I lost my cookies. And I forgot about them. But then I found them again. In FudgeTown.

Some months ago my daughter asked me why we never have Oreo cookies in the house and I thought, “You little ingrate.” Then I went and wrote a few hundred words on the subject, and made a plan for Chanukkah. I have since executed this plan. The plan was, Have boxed, storebought cookies make up a significant portion, if not all, of my daughter’s Chanukkah gifts this year.

In the end, it’s about 60% cookies, 40% other stuff (the Big Present being, She got her ears pierced), but every time she pulled out a box of cookies, she was thrilled. The biggest hit was the Mallomars. (Not that there were complaints about any of the other cookies.) I said “These cookies are, like, these are not normal, everyday, box cookies.” My husband piped up, “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never had a Mallomar.” “You HAVEN’T?” I asked, astonished. It’s not like I grew up with stacks of boxes of Mallomars in the house, in fact I don’t think my parents ever bought them at all, but I’ve certainly consumed them, sometime in my 46 years. I said, “Well, now’s your chance.” That night, our daughter opened the package, shoved one into her mouth, declared it the best cooky ever, and handed the box to my husband. He gingerly pulled one Mallomar from the plastic packaging and considered it; then he bit in. “These are good,” he said. “These are really good.” I threw my hands in the air: “Of course they’re good!”

“I could eat a whole package of these,” my husband said thoughtfully, reaching for a second one.

Talking about Mallomars led to my Googling Mallomars, and reading an extensive Wikipedia entry on the subject of chocolate-covered-marshmallow cookies. It was here that I read the name of a cooky company, Burry, that I swear to God I had not thought of in probably thirty years. And yet I was immediately thrown back to the kitchen where we kept cookies on this one long shelf, boxes and boxes of cookies (and also variety pak boxes of Fritos, Doritos, and Cheetos, and tall boxes of cold cereal). Burry brand cookies were a major part of my childhood, along with some Nabisco classics (Oreos), some Keebler classics (chocolate covered graham crackers), and — the best — Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies (Freihofer’s a close second).

So how on earth had I forgotten about them?

It wasn’t that they were so great. They were, in fact, kind of schlocky. But I loved them. I could not, at first remember what the specific cooky was that we used to get; but we live in the era of Google search, and specifically Google Image search. And this is how I had my Moment of Cooky Memory, The Cooky I’d Lost and Unexpectedly Found: the Fudge Town cooky.

Burry’s Fudge Town cookies. Which came in two varieties: “vanilla” with a “chocolate creme filling,” and “chocolate” with a “chocolate creme filling.” They were awesome. They were kind of flower-shaped, with a hole in the middle of the cookies and you could take your finger and pop the blob of filling in the middle right up and eat it separately.

A Google search for Burry’s Fudgetown Cookies results in an appallingly low number of hits: 1230. Even if you spell “Fudge Town” as two separate words, you only get about 15,000 hits. Compare this to “Oreos”(more than 22 million hits). Statistically speaking, almost no one loves these cookies. But I loved them, and though I’d forgotten about them, I will never forget them again. It turns out that I am not the only person who fondly remembered plowing through cellophane sleeves of these things, but I am the only person in my household who remembers them at all. I also remember Mr. Chips, which I think my brother liked, and the Burry’s Best bagged cookies, which were kind of competition for the Pepperidge Farm bagged cookies (like Milanos and others). We never had the Gauchos, the peanut butter cookies — oddly, though my mother and I both love peanut butter, we never ever had peanut butter cookies — but I bet they were really good.

The lost cookies of my packaged-snack childhood will no longer be forgotten. I may use the recipe linked to above to try to recreate them. Maybe not for a while. We’ve not even started the Keebler Deluxe Grahams, or the Oreos, yet, because since I’ve discovered how to make Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies… well: I am easily distracted. My family even more so. Last night we watched a DVD of Two Fat Ladies in which the ladies made a raspberry-strawberry shortcake that caused my daughter to croon at the tv, “I need that.”

If I can find a source for double cream….

January 23, 2017 3

A Holy Grail: How to Make the Entenmann’s Chocolate Chip Cookie at Home, or, Ok, it’s not EXACTLY the same but it is damned close

As a child, we almost never made cookies from scratch. My aunt taught me how to make something called Chocolate Pinks (chocolate cookies with pink frosting) that we found in a cookbook (I should Google it and try to figure out where it came from, and make them again and see if they’re any good). My brother used to make chocolate chip cookies sometimes. But 99% of our cooky consumption was store-bought boxed or bagged cookies. Some of them were wonderful and some of them were pretty crappy but we loved them anyway and some of them we bought and then hardly ever or never got again because they were so uninteresting.

The Platonic ideal of the chocolate chip cookie was the Entenmann’s chocolate chip cooky. They were small, soft, generous with the chocolate chips, and had a real, genuine brown sugar taste and texture to them. They were wonderful. My brother and I could eat an entire boxful in one sitting. But they were expensive, as store-bought cookies went (and go today), and so they were a once-in-a-while treat.

I’ve long wished I could just live on Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. In recent years it’s occurred to me, I’m a good enough baker now, I could maybe try to make cookies that good on my own. But I never thought hard about it. To be honest, I just didn’t believe it was possible. But the other day I decided to give it a roll. I Googled “soft chocolate chip cookies” or something like that and scrolled around a bit and eventually I landed on a website that had a cooky recipe titled “The Best Soft Chocolate Chip Cookie.” The photos — of which there were many — did indeed look more or less like Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. So I took out a stick of butter and an egg and did some thinking.

The list of ingredients was this:

8 tablespoons of salted butter
½ cup white sugar (I like to use raw cane sugar with a coarser texture)
¼ cup packed light brown sugar — I used 1/2 cup brown sugar, which was a big deal I think.
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1½ cups all purpose flour (more as needed – see video)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt (but I always add a little extra)
¾ cup chocolate chips (I use a combination of chocolate chips and chocolate chunks)

What you do is, you preheat the oven to 350°, and you set up a couple of baking trays with parchment paper. Then you soften the butter so it’s almost liquid, and you cream the butter with the sugars in your mixer (or do it by hand, whatever, I don’t care). I used 1/4 more brown sugar than the original recipe called for, which I think was a significant change — I really wanted that brown sugar taste to be strong. Add the egg (I used an extra-large egg) and the vanilla. The original writer says that if you beat this for too long it toughens the egg and makes for a stiff cooky; I have no idea if this is true, but I’m reporting it just in case.

Then you mix in quickly and completely the dry ingredients, which you’ve whisked together (the flour, baking soda, and the salt). Then you add the chocolate chips. The dough will be a very soft, cohesive blob in the mixing bowl.

Take the dough by the teaspoonful in your hand and roll nice little balls. Put the balls on the baking sheet about an inch apart from each other, and press them down ever so slightly to flatten the tops a tiny bit. Bake these cookies for about ten minutes. The tops should look dry, but alarmingly close to uncooked. You will think, “Damn, these are still raw.” Nothing should be golden brown — you know how some cooky recipes say “bake till edges are golden brown”? Sometimes, that’s a good thing, that’s what you want. In the case of the soft chocolate chip cooky, it means you have gone too far and have made a cooky that will not be soft or chewy once it’s cooled. It means you have wasted your time and effort and ingredients. We will not discuss it further.

Let the cookies set on the baking tray for a few minutes to cool before you transfer them with a spatula to a baking rack. You can eat them now that they’re not scalding hot, the chips will remains melty for a while yet.

