Category Archives: vegetarian

Emptying the fridge: Annotated Almond White Bean Dip

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Yes, I know I’ve already moved.  Yes, I know I’m now in a pattern of filling the fridge, not emptying it.  But moving, like writing, is a process, and I have to catch you up.  And that means talking about what I’ve done before I get into what I’m doing…

This recipe fruited during a hummus drought.  I had evicted all garbanzos from my pantry – not from lack of desire, but from too much desire: hummus-hummus-all-the-time.  And at first, facing the multiple cans of cannellini beans in the cupboard, I thought I might just whip up some hummus-with-white-beans.  But beans, like chilis, seem to call for applications appropriate to their specific qualities.  No one makes poblano salsa, for example.  Jalapenos are needed.  Tabasco sauce, to no surprise, can only truly be made with tabascos.  So white beans, as adequately as they might suit, are just not destined for hummus.  And really, when you’ve been scarfing down a batch a week, it might be time to try something different anyway.

So I faced off against the white beans and thought about accompaniments.  Like most dips – hummus, pesto, artichoke (maybe?) – it would need a few players with whom to harmonize and energize.  Acid.  Herbs.  Salt, of course.  Maybe some spice.  Maybe, given the circumstances, whatever I had lying around…

Out of rosemary, which seemed like a natural pairing (check the web: white beans and rosemary are easy, well established lovers), I did have some toasted, salted, rosemary-infused marcona almonds begging to be consumed.  Almonds in bean dip?  Why not?  Pesto couldn’t operate without pine nuts, and walnuts whir excellently together with roasted red pepper.  Lemon seemed too stringent, but an aging orange called me from the fruit basket.  Like adding colors to an outfit, each ingredient meant slowly ruling out and pulling in other things.  Orange and garlic don’t fit together well, at least not across my palate.  So some other sharpness was needed, and I opted for cayenne pepper.  Almonds and beans could be a bland marriage.  Couples therapy recommends adding some spice.

What came out of the food processor on a tentative spatula dip was a smooth creamy whisper of something amazing.  I’m not exaggerating.  It was warm, it was earthy, it was perfumed and heated and comforting.  As soon as we finished slathering this odd little puree all over crackers, and tortillas, and those amazing raisin rosemary crisps from Trader Joe’s (more on that in a bit…), we wanted more.  So I made it again.  And this time I wrote some things down and made some adjustments.  And some more adjustments.

You may have noticed, if you read this page with any frequency, that with the necessary and understandable exception of buttercream, I am not big on repeating recipes.  Most of what I post I have never made before and never made again.  It’s a shot in the dark.  It’s all experimentation.  Love it or leave it.  Or play with it yourself until it’s right for you.  But guys, I’ve worked on this one.  I’ve a real recipe to share that you can actually follow.  I’ve forced myself to note and follow my own suggested quantities to make sure yours will emerge the same way (well, sometimes my hand slipped a bit, but I’ll have you know I scolded myself resolutely for that and I won’t do it again.  This time).

So here it is, my perhaps overly-annotated almond and white bean dip.  Some of the ingredient quantities are listed in ranges.  I suggest you begin with the smaller quantity and increase as your taste buds request.

½ cup almonds, skinned and toasted.  Marcona almonds are best but most expensive, so choose as your budget permits (this doesn’t mean you have to pay top price for pre-skinned almonds, though.  To easily slip their coverings away, put your almonds in a bowl, pour boiling or near boiling water over them, and let them stew for 3-5 minutes.  Drain, and when they are cool enough to handle, you should be able to pinch them into nudity in moments.  Skinless, they are mild and meaty/fruity and ivory-pale, and you can then quickly toast them in a pan until they begin to brown and exude fragrant oil)

1 15oz. can of white beans (cannellini are creamiest, but great northern and unspecific “white beans”) will do just fine

3 TB fresh rosemary leaves (you can, if you wish, just strip them from their stems and toss them into the food processor.  This may result in larger green snippets and a dip chunkier in texture than you want, so depending upon how obsessed with smoothness you are, you can mince the rosemary finely before adding it in)

2 tsp orange zest from one large orange

¼ – ½ cup juice from the same large orange (you could use orange juice from a container, but I think it just doesn’t taste as fresh or bright)

½ – 1 tsp salt, according to your taste *

Pinch cayenne pepper, or to taste *

A generous ½ cup fruity olive oil (I use extra virgin)

In a food processor, pulse almonds until only small chunks remain (texture should be like very coarse sand, but not yet broken down into butter).

Add all remaining ingredients except olive oil and pulse three or four times, until all ingredients are mixed but large clumps resist blending.

