Summer's End

Five Years

Five years ago today, I was hit by a car while jogging near my mother’s home in Brookline. I fractured my pelvis and my sacrum, and tore the tendons and ligaments in my left knee. I smashed the back of my skull against the windshield and, as a result, I lost my sense of smell.

My starting date at the Culinary Institute of America had been set for only months away. But without smell, I lost my ability to detect flavor in food and hence, my dream of one day becoming a chef. Devastated, I suddenly operated in a world where I could not tell if milk was fresh or sour or if my clothes were clean or not. I could no longer detect the warning signals to fire or leaking gas. And even worse, I lost my ability to read people, to summon buried memories of my childhood, to fully function in a landscape filled with rich layers of sensory perception, the one that suddenly felt blank.

The accident changed my life. It changed the way I view eating and cooking, chance and purpose and even love. Instead of culinary school, I moved to New York City. Instead of handling chicken stock and confit, I worked my way through positions at magazines and newspapers. I returned to school for a masters degree. And, slowly, all the while, I regained my sense of smell. I’m lucky. I think about that every day.

This morning I baked a cake. It’s a simple cake, a butter-rich one scented with cinnamon and orange zest, and dimpled with plums. I made the same cake last year, on this exact day. I was at a writer’s residency in upstate New York then, and in the middle of writing this book on the sense of smell, one that I was afraid I would never finish. Today, the book is with my editor. Though it won't be published until next summer, it's practically complete. I’m proud of it, this project that has taught me more about perception, science and writing—and, well, about myself—than I knew was possible. Last year the cake, as I wrote, filled the kitchen with a sweet, warm scent—one of “fruit and caramel and autumn.” Today it did the same.

I didn’t purposefully bake the same cake on the same day two years in a row. At least not consciously. But I suppose it makes sense. This is a simple, easy cake. If I’ve learned anything over the last five years, it’s that these simple things mean the most: the bouquet of flowers picked from my mother’s garden or the sunset on an evening walk with Matt, a bite of homemade vanilla bean ice cream or the sizzle of the grill on a summer night. The deep purple, nutty brown scent of a plum cake here, now, today.


Dimply Plum Cake
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
¾ cup light brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs
1/3 cup flavorless oil, like canola or sunflower (confession: I used olive oil)
Zest of 1 orange, grated
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
8 purple or red plums, halved and pitted (I used only 4, perhaps they were large)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter an 8-inch square (or round) baking pan, and dust the inside with flour. Tap out the excess and place pan on baking sheet.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon.

Working with a mixer, beat the butter at medium speed until soft and creamy, about 3 minutes. Then, add the sugar and beat for another 3. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating for a minute after each. Then, beat in the oil, zest and vanilla. The batter will be smooth and creamy. Reduce mixer speed and add the dry ingredients, mixing until incorporated.

Scrape batter into pan and smooth the top. Arrange the plums cut side up in the batter, jiggling them a tad so that they settle in.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and puffed. Transfer to a rack and cool for 15 minutes. Then, run a knife around edge and unmold. Invert and cool right side up.

You can wrap the cake once it has cooled and keep it at room temperature for a couple of days. It will get softer and with more moisture. I highly recommend this. Also, I highly recommend serving it with a fat dollop of whipped cream.

Next Week

This week, after finishing the copy edits on my book and overnighting the manuscript to my editor in New York, I’ve had more time to cook. I thought that more time in the kitchen would mean more thought in my menus, more effort into my technique, and a whole lot more recipe success. I was wrong.

This week in the kitchen has been sub par.

I made a sweet potato and lentil curry, which was mushy and bland, and a spicy cabbage slaw with raisins and tomatoes that was both too sour and too sweet. I made a chicken dish stuffed with cilantro pesto and mozzarella cheese, which packed a punch with flavor, but emerged from the oven with a texture too soft and fine. I baked a flat loaf of cinnamon bread that rose improperly, either due to aged yeast or my own lack of patience, and sliced into doughy pieces not even I wanted to toast. I made a peach and apricot tart using a new crust recipe designed for a rougher, flakier bite. It was rough, all right. Yikes.

None of these dishes were colossal failures. Nothing hit the trash. I couldn’t pinpoint a forgotten ingredient or mistaken technique. The meals were colorful, and the kitchen often smelled divine. But each bite came with that tug of disappointment, the desire to apologize for it all.