These are without any doubt in my mind the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever made. My husband, who is not a worshipper of the Entenmann’s chocolate cooky, but knows it well, said that it was absolutely clear these were the best possible approximation of the Entenmann’s cooky as could be produced by a home baker. I baked two dozen of these cookies (the original recipe, which tells you to make the cookies big, produces between 9 and 12 cookies, according to the author) and they lasted all of two days. Writing about them right now, I wish I had about five of them to eat all by myself, and I would make more, except I made a chocolate cake yesterday and I’ve got to be responsible about these things.
But as soon as the cake is gone, I’ll be making more cookies.

January 17, 2017 0

Baking on Demand: or, How One Tired Hausfrau Rose to the Challenge Two Times in Two Days

It was late December and that meant there was a lot of baking on demand to be done, at least for me. My husband had no such pressures to meet; he was busy thinking about what he might make for Christmas dinner, which is a whole ‘nother story.

In years past, I’ve been involved with cross-country Holiday Cooky Exchanges; this year, all the regulars were too depressed to get revved up to do it, so that was off the table. But even this year, friends still hosted holiday parties, and that meant that guests still had to come up with lovely little tidbits to bring to add to the festivities. I don’t mind; I’m all for bringing things to festivities. But I was definitely a little blah about it, in terms of planning. I mean, I knew we wanted to go to these parties, and I knew I would have to bring something, but I was not feeling inspired, culinarily speaking. There was no one thing that I was thinking, “oh, man, I’ve GOT to try out those [fill in the blank] cookies on those people! They’re gonna love ’em! It’s gonna be awesome!”

No, this was a situation where we had one party on Saturday and one on Sunday, and in each case, the morning of the event, I awoke with no sense whatsoever of what I was going to bring. It’s really not like me, to be honest. I had moments of doubt: would I come through? And what would I come through with, exactly?
In the end, I began my work by thinking carefully about what ingredients I had on hand and what I’d have to do to turn them into something special. In each case, time would be tight: I’d have a maximum of three hours in which to commence assembling ingredients, baking, cooling, and icing. What’s more, I had to be working in cookies — cakes would not do. These had to be finger-food treats. (I could have gone a savory route, but that would have sent me into same-old-same-old territory — cocktail meatballs or pimiento cheese — and I just didn’t want to do that to my friends.)

In the case of the Saturday event, I wanted something fairly simple to put together but a little quirky. The hosts are people who like good food; they cook, by which I mean they cook ambitiously. I wondered what cheery herb or spice I had that I could throw into shortbread — because shortbread is a fast thing to make, and calls for very little more than flour and butter and sugar. Did I have anything kind of special just sitting around? I remembered the baggie full of candied rosemary that I’ve had sitting in my “sweet” drawer for two years, and thought “That’s it. Rosemary shortbread.”

And so I threw this together in about 15 minutes.

Take a lot of candied rosemary, and grind it in a food processor all by itself (just leaves, removed from stems); I wound up with about 1/2 cup of pulverized candied rosemary, which was probably 8-9 stems of rosemary, but I didn’t count before I started so who knows.
To this, add 1/2 cup granulated sugar; 1 3/4 cups white all purpose flour; 1/4 cup cornstarch; 1 tsp. vanilla powder. Combine in processor and then cut in one stick of butter. Combine, pulsing the processor, until coarse meal forms. Press into 8×8″ baking pan lined with parchment paper; bake at 325° until golden brown (about 30-40 minutes). Prick holes in dough with a fork before putting in oven, if you can remember to do so; I only remembered about halfway through baking, and everything turned out just fine. Cut shortbread in pan while still warm, then remove to rack to cool.

The resulting shortbread is a little sweet and is slightly perfumed with the rosemary. It’s definitely a “sweet” and not a “savory” but the line could certainly be blurred. If you left out the sugar and upped the salt a little, and maybe added some pepper, you’d have a really twisty-turny, probably very delicious snack. (The candied rosemary is always going to mean “sweet” but rosemary is such a flexible flavor, I wouldn’t put it past me to make another batch of candied rosemary just to give a pepper-candied rosemary shortbread a whirl.)

I gave a piece of the rosemary shortbread to my husband and a piece to my child and they both gobbled them down happily. Then my daughter went off to a birthday party for one of her associates.

About ninety minutes later, I lined up the stubby rosemary shortbread soldiers in a little blue Pyrex tub, covered the tub with tinfoil, and we piled ourselves into the car. We picked our daughter up at her friend’s birthday party and then went to the homey-yet-elegant Christmas party a couple miles away. There, two tables held a vast array of Christmas-y treats: a ham, numerous dips and crackers and cheeses, and a bowl of punch. I imagined that my daughter would graze here happily, but it turned out she was quite full up on party good already; she instead sat down in a corner chair with a coloring book and occupied herself nicely, completely fried, for about half an hour. Then we became aware of two things: 1. Our girl needed to sit down and eat a proper meal and 2. She desperately needed an early bedtime.

So we revised our plan — not that we really had a plan — and made our excuses and wrapped ourselves up in our winter coats again and tumbled back into our car. We were driving down Fountain Street when I observed that we were mere yards away from a favorite old restaurant, House of Chao. “We could stop and get Chinese food for dinner,” I said. There was no good reason to do this; we had good food at home. But my husband immediately grasped the appeal of this plan and turned onto Whalley Avenue. We had a hot, cozy meal; my daughter nearly fell asleep at the table, she was so tired (but she declared the food delicious); and we drove home. It was a very cold night, and we were all exhausted and what we really wanted was to be in our pajamas and curled up on the couch in blankets with our stuffed animals and perhaps a cat or two. By 8.30, this was achieved, and I wondered how the rosemary shortbread had gone over, but wasn’t too concerned. To be honest, it was a “what’s done is done” situation. If no one liked it, then no one liked it, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The hostess of Saturday’s Christmas party was present at the Sunday afternoon party. So I got my little blue Pyrex tub back — empty. This was heartening: if no one had liked them, she had at least been kind enough to empty the tub out so that I wouldn’t be faced with humiliating leftovers. “I hope people liked them,” I said. “I was kind of going by the seat of my pants.” She told me that people devoured the cookies, and wanted to know the recipe. Well, Gracious Hostess: see above. I thanked her for returning the little tub to me: it’s not a valuable piece of china, but I am very fond of it.

“What did you make for today?” she asked me. The tables in the kitchen were, again, covered with platters and trays and bowls of homemade goodies, some sweet, some savory. Some things were easily identified (guacamole) and some things were mystery tidbits (tiny quiches that held some savory thing entirely unidentifiable by sight). I laughed and said, “I made something else up,” I told her. “I made these little vanilla poofs with a brown sugar glaze. They’re on a white tray with little blue flowers on it.” I glanced back at the table where the tray of little vanilla poofs with brown sugar glaze was…. nearly empty. Maybe five biscuits left. Out of three dozen made. You could really see the little blue flowers. As we stood in the kitchen doorway blocking traffic, a guy to my left said, “You made those little biscuits? Man, those are good.”

I hadn’t started the day feeling so optimistic about whatever it was I’d be bringing to this party. I knew I had certain parameters, and a lot of flexibility. I needed finger food, but it could be sweet or savory; I needed something I could assemble handsomely and carry the daunting distance of one block; and I needed something that would be enjoyed by adults and children. I wanted to stay away from nuts (one worries about allergies at parties) and I wanted to avoid being deliberately weird. (This was not the time to try a pepper-and-candied rosemary-shortbread.) Remembering how, years ago, I brought soup and biscuits to a friend’s family on this same block, just a few houses down, when she’d broken her arm and couldn’t cook for the family, and how the four year old in the house had been enchanted by the biscuits (which she had called “butter muffins”), I decided to make a fancied-up biscuit. Like shortbread, biscuits are made out of basically nothing, and can be gussied up in countless ways.

