Last night, an interesting thing happened.

I baked gingerbread and because the recipe was for a pan that was 9″x2″ (round), a shape I do not have, I wound up baking two cakes, just to use up all of the batter without overfilling one pan. The cakes came out just fine, and we cut into one of them for dessert. My husband and child tucked into it happily, and I ate a slice myself, thinking, “Well, this is fine, but, who cares.” I’m just not a gingerbread person. I love the way it makes the house smells while it’s baking, but then I have no interest in eating it.

So I went onto Facebook last night and posted, “Who lives nearby who likes gingerbread?” My thinking was that I would deliver the “spare” cake to whoever dibsed it first. Within ten minutes, there was a long thread, and within a couple of hours there were about ten people who made it clear that they’d be more than happy to take any superfluous gingerbreads off my hands.

Today, thinking this over, I have formulated a question, a pondering, really, about my baking. Because — if you want the truth — I don’t think I’m a particularly good baker or cook. I don’t think my results are reliably stunning; I know for a fact that they are seldom handsome. (My family knows that my cakes always taste better than they look.) So why do all these people I know clamor for my spare cake?

I think I know the answer. I think we’ve reached a state where, as a culture, anything that is homemade is perceived as being better than the same thing, storebought. Or bakery-bought. Or made from a mix. And that’s just not fair: many excellent bakeries out there, folks, and they could probably turn out gingerbreads about a thousand times better than the ones I made yesterday. But most of us don’t want to find the great bakeries; we don’t want to pay for the great bakeries, even if we find them; and we really, really don’t want to spend the twenty minutes it would take to assemble a gingerbread and then the hour it would take to bake the cakes. And: we’ve been trained to believe that Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines are ok in a pinch, but they can never be truly great. (Which may be true, but even so — isn’t a Betty Crocker birthday cake as loved as a homemade from scratch cake? Sure it is.)
So my cakes don’t have to be Platonically wonderful. They simply come off as better than Betty Crocker because they are not Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines, out of some kind of weird snobbery.
It’s kind of not fair to Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines, to be honest. I love Duncan Hines brownies. Love ’em. Or, I did, the last time I made them, which was probably twenty years ago. Maybe I should buy a box and try them again.

I’m now thinking about vanilla cake frosted with Biscoff spread — why can’t I whip Biscoff with confectioners’ sugar and maybe some cream? No reason. This will, I am sure, be excellent. And I will get to work on it, as soon as the gingerbread is all gone.

I do believe that tastes change, despite the fact that we all know someone who’s reached the age of 47 and has yet to eat a green vegetable, something we all assume children will outgrow. I believe that tastes can change because in my own little life, my tastes have changed. For example, as as child I did not like:

the taste of alcohol plus chocolate; the taste of fruit plus chocolate; rum; lima beans; bananas; plums; oranges; cilantro.

This is just off the top of my head. And I am sure you’re thinking, “what kind of child is even aware of consuming rum? what the hell kind of childhood did you have?” But the answer is, rum was a flavoring in a lot of baked goods I remember from my childhood, and… I never liked those desserts. It was always a real bummer, because, you know, here’s some rich, dark, chocolatey looking thing, mmmmmm yum, but then NO: something was WRONG, and that something was: RUM.

In the last few years — say, the last five years (and I’m about to turn 45 this year, so I’m quite an adult now) — I’ve noticed that many of the things I would or could not choke down are things that I will in fact cheerfully buy and cook. For example, I will buy and even eat bananas. I will buy and eat lima beans. I like plums, on a hot summer day especially. Cilantro, I will go out of my way to come up with a meal gilded with some lovely fresh cilantro, if I notice a particularly hearty bunch of it in the grocery store. But there are other flavors that I still cannot handle. Orange, for example. I don’t know how people get up in the morning and drink orange juice. It would make me cry.

A serious stumbling block for me is alcohol in desserts. Rum in particular turns out to still be a real thorn in my side. I discovered this the other day, when I made a lovely birthday cake for my husband.

