces, like true amateurs. I believe this is what they now call “artisanal.”

What’s this? A chocolate cake recipe in January! Nobody wants to see that! We all want light and healthy, dammit. Well, I’m a rebel, so here it is: four layers of dense, dark chocolatey, cinnamony cake with 3 layers of light mocha-cinnamon mousse, with the whole being topped by melted bittersweet chocolate. Actually, I made this cake for my mom’s birthday back in November, but what with one thing and another, I haven’t gotten around to telling you about it yet. My mom likes not-too-sweet things, she likes dark chocolate, and she used to eat these candies called “coffee nips,” which came in a yellow and brown box. I combined these ideas to make this cake, which is dark and rich, but not too sweet. She said it was the best birthday cake she’d ever had!! Of course, it might have been a cake that only a mother could love.

Here’s Peter Tosh with Equal Rights, because my mother likes it a lot. And so do I.

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Chocolate marzipan cake and marzipigs

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Magpies

Chocolate marzipan cake

Rabbit rabbit! This morning I woke up feeling alright. Had a good cup of coffee, cuddled with the boys for a minute, and then Clio and I went out for a quick run. Bells were ringing out over town, the sky was bright on the melting snow, the birds were busy in the trees. We ran into lots of people and dogs, Clio exhibited her signature exuberance, and everybody cried, “happy new year!” 2013 feels like a hopeful year, so far! I had this picture in my head, in the middle of the night, of the world as a giant music box that played joyful, hopeful huzzahs and kisses and fireworks. As midnight struck in each part of the world, the tines struck the chord that set off happy cries and good wishes. Good wishes for everyone, because we’re all in it together, all hoping for the same things – I know I’m becoming redundant, but I believe this so strongly this year!! Yesterday we had a lovely quiet day. Malcolm and I went for a long snowy hike with Clio. The sky was dull and grey upon grey upon grey, but rosy on the edges, and the trees were dark and slick and beautiful. The ground was cold and wet, the mud seemed oddly black against the snow. Malcolm wanted to go on his secret passage-trail. I said, “If it’s too snowy I won’t be able to go, so don’t get your hopes up!” And he said, “I can’t not get my hopes up, because I’m a jolly good fellow!” When we got to the path it was too steep and snowy. I stood at the top and said, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” Malcolm took Clio down the path, and made little footholds for me in the snowy mud, and I carefully edged down like the old lady that I am. Malcolm said, “Mom, you can do anything when you’re with me!” I do believe I can!! We walked and walked, and came out in a sort of valley down to the river, with the sky muted grey & rose, the world quiet, bridges crisscrossing across the sky, and Malcolm charging towards me, pink-faced and happy. When we got home David and Isaac were back from their separate trips-out-the-house, and we made a funny dinner of ring-shaped French lentil, chard, and butternut squash pie (I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow!!). And we made a ring-shaped chocolate marzipan cake with a touch of cherry. And we put marzipigs on top, which I love very dearly!! I’d read that somewhere in the world they make marzipan pigs for good luck on New Years, and when Malcolm said the cake looked like mud (a compliment from a ten-year-old boy, believe me!!) I knew we’d put our marzipigs on top, as happy as pigs in mud, as hopefully we all will be in the new year!!

Marzipan pigs

Here’s Talib Kweli with Get By, one of my favorite resolution songs (and he samples Nina Simone!) I have a sneaking suspicion that I posted it last year, in which case we’ll call it a tradition.
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Coconut cherry chocolate bar cookies

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Magpies

Coconut, cherry, chocolate bar cookies

Happy boxing day!! We’re having such a nice, slow day, surrounded by the chaos of Christmas presents and Christmas wrappings and new toys to play with and things to build (if you’re a boy) or chew to pieces (if you’re Clio). We gave the boys a few noisy toys, which they played with for hours (starting before I was out of bed, of course!). And then, at one point, a hush fell on the room. Malcolm was on the couch reading a new book, cuddled with Clio. I used to love to get books for Christmas. I can vividly remember the keen pleasure of opening a new Tintin, or Joan Aiken, or book about horses. I’d be wearing new Christmas pjs, maybe, holding a new stuffed animal, sitting by the fire, absorbed in this new world. It’s hard to capture that feeling again when you’re an adult, which is why David’s present was perfect in every way. He gave me some beautiful new dishes (one is pictured above), some blank books with little drawings from the dishes

AND a Tintin book!! It’s all about how Tintin is drawn, and has little quizzes to test your Tintin knowledge. I love it!! I feel as excited as a child! As giddy as a schoolboy! And the best part is that I also feel inspired, by blank books and blank dishes. Oh the things I’ll cook to present on the dishes, and the nonsense I’ll write to fill up the books! The books I used to get for Christmas excited me because they contained vast, unknown worlds, and it was such a pleasure to watch them unfold. Of course we all have those worlds in our heads, strange and new – all of us do, and they can all come pouring out onto these blank lines.

