Leave

Matt was waiting for me when I emerged from baggage claim at the airport in Warsaw, Poland, late on the final Saturday afternoon of October. He had arrived on his own flight from Afghanistan, by way of Kuwait, only a few hours earlier. He looked tired under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the lobby. He wasn’t in uniform, which surprised me. We hugged for a long time, and his skin smelled exactly the same.

Matt had two weeks leave from Afghanistan and we spent them together in Eastern Europe. When we first began to plan the trip, we contemplated “normal” destinations like Hawaii or Costa Rica or even New York. But, in the end, we decided on an adventure: One far from the heat of the desert; one close to a history that fascinates us both. “I just really want to see fall,” Matt had told me on the phone.


We traveled through the foggy chill of Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Hungary over the following two weeks. It was a challenging trip, and a wonderful trip. We learned a lot about the land, and about each other. We rode a rickety bus through the countryside of Ukraine, descended deep into a cavernous old salt mine, and stood solemnly on the grounds of Auschwitz as the sun sank in the sky beyond the electrified fences and barbed wire. We sampled bright purple borscht in almost every city we passed and even made it through a bowl of tripe soup laced with sour cream and garlic at a pub in rural Romania. We walked among castles and monasteries and farms. We drove a tiny car through Transylvania and bought honey on the side of the road. We slept on a number of trains as they bumped over borders, sharing loaves of bread and tiny bottles of vodka along the way. The smells—of steamy trolleys, of sizzling meat, of human and animal and streets—were so strong I vacillated between feeling joyous and physically ill. We saw big things and small things, both expensive and cheap. I found I liked the simple best.






One evening in Krakow, Matt and I settled side-by-side on a wooden bench against the wall of a basement jazz club in the city center. He put his arm around my waist and we sipped thick tumblers of whiskey. Amid the swirls of Polish and clinking of glass, we listened to gray-haired men rock out on trumpets and trombones, a base guitarist who hardly moved and a drummer whose face gyrated with every beat. It was warm and smoky and sweet.

When the show ended, we were starving. We emerged outside to be hit by a gust of frozen wind. I immediately began to shiver and we moved quickly, jogging across intersections, only occasionally pausing to peer at our map. After ten minutes we reached a big blue van parked on the side of the street.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“Yes!” said Matt, excited.

In front of the van stood two men bundled in thick hats and coats. They manned two large metal barrels, which glowed with the lazy jump of flames. Within, they cooked dozens of kielbasa, thick curvy sausages lined up on poles. For seven zloty, or about $2.50, we each received a piece of meat, a splotch of mustard and a crusty white roll on a thin cardboard sheet. A snap to the slightly burnt skin gave way to tender flesh within. We ate them standing at a makeshift wooden table with plastic forks and knives alongside a handful of other silent, hungry men. Walking back to our hotel close to midnight, Matt’s arm linked with my own, I finally felt warm.


You can read more about our trip here.

Happy to be one of fifteen finalists for Creative Nonfiction's blog contest! My entry can be seen here.

Wedding Cake

Ashley and Colin were married last Saturday. The ceremony took place next to the ocean up in Maine. I stood near the lighthouse with the other bridesmaids in a line of deep blue fabric around noon. I watched Colin, who wore a kilt and a yellow rose on his chest, as Ashley walked down the aisle in her gown. I wasn’t sure if I was shivering from the cold or from the intensity of his smile or, later, from the radiance of her tears. Their happiness was contagious.

And I made their wedding cake.

Ashley and Colin asked me to make their cake a little over a year ago, during the cocktail hour of another wedding, which I wrote about here. I immediately said yes. I had had a drink or two and it sounded like a great idea. I’ve worked in bakeries before. I love to feed people. How hard could it be?

The anxiety set in around April of this year, however, and it didn’t let up until last Saturday around 3 p.m., when those two sliced into the bottom tier and fed each other buttercream bites with their fingers.

I learned a lot.