And so I reached for the flour bin and the butter and got to work. Soon we had several dozen 1″ vanilla biscuits baking. My husband expressed disapproval, saying I was getting too experimental with something I was planning to serve to friends and total strangers; but I was undaunted.

I took 1 3/4 cups of white flour, 1/4 cup of cornstarch, 2 tablespoons of baking powder, and 1/2 cup of white sugar and sifted them together. I whisked in about a teaspoon of vanilla powder. I cut in nearly a stick of butter, and set the bowl in the fridge to stay cold while I whisked together my liquid ingredients: I killed the last of a carton of heavy cream, maybe 1/4 of a cup of cream, blended with whole milk to make one cup of liquid, with a teaspoon of vanilla essence added. Basically, I made biscuits, but with more sugar than I’d normally use, and a double dose of vanilla.

I preheated the oven to 400° while I added the liquid to the dry ingredients, and combined them. The dough was rather sticky and delicate, and I had to flour the countertop heavily to be able to roll the dough out. But I managed, and using a 1″ round cutter I got almost four dozen little vanilla biscuits onto baking trays (about 15 onto a tray, as I recall). They baked nicely, if lopsidedly (totally my fault, I must have been sloppy when cutting). When the tops were just golden, I took them out of the oven, and when they had cooled, I took a misshapen one and broke it in half. “Here,” I said, offering a piece to my husband and a piece to my daughter. “Mmmmm!” my child said happily. My husband was less impressed, and said they were good, but he clearly didn’t see the point. “I’m not done yet,” I said. I went back into the kitchen and made a glaze. I melted a couple tablespoons of butter in a pot and added to it about four tablespoons of brown sugar. I stirred over medium heat until the sugar began to boil, and kept stirring to get the sugar to dissolve. I poured in a couple tablespoons of milk and kept stirring, over lower heat. I cooked this fairly carefully for a couple of minutes — I wanted to be sure this was as smooth as I could get it, but I also didn’t want it to boil over and make a huge mess — and then I turned off the burner and let the sugar and milk cool down. About five minutes later I stirred in about a cup of sifted confectioner’s sugar, and I whisked and whisked and whisked it until it was absolutely smooth. I lined the biscuits up on cooling racks that had waxed paper underneath them, transferred the glaze into a measuring cup (so I could pour more easily), and began to pour the glaze over the biscuits.

This was a messy process, and it did not result in beautiful, evenly, perfectly covered tops of all the biscuits, in part because so many of them had slanty tops (I reiterate: this is my fault, not the fault of the recipe). Some biscuits had more glaze than others. I’m going to be honest: These little vanilla poofs were quite homely.

However, the glaze hardened nicely, and by the time I could assemble them on a tray without dinging the glaze, the biscuits looked cute, if a little uninteresting. (Someone with more of an interest in the aesthetics would have added a contrasting-color fillip, like bright green sugar crystals dappling the glaze, or tiny sprinkles shaped like snowflakes, or something like that. Candied violets. I do not have the time or patience for this kind of thing.) Nonetheless, I knew these things would be a pleasure to eat, and I called my husband over. “Have one of these,” I said. He said dismissively, “I already had one, it was good.” I said, “Yeah, but have one of them NOW.” He obediently took a glazed biscuit from the tray and popped it into his mouth. “Oh,” he said. “Now, this version, I approve of wholeheartedly.”

He ate two more biscuits before we headed out to the party. I wrote up a little card explaining that these were vanilla biscuits with brown sugar glaze, taped it to a toothpick, and jabbed the toothpick into one of the biscuits. When we got to the party I set the tray down and stopped paying attention. Maybe half an hour later, I glanced at the tray — I was looking to snag a little artichoke and spinach quiche thingy — and half of them were gone. About an hour later, there were maybe five or six biscuits left. And then, by the time I was telling my daughter that it was time to put on her shoes, it was time for us to go home, there were none left.

I discovered this when someone asked me, as I was wrangling my daughter into her coat, and wondering where my boots were, “What did you bake for the party?” I said, “These little vanilla biscuits. Oh! I need to get my tray actually to bring it home. I’ll just move whatever’s leftover onto another tray.” I located my boots, set them just outside the door, and I went into the kitchen and looked for my tray. It was on the table, empty. The little card was lying there, but the vanilla biscuits — they were all gone. Only thing left on the tray was the toothpick with the card saying “vanilla biscuits with brown sugar glaze,” and the little blue flowers printed on the tray.

So it appears that the vanilla biscuits with the brown sugar glaze — which my husband described as slightly too experimental sounding — were a huge success. Assuming no voracious dogs in the house: Any little treat where the tray is left empty after 90 minutes is a success.

January 14, 2017 0

How to Cook Pasta: By Request

The other day my husband and child and I were in the car and our daughter was bemoaning the fact that she doesn’t know how to cook. We pointed out that she can barely see into pots on the stove — she’s not tall enough, and I hold that if she has to stand on a chair to see what’s going on at the stove, she’s not tall enough to safely cook — so it’s not really something we expect of her at this point. “I can’t even make noodles,” she lamented.
“Well,” I said, “That’s not true, really, you know exactly how to make noodles.”
“No I don’t,” she pouted.
I said, “Sure you do. What do you do, you boil water in a big pot, and you put in the noodles.”
“But I don’t know EXACTLY how to do it,” she said.
“Why don’t you tell her how?” suggested my husband.
And so I began a monologue. “First you get a big pot and you fill it about halfway or two-thirds with water. You need a lot of water, but you don’t want to fill it all the way to to the top, because then the pot is too heavy to lift. Then you put the lid on the pot and you put the pot on the stove and you turn on the burner to the highest heat. Then you wait for the water to boil.”
“How do you know when it’s boiling?” my daughter asked.
“Well, you can hear it,” my husband said.
“You can hear it, and also you see steam shooting out from under the lid,” I said. “And when you lift the lid to look inside you’ll see the water’s all bubbly, big bubbles rolling up to the top of the pot, not little bubbles. So then you take your pasta and you dump it in and you stir it right away. You have to stir it right away or else it’ll stick together and you can’t unclump it later. And you need to stir the noodles once or twice while they’re cooking.” My husband nodded.

“So you let the pasta boil. Sometimes it cooks really fast and sometimes it takes a little while. Spaghetti is usually about nine or ten minutes.”
“How do you know how long?” asked my daughter.
“The box usually tells you. It depends on the shape. Chunk-style shapes take the longest time usually, maybe ten minutes. The shortest time is angel hair, which cooks really fast, in about three minutes. Really fast. So you have to keep an eye on it before it turns into mush.”
“So then,” I continued, “You get a colander out and you put it in the sink. Before you put it in the sink, though, you should make sure you don’t have dirty dishes and stuff sitting in the sink. Make sure the sink is empty before you put the colander in. You put in the colander, then you go and stir the noodles again, and you pull one out to test it that it’s cooked. If it’s cooked the way you want it, then you take pot holders and you carry the pot to the sink and you pour the water out through the colander, and you let the noodles fall into the colander. Then you put the noodles back into the pot and put on your sauce and you’re done.” I thought for a minute. “Sometimes, before you drain the noodles, you want to dip a measuring cup into the pot to save some of the cooking water.”