When prompted to tell me what kind of cake he’d like for this birthday, he suggested a very moist chocolate cake with some kind of rum flavoring involved, frosted; I decided to interpret this by making a dark chocolate cake and then sandwich the layers together with a rum-flavored caramel frosting. I put all of this together, and it looked lovely; I made a very clear, plain rum sauce, too, to serve, warm, with the cake. And my husband was quite pleased. I, on the other hand, found the frosting and the sauce just terrible with the cake.

And I was crushed, because in recent years, I’d really begun to warm up to rum. When making a pot roast, I will sometimes deglaze the pot with dark rum. I’ve come to really like a couple of rum drinks, even. So what went wrong? I had such hope! But no: rum is not for me, I have come to realize, when combined with fruit or chocolate. In other words, it isn’t merely the thing itself that my mouth finds upsetting , it’s the combination of the thing with some other thing that I may or may not love. In the case of chocolate: no fruit or alcohol should be combined with chocolate. I will be upset. I will eat a Chunky bar, but that’s about as close as I get to wanting chocolate and fruit together. (And, incidentally, that’s one of the few times I’ll accept raisins at all.) Rum and chocolate is, for me, non-negotiable. (Orange and chocolate is my worst nightmare, though: my mouth puckers up just thinking about it.)

Clearly, my daughter feels as I do, too. She was so excited to eat the birthday cake, but her face fell when she dug into the frosting. She asked me, very politely, but very sadly: “What kind of frosting is this, Mama?” I couldn’t lie to her. “It’s rum and caramel, sweetie… if you don’t like it, you can scrape it off.” She ate it, but unhappily, saving the cake for last.

I realize that it’s unsophisticated-seeming of me to not like these things. But we like what we like, we don’t like what we don’t like. So, ok, I’m never going to really enjoy Bananas Foster. It’s all right. I’ve made real progress on cilantro and lima beans. I like rice pudding! I even like tapioca, a foodstuff that, when I was a child, just…. scared me. I mean, tapioca is freaky, freaky stuff. But I’ll admit it’s good… so long as it’s not cooked with, say, rum… or orange….

In the last few years I’ve arrived at a conclusion regarding chocolate cakes, which I cannot prove scientifically, because I am not science-y, but it goes like this:

The best chocolate cakes all call for boiling or at least hot water. Could be hot coffee. Could be plain water. But there is liquid in the cake (not just milk or buttermilk) and it is hot.

Several times now, I have made recipes that call for this. Inevitably — and in every single case, I am not exaggerating — the resulting cakes are rich and moist (sorry, those of you who hate the word moist, but it’s called for here) and very, very chocolatey. They are perfect chocolate cakes.

The first cake I made a lot that called for boiling water was Aunt Velma. Aunt Velma is, as has been written elsewhere (https://longspaghettinight.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/aunt-velma-the-little-black-dress-of-chocolate-cakes/), is a perfect chocolate cake. It looks like a pain to make, but is in fact easily assembled in about fifteen minutes. I made it for various birthdays, for miscellaneous celebrations, and for no reason at all. It went well with every kind of frosting I ever had an interest in making, and was even lovely all by itself, unfrosted. It also keeps astonishingly well, not a normal or expected quality in a chocolate cake.

Then there’s this: http://theenglishkitchen.blogspot.com/2009/06/blog-post.html

This sour milk chocolate cake is one I turn to when I have sour milk in the house, which happens maybe once a year. Every time I bake this cake, I wonder why I don’t bake it more often. It’d be worth it to reserve some milk and let it go sour, just to bake this cake. (I think it’s silly to “make sour milk” by adding vinegar to milk, but I don’t mind the idea of making good milk go bad for baking purposes; this is insanity, but never mind.) And yes, the recipe calls for a small amount of hot water.

I am convinced, convinced, that what makes these cakes so good isn’t anything in particular except the addition of the boiling water. There are other recipes I’ve used that call for boiling water, too — these are just the only ones I can remember off the top of my head — but I’m telling you: If you are seeking a superlative chocolate cake, and you don’t have a fuckload of time to mess around with complicated processes but want something really rich and good, the thing to do is keep your eyes peeled for recipes that call for boiling water.