Baking a wedding cake is all about the planning. It requires a lot of ingredients and a lot of equipment. It requires time. More time than I gave myself, really. I left the residency in Woodstock and arrived at my mother’s house in Boston on Wednesday evening. I made a few batches of frosting and went to bed. I began to bake on Thursday morning. It was an intense day: one that began around in the still-dark 6 a.m. and didn’t end until a bleary 11 at night. I got through the final stretch with the help of my mother, who fed me wine and ice cream upon returning home from work.

Early on Friday morning I drove up to Maine with the four frosted tiers, which I had carefully placed into plastic boxes and balanced snugly on the backseat. Around 1 p.m. I arrived at the inn where the reception would be held the following day. I brought the cakes into the professional kitchen so that I could stack them into something resembling a wedding cake. This task required wooden dowels, which I had never used before, and a lot of faith. Before I began I stood motionless for a few minutes, staring at the individual tiers. They were big, hefty cakes measuring at 8, 10, 12 and 14 inches, respectively. I held a pair of wire cutters in one hand and the dowels in the other and I thought: this will never work. The dowels seemed so thin and the cake, so heavy. But finally the teenage prep cook who was working on the mise en place for dinner service behind me leaned over and whispered: “Just do it.”

So I did.

I measured, cut and then stuck the dowels into the cake. I delicately placed the tiers on top, one after another. And it didn't collapsed. It didn't sink into a sticky cloud of crumbs. The cake held just fine. It turns out wooden dowels really do work.

And on Saturday afternoon the 125 guests devoured it all. It was an almond cake, filled with alternating layers of lemon curd and blueberry jam and frosted with a swiss buttercream. I will say: it was delicious.


Ashley and Colin’s Wedding Cake

This wedding cake required patience. It required 10 pounds of almond paste, 10 pounds of sugar, upwards of 60 sticks of butter and 100 eggs. It required 40 lemons, four cake pans and a whole mess of cardboard rounds and wooden dowels. But when I finished and saw it perched on a table and surrounded by pale blue hydrangeas, it looked like a wedding cake. A real wedding cake. True, it looked like a wedding cake made by a bridesmaid and not a professional baker, but I’ve never been so happy to watch a lawn full of people eat dessert. I’ve never been so happy to see two people in love shoving hunks of frosting into each others' mouths.

I am listing only the base recipe of each component to the cake below, which is enough to make one 10” cake. I am happy to expand if there's interest. For Ashley and Colin's I did a lot of guesswork, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t always the most time efficient. But, hey, it worked.

Almond Cake
Adapted from Baking with Julia

Recipe can be found here.

For a 10” cake, you need to use this recipe twice in order to make the four layers. Bake two cakes and them let them cool according to the recipe’s instructions. [I didn’t use any extra equipment in order to help this size cake come out smooth and even, and I had no problems. Only for the 14” cake did I use a baking core.]

When the cakes are cool, slice each in half using a long serrated knife so that you effectively now have four. This can be tough, so work slowly and at eye level, making sure to keep the knife even.

Then, dab the top of each layer fully with moistening syrup [recipe below] using a pastry brush. Use enough so that it soaks into the top, but doesn’t saturate it. I used perhaps 2 cups of the syrup for the entire 4-tier cake.

Moistening Syrup
Adapted from Dede Wilson’s wonderful book: Wedding Cakes You Can Make

Now this is key. I’m pretty sure this moistening syrup, which is just simple syrup with some lemon juice, kept the cake at a perfect just-baked level of moist crumbiness. It worked so well that multiple gray-haired men came up to me after the reception to say they have never had such delicious wedding cake in all their life.

1 cup water
1 cup sugar
lemon juice to taste

Bring water and sugar to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Stir until sugar is dissolved, and take off heat. Let cool to room temperature. Add lemon juice. I used around ¼ cup for this amount.

While the cake is baking and moistening syrup cooling, make the frosting. [Or, like me, you can make this ahead of time.]

Swiss Buttercream Frosting
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

You can find this recipe here.

