Happy Valentine's Day!

Hope everyone's was sweet.

More Birthdays, No Seeds

My goodness, could this really be the last day of the May Blogathon? Why, it's gone by just like that.

Well... no it hasn't. But it's been interesting. Between this and my regular blogging gig for Readerville, the month has felt at times like boot camp for Writing Without the Muse. Which is a book that I in fact own, but have I found time to reference it once in the past 31 days? I have not. Flying, as ever, without the net. There were times when I sat down in front of the computer and the well felt absolutely dry, but it mattered to me that I do this, and it made for an interesting trip. I'm a big believer in pushing things and going on the proverbial journey. It's been a fun one. I'm glad it's over, though.

Today is my birthday. I've now officially missed the window of time for getting that "45" shoulder tattoo, which is probably a good thing.

I'll always regret it a tiny bit, though.

My day was extremely chilled out. We drove out to a little diner I like in Tarrytown, 20 minutes away, so I could get eggs benedict -- not a diner staple in my part of Kingsbridge, sadly. Did the week's grocery shopping, puttered in the yard. I never got around to planting the new seeds, but I weeded, cleaned up the raised beds -- thank you, neighborhood cats of Summit Place! -- and did some needed thinning. That included the lettuce and spinach, which was getting crowded and leggy, and that meant we had the most unbelievably fresh salad with dinner. There's nothing quite like eating something that was alive very recently, and the greens were crisp and melting at the same time.
For my birthday dinner I made spaghetti and meatballs, one of my favorite meals ever, along with the aforementioned world's freshest salad and a nice bottle of red wine. All eaten off the gorgeous placemats my friend Margarita crocheted me, and in good company to boot.
Dorrie got a new collar and a new chewie, and all was well in her world too.
On the way to the grocery store and back I was blasting one of my favorite old cds in the car, Squeeze's Argybargy. There are a lot of albums that rocket me back to my teens, but that one never fails to put me in a state of extreme good cheer. So I drove and sang and drummed on the side of the car out of the open window and exposed the good people of the north Bronx to their dose of early 80s music for the afternoon, and it was all in all a very good birthday.
All in all, it's been a very good month. Thanks for bearing with me.

Two Things I Made This Week

1) A cake for my mother’s 80th birthday party, which – trust me – tasted better than it looks here. In fact, it looked a whole lot better than it looks here – the fine art of food photography continues to elude me. This one was taken with no flash, in broad daylight, and it still has the cheesy gleam of bad porn. (Not that I’ve ever seen bad porn, mind you, but I’ve heard things.)

It was a Chocolate Mandarin cake, just one dense layer of good-quality semisweet chocolate with lots of orange zest – and also ground toasted almonds and candied ginger, which made for a really great complex taste – covered with a glaze made up of nothing besides more good chocolate, heavy cream, and Cointreau. It was a hit.
2) A little (5x7) watercolor for a fine young man whose age can still be reasonably calculated in weeks.

Which, all things considered, makes this a good week.

I am a Master Baker

So I put off making my Christmas cookies until the last minute yet again. I like to lay claim to the theory that the closer to Christmas and their shipping dates I bake them, the fresher they'll be -- you can't work too far ahead with cookies. But really, I was just doing other stuff. I did get them all baked off over the weekend, which was a start.

But the gingerbread cookie contest over at Baking Bites lit a bit of a fire under my ass. The deadline was the 18th, so Tuesday night I dutifully left a boringish work party early and came home to frost cookies. Frosting cookies... it's both rewarding, creative work and a deeply onerous, endless slog that hurts my back, dries out my fingers, and puts me off sugar for days. But: rewarding and creative, yes, and people do love them. They're a very personal gift that takes a lot of the guesswork and frivolity (not to mention the spending of money) out of the holidays.

And whereas production-lining anything gets old after the first ten or so, the dancing dog cookies modeled after my sweet little Milo somehow never get tiring in the same way. There's a devotional aspect to them, certainly, and watching the cheerful little guys take form, and -- sorry, this is corny -- their personalities come out, never seems to get boring.
But damn they do take forever. I finished up and the cookies were dry enough to photograph at 15 minutes to midnight. Talk about cutting it close.
And... I won! A copy of The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, which yes I have coveted, and a groovy t-shirt. But also, you know, the recognition and the props and that happy feeling that no matter how minor an achievement it is in the greater scheme of things, it's still my achievement. It was a blip on my radar, not to mention an excellent compliment from Nicole, who is a hell of a baker in her own right. I've gotten many fine recipes and ideas off Baking Bites.

