Turns out, I drink a lot when I am happy. I also drink a lot when I am sad, but that’s a different type of drinking altogether, usually accompanied by a large measure of self-loathing and inappropriate texting and writing that I burn or tear into small, tiny pieces so no one could possibly read what I have written. Although I have been sad, I have avoided that type of drinking for obvious reasons, but also because it is hard to pull back from the edge when that gets started. #ItsInertia
But I digress.
As I write this, I am having my third glass of wine today, stirring cranberry curd, and thinking about my friend Bonnie. I just stopped by her house earlier in the day to see if I might catch her at home. She has a job that takes her all over the world to Africa and Asia and South America, and then she comes home and is a single parent to three kids. In short, she is a SUPERWOMAN.
Today when I stopped by we drank wine, caught up, and I sat in her kitchen and watched her cook.
Did I mention that she is an excellent cook? Like, a completely and amazingly intuitive cook with a wide range of culinary knowledge, picked up the way it should be picked up: through experience. She has managed to bring home all of the flavors (and many of the native spices) of the places she has traveled, and today she shared some of it with me in her toasted cashew hummus.
This stuff is AMAZING. Like, so creamy and delicious, with the cashews elevated by their brief sojourn in the oven. The spice is subtle and balanced, and people of all dietary stripes can dive in without reservations. I am not a huge fan of regular hummus; it is somehow rather pushy, and I get sick of it after a few bites.
This hummus, though. THIS. it’s more of a sly wink than a gaping leer. And it was seductive as hell.
Toasted Cashew Hummus
Note: Make this hummus at least a day in advance, refrigerate, then allow to come to room temperature before serving.
Ingredients
1 cup jumbo cashews, roasted in sea salt
2 garlic cloves
3/4 c. water
1/4 c. tahini
2 T. fresh lime juice
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
2 tsp. chopped fresh cilantro
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Spread cashews in a shallow baking pan and toast for approximately seven minutes, stirring occasionally. Cool.
Pulse garlic in food processor until minced. Add all other ingredients, including cashews, and mix until smooth. Chill overnight, then bring to room temperature and serve with chopped cilantro.
I like it with anything gluten-free, but it’s hummus, for god’s sake, and should not be taken too seriously.
Other than bourbon cocktails, this may be my new favorite snack with friends. What’s your favorite snack?
I maybe should have taken more pictures, but I couldn’t wait to get this in my face. DELICIOUS. Indulgent, but there’s nuts and fruit, so GOOD FOR YOU
You heard me.
Chocolate. Salami.
I had a sleepover with my very best friend in all of the land, Kerry, this past Friday. An earlier post on this blog had a picture of us in college, standing by the coffee pot, both quite the worse for wear. She’s the one that looks perkier than she perhaps ought to be, and I am the giant who looks like I might kill someone. We have known each other forever, through moves and tragedy and joy and everything else that happens over 30+ years.
This Friday I took the dogs, myself, and some chocolate salami over to her house to sit around, drink too many bourbon cocktails expertly prepared by her husband Mark, and to work on a puzzle.
You heard me. A PUZZLE.
Livin’ la vida loca.
But it’s not the puzzle. It’s the company.
When you are young and unencumbered by children, real jobs, and mortgages, you think nothing of sitting around in your pie pants all day, doing nothing. You have nothing really to do and all day to do it, and much of this lounging about is done in the company of good friends. As an adult, although I see Kerry often, I miss those days.
Plus, I need to tell her about a boy.
So it seems that chocolate salami is the thing to do, especially since my girl Kerry lurves her some white chocolate.
Gluten-free animal crackers took the place of shortbread, and crispy rice was also gluten-free
I used unsweetened dried cherries from Chukar Cherries in Washington. I could take a bath in these things.
I have a kitchen scale so I utilized the weight measurements, but if you don’t they translate into about a cup each of the fruits and nuts
Mise en place makes the recipe come together very quickly
In hindsight, I would make two salamis. One was awfully big and difficult to handle.
(Insert off-color sexual innuendo here)
Serves 1-? depending on how long the conversation goes, how freely the drinks flow, and how many like white chocolate. Next variation will utilize dark chocolate and a different variety of fruit and nuts and be equally delicious.
What do you bring to the table for long conversations with old friends?
When I initially started this recipe, I thought it was a revelation about taking time for yourself. How we often feel guilty for doing it, or how what we consider “self-care” is actually not really good for us (drinking, splurging on treats both edible and non-, etc.). I was coming off a week out of town, and the only thing I could bring myself to do was to bake. This, for me, was self-care.
I continued to think about this post this way as I carefully made the piecaken over two days. Two days of happy, humming baking, apron on (for real) and Florence + the Machine in the background. Two days of crossing my fingers because really, as with life, any stage of this piecaken could have taken the whole week completely off the rails.
