While you guys have been busy blowing off your resolutions and scraping snow off your cars, I have been making money moves. Taking care of business. Planning ahead. Reaching for the stars. Attaining goals.
Ha. Just kidding. That isn’t even remotely close.
I have been doing what I do every January since I became an adult: spending zero cash dollars, watching lots of movies, and cleaning out the pantry.
In December, I stock up on food goods like the apocalypse is pending (which it very well may be, but this is not a political blog only just sometimes, but I am trying to write something nice, so I am not going to go there because if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all, but, by the way, fuck 45, and why is this country not in full-scale revolution yet? And also I am glad I am not flying anytime soon, because those TSA workers and ATC are about to not give a rat’s ass about that gun in your luggage and landing your little old plane. But I digress.).
Something about the short days and cold nights makes me fill the freezer and pantry beyond all rational use for a house that now consists of two people, one of whom would rather scrape change from the couch cushions for UberEats souvlaki than spend ten minutes actually cooking herself something, and the other one of whom (me) eats maybe once a day and mostly snacks all the other times.
So because I am pathologically incapable of throwing anything out, I force myself to eat in all of January and only buy fresh veg and household necessities. I have a box of frozen gluten-free pizza from Costco (three pizzas), and if I am careful I will make it to February with those (#priorities), but otherwise, everything else is straight from the pantry.
We have had some epic meals already, starting with spicy lentils over cornbread, topped with a fried egg, for New Year’s Day, and braised spinach with chickpeas, sun-dried tomatoes, and lemon over rice for this recent snow day. I have made three batches of scones, each one better than the last, and I am thinking of going for another in the next few days (except my gluten-free AP flour is running out and cannot be replaced until February 1, and I might want waffles at some point).
I have also added the wrinkle of not buying any sugar, but that’s not going great. Scratch that. It’s going fine, except I had a lot of sugar in the house to begin with, so we’re set and buying extra wasn’t necessary. But I have eaten less sugar this month than normal in general (minus the three candy bars I had this weekend but that doesn’t count because it was a snow day anyway, and I was not at my house).
Today, I wanted something sweet but not too complex to make and fairly immediately gratifying. Something I could justify making and writing about instead of actually doing work I get paid for because today I don’t really feel like writing, but I have to anyway, so if I write and then take a little break that seems fair, right?
RIGHT.
So this is that. I have a bag of pitted Deglet Noor dates (also from Costco. Damn you, Costco!), a jar of honey peanut butter, some vegan chocolate chips, and some applewood smoked salt.
COME AT ME, BRO. These bitches are incredible. And it’s easy to make them with whatever you have. Medjool dates are bigger and sweeter but would be easier to stuff. Almond butter would be delicious (or any kind of nut butter – I toyed with the idea of making some homemade pistachio butter for this, but nixed it due to lack of motivation and the aforementioned immediate gratification). If dark chocolate is your jam, have at it; same with white chocolate, but also how dare you. Salt makes it better, so try different kinds.
All measurements are guesses. I used just enough peanut butter to leave some for toast if I felt like it later in the month.
Chocolate Covered Stuffed Dates With Smoked Salt
Ingredients 15 dates, pitted (fewer if the dates are bigger) Peanut butter 1 cup chocolate chips (see Recipe Notes) 2 teaspoons coconut oil Smoked salt (or flaky fleur de sel)
Method Using a spoon or a clean finger (naughty), stuff each date with about 1/2 teaspoon peanut butter and place in freezer to chill for about 15 minutes.
While the dates chill, melt chocolate chips and coconut oil in a saucepan, stirring until smooth.
Use a toothpick to dip each date into the chocolate until covered. Place on parchment paper and set in the fridge for a couple minutes before sprinkling each with salt (to taste).
Eat immediately, or keep sealed in the fridge for a couple days.
Recipe Notes *You could say, for the sake of argument, that if you had melted chocolate chips left, that adding the same volume of coconut oil and stirring to combine would be a good idea. Pour this into a jar and leave on the kitchen counter, then come down late at night when you want some ice cream in bed, and pour that over the ice cream, and you have homemade Magic Shell that is pretty much the best thing ever. You could definitely say that.