Drizzle in olive oil slowly through your food processor’s top spout.  The mixture should whir together into a creamy and relatively homogenous spread.  Continue to process until it reaches the texture you desire.  Chunky and smooth are both fine by me.  Taste, season if desired, and taste again.  Chill for an hour or two to allow flavors to entwine, and bring to room temperature before serving.

* A note on seasoning: during the hour or two of chilling time, flavors will intensify.  Salt, spice, and sharpness will become more pronounced after allowing the dip to sit.  Therefore, it might be wise to minutely underseason the first time you make this.  If it tastes a touch bland, it might not in a few hours.  If it’s already pretty spicy, be aware it will get spicier as it sits.  This is not a bad thing, but something of which to be aware.

Now you have your dip.  Or spread.  Or puree.  Depends on how long you processed.  But dips – and spreads – all on their own are incomplete.  They need a vehicle.  And in this case, with this dip, it needs just the right vehicle.  It’s not garlic driven, it’s not overwhelmingly pungent.  It hovers on the edge of savory.  It could even, if you were feeling a deep need for warmth and comfort, take a drizzle of honey and still be delicious.  It errs toward the sweeter side.  A tortilla chip just won’t do.  A pita chip leaves something to be desired.

A rosemary raisin crisp from Trader Joe’s makes it sing.  And I was content with that.  But then I looked at the ingredient list for these crisps and saw flax, millet, sunflower seeds… all, oddly, items in my pantry that needed using up.

So another project before perfection, which I will tell you about next week: the cracker soap-box derby.  Recreating the perfect vehicle for my perfect spread.

The Buttercream Project: Wedding day, part two

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Saturday morning – Wedding day! – was beautiful and bright and promising.  Our now-from-Seattle friends had arrived the night before, we’d all slept, the cakes had chilled, and now after a brief wedding day breakfast with the bride and groom’s families and out of town guests, I’d be on to decorating.  When I settled in to the buttercream production this time, I had an epiphany.  At Mom’s house, I had used an electric hand mixer instead of a stand mixer, and the buttercream had been fluffy and smooth and glorious.  What if, instead of using the paddle attachment on my stand mixer, I used the whisk?

This was, finally, the right thing to do.  I wish fervently I had thought of it the first day.  The frosting came together faster, and whipped up a bit smoother.  It was, I perhaps imagined, brighter ivory than the previous batches, and there were no chunks of butter to cause me piping distress.  If only, if only, the day before… but that is immaterial (and perhaps inaccurate too, since there were other factors, other differences, like the temperature of the butter, the temperature of the cheese, the amount of time spent whipping, the quantity of lime juice, etc) .

I piped.  I piped and I piped.  And things started to look better.  A lot better.  Most of the worst imperfections were hidden under the ivory and then delicate blue swirls and scrolls I snaked onto the cakes.  They actually started to look nice.  This might not be a disaster after all.  When I added a ring of round, pearl-like blobs to the bottom border of each, I started to feel happy with my project.

With the cakes done, all that remained were 92 miniature cupcakes.  All.  Right.  I had half a bowl of perfectly blue frosting.  Against my own better judgment (hey, it had worked out okay the day before with the gelatin in the filling), instead of starting over with a brand new batch, I decided to add more butter and more powdered sugar to the bowl, and try to tint it to match what I had already done as I went.  It worked.  I wanted a slightly thicker consistency of frosting for the flowers I planned to pipe so this mixture had to be more butter than mascarpone.  That worked out well, really, because I was out of mascarpone again anyway.

With time ticking, I filled up another piping bag with one of the new rose petal tips H. had bought me and went to work, remembering what I’d learned months ago about which way to swivel the cupcake as I frosted.  It took me a handful to get into a groove, remembering when to apply pressure and when to release, but once I got going I was making beautiful little horseshoe movements that resulted in sugary flower petals!  To perfect the color (not baby blue, but not dark blue either), I’d mixed a tiny bit of black gel dye in with the blue.  This resulted in a lovely periwinkle with just a hint of gray, matching almost exactly the blue on the couple’s save-the-date cards.  The exact blue of the wedding.  Boom.

N. would probably like me to add here that as I finished each handful of minis, he deliberately drizzled on a small quantity of silver-gray sprinkles.  My dear friend M., who arrived in mid-afternoon to coo over the product and do my hair for the event, would probably also like me to add that she took over sprinkling duties for the last dozen or so.  In fact, it was M. and S. who saw me through the last sheet tray of minis as, hand aching from the constant pressure and odd angle, I suddenly realized I was going to finish.