But then I stumbled across this TED Talk. If you have never seen or heard of Marina Abramovic, go ahead and take a second and watch this.
I’ll wait.
Done? Because after I watched this video my whole week changed. Funny, that, how I started out making this weirdly named, #trending cake and then suddenly the whole thing became a metaphor. The fluffy outside, vanilla flavored and sweet-smelling, followed by the almost crusty exterior of the vanilla cake and finished with a sweet, tart, creamy pomegranate cheesecake (with a final bite of its sugar cookie crust).
This cake is like me. Like many of us, really. On the outside it is just a beautiful bit of cake, snow white with smooth, glossy frosting.
On the inside, things change. Get more complex. Marina Abramovic talks about vulnerability as the thing that connects us all. Our willingness to truly show ourselves is what brings us together, not our common hobbies or politics, the fluffy white frosting of life. Vulnerability is where real change lies, where the art is made. Our insides don’t always match our outsides. We hide behind The Facebook and a carefully cultivated online brand that has us posting only the happiest bits of ourselves.
’tis the season for the happy horseshit group Christmas letter where the ENTIRE FAMILY was EXCEPTIONAL this year.
But that’s not real.
Which is sometimes okay because I know I don’t always want an intimate relationship online. And not everyone needs to know my business.
I have a friend (who shall remain nameless but who will know clearly who I am talking about if he reads this) who was a raging asshole in his younger years, angry and obnoxious and crappy to pretty much everyone. We didn’t like each other much at first but somehow became close. I got to know him. He showed me his cheesecake-like insides.
Gross, I know. But it’s the cake metaphor, people. Keep up.
Once when we were both deeply in our cups and he had just finished being a total douche to someone, I told him that if he would stop being a dick maybe more people would realize he wasn’t, well, a dick. If he would just let them know the person I know.
He said (or yelled, really, because this was the kind of drunken argument that happens in full voice), “But I don’t WANT them to know me that way.”
And that’s where it is. And that is where the art lies. My friend is an artist (in a genre I will not name, again, for his protection), and in his art he is completely and totally himself. Absorbed. Dare I say…vulnerable. He shows his squishy places to the world if the world will just look and see.
This cake, and the writing about it, and the sharing of it, is my squishy place. As noted in a previous post, food, to me, equals love. So I research it, I make it, I write about it, and I give it away.
And just as complex as we are as humans, this cake is also complex and time-consuming to create. But totally, utterly worth it.
Pomegranate Cheesecake With Sugar Cookie Crust Wrapped In A
Marshmallow-Frosted Vanilla Cake. You know, #PIECAKEN
Make these elements in this order. Read each recipe through before you begin.
Pomegranate Cheesecake
Ingredients
Crust
1 1/2 c. finely ground sugar cookies (I used gluten-free cookies, but graham crackers, Oreos, or any other crunchy cookie works)
4 T. melted butter
Filling
2 – 8 ounce bars of cream cheese, room temperature
3/4 c. sugar
1 t. cinnamon
2 eggs
1/4 c. heavy cream or half-and half
1/2 c. cooled pomegranate syrup (2 cups of pomegranate juice reduced to 1/2 cup. Apple cider works here, too)
1 t. vanilla extract
Method
For the crust: Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Butter the bottom of two 6″ springform pans and then line with parchment paper circle. You could also use a regular 6″ cake pan and line the whole pan with parchment.
In a food processor, crush cookies. Or put in a freezer bag and bash with a rolling pin until you get finely crumbled cookie. Add melted butter, and mix to combine. Divide between pans and press firmly. Bake at 300 for about 15 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely.
For the filling: In a food processor, thoroughly combine cream cheese, sugars, and spice. Add the eggs, one at a time, then add the heavy cream, pomegranate, and vanilla. Mix completely.
Pour into cooled pie crust and bake at 350 degrees until custard is completely set (about 35 to 40 minutes). Let cool completely. You can prepare these the night before you make the cake.
You could also make this in one regular spring form pan and stop here. But why would you?
Plain White Cake
a.k.a., possibly the best white cake you will ever put in your mouth
NOTE: You are making TWO of these. Make them one at a time. Do not double the recipe. Or give it a whirl and let me know how that goes.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare pan: butter bottom of 9″ cake pan, line with parchment circle, butter the entire pan and dust with flour. If you skimp on this step, your cake will stick and all your hard work will be for naught.
While you are making this cake, pop your cooled cheesecake out of the pan and into the freezer. This makes it easier to work with.
In a small bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.
In the bowl of a stand mixer (or a large bowl with hand mixer), cream butter with sugar and vanilla extract. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until smooth. Add dry ingredients and milk, starting and ending with dry (flour, milk, flour, milk, flour).