Don’t get me wrong; I can cook the hell out of some savory food. Enchiladas, arepas, ramen: I know it doesn’t seem like I ever cook dinner, but I totally do. But I love sweet things. I love to make them and eat them and give them away.
It seems fitting for the last three days of summer to feature just one more ice cream recipe, and this one is a doozy. The Honey-Hopped Ice Cream of last month came about when I got fresh Cascade hops from Redwing Farm in West Virginia. This month’s ice cream is also straight outta the Pacific Northwest. The Kid visited relatives in Washington State last August and came back with contraband: chocolate mint clippings, wrapped in a soggy paper towel and sealed in a Ziploc for the trip. I tossed them in some soil and sort of forgot about them. Fast forward over a year to a lush window box filled with fresh chocolate mint, a little leggy but bursting with chocolatey flavor.
Add a big carton of heavy cream about to turn and some leftover chocolate, and good lord. This ice cream is deeply chocolate, not too sweet, and richly flavored and scented with mint.
Served with Frank’s Holy Bundt, which was quite unnecessary and yet somehow very necessary at the exact same time. A fitting goodbye to a busy summer.
Chocolate Mint Chocolate Chocolate Chip Ice Cream
Tons of variations here. You can use plain mint. You can vary the type of dairy. You can eliminate the cocoa powder (but reduce the sugar to 3/4 cup). If you cannot find chocolate mint, plain will do just fine.
Ingredients
3 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1 packed cup fresh chocolate mint leaves
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
6 egg yolks
pinch salt
3/4 cup chopped chocolate (see Recipe Notes)
Method
Heat heavy cream and milk in a saucepan over medium heat until bubble form around the sides. Add fresh mint leaves and cover. Steep for at least 45 minutes.
While the mint is steeping, whisk together sugar, cocoa powder, egg yolks, and salt in a large bowl. It will form a paste (which is fine. Don’t panic.).
Strain mint leaves out of the cream/milk mixture and then back into the saucepan. Heat again until bubbles form. Remove from heat.
Here is the tricky part. Go slowly.
Pour a thin, trickling stream of cream/milk into the egg/sugar/cocoa mixture, whisking constantly as you do. It may be challenging to loosen up the egg/sugar/cocoa paste at first, but continue to go slowly. You don’t want to scramble your eggs.
Once all of the cream/milk is incorporate, place strainer over the saucepan and strain mixture through. This will catch any stray scrambled egg bits if you have them.
Turn heat to low, and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens (about ten minutes). Take this step slowly as well or your eggs will scramble.
Remove from heat and strain once more into a clean bowl. Cover the surface of the mixture with plastic wrap and chill thoroughly, at least four hours (but overnight is fine, too).
Once your mixture is chilled, process according to your ice cream maker’s directions. Add the chopped chocolate in for the last five minutes.
Freeze for a couple of hours, then share with people you love.
Recipe Notes
If you eliminate the cocoa, cut the sugar to 3/4 cup as noted above or your final product will be way too sweet.
For the chopped chocolate, I used a combination of 3/4 of an old bar of Ikea dark chocolate and a handful of Hershey’s Special Dark Kisses. It’s what was on hand, and I am all about that life.
The wild profiterole, captured in its natural habitat.
First, for you, a poem about love. Sort of. If you are not a lover of poetry, feel free to skip to the erudite synopsis – the TL:DR, if you will – below:
To His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
~Andrew Marvell~
Essentially, Andrew Marvell is trying to convince his mistress to get freaky, and quick, before worms begin to eat them in the grave.
What this is really about is time (well, and if we are being honest, which we should always try to be, also sex), and how little we have in comparison to how much we tell ourselves we have (time and sex, both).