You will always want to remember to line your cake pans, if you plan to remove the cakes from the pans to frost and serve (these will be delicate cakes; you cannot remove an Aunt Velma from a 9×13 pan by just turning it out; you’d have to create a sling for it with tinfoil or parchment, and be very very careful). But I’ve done the sour milk cake in a nicely buttered Bundt pan with great success. These are flexible recipes, in terms of pans, as long as you are sensible and don’t do anything too crazy.

So remember what the Tante says. Boiling water. Someone else can talk science. I’m talking taste, and I’m not messing around. The JoC can keep its Cockaigne; I’m standing by Aunt Velma.

A few days back — at the tag end of December — I was preparing to assemble a birthday cake for a friend. I had a caramel-based frosting in mind, which should have been (you should excuse the expression) a piece of cake, but unfortunately, I burned the caramel. I was trying to do something I am probably not qualified to do: I was trying to make what I think the chefs call a “dry caramel,” which is to say, I was starting with plain, dry sugar in a pot — no water added. I’d’ve pulled it off, too, except I let it go a little too long, because I kept thinking, “surely it’s not time yet? not time yet?” and by the time I thought “oh, shit, it’s time” — it was past time.

Nonetheless, I doggedly proceeded to add my butter and cream and the result was a beautifully colored pot of bitter caramel, which I could not bear to throw out, of course. Sighing, I poured it into a jar and set it into the fridge to ponder what might come of this.

As it turned out, I was able to use it to great effect in the caramel cake frosting — confectioner’s sugar will, of course, cover up a lot of errors — but I still had about 12 oz. of caramel left in the jar. What to do, what to do? I mean, I bake a lot of cakes, but not enough to use up that much caramel in the foreseeable future. A friend of mine who bakes a lot, when I asked her, “what can I do with this stuff?” said she’d once used some burned caramel to make a pot roast, and I instantly thought, “Oh, yeah.”

The two things I use most often to deglaze a pot I’m making a pot roast in are rum and sweet vermouth. Both of these have obvious affinities to caramel. It was, therefore, a no-brainer. Here, friends and strangers, is what I did:

1 large onion, sliced; four fat cloves of garlic, cut into chunks: these were sautéed until golden in olive oil. I then put in a pot roast (weighing about 3.5 lbs., but you could use whatever size you wanted) and seared the roast on all sides. I removed the meat from the pan, set it aside, and deglazed the pot with about 1/4 cup of dark rum. I let that cook away, until the onions and garlic began to form a kind of sludge, and then I splashed in another 1/4 cup of sweet vermouth, and let that cook away as well. Then I put in three hefty tablespoons of the burnt caramel and some water and stirred it to melt the caramel into a sauce. When everything seemed nicely blended, I put the meat back into the pot, added water to about halfway up the roast, and brought it to a boil. Once boiling, I cover the pot and put it into the oven, which I’d preheated to 250°.
The meat stayed in the oven for about four hours. I turn the meat over, once an hour or so, if I remember — definitely twice — and by the time it’s done, I’ve got an hour before dinner is ready.

Last night, when I did this, after removing the cooked roast (which was falling apart and savory and wonderful), I made the effort to cook carrots in the pot as well. I poured out the cooking liquid — which is VERY fatty — and defatted it as best i could with ice cubes (messy, but faster than any other option available to me) and left a little of the oily broth in the pot.  I put about a pound and a half of carrots (peeled, cut into big chunks) into the pot on a fairly high flame to let them fry a little; when they were starting to smell good, I poured the de-fatted beef/vermouth/rum/caramel broth into the pot, and simmered the carrot on the stovetop until they were VERY done. Soft. Not falling apart, but soft. Then I turned off the flame, put the meat back into the pot (so it would have time to gently warm up again), and, in another pot, boiled up some egg noodles. Because in my kitchen, you should serve egg noodles with pot roast. (Some do potatoes. Not me.)

I served this for Shabbat dinner with a cucumber salad (dressed in sour cream blended with roasted garlic, two items I happened to have in the fridge). There were no complaints, and I’ve used up a significant amount of that burnt caramel. I am now thinking about using it instead of brown sugar or molasses in my fake-barbecue chicken, which is something we love and which I could play with pretty endlessly and no one would complain. There are four chicken breasts in the fridge, and a cold Sunday afternoon, waiting for me.