For one 10” cake I doubled the medium size recipe that this blog author used, and had a bit leftover. I guess I like frosting. This can be kept in Tupperware in the fridge overnight. Make sure to take it out and let it return to room temperature before you use it. It needs to be whipped again in a standing mixer. Don’t be alarmed if it immediately looks curdled. That happened to me a number of times and I found myself constantly on the verge of a panic attack. Just let it keep whipping. All will be OK. I promise.


And then you can begin to stack the cake layers.

First, I generally take some frosting and put it in a ziplock bag. I then cut a tiny piece off the end of one corner and use it as a makeshift pastry bag. I pipe a line of frosting around the edge of each cake layer before I put on the filling. This helps to keep the curd and the jam from oozing out, so it won’t discolor the frosting later.

Lemon curd [recipe below] goes between the first two layers of almond cake. The blueberry jam ["recipe" below] goes between the second and third, and lemon curd again between the last two. Use a nice thick layer, maybe half an inch or so of curd, a little less of jam.

Lemon Curd
Adapted from Alton Brown

5 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
4 lemons, zested and juiced
1 stick of butter, cut into smaller pieces, cold

Bring about an inch of water to a simmer in a medium saucepan. In a medium size metal bowl, combine egg yolks and sugar and whisk until smooth, about a minute. Measure the citrus juice you’ve squeezed. It should come to about a third of a cup. If there’s less, add water. Add the juice and the zest to the egg mixture. When water in the pan is at a simmer, reduce heat to low and place the metal bowl on top of the saucepan. It shouldn’t touch the water. Whisk constantly until thickened, light yellow and coats the back of a wooden spoon. This takes anywhere between 7 and 12 minutes, in my experience. Remove from heat and stir in the butter immediately, one piece at a time, allowing each addition to melt. Keep stored in a clean container, with plastic wrap touching the curd on top, so as to prevent a crust.

Blueberry Jam

I meant to make this from scratch, but time got away from me. My recommendation in this scenario: Buy it at the grocery store. I used Bon Maman.



And next: begin frosting.

I frost the cake in two steps. First, I do a quick all-round layer, often called the “crumb coat.” I do the sides first, and then the top. I use a knife to spread, or an offset spatula. I get the cake completely covered in this round. If there any dips or dives in the cake, I put a bit more frosting there to even it out. Then I put it in the fridge for a few hours. The second frosting is more important. The second layer comes when the first is already hard, and you don’t have to worry about the crumbs desecrating the pristine white of the buttercream. So for the second layer, again, I do the sides first and then the top. I often dip the knife or spatula I am using to frost into a cup of warm water to help smooth things over. It just takes patience.

Anniversary

Four years ago yesterday I smashed the windshield of an oncoming car with the back of my skull. I broke my pelvis, tore the tendons and ligaments in my left knee, and lost my sense of smell. I don’t remember much about the following weeks. Or months, really. I went from working in the kitchen of a restaurant, on the eve of beginning culinary school, to recovering on a bed in my mother’s living room, enveloped by a haze of pain killers and depression.

This year, yesterday, I baked a cake. It was a simple butter cake. I used brown sugar and eggs, cinnamon and baking soda and flour. I poured it in a pan and I nestled a few neat rows of deep purple plums, cut in half, on top. I popped it in the oven, and when it came out into the kitchen a half hour later the whole room smelled sweet and warm, like fruit and caramel and autumn. A deep purple, nutty brown autumn.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am. I lost my sense of smell in a car accident four years ago. With it vanished my ability to taste and my plans to be a chef. But since then, it has slowly returned. It has returned in a curious and fantastic manner, one that ignites wonder almost every day. In fact now, after all these years of thinking and stressing and working on it, I think I can smell better than I ever did before.

I’m lucky because I experienced a traumatic accident, terrified my family and could have died. I could have lost so much more. But I didn’t. I’m here. I’m writing a book about smell and all that it means. The experience, in fact, has given me more than it ever took away. If I lost anything, it was the sense of immortality that at age 22 I really felt was mine. I lost some naivety, and the tendency to ignore the small things in life.