This winter break I wanted lots and lots of time. I wanted to have weeks of time to do as much or as little as I wanted, with no stress of deadlines. It may seem that as a freelance writer I have all of the time in the world, but in truth my days fly by in a haze of writing and basic life management. Most days I raise myself from a shitty night’s sleep and deliver The Child to school, and then, even with the day stretching out long before me, writing, house maintenance, family maintenance, yoga teaching/class planning, and yoga studio assistant managing fill up those minutes I thought I had plenty of when I first woke.
It astonishes me how I used to do all of the things I do these days with the added pressure of running a school and managing livestock. I cannot remember how it is that I got things done.
And that’s the haze aspect. I didn’t really spend too much time thinking about or noticing things that were happening. It’s the same as if your head is on fire – you don’t note the color of the flames, you just put the fire out. So many parts of my life have rushed by in a blur that I never fully experienced.
But the only way to really dive deep is to make time to do so. There are multiple studies on how we can’t actually “multi-task,” and that entering deeply into something is the only way to truly know that thing. If you quickly Google “how to learn something” you get 622 million results. The first few pages talk about learning something new every day and then quickly devolve into ways to learn new things in five minutes, or ten. It’s all about learning/doing the thing and less about experiencing the thing.
It’s hard to jump off the Must Get Things Done Treadmill.
But jump off I must. Not for any reason other than I want to continue to try to be present for everything. Possibly not things like cleaning the cat box or doing my taxes, but maybe even those things, too.
For months now I have wanted to give real pastry a try. I have been craving cream puffs and eclairs and cheese danish with an immeasurable ferocity for months now. The only reason I am not 1,000 pounds is because I am unwilling to pay eight bucks a pastry for substandard gluten-free bullshit. I may splurge for a $4 gluten-free cupcake on occasion, but I always regret it (I make them waaaaay tastier).
But real delicate pastry takes time and attention, both of which have been hard to come by in these past months.
Not anymore.
Here are profiteroles. Pâte à choux pastry, light and puffy, filled with sweet vanilla cream and striped with chocolate.
Authentic and delicious. Gluten-free (although you can make them with regular AP flour).
They take some time. I have modified the process a bit for less hands-on time, but still. You can’t just pop these in the oven and walk away.
Profiteroles
This recipe bows in gratitude to Michael Ruhlman and Ratio, but changes are made to accommodate the peculiar properties of gluten-free flour.
Ingredients
Pastry Creme (Creme Patisserie, or Creme Pat as they say on The Great British Baking Show)
1/2 cup chocolate, chopped (I used bittersweet chips because it’s what I had)
1/4 cup heavy cream
Method
Make the pastry creme first. In a large bowl, mix together flour and egg yolks until thoroughly incorporated and smooth. Set aside.
Heat milk, sugar, and salt to a simmer in a heavy saucepan over medium heat (look for small bubbles to appear around the edges of the pan). Remove from heat and grab a whisk.
Whisking constantly, slowly drizzle the hot milk mixture into the egg mixture. WHISK CONSTANTLY. Don’t skimp, and don’t add the hot milk too fast. If you do, you will end up with sweet scrambled egg which is gross and nobody wants that.
Once the milk is completely added, pour the mixture back into the milk pan and cook over low heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture begins to thicken (about five to ten minutes).
Pro-tip: use a whisk. I tried a spatula and that did not end well.
Remove from heat and add scraped vanilla bean (or extract). Place a fine mesh strainer over the bowl you will cool the pastry creme in. Pour pastry creme into the strainer to remove errant lumps (of egg or flour). Place plastic wrap directly on the surface of the creme and place in the ‘fridge to cool thoroughly while you make the pâte à choux.
To make your pastry, preheat oven to 425 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment pastry. Set aside. Set up a stand mixer with a paddle attachment (or see Recipe Notes).
Heat water, butter, and salt in a high-sided saucepan over medium heat until butter is completely melted.
Add flour to water/butter mixture and stir with a wooden spoon, still over heat, until mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan and forms a ball. You will also notice a thin skim of pastry on the bottom of the pot.
Move pastry to the bowl of the stand mixer and let cool slightly. You want to be able to touch it, but you don’t want it cold.