So, because I know y'alls are going to ask me -- yes it's my own recipe and no it's not a secret and here you go:

GINGERBREAD COOKIES
(amounts for doubling (red) and quadrupling (green) are in parentheses -- I have to color-code them because I'm easily distracted and tend to screw up. I usually use a double recipe, but sometimes a smaller or larger batch is appropriate)

1-1/3 cup all-purpose white flour (2-2/3) (5-1/3)
2/3 cup whole wheat flour (1-1/3) (2-2/3)
1 tsp. baking soda (2) (4)
½ tsp. baking powder (1) (2)
4 oz. unsalted butter, room temperature (8) (16)
1 cup packed brown sugar (2) (4)
2 tsps. ginger (4) (8)
1 tsp. cinnamon (2) (4)
¼ tsp. cloves or allspice (½) (1)
½ tsp. salt (1) (2)
chopped zest of 1 lemon (2) (4)
1 egg, room temperature (2) (4)
3/8 cup molasses (¾) (1½)

1. Sift together white flour, whole wheat flour, baking soda, & baking powder.
2. Cream together butter, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, cloves or allspice, salt, & lemon zest.
3. Add egg & beat well.
4. Add molasses & beat well.
5. Add dry ingredients in 3 batches, mixing thoroughly after each addition.
6. Refrigerate dough at least 1 hour.
7. Bake cookies at 325° 5-7 minutes (check after 5).

ROYAL ICING
2 egg whites (4) (8)
2 cups sifted confectioner’s sugar (4) (8)
1/8 tsp. cream of tartar (¼) (½)
½ tsp. vanilla extract (1) (2)
food coloring or paste colors
lemon juice for diluting

1. Beat egg white to soft peak consistency – use copper or stainless steel bowl, glass if you have to, but not plastic!
2. Add sugar, cream of tartar, & vanilla. Beat to stiff peak consistency.
3. Add coloring in small amounts. Dilute, if necessary, with small amounts of lemon juice to achieve flowing consistency.

Thankful for:

Gideon and Ivan, November 1989
Gideon and Ivan, November 2007
Ingredients: TurkeyAnd friends, and love, and food, and all that good stuff.
(I can haz turkey NOW???)
(I haz had LOTS of turkey.)

Scraps/Sweets

Doesn't this look appetizing?

Sometimes the stuff I throw out is prettier than the finished item. (It was mango salsa. Good but not transcendant.)

Also: I finally sent my friend Lysne, the person who organized my big excellent gardening care package, a box of gingerbread cookies to say thanks yet again. She took the photo -- looks like they made it reasonably intact. I sent a batch to my friend Eileen in Colorado for a belated birthday present as well.

Not food porn... more like food saltpeter

You know, I do take pictures of things other than my pets. It’s just that I’m such a crappy photographer, and the pets have that photogenic thing going on that will save just about any lousy picture, because they’re just so damned cute. And, OK, if I’m going to be really honest here, Jeff took most of the photos I’ve used for this blog anyway. Credit where it’s due; he has a good eye and a steady hand and the animals just plain act cuter for him.

I mean, I cook all the time, and I bake, I make these fancy-ass custom baked goods, but I cannot take a good food porn shot to save my soul. I have got to be the world’s worst food photographer. Part of the problem, I think, is that I do 90% of my cooking when it’s dark out, necessitating the use of the flash – and flash + food is just never very appealing. No matter how good dinner looks on the plate, no matter how pretty the cakes or cookies, they always look vaguely unsavory in my pictures.

Case in point: This cake I did for my dear friend, the wonderful artist Meridith McNeal. She has a terrific show up at Figureworks, in Williamsburg – it’s up through May 27, so all New Yorkers and those within a reasonable radius should go (yes, I know no one actually reads this blog, but I can dream) – and I agreed to bake her a cake for the party after the opening last month. A themed cake, of course, based on her artwork – so being basically a lazy girl I picked the simplest one, which turned out to be the piece she used for the mailer so rather than lazy I just looked clever. It’s good when that happens.

Here is her piece:

It’s a silhouette cut from vintage wallpaper, which doesn’t begin to do justice to its essential beauty and elegance but that’ll give you a little context, anyway.

And here is my cake:

It was chocolate, with chocolate raspberry frosting and a layer of raspberry jam in the middle. Over that I used a thin layer of egg white mousseline buttercream to color and decorate with, and then after a night in the fridge I cut a silhouette down to the chocolate frosting. It came out rather nicely, for a quickish labor-of-love job.

But see how lousy my picture is?

OK, granted, it’s not particularly well set off by the tablecloth, which was lovely in its own right but not as a backdrop. And there’s the flash factor. And the couple of glasses of wine factor. But still. I really need to figure out how to shoot food, especially my baked goods, just a bit better. Maybe I need a fancier camera, which isn’t gonna happen anytime soon… mostly I think I need to think a little harder about using what I’ve already got.

At any rate, I can always go back to taking pictures of the animals. Or using Jeff’s and taking credit for them. Maybe I’ll just get him to take my food photos.

Cookies

Yes, well. I'm not the world's most prolific blogger. But I made some nice cookies this year.

(Inspired to post by Habeas Brulee's Sugar High Friday #26: Sugar Art.)