The winery where the wedding took place was a half hour drive from town on winding and sometimes roughly surfaced roads.  Though we positioned the cakes and cupcakes carefully in the back of our Subaru, I still got a little white-knuckled every time N. drove around the bend.  What if, after all that work, we got going a little too fast and one of the cakes slid into the side of the car?  What if, despite the air conditioning running at full blast, it was too hot in the car and the frosting started to slump off?  What if we did get there safely, but I dropped a cake on the way from the parking lot into the building?  I had packed flats as well as a bag of white frosting and a bag of blue in case of an emergency, but I’m not sure I was emotionally prepared to fix any problems that might happen on the way.  Not in a busy winery with the bride and groom’s families darting around setting things up.

Fortunately I didn’t have to.  Three or four of the minis fell over during our ride, but because I’d stuck them in the freezer for a few minutes while I got dressed, their frosting remained hard enough that it didn’t crumple much.

Setup was easy and disaster free.  Some of the wedding party helped carry the precious cargo in from the car, and when every last cupcake was situated on the table, I have to say it looked pretty fantastic.  I made a wedding cake.  And people liked it.

Final thoughts on this massive saga: I will not be going into the wedding cake business.  I would happily make another cake or three for friends who requested it, but I think I’d want to go to at least one cake decorating class first.  I will also not use American buttercream again, except for petal work like I did on the minis.  It’s just too sweet.  I loved the taste of the cakes I made, and the filling was a wonderful, bright tartness (the color contrast was great too), but the buttercream was just achingly sweet, even with the addition of lime juice to the mix.  For my sophomore performance, if I ever have such an opportunity, I would try an Italian or Swiss buttercream instead, relying on cooked egg whites for structure rather than powdered sugar.  As a thank you, J. and H. let me keep all the baking and decorating equipment they bought for the project (thanks again, you two!), so I’m set for all kinds of future practice.

I have to say, though, despite all my moaning and complaining and anxiety, I was really happy with how the cakes looked, and delighted with the reactions I received.  The bride and groom took home the leftovers and ate them the next day, and the one after that.  They were still good.  N. and I ate the trimmings and cupcake guts smothered in leftover filling, and they were delicious.  It was, regardless of the exhaustion and concern during the journey, a monumental success.  I can only thank J. and H. for letting me be such a big part of their day, and wish them all the joy in the world – joy like clouds of powdered sugar, perhaps – for the rest of their lives together.  N. and I love you both.

The Buttercream Project: Wedding Day, part one!

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So…

I made a wedding cake.  For a wedding.  And it was served.  At a wedding.  And no one threw anything at me, or snickered behind my back, or insinuated the bride and groom would have made a better choice by hiring a professional baker.

In fact, several guests, and a few of the employees at the winery where the event was held asked me where I worked, or whether I had a business, or how many wedding cakes I had made before.  I was forced to respond to these questions thusly: my kitchen, no, none.  And they were surprised!  And I, still struggling with the sickeningly sweet baggage of failed buttercreams weighing down my memory, was surprised they were surprised.

But there we were!

Deep breath; here’s how we got there, in two parts:

The wedding took place on a Saturday.  After consulting a professional baker through a friend who is also her sister, I decided to do all the baking on Thursday, the majority of the frosting on Friday, and the detailed decorations and mini cupcake flowers on Saturday morning.  The cakes would still taste fine, she said, and the rewards of working with day-old rather than freshly baked cake are staggering.

My biggest comment about the whole process is that everything takes longer than you expect it to.  And it “takes a village,” as they say.  I knew approximately how much cake I was going to make, but I didn’t really stop and think about how much time it would take to bake, or how much space it would require, or what 36 egg yolks looks like (6 egg whites in each batch of batter = 36 unused yolks).

Anyway, I baked on Thursday, and despite my naïve assumption that I would bake in the morning, tidy up the kitchen and rest in the afternoon, I baked almost all day.  See, butter takes time to come to room temperature, and egg whites take a while to whip to soft peaks, and when you only have one muffin tin you can only make 12 full size cupcakes at a time!  My friend J. joined me for lunch, which was a welcome break (relatedly, crisp, juice-laden pink spears of watermelon are incredible when you don’t have to slice them up yourself, and Stash’s pomegranate raspberry green tea makes a wonderful iced tea that requires zero sweetener), and a bit later M. came by to keep me company while I scooped and poured and measured and mixed and sweated and burned myself only twice!  The entire day!