Turn on stand mixer and begin to add beaten egg a little at a time. Smart people beat each egg separately and add them one at a time. You may not actually use all of the egg, which can be scary.
Don’t be scared.
Add a bit of beaten egg at a time and beat until it is incorporated. Ultimately you are looking for a dough that is somewhat stiff but still able to be piped. This is somewhere between cookie dough and a thick batter. It should not ooze at all or be sloshy. I know this to be true because that’s what my first attempts were like, and I ended up with egg-tasting pancakes. #Barf
The reason you may not use all of the eggs is because of the level of humidity in the air, the temperature of the flour/water/butter mix, alignment of the planets, the difficulty of the French: any number of reasons. It’s best to concentrate on the texture you are aiming for rather than the amount of each ingredient.
This is why people have dogs: to eat their extra eggs.
So beat your eggs as needed into the flour. When done, you can refrigerate your pastry dough for a day, or you can proceed.
Place dough into a pastry bag (see Recipe Notes) fitted with a round nozzle; I used a size 11, but you can eyeball it and go for 3/4 to 1″. Pipe 1″ rounds of dough onto parchment one inch away from each other. Each dough ball should have a little peak on top (if not, your dough is too runny. Sorry.).
Use a wet fingertip to smooth the top of each dough ball.
Place in oven at 425 for ten minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and cook for another 20 minutes.
Remove from oven and pierce sides with a toothpick to allow excess moisture to escape. Place back in turned-off oven and let them dry out for another 10 minutes.
Let cool completely.
Filling options:
Pipe cooled pastry cream with a skinny nozzle through the hole you made with the toothpick
Slice in half and use a spoon to dollop cream between both halves
For the optional drizzle, melt chocolate and cream over low heat, stirring constantly. If you are fancy as fuck, place that into a squeeze bottle and with a practiced air move it back and forth over your filled profiteroles until you achieve the chocolate coverage you desire.
If you have leftover drizzle, add some heavy cream, shake well, and pour over ice cream. Or add to milk and heat for hot chocolate.
Recipe Notes
You don’t need a stand mixer to make these, just lots of muscle. You can add your eggs and beat with a wooden spoon until you achieve the desired consistency. You can also use a food processor.
You also don’t need a pastry bag. Use a sealed freezer bag with the end snipped off and the pastry tip nestled into the snipped-off corner for the exact same result.
If you have read all the way through, finish this sentence in the comments: Had I but world enough and time, I would…”
For someone of my age this may seem an overly dramatic statement: I am losing my memory.
For the record, I am 46, born in 1971, so just a shade away from 47 which is officially the late 40s but I don’t really care.
What I care about is that I cannot remember things.
Part of this is a car accident when I was 16. I can remember THAT: staring up through the spiderweb of the windshield, one leg on the driver’s side of my dream car, my 1971 refurbished Volkswagen Bug, the emergency brake raking open a long, bloody seam up the back of my left thigh, and the rest of me in the passenger side. An EMT with a shaky voice, tending to a cut on my head, saying, “It’s fine. You’ll be fine,” and then nothing until the vision of my mother storming through the curtains in the ER, brusque: “You’re fine. You’ll be fine.”
The doc, several weeks later, telling me that my memory would be affected forever by the early trauma to the frontal lobe.
Part of this is other trauma in childhood, some of which I remember and am addressing with My Therapist, some of which I believe is so deeply buried that the excavation itself would cause trauma.
Fast forward decades, when this – this memory loss thing – wasn’t really an issue, to now, when it has suddenly become one.
I can’t remember shit.
Not the funny, old-timer CRS (Can’t Remember Shit) disease.
Whole swathes of my life, gone with no real understanding of what happened or where they went.
Me in a formal dress next to a boy in formal dress: no idea the occasion or the boy.
Yesterday – what I did, where I was.
Some of this can be attributed to the lifestyle of a freelance writer. I have only one real standing appointment every week; otherwise, the days are all meaningless, fabricated markers of time. Other of this can be blamed on my Ayurvedic dosha – vata – which has me consuming large quantities of information and then promptly forgetting it.