Yesterday was New Year’s Day, and my husband and I were expecting company: three couples, some old friends, some new friends, and the plan was that the adults would laze about the living room and dining table and eat and drink while our children crashed around upstairs. To achieve this goal, we set up a basic menu of options and then guests brought items to add as they saw fit. One of the things I prepared for the party was a birthday cake, because, as it happened, one of the guest’s 50th birthday was December 31st, and I was fairly sure it hadn’t been formally acknowledged.

So the cake. My friend’s wife provided me few clues to go on, and I’m not even sure how accurate they were, but I figured I couldn’t go too far wrong. “He likes vanilla,” she told me. “I know, it’s weird, but — vanilla.”

I found a rich-sounding vanilla cake recipe and banged out two layers, thinking, “I will make a caramel frosting to go with this.” I gave myself plenty of time to work on this. I made the cake layers on Monday and put them in the freezer. Tuesday morning, my daughter announced she wanted to have three egg yolks on toast for breakfast, and I said I’d give them to her if she’d help me make meringue in the afternoon. She didn’t agree to help, so I didn’t cook three egg yolks for her, but I made brown sugar meringue anyhow: a pan of cookies, sure, but also a nice layer 9″ across, in a cake pan, to use as a middle layer in the birthday cake. I also made the caramel on Tuesday afternoon — a bad idea; I’m never really at my best by late afternoon. I decided to overshoot my skills significantly and make a dry caramel — that is, start with plain sugar and no water in the pan — which led (predictably, I suppose) to my burning the stuff, but I forged onward anyhow, believing that the slight bitterness would be offset by the vast amount of sugar that would be involved with making frosting. (I turned out to be correct.)

Equipped with the basic components of the cake, on Thursday morning I assembled the cake. My husband watched with a combination of horror and awe as I got to work. I put four pieces of parchment on my cake stand and unwrapped one (thawed) cake layer and placed it just so. Then I creamed butter and added caramel and sugar and heavy cream to make an intensely caramelly frosting; half of this, I spread on the first layer of cake. Then I sprinkled on the frosting some leftover cooky-crumb streusel I had sitting around (chocolate cooky crumbs, brown sugar, pecans, ground together). I placed the meringue layer, crackling-apart top side facing DOWN, atop the chocolate streusel. (To put the crackly side up would have meant that putting frosting on it would be a fucking MESS; the smooth side, though, would be a piece of cake, and it was — the second half of the intense frosting in the mixer bowl was spread atop it, and more streusel applied; and then the final cake layer was put on top of that.

At this point, the cake was already, let’s say, a little ongepotchket. My husband, a man who will gild a lily as soon as hand you a kleenex, said, “jesus christ, what is going on here?” By this point, I was already working on the next batch of frosting, which would cover the whole shebang. “What,” I said. “It’s a birthday cake.”

But even I could see this was a little insane.

I doubled the amount of frosting this time around. An entire stick of butter. I don’t even know how many cups of confectioner’s sugar. Probably 3/4 of a cup of caramel. Cream. All whipped together. And then I started slathering it on. I thanked god that my aunt had given me a cake stand back in September, because I don’t know how I’d’ve got this job finished without being able to turn the cake constantly. (Seriously, why did I not acquire a cake stand fifteen years ago? So much agony I could have saved myself.) The finished product, which I put four meringue cookies on top of, simply because I HAD them sitting around, was stupidly tall. It looked like something you’d find at a county fair in Alabama. It had no dignity whatsoever. “I think I may have overdone it a little,” I said cheerfully as I carried the cake to the counter from which it would be served.

“I don’t know,” my husband said. “I think it needs something. A little duck bacon, maybe? Some peacock feathers?”

Well, folks, people ate the cake. It wasn’t as hard to cut as I’d feared it might be, but there are only about three small slices leftover, and I fully expect those will be gone daddy gone by the end of Friday night dinner tonight.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/golden-vanilla-cake-recipe
is the vanilla cake recipe I used, by the way. I recommend it highly and plan to bake it again. Oh yes.