Completion of the day’s project took some finagling, because as much as we tried to use up perishables to create fridge space, it hadn’t occurred to me how much room it would take to fit one 9”, one 8”, and one 6” cake in there along with 52 cupcakes and 90-something mini cupcakes.  There weren’t enough shelves!  We improvised by double stacking the cupcakes and minis on sheet trays, separating each with upside down drinking glasses to keep them from squashing each other.

Thursday night, I was exhausted.

But that was nothing.

Friday, I got up with excited anticipation and set a pot of water to boil so I could peel the apricots for the filling.  Once the raspberry apricot compote was cooked down to a thick, sticky jam and nearly ready to chill, I would set out the butter.  I knew now it didn’t take an eternity to soften.  This was going to be a breeze.  It would be my best buttercream ever.  Well, as these things often go, it wasn’t, and it wasn’t.  

Apricots don’t like losing their skins.  They hang onto them like some living thing.  By scoring an x in the bottom of each and plunging them into a boiling bath for a minute or so, I thought I would be able to slip them free and naked, like peaches.  Instead, the skin came off in little peels as though they’d been sunburned, and sometimes it wouldn’t come off at all, unless attached to chunks of flesh.  This, then, took longer than I’d anticipated.

When the apricots were finally mostly nude, slippery chunks of ruddy gold, I flopped them into a big stock pot with 3 pints of dewy, just-rinsed raspberries, a light sprinkling of sugar (maybe ½ cup?), and the leftover champagne from the previous day’s baking.  There was maybe a cup of liquid when I began, and I worried this would not be enough.  Half an hour later, as the raspberries broke into fragrant, molten juice, I worried there was too much liquid.

I’ve never made jam, so I don’t know how long it really takes for fruit to boil off its liquid, but at an hour into the process, when I still wasn’t mixing up a batch of buttercream, I panicked and poured off about half the compote into a colander, making the sink look like a murder had been committed.  Too afraid to pour off any more lest I lose the flavor, I plopped the sodden fruit bits back into the pot and boiled a bit longer.  Then, when things still weren’t thickening and I was despairing for time (morning was already almost gone), I made a daring, despairing, hand-wringing choice of desperation and poured two packets of gelatin powder into some water, sloshed it about to combine, and tipped it into my steaming, bubbling, red gold concoction.  Alchemy, do your magic!  I bubbled the whole thing on the stove for a minute or two longer, then turned off the heat, held my breath, squeezed my eyes almost shut, and poured the whole thing into a glass bowl which I topped with plastic wrap and shoved into the freezer.  Now it just needed to chill, and we’d be back in business.  I’d be done by mid-afternoon with plenty of time to tidy up before the rehearsal dinner (I should add that during all the hand-wringing and the despair and the certainty that accepting J&H’s desire to have me bake for their wedding was a mistake, N. was very supportive.  He helped me monitor the pot while I showered and cleaned the bathroom in preparation for out of town guests staying with us while they attended the wedding.  He’s a dream).

My sense of timing, ever prescient, was of course wrong again.

It was 6-8 cups of boiling hot near-liquid.  Cooling takes time!  Cooling takes, as it turns out, a lot of time.

No matter.  In the meantime, I hollowed out the cupcakes to receive the (hopefully eventually) cool filling, and trimmed and halved each pale gold circle of cake so there would be four approximately even layers to each one.  Unable to stand it any longer, I took the butter and mascarpone cheese out of the refrigerator to soften.

What I made, when I made it, was not my best batch of buttercream.  Remember the one from June that I made at my mom’s house?  Remember the sharp edges and beautiful, smooth consistency?  This one was a step backward.  It was clumpy.  It was grainy.  It was so, so sweet.  If I were a professional baker, I would have thrown out the whole thing and started again.  But I’m not.  I’m a home-trained amateur, and though I took into account everything I’d taught myself over the past six months and continued to beat and beat and add more lime juice and beat, at a certain point I had to frost something.  No worries, I thought, it’s just the crumb coat.  Just do the crumb coat, and it’ll be fine.  It was.  It worked exactly like a crumb coat should.  After piping a generous circle of frosting around the top edge of each layer and spooning in a nice puddle of filling, I stacked the cakes as evenly as I could.  I scraped on the crumb coat, catching moist, delicate, champagne-flavored bits, and as I finished each cake I returned them carefully to the fridge so this first all-important layer of icing could harden. 

In the meantime, I filled and frosted the cupcakes with careful swirls.  Contrary to my most recent performance, these did not come out in sharp rosettes.  In fact, a few of them threatened to plump into blobs.  But I administered a careful sprinkling of blue sugar anyway, and shoved them, too, into the fridge to think about what they’d done.