But this loss of memory is distressing.
I can’t remember significant events in my life, events that make me the person who I am. Events that have forged relationships with people I love.
The thing that has saved me in many ways is my friends.
In my head, I call them the Keeper of Records.
I have friends who have known me for forty years- they have a grave responsibility to recall the child that they thought I was to the adult I am now.
I have friends who have only known me since this move back to Baltimore in 2014. They have less responsibility, perhaps, but they also have less invested in me. Perhaps they will grow weary of reminding me of their important dates, or nudging me towards our shared memories that are even now, just these few years on, receding.
It’s hard to go on record like this. It feels like failure.
And nothing soothes that feeling better than baking, and eating, cake.
Full disclosure: I have never before eaten Smith Island cake.
#Shocking
As a native Marylander, this is also something of a failure, but I choose to let this one go. I am letting it go because as I type this I am having a big slice for breakfast, which means not only am I not a failure in the long run, but I am also a fucking grownup who can eat cake for breakfast if I feel like it.
Plus, as I was researching this recipe I found out that the one lady on Smith Island who is super famous for her “authentic” Smith Island cake uses BOXED CAKE MIX.
GTFO. That’s just DUMB.
So I looked deeper and found the “original” recipe from Frances Kitching, an innkeeper on Smith Island who is believed to have created this iconic cake. This lady is the real deal; from her linked obituary, she delivers gems like:
“The best thing you can do to a crab is let it be. Clean it, fry it, and watch that it doesn’t pop in the skillet and burn your arm.”
And, when someone asked if they could keep their beer cold in her fridge while they ate:
“You’d be the first. I have simply turned down some people who appeared to have been drinking when they came here to eat. They were in no condition to enjoy and appreciate good cooking.”
The New York Times even stopped by her inn in 1979 to write a story about her. The article is notable in its description of not only the meal the writer enjoyed but also in the beauty of the descriptions of life on Smith Island.
In 2008, Smith Island cake became Maryland’s state dessert. You will note in the description that in order to be a Smith Island cake proper, flavor doesn’t matter, but the number of layers does: between eight and 12 is the standard.
So don’t look too closely at the picture above (hint: mine only has six, but in my defense I was feeling a little woozy when I made this AND it’s my first one AND I am not actually particularly fond of crepe cakes, which is what it begins to be when you have too many layers, so BACK OFF).
Never you mind the layers. I am calling it a Smith Island cake that cannot count. The next one will come correct.
And also, for those of you following along at home, this little thing happened:
I wrote this.
Chad and I have been working on The Food Market {at Home} for nine months (my name is on the inside: “Written with Suzannah Kolbeck”), and it came out on Black Friday. You can order it online, or you can get it at either of his two restaurants, The Food Market in Hampden and La Food Marketa up in the county. I am not shilling this because I make any cash on the deal (I don’t), but it’s a nice big deal, and I am proud of the work.
There is even a recipe for Smith Island cake in here, Chad’s interpretation with a crazy good strawberry-flavored whipped cream cheese filling, microbasil, strawberry dust, and dehydrated strawberries. You, too, can get fancy at home (without too much fuss – seriously).
It may not look like much, but it’s basically religion in a bundt pan. #Trust
It’s fall, people.
The calendar may argue the point, but the weather surely doesn’t.
And not a moment too soon. My schtick is not depression lit, but I have made no secret of the fact that in my personal life it can be hard to find a lot of things to get it up for on a daily basis (yes, I said “get it up for” not “get up for.”). Often life seems like a silly march towards the end, just looking around for things to fill the days until you don’t really have to look around anymore and can sit in a chair, watch the news, complain about the weather, and worry about your 401K.
This summer in particular has been one of the more difficult ones. Maybe it is the return of the prodigal daughter from France. Or the conflict and stress of a freelance project that is exciting and challenging but an ongoing battle. Maybe it’s the completely fucked state of the U.S. Whatever it is, things feel pretty meh, enough so that even a drop in temperature is enough to get excited about.