“How come?”
“Because sometimes you want the cooking water to help make your sauce right. Like when you’re making a pesto sauce, if it’s too thick to stir into the noodles, you can thin it out with the cooking water. Also it helps to heat up the sauce a little bit, so you’re not just dumping cold-from-the-fridge pesto sauce onto your nice hot noodles.”

“You should write this down,” my husband said.

So I did.

Postscript: one regular reader, who doesn’t cook much, asked me in a private message, “Aren’t you supposed to put salt or oil or something into the water to keep it from boiling over?” I remember that people talk about these things all the time.
I can’t believe I linked to a Smithsonian Magazine article about cooking, but there it is: when I Googled on the subject, this was the first thing that came up, and it wasn’t such a bad recap of how to make pasta (though clearly the commenters find it lacking, and if I were to write it, I’d do it differently (duh, look what you just read), but whatever).
Anyhow: There is a school of thought that says you should add a bit of oil to the pot to prevent boiling over: I hold that if you don’t fill the pot too much, this ceases to be a concern, and that doing this is basically a waste of good oil and makes for a nastier pot to wash up without much benefit during the cooking process.
As for the salt: the reason to add salt has nothing to do with water boiling over, but is about adding flavor. Some people really like salt a lot. I find that I am easily overwhelmed by salt in food, and see no reason to add it to pasta water. If I do this, I am very likely to feel that the finished, sauced dish is ludicrously over-salted, because I’ve got my sauce salted to the degree I like. (If my husband and child want to add salt, as they often do, that’s their business. I don’t like that they add salt, I find it insulting, but it is their choice, and I do understand that.) This is particularly an issue with sauces that have a lot of Parmesan cheese in them, because Parmesan is really salty.

So I don’t salt my pasta water.

The real issues with making pasta are 1. don’t let the noodles stick together while cooking and 2. don’t overcook them. The fact is, you CAN make good noodles in a minimum of water (you can, if you want to, cook noodles the way you’d make risotto, though you’d have to have a weirdly shaped pan if you wanted to do it with spaghetti — short, chunk-style shapes, though, and orzo, this is not a problem). But your average spaghetti-with-meatballs dinner, follow my instructions and you’ll be fine.
Not you are planning to make spaghetti and meatballs or anything.

January 2, 2017 2

Sour Cream: No Sour Grapes

A few months back I read a new Jewish cookbook — The Gefilte Manifesto — which had in it instructions for making your own sour cream. It seemed to me that it would be rather pointless to do this, but on the other hand, it would take almost no effort to make the attempt and see if it might possibly be worth doing. So a few days ago I did as instructed. I took a cup of heavy cream (the best cream I could find, which has no added thickeners or other mishegas in it) and a half a cup of buttermilk (again, the best stuff I could find) and I put them in a jar with a lid and I shook them together, hard, for a minute. Then I left the jar on the counter top and waited.

Eventually, this stuff turns into sour cream.

It took about six hours for me to have the nerve to open the jar and see what would have developed inside. It turned out to be a combination of things. The top inch or so was thick, fluffy sour cream that tasted lovely, and the rest of the jar was filled with runny sour cream that seemed like a good useful product to me, but not to anyone else in the family. When we had latkes for dinner, I was the only one who’d use this sour cream. In other words, this was an interesting experiment, but not one that is likely to be often repeated unless I am willing to figure out a way to thicken the product (I glean that this is easily done with unflavored gelatin, but do I really care?). It turns out that I know a woman who makes her own sour cream all the time. She admits it’s not the same thing as storebought, but loves it on its own terms; I tend to think that I’m in that camp. It’s not “sour cream” as we’ve all been raised to think of it, but it’s a very good thing if you accept it for what it is.

In the end, I worked out a process in which I’d use the top layer, then shake the cream again and let another top layer develop, and so on and so on. It was not unlike the way when you toast marshmallows, you can toast the outside, slip it off, eat it, and then re-toast the marshmallow, and take off the “skin” and start over and over again until you’ve eaten the whole marshmallow. But it was silly, if I was the only one going to eat the stuff. I decided, after a few days, that I’d be better off just using the sour cream up in some recipe, because homemade sour cream doesn’t last very long. No preservatives, don’tcha know.

It was time for me to set up a loaf of bread, and I decided on a whim that it could not possibly hurt to use the sour cream as the primary dairy product in the bread. I’m talking about my usual pain de mie, the bread we use for breakfast toast and sandwiches and all that. Instead of adding dry milk and regular milk to the dough, I just threw in the last of the sour cream (it was about one cupful), and prayed. The dough was rather slow to rise at first, but after the first knocking down, I knew everything would be fine. I did my usual three rises, and when we baked the bread we wound up with this incredibly, ridiculously, tender loaf of bread that has been almost entirely consumed after two days. People keep coming up with excuses to eat toast. My daughter’s been asking for toast with butter and capers to have as her afternoon snack. My husband’s been eating it toasted with cream cheese and sliced green olives. It’s nearly gone.

I’m almost wondering: is it worth it to make a second batch of this failed experiment just so I can use it in more bread?

December 29, 2016 0

Chapter Three: The Knives are All Right.

As someone who cooks food with depressing regularity, and, therefore, uses knives — sharp, scary, dangerous knives — on a daily basis, I couldn’t go indefinitely without decent, workable knife storage. Storing them in a drawer: not a viable option, according to both my husband and me. There was no point in hoping that my husband would somehow miraculously come around to the idea that a magnet strip on the wall was the best way to store our knives. The knife block was a nuisance and a failure; the (ahem) novel Book-Based solution was interesting, but as implemented by me, a failure. I had to devise a countertop solution that wouldn’t make me or my husband crazy and would still be a safe, reliable, reasonably attractice way to store the knives. A Google search about DIY knife storage — which showed me the Book-Based Solution — also showed me a Vase-Based Solution. This seemed like a good avenue to pursue; and by this point, I was up for anything. So I began keeping my eyes peeled at tag sales, looking for vases that would work to hold knives. What I needed was at least two, and probably three, glass vessels that didn’t curve in at the top (as so many vases do). They needed to be wide-mouthed vases easily washed, that would be big enough to hold even wide blades of chef’s knives.

People are always getting rid of vases when they move, probably ’cause they’re a pain in the ass to pack. I knew if I just roamed the streets of my neighborhood, I’d eventually find exactly what I wanted. And then one day a Facebook post in a group I’m part of brought me what I needed.

It’s a local group called Curb Alert and it lets folks know when someone’s put some cool item out on the street free for the taking. Living in a college town, this is quite common. Someone’s moving and they can’t take all their stuff; they’ll put out boxes of things — often kitchen equipment, but it could be anything — books, baby gear, stereo equipment pieces of furniture — tape up a sign saying “FREE STUFF” and move on. Anyone who’s lived in this town has benefitted from this system: it’s an easy way to get rid of things you don’t want, and it’s an easy way to acquire things you might actually need. Yes, there is furniture in my house that’s come to us via the curb; and if you’ve eaten at my house, you’ve probably eaten from pots or plates that I’ve acquired in this manner. I realize that many people would find this appalling. I truly don’t give a crap. It’s a beautiful little ecosystem and I love it.