These cookies were very easy to make, and they seem quite fancy, cause of the chocolate and cherry combination, which always tastes like a celebration. Basically, they’re a coconut shortbread covered with a thin layer of cherry preserves, and topped with a chocolate ganache. Like a version of millionaire’s shortbread, I guess! I put a bit of sherry into the shortbread to make them taste extra Christmassy.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of Jimmy Smith, lately, but he’s just killing me! His songs are so warm, and pleasing, but completely unexpected in parts, till he brings it all home again. Here’s We Three Kings. I love how grand and big band-y it is, before it breaks into this ridiculously joyous and swinging tune.

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Yule cake with cranberries and chocolate chips

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Magpies

Yule cake

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!! Merry Christmas you beautiful old Ordinary, you! I hope everybody is making merry with their friends and family. Best, warmest, brightest wishes to everybody!

Your playlist assignment for this week is songs about peace. It could be world peace, peace of mind, a still and peaceful moment, or a song that sounds like peace to you in any way. I’ve made the playlist collaborative, so add what you like!

And as a bonus, here’s last year’s Christmas playlist, with some tracks added. It’s a doozy!!

And a recipe for yule cake. I found an old recipe in Mrs. Beeton’s cook book, and I adapted it somewhat. It’s a mild, yeasted cake, with dried cranberries, clementine zest and bittersweet chocolate chips. Not too sweet, and very Christmasy. Nice toasted with butter, actually!!

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French-cake-a-week: Buche de Noel

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Magpies

Buche de noel

In which Claire, who doesn’t speak French, bakes her way through the cake section of a French cookbook from 1962. It’s nearly Christmas!! Three days till Christmas eve, and we get presents on Christmas eve, too! Or so I’ve been told over and over and over again. The boys have been waiting ages for Christmas, and I’ve been waiting for ages to make this cake. The time is finally right! Tis the season for buche de noel. I’ve gotten into the habit of talking about French films in my preamble to my French cakes, and it’s a habit I’ve enjoyed, so here we go again… This is a season of lights, in which we celebrate the lights on our Christmas tree, and in our hearths and hearts, so let’s talk about the Lumière brothers. Their name means light, of course, and they invented a way to organize lights and shadows to make pictures, and to project them so that we could all see them. They invented cinema, or more specifically, the cinématographe, a device that recorded, developed and projected motion pictures. (Of course they didn’t invent moving pictures singlehandedly, but were part of a long process of experimentation performed by many different people in many different places.) They were the first to perfect the art, though, and the first to project it. Cinématographe means “writing with movement,” which I find a beautiful idea, and which many film theorists would be drawn to, later, in discussing the language of cinema. I love the films of the Lumière brothers. They’re short (50 seconds), simple, beautifully framed, and oddly compelling. This time of year, when I look at the boys and the pure, concentrated force of their love for everything about Christmas, for everything that makes Christmas magical, I’m always more than a little envious of them. We’ve all become jaded about film, I think. Digital effects, techonological advances, and millions of dollars thrown at what has become an industry have helped us to forget how magical film must have seemed at its birth. Watching the Lumière brothers films is like seeing a child excited by Christmas – thrilled by the lights, proud of the decorations they made, hopeful and inspired. And, of course, I love the Lumière brothers films because they’re all (wait for it) about ordinary people, and every day situations. Their films are called actualités, and they record mundane, daily events. The very first film shows workers leaving a factory, along with a large dog, a horse-drawn carriage and a few bicycles. Subsequent films show babies eating, trains arriving at a station, children playing marbles. But they’re so beautifully shot – they’re static, but the composition is so thoughtful, and the play of light and darkness so graceful, that they’re unforgettable. By noticing and recording an ordinary moment they make it memorable. And surely that’s what film is all about.