Ever since I lost my sense of smell, five years ago almost to the day, I have struggled with trust in the kitchen. Can I operate at the stove without a full sense of smell? Without perceiving the entirety of flavor in the food I make? Can I cook for others when sometimes I feel that I can’t even cook for myself?

This hasn’t been much of an issue of late. It’s been a long time since I haven’t been able to smell something that those around me can. I’ve been training my nose and when acquaintances ask me if I’ve recovered, I always say yes. I feel good at the stove; I’ve had success at the table. But the failures, I’ve found, often come in spurts. And when they do, it’s hard not to let them get me down.

In the first draft of this post, I finished with a question: will my confidence ever fully return? I had Matt give it a read. He told me that I was being too harsh—on myself and on my food. “Bad weeks happen to everyone,” he said. “You just need to shrug it off and say, ‘Oh well.’ Next week will always be better.”

He’s right.

Wordless Wednesday: Summer

I've never done this before, but I've always liked the whole Wordless Wednesday thing. I thought I'd give it a shot.

Toasted Cheese

Laurie Colwin writes about her first New York City apartment in the essay "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant." Hers was a tiny studio that fit a twin bed, a night stand, a small desk, and a wicker chair. The kitchen consisted of a metal counter, a little refrigerator, and a hot plate. "The ceiling was fairly high - a good thing since a low one would have made my apartment feel like the inside of a box of animal crackers," she writes.

I reread this essay a number of times last year, while living in my own miniature New York apartment alone. Mine was in Brooklyn, not Greenwich Village. I had an oven and four burners on my stove. But, like Colwin, I had very little room. Just enough space for a bed, a desk, a chest of drawers and a little folding table that pushed nicely up against the window. My bathroom couldn't fit a sink; the kitchen one had to do. "Many thought I must be insane to live in so small a space," Colwin writes, "but I loved my apartment and found it the coziest place on earth." Me too.

In her essay, Colwin writes about what she ate while she lived in that breadbox apartment alone: soup, spaghetti, eggplant in all forms. One time, her mother gave her a toaster oven to augment the two-burner stove. "I began with toasted cheese," Colwin writes, "that staple of starving people who live in garrets." I love the word garret. It reminds me of home.

Sunday afternoon in Boston was rainy and cool. Sitting in my new apartment, which is much bigger than any place I've ever lived before, I thought about Colwin, about coziness, about toast and cheese. I began to miss my cramped studio in Brooklyn, the one that kept me so snug while Matt was in Afghanistan, the place where I made many solitary meals, where I carved a life on a very limited budget alone. Then, I ate a lot of toasted cheese. Suddenly, I wanted more.


I find that toasted cheese is best made in the oven, on fresh crusty bread. I like to eat it with just a little sprinkling of Worcestershire sauce, like my mother used to make me as a child. Yesterday I sliced a sourdough loaf from the farmers' market and shaved some Gruyere off a thick hunk I had been saving in the fridge. I ate it alongside a mug of coffee, over a well-worn copy of a good book.

Chiles

My mother and her boyfriend, Charley, went to Colorado for a long-weekend hiking trip and when they returned, they brought me a bundle of dried chiles. I hung them on a vacant nail above the kitchen archway, one that had been hammered in place by the last tenant and not quite in the right spot. As a result, they dangle a bit awkwardly—half above and half below the wood, a blip in the peripheral vision, like mistletoe.

Matt doesn’t want me to use them to cook because, bright red and just a bit wrinkled, they are beautiful against the faded green of the wall. But I can think of little else I need when dinnertime rolls around. I sneaked one into a quick ginger-beef stir-fry. I sliced one to add to a sweet-and-sour marinade for pork. Tonight I’m making enchiladas and, well, you know. These chiles are intense and spicy, not for those with sensitive palettes. I love their not-so-subtle kick.

I am looking at the bundle of them now. They remind me of when I was small and my family took a trip to New Mexico during one summer vacation. There, we stayed in a small house with an adobe roof and sandy walls. I remember the burnished shades of orange and gold on the carpet in my bedroom. I remember the dry heat of the desert sun and the sharp prick on the soft flesh of my palm when I grabbed a cactus with my bare hands. I remember returning to Boston with the same kind of string of chiles, which my father hung in the archway between the kitchen and living room of my childhood home. I wasn’t interested in cooking then. I didn’t pay much attention as they slowly dried and then crumbled.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

A few weeks ago, on a bright afternoon smack in the middle of that odious national heat wave, I decided to bake. I’m not sure why. The small air conditioner installed in my bedroom window certainly didn’t reach the kitchen, which shimmered at 95 degrees.