A new batch of buttercream was now required.  And I was out of mascarpone cheese.  As always, this was more of a challenge than I’d anticipated.  It was nearing 4pm, the rehearsal dinner was in less than 3 hours, and I wasn’t done yet.  Okay, just go and buy some more mascarpone.  The grocery store two blocks from us didn’t have any.  The grocery store on the south side of town did, but it was a different brand, a higher price, and a looser consistency.  And cold.  Deep breath.  Beat its brains out.  This batch was, admittedly, a bit better than the first, but still not the smooth creamy perfection I’d achieved in June.  But it was what I had.  I would deal.  It was just frosting.  I could conquer it.

When I finished the first cake – the 8” one, I think – I called N. in to have a look.  “Be honest,” I said to him, “does this look decent?”  We agreed that while it wasn’t great, it was probably passable.  I pressed on to the 9”.  When this one was done, I felt my stomach sinking.  Yes, I had carefully covered the crumb coat, and yes, I had dipped my spatula in hot water and let it glide carefully and quickly over the surface when I was finished to smooth things out, but I could see tiny chunks of butter in the mixture.  I could see where the icing wasn’t absolutely smooth.  There were dents and cracks and, inevitably, the indentation of my knuckle from a moment of carelessness.  I filled that one in.  By the time the 6” cake was done, I was almost ready to cry.  It looked the best of the three (practice is important, people), but I was tired and disappointed with myself and worried that the bride and groom would second-guess their choice.  Still, all that could be done was to carefully deposit them back into the fridge, try in vain to scrub the blue dye from the blue sprinkles off my hands, and go to the rehearsal dinner.  The detail work, which I’d never had time to practice, would have to wait until morning…

The Buttercream Project, part 6

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Buttercream and I are getting more comfortable with each other (and we’d better be, since the wedding is in one week.  One week!).  To prove this to myself, and because my family was clamoring for a taste of the cake I’ve been practicing for so long, I made a batch of wedding cupcakes while visiting my parents a few weeks ago.  My mom acted as sous chef, and we produced a batch together that will, thanks to time slipping away from me, serve as my final practice before I execute the real thing at the end of this coming week.

This practice run was an exercise in slight changes.  Not only did I not have cake flour to work with, or as many raspberries as I wanted for the filling, or enough champagne to add to the fruit compote, I was also working with a new oven, new tools (my mom has an electric mixer, but not a KitchenAid stand mixer, which is what I use at home), and a new friend: I’ve upgraded cameras.  I’m now (mostly) shooting with a Nikon D3100, a fantastic graduation gift courtesy of my folks.  It’s amazing.  I love it.  But I digress…

With regular instead of cake flour, the baking time needed to be increased by a minute or two (science-types: why might this be?  Does it take longer for regular flour to absorb liquids than cake flour?), and in my impatience, a few of the cupcakes fell in the middle and remained a bit gummy.  Initially this upset me, but the wonderful thing about filling is that you hollow out the center of the cupcake, which eliminated any underbaked batter completely.

My mom dipped apricots in a boiling bath so she could slip them easily out of their skins, and she chopped them up in a medium dice to add to the mush of raspberries we had available, water, a small drift of sugar, and a generous splash of dry white wine.  We cooked this down for at least half an hour, then poured off some of the remaining liquid and cooked it a bit more. What was left was the consistency of loose jam, and pleasantly melon-colored.  To be honest, though the combination was nice and the filling tasted fine with the cupcakes, I think it could have benefited from less cooking time and less sugar.

Baked, cooled, hollowed and filled, the cupcakes just needed their final element: perhaps the tastiest nemesis anyone has ever had.  I only let the butter and mascarpone cheese soften for half an hour or so.  In my mom’s summer kitchen, it was in the low 70s and the butter had a slight give at the press of a finger, but was not as achingly soft as it would be for chocolate chip cookies.  This seemed to be the right move.  It whipped together with the cheese easily and well – no large clumps of butter, no separation of fat from liquid.  I added powdered sugar a half cup at a time, as I’ve been doing, this time through my mom’s sifter, an ancient, squeaky-creaky crank-powered tube of tin.  Only one tablespoon of milk trickled in, and then I had a stroke of genius.  The problem with this frosting – the problem I’ve been searching in vain for ways to combat without compromising the texture – is that it’s too sweet.  Sitting in a wicker basket on the counter next to me was a large, juicy lime.  What would happen if we whipped a little lime juice into the frosting?