So when a hipster couple across the street from me began to post photograph after photograph — Free stuff! Come and get it! — I hustled out to the sidewalk. It was late July. This couple had lived in their apartment for several years, long enough to acquire all sorts of housewares, but they were moving to North Carolina, via U-Haul, and just couldn’t take everything with them. I walked across the street and within about two minutes I had snagged three clear glass vessels. Two of them were vases. One of them was some kind of special mixology carafe marketed by St. Germain — an odd shape, rather narrow but quite tall — and though I didn’t really want an ad for St. Germain in my kitchen, I knew immediately that it would be the perfect thing to hold my bread knife. I took home my three pieces, practically chortling at how easy this was, and I washed them and dried them. I took a piece of very old, soft, flannel (a pillowcase that had gotten holey, which I’d converted into rags) and folded up small squares to line the bottom of each piece — I didn’t want to have the tips of the knives hitting glass — and then I filled them with white rice. (White rice is cheap enough, I reasoned, that even if this experiment failed, it wouldn’t be much of a loss. Furthermore, since I’d cleaned the vessels so well, there wouldn’t be any reason I couldn’t actually cook the rice, should we decide against the Vase-Based Solution.)

The glass vases are very different in shape and so it was easy to determine which knives would go into which piece. The tallest, plainest one was perfect for the three chef’s knives; the St. Germain decanter was for the bread knife; and it turned out the short, squat one was very happy to host my numerous paring knives and the one oddball small serrated knife I like to have around. Installed in these containers, only one handle stuck up so high that I could not nestle the vases on the kitchen counter under the shelf where we keep our spices. Sadly, the handle of my left-handed bread knife is too long to allow the knife to fit comfortably in that space (the handle is about 1/2″ longer than the other bread knife’s handle); but I don’t mind keeping that in a sleeve in the kitchen drawer, as I only use it once a week at Shabbat. But nine knives out of ten fit well: I declared the initial set-up a success.

I’ve now had the knives in the Vase System for four months. There are a number of good things about this admittedly odd knife storage system. One is that it doesn’t take up space in the same way the knife block did. It’s space, to be sure, but the way the space is allocated bothers me less. For example: when I wanted to wash the whole countertop (as I do after working with some really messy dough, for example), moving the knife block with the knives in it was always kind of scary. With these vases, it’s easy. Each vase can be easily lifted and set down somewhere else, and I don’t feel like I’m risking lopping a hand off by accident doing so.

In the case of the short knives, I don’t have to move the vase at all to get out the knife I want to use; and with the taller knives, I find pulling the decanter out to get a knife is no big deal. I also like that this system keeps the blades in a very dry place. I wash and dry my knives by hand but any residual dampness in a wooden handle will be absorbed by the rice, or evaporate (with the knife block, I was always fretting to myself about wood possibly getting wet and staying wet and getting gross as a result).

The more aesthetically-aware types who use the Vase Solution and want to have the rice look like something other than rice will find that there are many ways to fill the vases and have this system work. Some people use dry beans — which come in many attractive colors and look cute. Some people use bamboo skewers instead of foodstuffs, which makes a great deal of sense, and I will probably acquire a couple hundred skewers one of these days to allay my concerns about rice and mealworms (we’ve not had any trouble, but we are always on the lookout). One could dye the rice to make it match one’s kitchen decor, but that’s a little too too for me to bother with.

I can easily see that most people would not find this an acceptable knife storage system. However, given my strong feelings regarding how unacceptable the conventional options are, I really don’t give a hoot. And people who are, like me, endlessly annoyed by the more conventional options might give this one some thought. Because, as I say, it’s been a few months, and so far so good. This is a huge improvement over the daily misery I felt every time I looked at the knife block — which, I admit, I kept, out of a nagging sense of fear that I’d need it again if my other knife solutions failed.

I am confident enough about the vase solution that one of these days I may post my own Curb Alert on Facebook: Knife block out on the sidewalk, yours for the taking.

December 19, 2016 0

Knife Storage is a Pain in the Ass. Chapter 2: In Which the Hausfrau Got Slightly Crafty

The hausfrau is not the sort of person who mucks around with hot glue guns or sews cunning aprons from old pillowcases. It would be nice, but whatever. But back in May, a friend on Facebook brought to my attention a knife storage system that I thought even I could handle making. The idea was, you’d take a few old, fat books you didn’t need to read anymore, and use them as knife blocks. I immediately grasped the sense behind this plan, and thought, “I’m gonna give that a roll.” I went and got three very old cookbooks, used damp string and rubber bands to tie them shut very tightly, and started jabbing knives into the text blocks. For the shorter knives, the paring knives, this system worked very well. But, I wondered, was I doing damage to the knives? (The resale value of these books was zilch; I wasn’t going to use valuable books for a project like this. The knives, on the other hand: I didn’t want to deal with having to replace knives because I’d ruined them on a stupid pseudo-crafty kitchen project.)

I went to my computer and emailed a nice young man in the neighborhood who is a professional knife sharpener. His name is Harper. I met him last year or maybe two years ago now, when I heard that he would be sharpening knives at a farmer’s market. I had, at the time, recently realized that my knives were all in really unforgivably awful condition. We have an electric knife sharpener, and I like it, but it was clear to me that most of my knives needed professional help. I brought Harper most of my knives, hoping for the best, and was more than happily surprised. Every knife he worked on was a pleasure to use afterward. With these rejuvenated knives, I got more attuned to using my sharpener a little more regularly, and I started sending as much business as I could toward Harper’s stand at the farmer’s market.

Harper is a gentle eccentric, it seems to me — I expect his family worries about him — but he is someone I’m always happy to run into around the neighborhood. I think he goes to Yale, but can often be seen hanging around with his wonderful dog Lola. I don’t know how he came to be a knife and tool sharpener, but he’s definitely good at it, and, I learned, he is friendly about it. I know this because I’ve chatted with him many times, on the street. When I got this idea about the book knife block in my head, I sent him an email. I was afraid he might think I was insane, or a moron, but I figured, “You know someone who has the knowledge you need access to; just ask him, maybe he’ll write back.” I wrote, basically, “Dear Harper, Is this book-knife block thing an incredibly stupid idea, or a perfectly ok idea? Is it gonna hurt the knives? Is there some fatal flaw I’m not thinking of? Please advise. Love, The Hausfrau.” I was a little more formal than that, actually, but not much.

To my surprise, Harper wrote back pretty quickly. He assured me that the issues I had asked about — would the ink possibly harm the blades? would the act of putting the knife into the text block repeatedly dull the blade? — would not be problems. We had a nice little back and forth, agreeing that some book pages would inevitably get crushed or slashed by moving the knives in and out of the block; we discussed the question of top-heaviness, and whether or not the “block” should be put through a bandsaw to angle the bottom of it slightly and make it a little more stable. He even offered to help me out with this, which was really nice of him.

My husband came home and saw the “knife block” on the counter and was, to put it mildly, skeptical. He didn’t actually say, “That’s an incredibly dumb idea,” but he clearly believed it was.

We agreed to live with the system for a little while to see how it would work out. After about six weeks, I had feelings on the matter; if my husband did, he never voiced them (which means he did not approve, but had better things to pick arguments about with me). The problems were subtle but definite. For one thing, the widely varying lengths and sizes of our knives meant that sometimes a knife would fit nicely into a book; in fact, one old book held most of the smaller knives quite nicely. But for chef’s knives, it would have required a lot of books — and, more significantly, a lot of counter space — to make the system work well. Also, the books had to be pulled out from their home on the counter before I could pull out the knives, which was a nuisance. I discussed with Harper the idea of sawing off the bottoms of the books to angle them slightly and make them sit in a fashion more like a traditional knife block; he offered to saw the books for me since, for some reason, he has easy access to a bandsaw. But it just didn’t seem worth it to me. I decided that the system was cute but for a household with very limited countertop space, too flawed. I decided to continue my hunt for a better knife storage system, and thought back to the time I had spent doing Google searches for terms like “DIY Knife Block.”