Pour approximately 1/2″ of batter into prepared pan. Place one cheesecake into the batter, crust side facing up. Pour remaining batter over cheesecake and level the batter in the pan. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean (test on the sides and in the middle until it hits the cheesecake crust), between 40 and 50 minutes.
Cool in the pan for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely. You can cool on the rack in the ‘fridge.
Make second layer, and while it’s cooling, start on the frosting.
Marshmallow Frosting
Ingredients
250 grams (approximately 2 c) powdered sugar
1/4 t. cream of tartar
2 t. light corn syrup
2 egg whites
1/4 c. water
1 t. vanilla extract
Method
Combine ingredients in a metal bowl and whisk to combine. Place metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and beat with a hand mixer on medium until the mixture begins to thicken (like marshmallow Fluff). Continue to beat on high until mixture stiffens (stiff peaks). This whole process takes 10-15 minutes.
Remove from heat and add vanilla. Continue to beat the frosting until it is completely cool.
Assembly
Frost as you would a regular cake, with a generous hand. A rotating cake stand and offset spatula make the process easier but are not requirements.
Recipe notes:
This is a time-consuming affair, but the resulting cakes serves 16 people, easily, and is impressive as hell. Make it over two days to take the pressure off.
Seriously, the sun-swept fields of Italy on a plate.
Today, unexpectedly, a new(ish) friend told me about something traumatic happening in her family.
I was giving her a ride home, and when she strapped herself into the passenger seat of the Cube she began to talk, surprising herself, even, at what she was revealing. She apologized for laying it all out in the open.
I told her it was the Cube that had that effect, that the boxy walls and ripple pattern on the ceiling often caused The Teenager to open up. Some of our best conversations have happened in the Cube.
In fact, some of my best conversations, period, have happened in cars. It’s where it took me 30 minutes to ask for my first bra. Where I fell in love with the man I thought I was supposed to marry, and then again where I realized there was no way we could be together. And then a car brought Dane and I together when he rescued me from the body shop where my new-to-me-car was deemed dangerous to drive. He swooped me up in his tow truck, just another type of vehicle, and laughed, outraged, when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
What struck me about my friend sharing her traumatic event (which is not mine to tell, so suffice it to say it is beyond what most of us will have to deal with in our lives) is twofold.
First, that she trusted me enough to share it. But then again I guess cars do that. You are trapped, even by your seat belt, and it’s like you have no choice.
And second, what a burden secrets are to the keeper.
We all of us walk around with secrets, large and small. Secrets we keep from others. Secrets we keep from ourselves.
So potent and powerful, this secret keeping.
My friend’s timing was, as usual, impeccable. In sharing her secret and seeming visibly relieved and unburdened, she reminded me of two things.
One: You never know what burdens other people are walking around with.
It’s easy to make so many of our daily experiences about ourselves – the unkind word, the slow driver, the glare from a stranger – but often they have nothing to do with us. We are, in truth, the center of our own universe, but the universe does not actually revolve around us.
(Get it? Revolve around us? Solar system humor).
We can cultivate a fine sense of outrage about the many things that happen to us, even when so many of them are actually happening to others on the periphery of our little world with some spilling over on us. Then we get fired up and let that interaction shape our world when, turns out…it was never about us.
Two: The time has come for me to unburden myself of my own secrets.
Some are quite dark and have been a part of me for my entire life. Others are small, hidden creatures that just need a little light.
Shadow work, they call it. It sounds dark and hard and scary, and it is those things. It means confronting potentially the most painful things about myself, but it also means rolling them around in my hands and then letting them go. Letting them be.
Heady stuff for a Tuesday, and not quite what I expected to come out of a simple ride home.
As we were getting ready to part, my friend said in passing and in reference to my recent (welcome) onslaught of paid work that had seen me badly neglecting my unpaid work – this site, recipe development, food writing, and photography – “Yes, but you make CAKE.”
And that is exactly true.
Cake is a comfort to me, in the making, the sharing, and the eating. I love pretty much everything about cake; it may even have surpassed my love of chocolate candy, which is saying something.
There is nothing new in a polenta cake, but this one has a few special touches. I developed this the way the very best recipes are developed: by listening to the ingredients themselves in the season in which they are intended to be eaten. I bought a few fuyu persimmons at Asia Food (my favorite Asian market off York Road) and started thinking about how I might like to eat them. Raw was of course always an option, but I wanted more. A quick search led me to a recipe for blood orange upside down cake. Some tweaks to highlight the ingredients, fine-tune measurements (and get rid of some sugar), and make it gluten-free, and this is what you have. Mad props to the process in the original recipe; the inspirational recipe was lovely, and I can’t claim this as my own.