— can be a haphazard affair, to put it generously. Also complicating matters: when you help create the shopping list, but then are not the one who does the marketing. Things can go awry. For example, the man who has written down on the list “white rice,” and who needed to grab only a simple, inexpensive bag of good old American white rice, like a cheap bag of Carolina, or even store brand rice, has come home with a tiny little box of hideously priced, completely ill-suited to the recipe, arborio rice.

You don’t use arborio rice to make rice pilaf. But the man driving to Stop and Shop didn’t know that, clearly. I am sure he thought, “Well, this costs more, so it must be what she [my food-snobby, overly obsessed with cooking daughter-in-law] would buy.” But he would be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

So while I’d planned to make a nice, simple rice pilaf with white rice and orzo and a little bit of shallot, I was suddenly forced to reconceive my plan. I made a risotto, with orzo thrown in for the hell of it (and to bulk up the pot, because the 12 oz. of arborio was not going to cut it).

The dinner was a birthday dinner for my father in law’s lady friend, a nice woman with a good sense of humor and, I had been told, a certain level of skill in the kitchen. Would my husband and I be willing to cook a dinner for her? Father in law was certainly not capable of it. Husband and I agreed immediately to do it, and began to wonder what the menu should be. We arrived at the following: roast chicken with lime and garlic (to use up ingredients my husband had added to our Christmas stockings — yes, he put limes, garlic, shallots, and artichokes in the stockings); rice pilaf; a green bean casserole; blondies for dessert. I would be in charge of the blondies.

Cooking at my father in law’s house is always something of an adventure. His kitchen is not very well organized, which is fine, if sometimes a little scary. He does not cook, but has a tendency to purchase ingredients nonetheless without any real sense of how they should properly be stored, or how long they might last (especially given their storage). In other words, it’s quite possible you might open the fridge to find a bottle of Frangelico in there (which needs no refrigeration) along with a can of breadcrumbs (ditto), and then, on the door of the fridge, a bottle of mango juice with mold growing in it that makes it resemble nothing so much as a tasty bubble tea drink. I can assure you: that is not tapioca in there. It is mold.

We preheated the oven, which had no thermometer in it, and has probably never been calibrated since it was installed when the house was built in 1963. “It doesn’t really feel that hot in there,” I mused, when I opened the oven to see what I thought. “But I’ll put the blondies in first, and then we can turn it up so you can start the chicken at high heat.” Husband agreed this was a reasonable plan. I opened the cabinet where, I knew, the white flour should be kept, and measuring cups. The first thing I saw when I opened the door was an open box of D-Con.

I closed my eyes for a moment, reached in, and took out the flour and the measuring cup. After I’d washed the cup, I measured out the flour (it looked like a reasonably recent purchase) and put the rest of the bag away in its protective (that’s sarcasm, there) Ziploc bag.

The bag of brown sugar had a cobweb growing around the wire tie closing the bag. But the sugar felt soft. I was in good shape.

I assembled the blondies and baked them; they came out beautifully in about 20 minutes, so the oven was, presumably, reliable enough. While the sweets cooled, my husband got to work on the chicken. He’d already set up the béchamel for the green bean casserole. I surveyed the kitchen: we were in excellent shape.

At six thirty, the meal was served. It was as good as anything we’d’ve cooked at home, though we had improvised on a lot of little details, and were working with decidedly inferior cooking equipment. (For example: the handles of saucepans are supposed to be attached to the saucepans, not come off as soon as you try to lift the pan of hot liquid from the heat.) No one reacted to the food by vomiting profusely (indicating to me that the box of D-Con had not tainted my blondies). Will my father in law ever understand that he is, in fact, capable of roasting a chicken? That nothing we did was difficult at all; that it all merely took some time and effort — and not even much effort, at that (it is not hard to pull a dead chicken from a bag, put it in a pan, and shove some garlic and lime into its cavity and then bung the whole thing into a hot oven). I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that he’ll never really appreciate that meal, but the birthday girl did, and for that, I am grateful.