Revelation.  The good kind.  Just a tablespoon of lime juice and the frosting already tasted less sweet.  Another tablespoon and it was markedly less saccharine, but still no citrus flavor overwhelmed it, and it piped on beautifully in both swirls and curlie-cues.  This is an experiment to be repeated.  In a week.  One week.

Food from Fiction Potluck

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So what does one do, you might ask, as a newly minted Doctor of Literature, unfettered from the everyday proletariat academic concerns?  Well, one grades, and one line edits, and one revises frantically, and frankly, one feels completely different and not different at all.  The school year isn’t over, even though (as of Tuesday, when I upload my “completed” dissertation to our Graduate School’s website) my degree is.  So my daily duties no longer include anxious preparing for the big day, but they still include student emails and lesson planning and reading.

But because they don’t include anxious preparation and last minute rethinking and nail biting about what the committee will think, these days can also include celebrations.  Last night was one such celebration: a party I’ve wanted to have for several years now.  The style: potluck.  The theme: “Food in Fiction.”  Interpretation: bring a dish inspired by or mentioned in a book.  That’s it.  There are so many vivid options in novel, drama and film, and our guests had only to choose one and recreate it in the material, taste-bud-bearing world.

We had tremendous fun, in brainstorming, in cooking, and in sharing the variety of dishes from books we love.  As I mentioned to one friend who thanked N. and I for the great party on his way out the door, this is a party we had to have before parting ways as many of us graduate this June, because only in this company could we feel so self-congratulatory and so excited about immersing ourselves in something so nerdy.

Here are a few of the dishes we enjoyed.  I suggested to folks that they provide the description of the food in question from its source text so guests would know what they were eating and which world it was taking them to.  We had Victorian sandwiches and High Modernism Stew nestling next to a magical realist chutney and a warm wassail of fantasy.  What wandering, all in one house…

Cucumber sandwiches from Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Rorschach’s beans from the graphic novel “Watchmen.”

Boeuf en daube from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

A trio of deviled eggs to breathe life into Hemingway’s thoughts on being hard boiled in The Sun Also Rises.

A wonderfully smoky molasses cake inspired by the molasses-drenched dinner scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

Well spiked butterbeer (you drop in a few marshmallows which, as they melt, mimic the foamy head on the beer) from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Not pictured: (more!) deviled eggs, from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, sautéed marinated mushrooms inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, raspberry cordial from L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and a few sourceless delights: meatballs (Cloudy with a chance of, perhaps?), and a bread, cheese, and hard salami platter.  These were justified by their authors with the claims that “surely there must be moments of literary eating that include these items,” which I was quite willing, given their deliciousness, to accept.  And of course, wine.  If we were picky, we could call this an homage to Hemingway, whose characters “get tight” with abandon, or to Carroll’s Alice, who does imbibe from the mysterious bottle demanding she “drink me.”

I made two offerings: a take on the “green as grasshoppers” chutney so adored by Saleem in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and a pork pie stuffed with hard boiled eggs from Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World.  Both turned out extremely well, but I want to talk about the pie first.

Danny the Champion of the World is the story of a boy and his father.  Without giving too much away, I will only say that Danny’s father suffers an injury almost halfway into the book, and when Doc Spencer, the family physician, brings him home from the hospital to the gypsy caravan in which he and Danny live, Doc also brings Danny a package from his wife:

“Very carefully, I now began to unwrap the waxed paper from around the doctor’s present, and when I had finished, I saw before me the most enormous and beautiful pie in the world.  It was covered all over, top, sides, and bottom, with rich golden pastry.  I took a knife from beside the sink and cut out a wedge.  I started to eat it in my fingers, standing up.  It was a cold meat pie.  The meat was pink and tender with no fat or gristle in it, and there were hard-boiled eggs buried like treasures in several different places.  The taste was absolutely fabulous.  When I had finished the first slice, I cut another and ate that, too.  God bless Doctor Spencer, I thought.  And God bless Mrs. Spencer as well” (Dahl 85-86).

Since my first trip through Danny, I salivated over this savory pie Danny enjoys.  And this party was the perfect excuse to attempt my own.

I found a perfect (and much prettier) base recipe for my pie in the archives of the blog Married… With Dinner.  Though I followed their basic instructions, I made a few amendments for ease and expense.  The key points are as follows:

Use a springform pan.  That way the pie is tall and regal and can sit magically outside a pie plate all on its own.

Roll the bottom crust out large enough to come almost all the way up the sides of the springform (I used storebought crust and it work out just fine), so you can connect top and bottom more easily.