One website showed me a kind of knife block that wasn’t a block but was some kind of silicone gizmo that looked like very tall astroturf; you slid the knives into the “blades of grass” and it supported the knives safely. This seemed like a clever idea, but I didn’t relish the idea of having to clean out such a gadget (and it was, in the end, no more than that — a gadget, and not a DIY one at all).

A similar idea held a little more weight with me. This was a concept in which you take a tallish wooden box without a lid, fill it with bamboo skewers, and keep the knives by sliding them in among the skewers. Depending on how nice the wooden box is, this could be a rather attractive way to handle knife storage. But I didn’t want to think about acquiring a handsome wooden box, and, I knew that I’d need one hell of a big wooden box to accommodate my knives, and I didn’t want any one thing that big on my countertop. (That’s part of what I hated about the original wooden knife block to begin with.)

It was the next concept that stuck with me. The next concept involved using vases and raw rice or raw beans. I thought, “Vases and rice are easy to obtain. Furthermore, it requires zero skill to set this up. Note to self: start poking around tag sales for cheap vases.”

I kept the knives in the books on the countertop, but secretly began my hunt. August is one of the big tag sale seasons in my neighborhood: I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long to put my plan into action.

December 9, 2016 0

The Zabar’s Catalog, The King Arthur Catalog, and the Devious Plan in Which Zingerman’s Will Play No Role

As you can imagine, our household receives several food-related catalogs in the mail. I don’t mean food magazines — we actually don’t have any subscriptions to any food magazines right now. I mean catalogs: lists of food items we can buy from various specialty purveyors. We are very loyal to the good people at King Arthur Flour, and Penzey’s, for example. We also get catalogs from Zabar’s and Harry and David (though we’ve never once placed a Harry and David order; I’m honestly not sure why we get their catalog) and I will even count the Vermont Country Store as a food catalog because half the time the things I order from them, in my infrequent orders, are edible.

With the Vermont Country Store, if I’m placing an order, it’s either edible or it’s soap.

We recently received a food catalog I hadn’t seen in a while — the Zingerman’s catalog. Zingerman’s is a famous delicatessen out in Ann Arbor and I’m sure it’s a pleasure to go there but in all the years I’ve looked at their wares in the catalog, I’ve never once been tempted to order something.

Now, Zabar’s: Zabar’s is another thing entirely. The Zabar’s catalog is a situation where 80% of the pages have something I’d happily order and consume in one sitting. I would not sniff derisively at a package of smoked belly lox; I would be perfectly happy to consume their babka, even the cinnamon one; a dozen bagels? Absolutely.

But Zingerman’s. They have all kinds of fancy anchovies and bacon and bread and cheese and none of it rings any bells for me. Ok: the bacon, I guess it’s obvious why I wouldn’t want to order that. But if they had some duck bacon, I might well spring for that: we like duck bacon. But they don’t have any.

And this year, I was opening the catalog with a very open mind, because we agreed that the gifts we give to each other at Chanukkah and Christmas this year should be food-oriented. The idea is that the gifts we give each other will get eaten up or used up, and not sit around gathering dust for the next ten years becoming something I eventually have to throw out or repurpose. This concept was devised when our daughter, now eight and a half years old, ripped the King Arthur Flour catalog from my hands while I was sorting the mail a few weeks ago. “I need a pen,” she said.

“You need a PEN?” I asked skeptically. But I handed her a pen. She promptly settled herself down at the dining table and began circling things. “What is this,” I demanded.

“I’m marking the things I want,” she said. And boy howdy, did she. She wanted mixing bowls and she wanted cooky mixes and she wanted a bread box and she wanted a butter dish and she wanted various kinds of flour. I pointed out that we already own two butter dishes* and a bread box, and that I already have all the types of flour I need, and that with these things, we had no use for cooky mixes. She marked baking pans (mostly USA brand) and a Thermapen. I said, “We have a Thermapen, you’ve seen me use it a million times.” “But this one’s RED,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.

If we ordered everything from the King Arthur Flour catalog that my daughter circled, we would have to install a second kitchen somewhere in our apartment to hold it all.

But it inspired what would be a much larger conversation about gift-giving this year. And when the Zabar’s catalog arrived a couple days later, my husband and child both paged through it thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t mind getting kippered salmon for Christmas,” my husband said.

“I like cake,” my daughter reminded me.

I’ve been trying to get into the spirit of things. I ordered for myself an expensive (i.e. costing more than $3.50) bottle of tomato vinegar. Tomato vinegar is something I’ve been using very very sparingly because my first bottle is nearly empty and I don’t want to run out of it entirely. (I bought it myself because I am positive no one in the family would think to get one for me as a gift, but it definitely qualifies as a quality gift item.) I’m hatching a plan for my daughter’s Chanukkah presents — I think I have an excellent concept that will be very easy to execute — and I’m slowly devising a list for my husband. If everything goes as I think it should, then we will certainly have some objects sitting around, six years post-Christmas and Chanukkah, but the majority of our holiday loot will be used up, long-since enjoyed, a happy memory.

The best part, really, is that the shopping will be, for once, just as much fun as the giving — even for my shopping-averse husband. I think. Fingers crossed. (Note to husband, if he’s reading this: we could use some new potholders, badly. Those, if they’re nice, I won’t mind if they’re still hanging around the kitchen six years from now.)

*at the time I wrote this piece, we did own two butter dishes, one of which, regular readers know, has come to an untimely end thanks to the goddamned cats.

December 8, 2016 0

Knife Storage is a Pain in the Ass. Chapter One: in which we cannot agree on anything, and I bitch about knife blocks.

Problem: if you have a kitchen, you probably have sharp knives that have to be stored somehow.
Problem: if you share a kitchen with someone, they probably feel that the way you want to store the knives is unacceptable, and the way they want to store the knives is equally unacceptable to you.

I am of the school that believes that knives are best stored on the wall, on a span of magnetic strip. For many years, I lined strong magnets on the wall of the fridge that was adjacent to the short span of counter next to our stove. I found this a completely wonderful system for many reasons. It kept the knives at hand; it kept the knives out of the way of children and other people who shouldn’t handle knives (only grownups could reach this place); and it was just a neat, clean way to store items that would otherwise take up precious horizontal storage space, of which we had essentially none. We had almost no counters in our kitchen — I mean, there were 18″ of counter space next to the stove, and that was that — and similarly very little in the way of drawer storage. Magnets on the side of the fridge struck me, to be honest, as quite ingenious.

My husband felt differently. He essentially felt that storing the knives this way would result in all of us being maimed or killed.

When we moved to our current residence, we began a large-scale discussions that continued for two and a half years as we designed the kitchen we planned to build. “Where are we going to store the knives?” My husband initially expressed interest in one of those special knife-drawer designs people seem to like, but I found it fussy and a needless expense. What’s more, I don’t like the idea of having to open a drawer to get at a knife. When, at an estate sale, I found a knife block for $5, I bought the knife block and lugged it home. “When the kitchen is done, we can use this,” I said. My husband looked pleased. Though it was awkward to fit our ragtag collection of knives into this block, it could be done.

But the knife block presented numerous challenges from Day One. For one thing, when I got it home from the estate sale, I felt honor bound to clean it. It was dirty, after all, and I was going to put my knives in it: it would obviously be ideal for it to to not be completely fucking filthy.