I am also exceedingly grateful, today, to be back at home, where the pot handles are all firmly attached to the pots; where I know how to clean things properly; where there are no smelly sponges that I’m supposed to use to clean the dishes; where the knives aren’t so dull they are going to hurt me; and where, most of all, I can cook what I want and only worry about pleasing myself, my husband, and my child. They are easy to please: if it’s good, they’re happy. Home is where the food tastes right.

Last night, around 10.30, my husband was eating a very late dinner and I was sitting on the couch, nearby, thumbing through the new Rose Levy Beranbaum cookbook, The Baking Bible. It is filled with recipes for things I’d never make, and has a few things I’d probably make once in a while when feeling exceptionally energetic. One such thing was called Meringue Birch Twigs. I’ve been on a meringue kick lately, so it seemed like a plausible thing. Also, the recipe mentioned that serving them in a vase is very festive-looking, which also seemed likely to me.

“Look,” I said to my husband, bringing the book over so he could see the glossy photo.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“What?” I said. “Wouldn’t this be fun to serve to guests on New Year’s Day, when we’re having people over?”

“You know, I remember you when you didn’t cook at all,” he said. “And now look at you. I remember when you would have looked at a recipe like this and said, “What is this twee bullshit?”

I started to laugh. “I don’t know what happened,” I admitted.

“You used to make fun of stuff like this,” he said.

“I notice you don’t mind eating stuff like this when I make it,” I countered.

“That’s true,” he said.

“Your internist said you should eat more cookies,” I reminded him.

“It’s true,” he said.

I might be making Meringue Birch Twigs for New Year’s Day. We’ll see.

…. which sounds like it should be one of the racier Edward Gorey titles, as I think on it, but really, this is about a ridiculous coffeecake.

A friend had a baby last week. This baby arrived a little faster than the parents expected; they’d planned to do the normal thing, show up at a hospital, have the option of an epidural, etc. etc., but things didn’t work out that way, and the proud Papa, a former EMT, wound up delivering his firstborn, a daughter, at about 7.50 a.m.

I knew this couple to be pretty badass, in a quiet, unassuming way, but this just knocked me off my feet. “I gotta bake those people something,” I said to myself. “They’re gonna be exhausted, they’re gonna need to eat something, but damned if I’m bringing them some sad lasagna or something.” First I thought I’d do an applesauce cake, which is nice and wholesome, not unlike this badass couple, but then I thought, “No. I’m having no truck with that. I’m going to appeal to their baser instincts.” And I decided on making some kind of chocolate-swirled coffee cake.

Armed with precisely no recipe in mind or on a piece of paper in front of me, I set up the base of the cake: yeast, sugar, milk, water, salt. I let this sit a while (taking my daughter to school in the meantime). When I got home, I mixed in flour, salt, sour cream, and stirred it with a spoon. When it began to come together, I threw it on my counter top and kneaded in a few tablespoons of butter. The dough felt silky and dense: this, I knew, would make a fabulous loaf of…. something.

I let it rise for a few hours and knocked it down; then I separated it into two fat knobs of dough, one for a large, ring-shaped cake, the other smaller, to be done in a loaf pan. Then I put together a filling. I toasted some pecans and threw them into a food processor with some dark cocoa, a lot of cinnamon, and a combination of white and brown sugars. I rolled out the dough, spread the filling on, and rolled up the cakes, which I placed in two buttered pans, in which I’d also put some of the cocoa/pecan filling (once it had some butter cut into it, and a little flour added, to give it a slightly more streusel-y quality). I let the cakes rise again, and then baked them at 350° for about 45 minutes. They smelled heavenly when they came out of the oven, and looked… well, not handsome, but appealing, in a distinctly-homemade sort of way.

I cut into the ring shape as soon as I felt I could get away from it, and gave one slice to my daughter and one to myself. “Ummmmmmmmmm,” my daughter said, cramming as much of it into her face as she could. “This isn’t bad,” I said thoughtfully. And it wasn’t. The crumb was soft and melting, the filling was delicious… but it wasn’t quite what I’d wanted. I felt bad. But the second loaf was still there to give away, and give it I did, on the theory that while I’m a little disappointed in the cake, a new mother is very unlikely to turn down a sour cream coffee cake with chocolate pecan filling, even if it’s not a product Zabar’s would add to their line.