I squashed together a mixture of ground pork, pork sausage, finely chopped ham from a ham slice, salt, cayenne pepper, ground cloves, and black pepper.  I pressed a thin layer of the meat mixture onto the bottom of the pie crust, then laid six hard boiled eggs in a circle through the middle of the pie (regrettably, with ham-covered hands, I did not get a photo of this).  Then I lightly packed the rest of the meat mixture around and over the eggs and sank a bay leaf deep into the very center of the pie.

A traditional English pork pie has warm pork stock poured into a hole in the crust just after baking, which turns into a thick jelly as the pie cools.  This did not sound particularly delicious to me, though I did like the idea of a rich layer of something atop my pork.  I decided on cheese.  I grated about a cup of sharp cheddar and sprinkled it lightly on top of the meat before draping the top pie crust over it.  I cut a little hole in the center of the crust and sliced some steam vents for additional release before baking.

It’s a long baking process (almost two hours), but you are dealing with raw pork, so the cooking time needs to be sufficient.  When the pie is almost done, Married… With Dinner recommends you carefully release the spring on the pan and brush an egg wash all over the top and sides of the pie.  Fifteen minutes more in the oven and this results in a beautiful, shiny golden glaze all over the pie.  It also, in case you are lazy like me and didn’t brush an egg wash over the top edge of the bottom crust to help the lid adhere, creates an after-the-fact glue to hold base and lid together.

I let my pie cool on the counter for an hour or so, then tented it with aluminum foil and stowed it in the fridge until the party started.  It did, after all, have to be a cold meat pie.

It was fabulous.  The meat was nicely spiced and the ham bits shredded in added some smoky, salty variety.  The hard boiled eggs were, indeed, delightful treasures to find, though I admit to over-boiling them slightly so their yolks were not as bright as they could have been.  Still, this is hardly a complaint.  It was like a meatloaf wrapped in flaky, buttery crust, and the cheese was a nice additional flavor and richness.  I suspect this could have been just as good warm as it was cold, but the pie might not have held together quite as nicely.

My second offering was a cilantro coconut chutney.  Saleem, as Midnight’s Children comes to a close, receives a meal from a blind waitress.  He lists:

“On the thali of victory: samosas, pakoras, rice, dal, puris; and green chutney.  Yes, a little aluminum bowl of chutney, green, my God, green as grasshoppers… and before long a puri was in my hand; and chutney was on the puri; and then I had tasted it, and almost imitated the fainting act of Picture Singh, because it had carried me back to a day when I emerged nine-fingered from a hospital and went into exile at the home of Hanif Aziz, and was given the best chutney in the world… the taste of the chutney was more than just an echo of that long-ago taste – it was the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away…” (Rushdie 525).

I found a recipe for a coriander chutney replete with tart lemon juice, lip puckering spice from serrano chiles, and bright, bright green cilantro, tempered by shredded coconut.  The recipe called for unsweetened coconut but I, in my haste, having only sweetened, forgot to rinse it to get some of the sugar off before dropping it into my food processor.  As a result, my chutney was lightly sweetened, but no one seemed to mind that, especially when it was spread onto the pakoras I made.

I searched around online and made a master recipe from a combination of ideas for these pakoras.  Mine included:

4 cloves garlic, smashed and finely minced

2 tsp. each:

Garam masala

Turmeric

Chili powder

Salt

2 cups Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free all-purpose flour (pakoras are made with garbanzo bean flour, and though the Bob’s Red Mill mix is a blend including potato starch, it is composed mostly of garbanzo and fava bean flours, so since I had it, I decided a little break from tradition would be okay.  This is literature, after all.  It’s all interpretation anyway!)

1 ½ cups water

½ head cauliflower, diced

¾ large onion, diced

1 small sweet potato, diced

1 quart vegetable oil

Heat the vegetable oil to 375F in a large, sturdy pot.  I used my dutch oven.

While the oil heats, whisk together the dry ingredients and garlic until well combined, then slowly whisk in the water to form a thick, smooth batter.

Add the diced vegetables and stir to combine.

Drop spoonfuls of the batter (ever so carefully!  Watch out for splashes!) into the hot oil and fry for 5-6 minutes, or until the batter is deeply golden and the vegetables inside have magically cooked.

I got to taste one of these.  It was crunchy and starchy and slightly spicy and wholesome and delicious.  It was vegan.  It was gluten-free.  Topped with the chutney it was fresh and springy and spicy and then gone.  By the time I went back to have another, the giant platter I’d made was empty, and only a spoonful or two of chutney remained.  Pride overwhelms disappointment, in moments like these.  My little experiment was so successful it prohibited me from tasting further.  So I had another deviled egg instead.