Cleaning a knife block is not the easiest thing in the world. I mean, it’s not that cleaning it is precisely difficult — it requires less skill than cutting a good jack o’ lantern — but it requires patience to do it thoroughly and well. I used a lot of soapy water, and vinegar, and rags, and pipe cleaners. Years of accumulated layers of dust and grease had definitely left their marks on this thing. But I got it clean. I took it out on the balcony to rest in the sunshine, and then I let the damn thing sit and sit and sit for several days before I decided the wood was dry enough.

Then, we arrived at another inevitable problem: it took me about half an hour to figure out how to arrange our motley knife collection in the limited slots and spaces of the block.

I managed to set it up so that the system was good enough. No one would be automatically harmed as the result of this knife block sitting in our kitchen. But it wasn’t great. There were only two slots that could hold chef’s knives, and we have three such knives that we use regularly. There’s a total of eleven knives that I want to have right at hand all the time. The knife block could store about half of them comfortably. I managed to get ten of them in safely, but it took some creative thinking. (The 11th knife, my left-handed serrated knife, I settled with keeping in a sheath in a drawer under the workspace.)

I spent probably an hour fiddling around with all the knives and the block. It was a process not unlike arranging one’s furniture in a new apartment. I learned that the chef’s knives couldn’t rest in the block the way knives always do in photos, with the edge of the blade facing down, handle ready to be grabbed. Our knives, placed just so, became wobbly and dangerously unbalanced; the handles were not designed in a manner that fit well with this block. I figured out that if I turned them so the edges of the blades faced up, the knives in vertical slots would be relatively stable, and that what’s more, the edges would stay sharper that way. I was able to nestle two chef’s knives into one vertical slot in this manner; it wasn’t perfect, but it was okay.

The horizontal slots in the block, which is where I’d’ve kept the chefs knives, ideally, were too narrow for those blades; instead, the relatively narrow-bladed, serrated bread knives went there. All the little paring knives went willy-nilly, two to a slot, in the other horizontal spaces, and the spot where the honing steel should go was where I kept an old favorite, a skinny little serrated knife that looks like junk but slices tomatoes and onions into perfect thin slices really well.

So the knives were housed, if imperfectly; but we lived with it. Over time, the top of the block collected dust, and the whole thing annoyed me as it took up a surprising amount of real estate on the kitchen counter. The system worked, technically, but I hated it. I hated this knife block, as I have always hated all knife blocks, and I never stopped thinking, “What would be a better way to handle this situation?”

After three years, someone posted an image to my Facebook wall. It was a knife block someone had made out of old books. I looked at the picture and I began to think.

September 19, 2016 0

Purple Rain in Ocean City: A Celebration, a Lament, a Learning Experience

I imagine that most people, when packing to spend a week in a rented apartment in a Mid-Atlantic resort town, do not make a point of carefully selecting knives, silicone spatulas, a good can opener, and a pair of serious kitchen scissors to take with them, along with a Microplane. They also wouldn’t pack a set of four mixing bowls and a stock pot, and they absolutely wouldn’t bother with two 9” cake pans. That is their business; that is their God-given right.

But I have, in 2016, done these things. And I have not regretted it for a moment.

We were in this same apartment last year, sharing the apartment with a close friend from our college days, G., and her husband and their children. Last year when we came, we had no idea of how the kitchen would be equipped; we expected to be able to cook sort of normally, and tried, but kind of failed. Part of it was, I admit, total apathy on my part, but a lot of it was due to a sense of frustration with the gear in the kitchen. The big stock pot we cooked spaghetti in, to serve with Cincinnati chili, smelled deeply of boiled crab. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world… but…. it wasn’t ideal. Especially for our crew: We don’t all like to cook, but we all like to eat. And it matters to us if we boil spaghetti and it tastes like old crab and Old Bay. We are not pleased by such things. It doesn’t feel like exciting Fusion Cookery to us. It feels weird and not at all pleasant.

So this year, I said to my husband, we weren’t going to screw around. Not only would we eat proper food in the apartment, at least some of the time, and not just live on crappy boardwalk food like French fries from Thrasher’s and sub-par gyros; but I also had plans to bake a birthday cake for my friend’s oldest child. This girlchild is not a little girl like my daughter: she is in her 20s, an adult, and someone who doesn’t require lots of fuss at her birthday, but I feel she deserves a little fuss. Her mother has two little boys, now, aged 5 and 7, and it always strikes me as possible that her firstborn might a little bit shorted in the birthday-celebration department, now that she’s got these two much younger little brothers. Maybe she doesn’t care. To be honest, she probably doesn’t, and would rather spend her birthday with her boyfriend anyhow. But I care; I wanted to make a cake for her. So I planned ahead.

A digression, but an important one: Some months ago, shortly after Prince died, I was in a Target in North Haven, Connecticut, with my friend Eliza. This is as novel to me as going to Harrod’s. While there, I discovered something that probably most Americans in my demographic already knew, which is that someone out there has been marketing Purple Rain cake, in a boxed mix, for some time now. If I watched TV and went to supermarkets more often, I’d’ve already known about this. But I don’t, and I don’t, so I didn’t. “What the hell is this?” I gasped to Eliza, who laughed. I insisted on buying it — its price had been slashed to something wretched, like $1.25 — and said, “I’m gonna bring it when we go hang out with G. in Ocean City this summer.” I posted to Facebook about this cake mix, and there was much discussion of preserving it in a kind of archival way, but it dawned on me that the obvious thing to do was to bake the Purple Rain cake as A.’s birthday cake, which we would be celebrating at the end of August. I put the box into the cabinet where I keep baking supplies and said to my daughter, “When I pack for us to go to the beach for a week, do not let me forget to pack this.”

August came. I began to organize in earnest. G. and I exchanged dozens of emails regarding packing lists: what would we need for the beach, for the kitchen, to increase our general comfort. “Don’t forget laundry detergent,” we reminded each other. I remarked that because I’d been given a wonderful knife roll as a birthday present, I’d be able to safely and easily pack good kitchen knives. “Also some other things we’ll want in the kitchen,” I said. “Like a can opener that works, and a cheese grater that won’t cut our hands open, and stuff like that.”

I plotted and plotted. I set aside a stock pot to take with us. I debated taking a Dutch oven but decided against it (should have brought it! Next year). I pulled out two cake pans. I packed groceries (boxes of pasta, various shapes; canned beans; canned tuna in olive oil; canned olives; capers; a small block of Parmesan cheese). We made dozens of good meatballs and put them into strong-sealing plastic tubs that would be packed to travel in a cooler stocked with ice packs. I packed dishcloths and tea towels. I packed a cutting board. I packed my little silicone-coated kitchen tweezers, because I thought they might come in handy, though even I admitted it was a little crazy.

I remembered to pack things that had to do with going to the beach, too: I packed an ancient Indian print tapestry to use as a beach blanket and I packed cornstarch to use when we had to rub sand off our children. I packed Solarcaine. From our domestic Health & Beauty department, I packed a thermometer (natch) and a bottle of cold and cough medicine just in case (and yes, it came in handy).

So we arrived in Ocean City on Sunday afternoon and I unpacked our things and G. mocked me (though she had also packed an astonishing amount of stuff, including several cans of chick peas, some cups of instant macaroni and cheese, and a whole watermelon). My husband mocked me as well, but I moved serenely through the kitchen knowing that I would have what I would need for the week.