But one of Matt’s good friends from the Army was just about to return from a year-long deployment in Afghanistan. I couldn’t be there at the airport to greet him as well, and I wanted to send something sweet in my stead. So I pulled out a cookbook, my mixer, and a glass bowl. I set to work.

I wanted to bake something simple, something that filled my kitchen with the scent of butter, something that reminded me of home. The decision was easy: chocolate chip cookies.

I decided to use a different recipe than I normally do—one from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, a cookbook that was given to me as a present last Christmas and never before used. I opened it to one of the still-unstained “essential” recipe pages. There were two options for this particular cookie: crunchy or chewy. I compared them.

The crisp cookies required more fat—both butter and vegetable shortening opposed to only butter—which, writes Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, "lubricates the solid particles of flour and sugar and encourages the cookie to spread and thin." The crunchy cookies used less flour and fewer eggs, loosening the dough and reducing the moisture. They also called for a higher proportion of sugar—which, says McGee, can cause more sugar to dissolve while baking in the oven. "Then when the cookie cools, some of the sugar recrystallizes, and the initially soft cookie develops a distinctive snap...." The chewy recipe, on the other hand, included corn syrup to retain moisture and an additional egg for a more cake-like texture. Interestingly, both called for a tablespoon of white or cider vinegar—to temper the sweetness of the sugar, I read in the cookbook, and to react with the sodium bicarbonate in the leavener to give the cookies a bit of a lift in the oven.

I had never given much thought to the science of chocolate chip cookies. In the end, I made them both.


For each, the ingredients came together swiftly. I had chocolate on my fingers and trays of mismatching rounds cooling on the counter within an hour or two. The crunchy ones emerged as advertised: crackling crisp, not too sweet, and full of butter. They were bold cookies. Heat wave cookies. Perfect in a cold glass of milk. The chewy ones, however, turned out to be quite cake-like. They were tamer cookies, quiet attempts at miniature scones. Ones that should be eaten in autumn, while sipping hot tea. Both were very good.

In the end, I sent a towering plate of the crisp cookies away with Matt, who soon left to meet his returning friend. Intense experiences require intense flavors, and I could think of little else to welcome him home.


Crunchy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon white or cider vinegar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups all purpose flour
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease or line two baking sheets with parchment.

In a mixing bowl, cream the butter, shortening, sugars, vanilla, salt, and vinegar. Add the egg and beat until combined. And then add the baking soda and flour. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Drop the dough by the tablespoon onto the pans. Bake 12 - 14 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and transfer to a rack to a cool.



Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

3/4 cup unsalted butter
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 tablespoon white or cider vinegar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly grease or line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a mixing bowl, cream butter, sugars, corn syrup, and vinegar. Then, beat in the eggs. Beat in the vanilla, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Add the flour and chocolate chips: stir.

Drop the dough by the tablespoon onto the pans. Bake for 10 minutes, until just set. The centers will look underdone. Remove from the oven and set on a rack to cool.

New York Minute

I walked down Broadway early on Wednesday evening, a fleeting free moment in a whirlwind forty-eight hour trip to New York City. It was hot and humid, and despite my light summer dress, I felt like I was swimming through the air. I had taken the bus from Boston that morning, carrying only a small computer bag and my purse. It was my first time back to the city since I moved two months earlier, and I was surprised to find that most things there were exactly the same (the vendors in the farmers’ market, the cracks in the asphalt, the scent of the café near where I once worked) and also a little bit different (new restaurant signs, strappier summer outfits, earlier hours at that same café). I had a dinner scheduled that night and meetings throughout the next day, but with a couple of hours to kill before it all began, I decided to walk. I love to wander.

I walked around Gramercy, past the line for the Shake Shack snaking through Madison Square Park, amid the honk and screech of taxicabs and the rumbling of the subway beneath my feet. I lingered at the market in Union Square, checking out the boxes of fuzzy peaches and shiny purple plums, apricots almost neon in their orange. I bought a book at the Strand, and flipped through the racks at an overpriced thrift store or two.