On this the first day of September, I had been planning to kick off a 30-day month with three things: 30 days of cooking, 30 days of writing, and 30 days of yoga.
I am a huge fan of the 30-day challenge, but only the ones I make up for myself because YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME. In an effort to cast about for something to focus on, I thought piling on the 30-day deadlines would be a good idea.
And then September 1st hit. Today. And I am still finishing up a recipe that I have been working on for two weeks and have a website with half-written blogs and a cell phone with jotted notes.
Turns out, sometimes you have to plan a little bit when you are gearing up for something.
Ah, well. In the wake of flooding in Texas, missile tests in North Korea, and navigating the complexity of emotions and people in combining two households with two teenagers (yes, I compared those three things. What of it?), planning has been…difficult.
So here we are, September 1st, and I am presenting to you a recipe from someone else.
The original recipe is not actually called Frank’s Holy Bundt.
Khristian (my particular friend, for those of you new to the blog) has a friend Peter with whom he performs. Peter lives with a roommate, Liz, whose boyfriend is Frank.
I met Frank briefly once before and only in passing, but a couple weeks ago I spent more time with him on Peter’s back porch. Cocktails at The Bluebird Room in Hampden had me feeling social, so I stopped by Peter’s house on the way home and found Peter, Khristian, Liz, and Frank.
Frank is a musician, constantly on tour. He has unruly hair, a beard, and an easy, warm way about him. As with many people, he also comes with verbal tics, one of which is “holy.” Everything that night was holy, from the cupcakes I made Liz for her birthday to a broken down car in western Maryland. Even the mashed potatoes they heated up later that night were holy.
In honor of Frank, and that warm summer evening, and the reminder that sometimes it’s nice to not worry about the big picture and just hang out on the back porch and enjoy what is, I present this, Frank’s Holy Bundt, a strange but incredibly delicious marriage of zucchini and chocolate. I only made slight adjustments to the original recipe mostly because I like to use what I have. If you have an abundance of zucchini, shred it and freeze it in two-cup measures so you can make this mid-winter.
Frank’s Holy Bundt
This cake has very little sugar for a cake, plus vegetables, so it’s practically health food. I used chocolate chips because it’s what I had on hand, but if you are fancy and have fancy chocolate, use that instead.
Ingredients
2 cups gluten-free all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 tablespoons strong cooled coffee
3 large eggs
2 cups unpeeled grated zucchini (I used frozen and squeezed all of the water out)
3/4 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips, chopped
Confectioner’s sugar for dusting
Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a bundt pan with non-stick cooking spray.
Whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
In a stand mixer, beat the sugar and butter until fluffy. Add the vanilla, coffee, and eggs, mixing well between each addition (see note below for why this sort of doesn’t actually matter).
In a separate bowl, combine the zucchini, chocolate chips, and a cup or so of the flour/cocoa mixture. Stir well to coat and separate as much of the zucchini as possible.
Add the rest of the flour mixture into the egg batter. Mix until just combined; the batter will be thick.
Fold the zucchini mixture into the batter, and blend with a spatula without overmixing (see Recipe Notes).
Pour into the prepared cake pan, and use your spatula to make sure the top is level.
Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer to a rack to cool for 10 minutes, and then place the rack on top of the bundt pan. Flip the bundt over and allow to cool completely.
Use a fine-mesh sieve to sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar. Try not to eat it all but remind yourself that there is zucchini in there if you do and count that as a couple servings of vegetables.
Recipe Notes
I beat the shit out of the butter and forgot the sugar. When I added it after the next step, the batter was lumpy and gross looking, with clumps of butter. DID NOT MATTER AT ALL. This cake is very forgiving.
When working with cakes, muffins, pancakes, etc, you will often see the direction “mix until just combined,” or “do not overmix.” This is so the traditional flour doesn’t begin to develop the gluten and result in leaden cakes. With gluten-free flour, you can mix as much as you want. I don’t worry about it at all, but if you are using regular AP flour, tread lightly.