Full and happy, we fell into bed at midnight with a sinkful of dishes and a fridge-full of leftovers to look forward to.  It’s like reopening a book to your favorite chapter: whose world will I lunch from, dine from, be returned to today?

The Buttercream Project part 5

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It’s funny, the things we feel we have to do to catch up with life.  Thursday was a big day: I successfully defended my dissertation, the last step on the way toward becoming a PhD in English literature.  So I guess I’m a doctor now, of a sort.  And now that the defense is over, and summer is (supposedly) on its way, I’m trying to find footing in the landslide of other responsibilities I’ve let slide: getting back in touch with friends, grading student work, cleaning up an office I’ll have to vacate in a month or so, and remembering (much to my dismay) an unwritten conference paper I have to present at the end of July.  And yet, rather than doing any of those things, the most important obligation I feel I must fulfill is this one: sharing how my most recent efforts on the cupcake front – now almost a month old – came out. 

The answer is spectacular.  I think, barring any further requests or complaints from the bride and groom, I have hit on THE mixture we’ll be using for the wedding.  And of course, as always, I’ve learned some things too.

Last time I made a floaty, creamy filling that coated the tongue and whispered with sweetness.  This time, I wanted something tart – almost aggressive – to to cut through the sometimes overwhelming clouds of frosting.  I combined 1 bag each frozen raspberries and frozen peach chunks, 1-2 cups champagne, and about ¼ cup of sugar in a small pot, and simmered them together for 20-30 minutes.  I was hoping for a thickened, jam-like compote, but I think there was too much champagne for that, and the mixture stayed fairly loose.  The flavor was great, though – with such a small quantity of sugar, the tartness of the fruit and champagne made the mixture bright and assertive.

When the cupcakes were baked, and both they and this ruby mixture were completely cool, I cut the middles out of the full sized cupcakes and deposited a teaspoon or two of filling into each.  To my relief, despite being thin, the juice of the filling did not bleed through and stain the exterior of the cakes.  Bright red splotches on otherwise pristine ivory-white wedding cupcakes would be disastrous.

When I mixed up the frosting this time, my butter and mascarpone cheese were not as terrifically soft as they were in my last attempt.  Therefore, they creamed together without the fearful separation I wrote about previously.  The edges and ripples of the swirls were still not as rigid and fluted as they are on bakery cakes, but they were still okay.  And when I went to frost the mini cupcakes, I finally figured out what was going on.

I ran low on frosting as I approached the minis, and because I was now out of mascarpone cheese I plopped a half-softened half-stick of butter into my mixer and let it rip.  Immediately, even though I hadn’t upped the ratio of sugar in the mix, this frosting was different.  The flowers, which I’ll say more about in a minute, actually had fluted edges, and the frosting required more pressure to liberate from my piping bag.  Mascarpone cheese, even when it’s cold, is already softer than butter.  It is never going to result in the same consistency as pure buttercream because it is such a soft cheese.  So while it is fine for simple swirls or covering a cake, it is not great for detail work that requires sharp edges or fine points.

As you can see, these are the best flowers I’ve made so far, thanks mostly to the higher ratio of butter to mascarpone in the frosting.  I still wondered why mine did not seem to ripple out of the petal tip I was using the same way they do in the instructional video I’m using, until I remembered – what an epiphany – that I’m left handed.  If you turn a cupcake to the left while you hold the piping bag in your right hand, you probably need to turn the cupcake to the right if you’re going to hold the piping bag in your left hand.  I realized this minutes too late to apply it this time around, but now I know.  That way the icing will emerge from the piping bag in the same pattern as it would for a right handed person. 

Survey said these were the best version I’d attempted yet by leaps and bounds.  The filling was perfect because it provided the right counterpoint to the achingly sweet frosting and the delicately sugary cake.  The flowers looked like flowers, and the blue sugar I found for the full size cupcakes is a deep enough blue to look sophisticated and adult (previous, lighter versions would bit better on sweets for a baby shower than on wedding cupcakes).

Next month, the challenge is piping.  I’ve purchased some beautiful ivory and gray cupcake wrappers that we’ll be using for the wedding, and I’d like to be able to imitate – if not copy – the leafy designs on them as the piped décor on one of the full sized cakes.  This will give me at least one more trial run with buttercream before the big day, and allow me to prove my theory about the mini cupcake flowers.  It will also, assuming Oregon’s weather gets its act together and remembers it’s Memorial Day weekend, give me a chance to see how the frosting behaves in warmer temperatures.

Fingers metaphorically crossed (it’s too hard to type otherwise)!