I’ve had another slice today and have decided that actually this is a very good cake indeed, and that the only things to change are: add more sugar to the dough, and use twice as much filling. I was too stingy with the filling. How could I have made that mistake? But we live, we learn. Next time, I’ll do better.

Last week I had a small epiphany regarding what to get my husband for Christmas this year, and I took to my computer and with a few keystrokes, I’d ordered him a gift which was — I think — a little shard of genius. The thing I had to be careful about was its arrival: this is an item that I had to be sure to slam into the freezer as soon as it arrived. I’ll say no more.

I scheduled the delivery for today and as such after I dropped my daughter off at school, I came back home and determined to do this and that around the house to make the most of the time when I’d be waiting around for Federal Express to bring my package. A friend got in touch unexpectedly and asked if I was free for coffee, and I said, “I am, if you’ll come to my house — I’m waiting for a package and can’t go out.” So she came over, we had some coffee and chatted, and when she left a little after eleven o’clock, I decided to take some of the pimiento cheese I threw together yesterday and use it to make crackers. Because that’s the kind of thing I’ll do when I am at home by myself and, okay, I could be doing other, more important things, but… it seemed like a good idea.

I’m sure it is a good idea, too, but the crackers I produced strike me, so far, as a little bland, a little lackluster. I don’t know where I went wrong. I took pimiento cheese and blended it in the mixer with butter and chopped pecans; then I added rice flour, all purpose flour, and a little bit of baking powder. I rolled the dough into cylinders, froze them for half an hour, and then cut them into thin slices and baked them with an egg wash. Some of the cylinders were rolled in a brown sugar-spice mix; some of them were not. Some were sprinkled with the spice mix on top. It seemed like a no-fail proposition, but right out of the oven, these crackers taste bland. It’s very disappointing, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them all…. though I suspect that, if nothing else, I can give them to my daughter as an after-school snack with a cup of hot cocoa. I’d hoped they’d be yummy enough to give as gifts to friends, but I don’t think they are. On the other hand, it is sometimes my experience that things right out of the oven don’t taste right, and that it takes a few hours for their real character to come through.

Wish me luck that when I taste these again at three o’clock, I’ll think they’re good. Otherwise, I’m facing some more baking tomorrow. ‘Cause I’ve got to come up with something decent to give to folks.

In September of this year of someone’s Lord, 2014, I had to make whoopie pies for a large number of people to eat at a big ol’ fundraiser event, and in preparation for this I bought several jars of Marshmallow Fluff. This is weird stuff. I know it’s a Classic New England thing, but I never ate any, that I was aware of anyhow, until recently. When I had to start working on making whoopie pies for a hundred.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me how much Fluff I’d need, and I bought six jars of it — these are, I think, 18 oz. plastic tubs… it’s a lot of damned Fluff, is my point, and to make the whoopie pies I only needed one and a half tubs in the end (because you whip the Fluff with butter and sugar to make the filling, you don’t use it straight). Which means that since then, I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind: Ways to Use Up a Lot of Fluff.

Today I hit on one way and I killed one-half a jar that was sitting around sad and lonely in the cabinet. I made a pan of chocolate peanut butter swirl fudge. This called for 7 oz. of Fluff, which meant I still had a little bit left in the tub… and so, when I came home from school with my first grader in tow, and had to provide her with a snack, I uttered these very Yankee words: “How about a Fluffernutter sandwich?”

An item, mind you, which I did not know existed when I myself grew up here in Connecticut.

“What’s that?” said my curious daughter. “Peanut butter and Fluff,” I said. “Ooooooo yes!” she said, eyes aglow, as they say. I cut two slices of bread, slathered them with the peanut butter and the Fluff, and she gobbled it up. Then, as an EXTRA treat, I let her get a spoon and scrape out the last of the fudge from the pot. My six year old is now completely and utterly indebted to me: she cannot misbehave at all, because I have started her week off with, really, the best of all possible things.

I’m making chicken cacciatore for dinner tonight. That’s one of her favorite dinners, too, come to think of it. Really, everything’s coming up roses for this kid.

Am I allowed to sneak some fudge for myself after dinner?