Around 5 p.m., I stepped into a familiar bodega downtown, looking for a moment of air conditioning and perhaps something sweet, and picked up an icy coconut popsicle, one of dozens of flavors stacked in the freezer in rows. I peeled off the plastic wrapper and ate quickly as I walked. It immediately began to melt.

Weaving there among tourists in baseball caps and business men in suits, I remembered how much I love Manhattan on a summer afternoon—meandering and anonymous, my neck damp with sweat, my tongue frozen with the taste of sugar and vaguely tropical fruit.

Wild Blueberries

I have a lot to write about. Nothing big. Nothing life changing.

This has been a slow summer, one taken day by day, moments at a time. Now that Matt is home from Afghanistan, I’m remembering what it’s like to be in a relationship. Now that my book is almost done, I’m remembering what it’s like to take time away from work. This summer I’m trying to concentrate on the small stuff, the tiny things – the smells and tastes; recipes and meals; the best pulled pork sandwich I’ve ever had, last week at a roadside diner in East Tennessee. But it’s been more than a year since I’ve written regularly here on the blog, and I find myself unable to sit down at my desk, open my computer, and simply begin. It’s all about taking small steps, I suppose.

To start: Matt and I rented a tiny cabin on the coast of Maine for one week in July. We hiked mountainous trails in Acadia National Park, and bicycled miles and miles around the seascapes of Schoodic Point, which smelled of salt, sea and pine.


In the evenings we drank whiskey while sitting on our porch, reading books and watching the sun as it went down over the bay. Sometimes I cooked in our miniature kitchen: pastas with sausage and kale, frittatas with onions and peppers and Gruyere. Other nights we went out for lobsters or lobster rolls, fried oysters or fish and chips. There was a lot of vanilla soft ice cream and a couple of blueberry-flavored beers.




One day we drove north on Route 1 to Lubec, Maine, the eastern most point in the continental United States. We stopped at the lighthouse at West Quoddy Head. It was dark with fog and cold with the ocean breeze. I felt like I was standing at the edge of the Earth.


Later, we ate turkey sandwiches with mustard and Swiss cheese while sitting on our car, overlooking the sea. We shared an oatmeal cookie – one studded with wild blueberries and a soft sugar cream, which we had purchased that morning at a neon-blue, dome-like building called “Wild Blueberry Land” on the side of the road.


The cookie was nondescript—a medium sized oval, brown with sugar and blue with berry juice. But it tasted so unexpectedly good that I stared at it, distrustful for a moment. It was tender and moist, spiked with cinnamon and nutmeg, perfect-fruit sweet. It reminded me of a blueberry crisp, a huckleberry buckle, a cookie I once ate at a State Fair near my aunt’s summer home in Pennsylvania.


On our way home we stopped at Wild Blueberry Land again to buy more. But the tray on which the cookies sat before was empty except for a piece of parchment paper and a few stray lines of grease. We asked for the recipe at the counter and watched as a young baker wrote it out on the piece of notebook paper now sitting crumpled in my bag. Back in Boston, I keep telling myself to bake them. But I haven’t yet, and I’m not sure I will.

I’m afraid that was a moment that belonged only there, on the wind-swept coast of Maine.

Summertime

Early on Monday Matt and I drove through the empty streets of Cambridge and then the highway crowded with commuters, our road bikes bouncing on the rack strapped to the back of our car. We drove an hour south in the glossy morning light to Plymouth, Massachusetts—home of the Mayflower (II) and the town’s namesake rock, a smooth little stone housed under a portico on the water. The tourists were just beginning to hit the streets when we arrived, but we weren’t in town long. We were there to bike.

We began our cycling route from the parking lot of a supermarket. The sun was already thick in the sky when we entered the Myles Standish State Forest, where we spent hours riding: Up and down, up and down. Hill after rolling hill, small pavement bumps that passed like hiccups, but ones that made my legs burn. It was close to 90 degrees and I could soon feel the salt on my skin, layered like a mask.

On our ride we passed through miles of forests and fields. Zipping along, I could smell stagnant ponds covered in algae, pine trees, the fresh turned earth. I caught whiffs of car exhaust and concrete. The hesitant green of plant, or maybe flower. Fried dough in town, and briny ocean water to its side. Human sweat. Gatorade. Always: The soft sweet of summer air.

Matt and I have been bicycling a lot since he returned from Afghanistan. A long-time runner, I love the challenge of a new sport. I love its speed. I love how hungry I am when we’re done.