#GiveCreditWhereItsDue
I immediately shared it with another friend and made sure The Teenager had a hunk after school, but I won’t lie: I ate most of it.
This cake is for everyone out there doing the shadow work, and for my sweet friend whose world has been flipped on its head. This cake is for you.
Persimmons in cast iron – rustic as hell.
A few notes before you begin:
Read through completely before beginning, and utilize the principles of mise en place. It will make the process much more enjoyable (in life as well as baking, if we’re being honest)
Dry goods are measured in grams. Otherwise, you have imprecise measurements like “six tablespoons.” But don’t worry; I have included those as well.
Persimmons should be ripe but not mushy. This makes them easier to peel and slice. And mandolins make slicing easier but are not 100% necessary.
I used grits, not “polenta.” When we lived in the south, I went searching for polenta in the grocery store one day, and the clerk looked over his glasses, down his nose, and drawled, “Y’all mean grits, raht?” If you want to save some cash, use grits. Polenta is a little finer, and it is, after all, in the title of this, but I like the slight toothiness of grits. A little crunch.
Persimmon Polenta Cake With Rosemary And Lemon
Ingredients
75 grams of sugar, plus 150 grams of sugar (6 tablespoons plus 3/4 cup)
3 tablespoons water
8 tablespoons butter (one stick), softened
3 Fuyu persimmons, ripe but firm, peeled and sliced 1/8″ thick
Prep all ingredients first. Peel and slice persimmons, zest the lemon, finely chop the rosemary, separate eggs. The sugar is used in two separate steps, so divide it as noted.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a 10″ cast iron or ovenproof skillet, dissolve 75 grams of sugar in water and heat until the mixture becomes slightly amber in color (about five minutes). Don’t stir during this process, but feel free to give the skillet a little shake. Don’t walk away, as the change happens quickly. Once it is amber, remove from heat and stir in two tablespoons of butter until dissolved.
Arrange the peeled, sliced persimmons in a spiral pattern and then set aside while you make the cake.
Combine the dry ingredients in a small bowl: flour, polenta, salt, baking powder, chopped rosemary, and lemon zest.
In a large bowl, cream the butter, remaining sugar, and vanilla until creamy. Mix in one egg yolk at a time. Alternate adding milk and dry ingredients, starting with dry. Mix until just combined, then add milk, then dry, then milk, then dry.
In a medium bowl with absolutely clean and dry beaters, beat the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. They will be shiny and hold a stiff peak.
In three additions, fold the egg whites gently into the batter. The batter will be thicker than a regular cake batter.
Pour over your persimmons in the skillet, then spread evenly with a spatula. Bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes. This is a large range because ovens vary so much. Start peeking in at around 30 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick or cake tester comes out clean, and the top is a lovely brown (just past golden).
Remove from oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes, then loosen around edges with a sharp knife. Place a platter or plate on top of the skillet, then carefully invert. If any persimmons have moved or look wonky, replace them, then cool completely before serving.
For me, this serves four. But that’s because I ate it for breakfast, a snack around three, and then again after dinner. And I let my kid have some.
I am more excited about this potato ricer than perhaps I should be.
True confession time: I have only had gnocchi once. It was at a restaurant in Little Italy in Baltimore, a place that shall remain nameless but based on reputation alone should have had someone’s nonna in the back making delicate little puffs of potato. They certainly charged cash money like they flew Nonna over first class. Turns out, their gnocchi was less than stellar. They were lukewarm and gummy, served in a quickly-cooling butter sauce with fairly tasteless Parmesan that may have seen the inside of a green can. It was not a good showing, and for years I ignored the presence of this dish in favor of anything else. Flash forward to gluten-free years, a chilly fall in Baltimore, and some gorgeous and delicious organic russet potatoes from the local market. Turns out gnocchi is a great pasta dish for those avoiding gluten, and some recipes don’t require the use of eggs (although Tom Colicchio’s does, and his is on the list for testing). I have no idea what I am doing, but tonight is the first experiment with the recipe from Mark Bittman’s book How To Cook Everything. All it requires is russet potatoes, salt, pepper, and flour (I am using my gluten-free all-purpose flour blend, so we will see). I have a newly-acquired potato ricer, a bowl that is too big for the aforementioned potato ricer, and the will to dive in. I also have a four-hour Sunday sauce that I made on Monday (details, details), and I figure the gnocchi might like to rest on top of that when all is said and done. So help me out before I judge my initial effort (which Tom Colicchio insists will be unsuccessful on the first attempt): describe the texture and taste I am aiming for. What is the goal? I plan on trying several different recipes before reporting what actually happen. I may need volunteers to taste. Any (local) takers?