As the Lumière brothers were the first filmmakers, this buche de noel is the first cake in my French cookbook. Although it seems fancy, it’s actually quite simple – a sort of genoise sponge cake, just butter, sugar, eggs and flour, spread thin, and then rolled up with mocha cream inside and out. I followed the cake recipe exactly, but I was a little perplexed by the mocha cream, which seemed to consist of uncooked egg whites and coffee, so I strayed a bit on the cream, and made my own, sort of a pastry cream/mousse, with chocolate and coffee. Very delicious!! And, as you know if you’ve been following along, my attempts to make marzipan were mixed, so I bought some to make these leaves. And then added a bit of green writing-frosting, because if there was one thing this cake needed it was more sugar!! The whole cake was lovely – after a few hours in the fridge it set enough that you could cut it into slices, but we finished off the cake, all of us attacking it directly on the platter!! buche-de-noel

Here’s the first part of a show on the Lumière brothers that shows all of their early films and has lovely dry, witty, informative narration by Bertrand Tavernier.

And here’s Ding Dong Bell, by The Ethiopians. Another song that I posted last year that bears repeating. I love it!!

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Marzipan, cherry and bittersweet chocolate chip cookies

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Magpies

marzipan-cookies Clio loves Jaques Tati. From the opening credits of Mon Oncle to the frighteningly affectionate german shepard of Trafic, she watches with rapt attention, ears perked, golden-grey eyes bright. I’ve never had a dog who watched television, and I said she must be a genius! David pointed out that the inclination to watch television is not exactly indicative of intelligence – a point I must concede. However! She’s watching foreign movies! She’s watching artsy French films. I rest my case. The truth is, of course, that Tati is not high brow or difficult in any way. Tati is pure pleasure from start to finish – visually beautiful, with lovely colors and graceful movements, and thoughtfully, perfectly quiet, with just the right sounds at the right times. We saw an interview with Jaques Tati from a television program that must have been called Showstoppers! The interviewer seemed nervous, and very sweetly kept on and on asking Tati about his favorite show stoppers, in his films, or Chaplin’s films, or Keaton’s films. Tati’s films, of course, aren’t about the fine art of show-stopperism. The action comes gently, in wave after wave, swirling and swelling and falling. In this interview, Tati secured himself the coveted position of patron saint-filmmaker of The Ordinary by saying that the purpose of his work is to bring a smile to ordinary life, to find the beauty and humor in things that we do everyday, and in everything that goes on around us. He’s laughing at us, but kindly and generously, with warmth and fellowship, because he’s as foolish as any of us. These foibles connect us, and the act of noticing them makes every moment, and every movement, important. In another interview, not with Tati, but with the stars of Trafic, the actors were asked how working with Tati had changed their lives. They replied that they look at everything differently now, the movements of people on the street, in their homes, in their businesses, and they, too see patterns and humor. This is a quality I aspire to. I want to notice things, everyday things and the movements of the people all around me, and recognize the beauty and comedy of it all. This feels like a grand ambition to me, an important aspiration. Tati proves that a comic film, so light and warm and absurd, can have great weight and depth, with strong, far-reaching roots that connect us all.

Why am I talking about a French film when it’s not a French-cake-a-week recipe?!?! I’ll tell you why! Part of this recipe was meant to be in a French cake, and was, in fact, from my French cookbook. These could be called “failed marzipan cookies.” I tried to make massepain, to make little shapes for my upcoming Buche de Noel (act surprised!). Instead I made a sort of almond toffee, delicious, but too hard to form into little shapes. So I cut it into little cubes, mixed it in with some dried tart cherries and some dark chocolate chips, and made one of the best cookies I’ve ever eaten!! They’re irresistible. The tartness of the cherries sets off the sweetness of the marzipan, and the chocolate is perfect with both. You could probably use regular almond paste for this, but it wasn’t hard to make failed marzipan. I simply combined sliced almonds with regular sugar (not icing, as I should probably have used) a few teaspoons of warm water and a few teaspoons of vanilla extract in a food processor, and I processed it for ages. Well, maybe 15 minutes. I scraped down the sides, now and again. The processor became quite warm inside, and the oil seemed to separate from the almonds. The resulting mix, when I pressed it altogether was quite hard and slightly grainy. I let it cool its heels in a bowl overnight, and it dried out a bit more. And that was that!!

Here’s a scene from Trafic with a very human gesture that I think we’ll all recognize!!

Here’s the Maytals with Happy Christmas. I posted it last year, too, at this time, but I just love it so much!!

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Out of the Ordinary

extraordinary food from an ordinary kitchen

Category Archives: dessert

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