On Monday evening we returned home from Plymouth sweaty and starving. I was surprised when Matt, who loves to eat but has never been one for the stove, offered to cook. He grilled bratwurst, heated a pan of sauerkraut and steamed bright green broccoli florets, which he served with Parmesan cheese and lemon juice. We ate the sausage with mustard, and sourdough rolls warm from the oven. There were a few cold, cold beers. I can get used to this, I thought.

Crisp

I spent last weekend with my family on a lake in rural Pennsylvania. We stayed in the same cottage where my mother and my aunt spent the summers of their childhoods. It smells now as it did then: Of varnish, sunscreen and musty beach towels faded from the sun. It echoes with the sound of crickets at night. We attended a pig roast and drank red wine while sitting on the dock. Canoeing around the murky waters, we didn't put on sunscreen until a bit too late in the day. On Sunday night, we lit sparklers and read the Declaration of Independence out loud. I made a peach-blackberry crisp. It came out of the oven bronzed and crunchy with tiny shards of pecans. We ate it with vanilla ice cream.


Peach-Blackberry Crisp
Loosely adapted from Alice Waters

5 ripe peaches, pitted and sliced
1 cup blackberries
1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon amaretto liqueur
3 cups crisp topping

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. In a mixing bowl, toss together the fruit, sugar and flour. Add zest and amaretto. Mix. Transfer to a large ovenproof dish. Cover with crisp topping. Pressing down lightly, leave no fruit exposed. Place on aluminum foil or a baking dish to catch bubbling juices. Bake 50 - 60 minutes, turning after a half hour for even bronzing. Serve warm, with ice cream.

Crisp Topping

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons firmly packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 (heaping) teaspoon cinnamon
2/3 cup pecans, toasted, and then ground in a Cuisinart
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) butter, unsalted, chilled, cut into small pieces

Stir together flour, sugars, salt, cinnamon and pecans in a large bowl. Work the butter into the flour mixture with tips of fingers, or an electric mixer, until crumbly in texture. Can be made ahead, or frozen.

Boston

I moved to Boston the first week in June. I moved with Matt, who returned safely from Afghanistan in March, early on a Sunday morning. It was hot and muggy, and we were sweating before we began. My brother, Ben, had taken a cab from Manhattan out to Brooklyn to help us load the truck and we ate bagels with cream cheese and drank lukewarm cups of Dunkin' Donuts coffee as we worked. I lifted box after box, and watched as Ben and Matt lugged my bed and dresser down the lopsided stairs of my Park Slope studio—the studio I found in the week after Matt was recalled to the Army, the one too small for a sink in the bathroom, the one overlooking the pear tree newly-blossomed in the back yard.

Matt and I now live in an apartment in Cambridge, close to where he will begin a graduate program at Harvard in the fall. It’s a few blocks from the river in one direction, and from the public library in the other. The apartment has large windows, and lots of light. There’s a view and a fireplace and enough space for both a couch and an armchair. After five years (more or less) in New York City, my appreciation for dining tables and walk-in closets, for multiple rooms and bathroom sinks has grown exponentially. The kitchen counter has enough space for a coffee machine and a dish rack. There are cabinets for all of my pots.

But a new home, for me, isn’t really a home until I’ve baked something—until the kitchen is filled with the smell of butter, flour and eggs. So, last Wednesday, in the humid haze of an almost-rainstormy afternoon, I pulled out my spring-form pan and baked a vanilla cake. I let a bowl of quartered strawberries macerate with a bit of sugar and then reduced the resulting syrup in a tiny pan on the stove. The cake, which was dense and sweet, was layered with the fruit, which I had pulsed in my Cuisinart until they became a bright chunky sauce, and a light frosting whipped with tangy cream cheese. Later, when the sun had set and we could see the church steeples across the Charles from our window, I served it to some old friends. I guess this means that I’m home.

Taming the Beast

Time has slipped away. Since I last wrote, I finished the first draft of my book. Matt returned from war. We spent a week drinking wine on a beach in the Caribbean, and then another in New Orleans, where we ate muffalettas, turtle soup and wild cherry sno-balls topped with puddles of condensed milk. I've baked countless loaves of banana bread, zucchini bread, and a few of honey-whole wheat. I've cooked spicy spinach lasagnas, braised short ribs and stewed pots of chana masala thick with spice. I'm currently in the final months of editing my book, a process that has been frustrating and fascinating in equal measure. Over the last year I've created what feels like a wild animal of a story. An unruly little beast, really, one that changes daily - sometimes confusing, often maddening, always inspiring. But it's here. And now I have to figure out how to calm it down. We'll see how that goes. In any case: I'll be back.