Naturally, setting up the kitchen for the week required a trip to a supermarket. Some things, you don’t want to pack ahead when you’ve got a six hour drive to your destination. “We need milk, we need fruit….” To bake the Purple Rain cake, we’d also need eggs and a bottle of oil. G. and I spent less money than I had feared we might, on that grocery run, which I felt was a testimony to how well we had planned ahead. I admit, it wasn’t good that we had to buy a pound of butter and a bottle of vegetable oil — I could have handled that better — but as oversights go, these are small failures. We did remember to buy a can of ready-made cake frosting to decorate the cake. (I was not willing to hand-whip some kind of frosting together; besides which, a Purple Rain cake seemed to be the kind of thing that deserved some equally terrifying frosting to go on it. I mean, you wouldn’t make Swiss meringue to go on top of a Purple Rain cake, would you? No, you wouldn’t.)

It was self-evident that a can of lurid purple frosting would be just the ticket for the Purple Rain cake. “AND it comes with Funfetti®!” G. pointed out gleefully. We grabbed a box of little white birthday candles (but no further decorations, as we saw no need to gild a funfetti’d purple lily). We drove back to the house feeling pleased with ourselves.

Monday mid-day, I started to assemble the Purple Rain cake batter with a kind of cockiness (“I bake cakes all the time, this’ll be a snap!”) that was quickly dimmed by apprehension as I realized that I was going to have a lot of small technical issues. It turned out, for example, that we had no measuring cups. We had no measuring spoons. It hadn’t occurred to me that the kitchen wouldn’t have these things and, astonishingly, it hadn’t occurred to me to pack them. I had silicone tweezers, but no measuring spoons. Worse, while the oven could be turned on, I had no ability to gauge how hot it was really getting: a huge disadvantage when baking.

The recipe called for, as I recall, three tablespoons of oil and one and a third cups of water. I eyeballed these amounts using a kitchen tablespoon and a teacup. I felt I was likely to get it roughly correct, but I worried, nonetheless, because I knew I was going to be baking these things in the wrong size pan anyhow; that is to say, I was, in a sense, screwed before I’d even begun. “It’ll be fine,” I assured myself. “I can totally do this shit.”

Totally doing this shit is what I did, and G. and I spent a lot of time laughing at how it got done, but boy did I not have much faith in that cake. You have to mix up the cake batter in one big bowl (if combining by hand, they recommend 450 strokes, which is a lot). Then you separate the batter into two bowls.

To one bowl, you add purple dye that comes in a tiny packet about 1/4 of the size of a takeout ketchup packet; it is a tiny packet of what is surely purple toxic waste. (Photo taken by G., who observed that it looked like I’d drawn little teeny purple-featured ghost.)

You stir the purple dye into that one bowl of batter. You want to have one bowl of uniform purple batter and one bowlful of pristine white batter. (The white batter is white: it is white like Marshmallow Fluff, weirdly beautiful) Then you carefully pour the batters into the buttered-and-floured (in my case, buttered and cake mix’d) cake pans in such a way that concentric circles of cake batter form a beautiful bullseye in the pans. This is easier said than done. Actually, had I been at home, with my full batterie de cuisine, it would have been a snap, and I’m tempted to give a cake like this a roll once we’re home (using regular cake batter, maybe I’d add chocolate to half the batter). But under the circumstances, it was all a little challenging.

But we did it. And I took those 9” cake pans and I put them in the oven and set my phone’s timer for 30 minutes. I washed some dishes, and then went to relax on the porch for a bit.

About eight minutes later, G. came out to the porch. “I think the cakes are burning,” she said.

“Shit,” I said eloquently. I looked at my phone’s timer: I was supposed to have another 22 minutes to sit around being lazy. “That can’t be right.” I went into the kitchen and opened the oven. G was saying, “I think the oven runs really, really hot.” I tipped a knife several times into each cake, and the things were fully baked. It made no sense. I’d set the oven to 350° but it was like they’d baked at 450°, and boy howdy they were done. “Well, ok then,” I said. I then realized I had no cooling rack on which to rest the pans. I opened a cabinet wondering what I could find that might be a decent substitute, and I found a stack of those wicker “plates” that always seem to take up residence in summer-resort houses. I never knew what they were for, but pressed for a solution to my problem, I used them as cooling racks for the cake layers, and felt very clever. (G. tells me that people use these to lend support and strength to cheap paper plates. Now I know.)

I let the cakes cool for a good long while before attempting to pry them from the pans.

I figured that trying to tip out cakes that weren’t cool enough would be a recipe for disaster in what I already felt to be a tenuous situation. What I didn’t count on was that getting these things out would lead to disaster pretty much no matter what. I whacked and whacked the bottoms of those pans; I ran knives around the edges; I whacked and whacked some more. Both layers fell from the pans, eventually, landing fairly neatly on the waiting plates, but in each case, the bottom crust remained in the pan. The good part of this was, I could confirm visually that the cakes were, indeed, both swirled purple, and baked all the way through. The bad part was, the layers were all fucked up. What you see here is one layer of cake, turned onto a plate, and its bottom crumb, still firmly attached to the baking pan. It wasn’t an ideal situation. And I still had to frost the cake.

The usual way to frost a cake involves putting down what Cake People call a “crumb coat,” a thin coating of frosting that seals the cake. You do this after you’ve trimmed your cake layers so that they’re not domed anymore. In my case here, it was all folly. The cake layers were so thin and mangled there was nothing for it but to pop open the can of frosting and just have at it. I peeled as much cake “skin” as I could out of the pans, and placed them carefully where they belonged, and then I just started plopping tablespoons of frosting in strategic places. If I was careful, I reasoned, I could spread a thick layer of frosting atop one messy layer and carefully flip the second sad layer atop that, and then I could pray.

So that’s what I did. The frosted cake was far from a thing of beauty, but it was purple.

The Funfetti® didn’t hurt us, but I’m not sure it helped.

That evening, after dinner out at a restaurant, the two families came back to the apartment. The younger children were wildly excited about the cake. The 26 year old was politely amused. G. and I managed to light 26 tiny white candles without burning anyone or anything, and we sang “Happy Birthday” really quickly so as to avoid having wax melt onto the purple frosting — it seemed important to move fast, since the truth was we didn’t know if the frosting itself would melt, either.

Then we cut into the cake.

The crumb was so tender the slices of cake could barely be called slices. Doubtless if you use an 8” pan this isn’t so much of a problem — but the shallowness of the layers and their precarious condition meant that this was a cake that should really have been doled out with a large serving spoon. But the kids ate it up, and asked for seconds (denied). The leftovers were packed up and sent home with the birthday girl when she left the next day (to have her proper birthday celebration in the company of her boyfriend).

The cake itself tasted fine. It had a very soft, fine crumb, and was very sweet, but it lacked a distinct flavor; perhaps this is just how white cakes are. I have to admit, I’m not an expert on white (or purple) cakes. The frosting definitely had that synthetic tang we all know and love. I think the adults found it amusing, but not a cake they’d sneak slices of as the night wore on… and the fact that we had leftovers to pack up supports this judgement.

The rest of the week, when we needed dessert, we did what any self-respecting person on an ocean boardwalk would do. We bought ice cream and caramel corn and fudge. Some of us gorged on deep-fried Oreos…. but we can discuss that later.

Note for future rented apartment vacations:

What I didn’t pack that I should have: measuring cups and measuring spoons; an oven thermometer; pot holders; a cork trivet or two; perhaps a cooling rack, if I’m going to be stupid enough to bake a cake. And, most importantly, ingredients to bake and frost a decent cake.

September 1, 2016 2