I baked that plum cake in the kitchen of a large, wood-planked house in Woodstock, New York. I’m here for the month of September, quietly tucked away in a small studio to write. There are nine others on the property —writers, painters and composers—all doing the same as part of a residency program up in the hills. It’s so quiet at night I can hear the crickets. I can hear water trickling from down the road. It gets so dark that the moon illuminates the trees, shimmering through the leaves like diamonds, and it’s not hard to imagine all sorts of ghosts waiting just behind the creek.

Morning

I’ve been waking up early since I returned from France. Very early. Like, pre-dawn early. I’m not entirely sure why. At first it was because of jet lag. More recently it’s probably because of too much work. Too much of that now-familiar anxiety, born of book writing and boys at war, which curls up from my toes and shoots through my spine.

Anyway.

In these very early mornings I enjoy watching the sun rise. There is a pear tree that grows in the yard behind my apartment building. It looks nice in the dim morning light, thick with green fruit and leaves. I’m watching it right now, in fact. It’s not morning, but that doesn’t matter. It’s raining like crazy, blustery and dark as thunder claps above my head. The pear tree looks like it's dancing in the wind: something fast and jaunty, like the four-step I learned in Louisiana this spring.

Also in the very early morning I like to bake. This morning, for example, I made zucchini bread. I used my stepmother’s recipe, which is a favorite of Matt’s. I baked a loaf and let it cool. I wrapped it up tightly and put it in a box. This afternoon I brought it to the post office. I’m not sure how well zucchini bread travels, but we’ll see. Next stop for that plump little guy: Afghanistan.

Last week I made cantuccini, a simple biscotti-like cookie, almond-studded and bronze. The recipe came from Julia Child’s Baking with Julia, which now seems fitting with all the press swirling about a certain film. They are wonderful in the very early morning, especially when dunked in a mug of coffee.



Cantuccini
Adapted from Baking with Julia

2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon. salt
1 1/2 cups whole, blanched almonds
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Combine all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Stir. Add almonds and mix well.

In another bowl, whisk together the eggs and vanilla extract.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead it for a few minutes. It’s dry, but comes together after a few minutes. Add flour if it sticks.

Divide in half and shape it into two 12-inch logs. Transfer the logs to a baking sheet lined with parchment.

Bake for 30 minutes. The logs will rise a bit, turning lightly brown on the bottom.

Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely.

Once cool, cut the logs into quarter-inch slices. Lay the slices, cut side down, on a baking sheet lined with parchment.

Bake for an additional 10 or 15 minutes, or until the cantuccini are bronzed but not too dark. Let cool completely and enjoy!

Grasse

On Friday afternoon I sat at a table outside of a bistro in the hills above Grasse, France. The pale blue sea was visible in the distance. The air smelled of salt.

Ten of us were there together to eat lunch. An international group, hailing from places like India and Argentina, we are all in the midst of an intensive course on scent at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery. Grasse itself, speckled with fields of jasmine and firms of fragrance, is the birthplace of the perfume industry and remains vibrant and involved today. We spend long days in class sniffing thin paper strips, the tips of which have been dipped into bottles of raw materials like bergamot, lavender, and galbanum. I’m deep into work on my book and on my nose, and thus far I can smell them all. The scent of cistus, an aromatic and woody flowering plant from Spain, brings me straight to the The New England Spring Flower Show, an annual event that filled cavernous rooms in the Bayside Expo Center with the scent of earth and smoke and pine, and where my father brought me every year when I was small.


As we sat around the table on Friday, speaking of little else than smell, a portly man with a shock of white hair tied back in a ponytail brought out a massive steaming plate and plunked it down in front of us all. Paella: a rice dish rich with paprika and saffron, with chicken and mussels and squid. Though originally from Spain, it is the specialty of this coastal French chef. It glowed in orange and red, punctuated with the pink of prawns. Everyone leaned in to sniff before taking the first bite.

Later, we finished with pie. The tarte au citron smelled of lemon and brown sugar. It was light and sweet and tasted of summer.