Sticky Buns

When I was small my family celebrated Christmas morning with sticky buns. Presented in a white cardboard box from the local bakery, they were fat and luscious with brown sugar frosting and crunchy pecans. I always ate mine in small bites, pulling them apart with my fingers at their seams.

Years later, when I was in high school, my parents split up. As a result many things changed. Among them, our holidays suddenly became disjointed. Many of our traditions—the tiny ones that we'd carved together beneath the tree, beside the menorah—were thrown to the wayside, now relics of the past.

Last week, however, I revived one. I wanted sticky buns for Christmas. This time, I made them from scratch. They were the first I’ve eaten in years.

I began the recipe, which is from Bon Appetit, on Christmas Eve at my mother's house in Boston. I let the dough rise while my mom, her boyfriend, my brother and I ate dinner--sharing a lasagna with spinach and ricotta, salad with pomegranate seeds and pine nuts, and lots of wine.

I kneaded the soft pillow of dough at 11 pm, giggling in the hazy glow of a glass of Burgundy. I rolled the dough into rectangles, brushed it with butter and spice, and then wound it into two tight logs. After cutting each one into tiny rounds, which curled like snails, I placed the buns into cake pans coated with a thick brown sugar glaze. Then I let them sit in the fridge overnight.

I came downstairs before anyone else on Christmas morning, the kitchen awash in a pink post-dawn light. I took the pans out of the cold and let the buns rise on the counter for a second time. Then I stuck them in the oven as my family slowly made their way to join me by the tree. Soon, the house was filled with a sweet yeasty scent, one of hot cinnamon and sugar.

Later, we ate the sticky buns while sitting on the couch and washed them down with glasses of champagne. They were fleshy, flaky and warm. The rich caramel glaze hung over each hump of baked dough like snow. They were just as I remembered. Actually, they were better.

Sticky Buns
Adapted from Bon Appetit

Makes 24

Dough
1 cup warm water (105-115 degrees Fahrenheit)
4 teaspoons dry yeast
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup dry nonfat milk powder
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
2 large eggs
4 1/4 cups all purpose flour (plus more, I found, to get the dough the desired consistency)

Glaze
1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar, packed
3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup golden syrup, or dark corn syrup
1/4 cup water
3 cups pecan halves

4 teaspoons sugar
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon

For Dough:

Mix warm water and yeast with a pinch of sugar in a small bowl. Let stand until foamy, about 8 minutes. Using electric mixer, beat remaining sugar, butter, milk powder and salt in a large bowl until well blended. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add yeast mixture, and then 3 cups of flour, one cup at a time. Using a rubber spatula, mix in final cup of flour, scraping down the sides of the bowl frequently. The dough will be soft and sticky. Sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup flour on the counter and knead dough until smooth and elastic, adding more flour as you go until no longer sticky, about 8 minutes.

Butter another large bowl and put the dough inside, turning to coat. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm area, until doubled, about 2 ½ to 3 hours.

For the Glaze:

Butter two 10-inch round cake pans with 2-inch sides. Beat brown sugar, ½ cup butter, honey, golden syrup, and ¼ cup water in a medium bowl to blend. Spread half of the glaze in the bottom of each prepared pan. Sprinkle 1 ½ cups pecans over each.

Punch down the dough. Divide in half. Roll each piece out on a floured work surface into a large rectangle, about 12 by 9 inches. Brush excess flour off of the dough, and spread the remaining butter over each rectangle, dividing equally. Mix the four teaspoons of sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Sprinkle it over each rectangle evenly. Then, starting at the long side, roll each rectangle up into a log. Cut each into 12 rounds. Place 12 rounds, cut side down, in each pan, spacing evenly. Cover with plastic wrap.

You can let this rise now for about an hour, until doubled. Or you can place the pans in the fridge overnight and let them rise the following day, for about an hour and a half or 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake the buns until a deep golden brown, abut 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edges to loosen the buns, and then turn immediately over on a platter while still hot. Serve and enjoy.

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.