Summer Cake for 13.

Welcome September, season of excess! We have so many rosy jars of glittering homemade jam that our cupboard suggests we might also stockpile Spam (and ammunition). Why the excess? Lust for sugar and beauty, of course, but also the last three times I was trying to leave the weekly laiki (farmer's market), cart and bags heavy, some guy had filled plastic sacks to bulging with the rest of his nectarines, plums, or peaches, maybe 5 kilos, for a euro, and it seems irresponsible to not get them. We're perpetually in some phase of eating them fresh, like chain smokers always pre- or post- cigarette, and each is tastier than the last. We keep making jam (more on urban canning soon- it's a delight), and there are also plenty for this cake.

When the girls were little, we spent summers in Chania (Crete), in a quirky shanty-like apartment a few steps from the sea. It had a fan and a small television we would watch late at night while eating chilled wrapped cakes (the kind given out as favors at Orthodox baptisms) in our underwear. The apartment had a gas burner, a small free-standing and very emotional oven, and an equally emotional refrigerator. I made up several recipes that would not tax the dear kitchen and could be made with only a pot, a pan, a small paring knife, and bare hands, which was all we had in the kitchen. We loved scaling back to this elemental lifestyle; rather than outfit the kitchen, we had this cake, tomatoes and myzythra and paximadi (the Cretan salad), rice pudding with cream, boiled baby zucchini with oil and lemon, Marcella Hazan's butter-tomato sauce (with fresh tomatoes) on pasta, and chocolate zucchini cake. It was a clean break from the elaborate way we go about things in our main house, a more monastic sumptuousness. If I make this cake in the big house now, the girls say "Oh! Summer cake!"

We just had another dozen people in, film students making a movie Charlene is directing, and I made this twice. (Some days I made them the other summer cake- chcoclate/zucchini.) This is rich with the taste of butter, tangy and luscious with fruit. 

The Cake:

300 g/ 2 1/2 C flour

300 g/ 1 1/2 C sugar

4 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

- mix with your hands, and then blend in with your fingertips:

125 g/ 1/2 C butter, until it looks crumbly and there are a few small pieces of butter throughout:

Add:

2 eggs

3 C fruit in small pieces- here, a mix of nectarines and plums

1/2 tsp. bitter almond essence* 

1 tsp vanilla (homemade here)

mix the vanilla and bitter almond in with the fruit and blend the fruit and the eggs in with your hands, gathering the dry ingredients from the bottom of the bowl and lifting them to the surface. As soon as no streaks of dry flour/sugar remain, put the batter into a *large pan- ours was 25 x 28 cm (11" x 12"), lined with baking paper if you like. Cover with:

3 or 4 tablespoons demarara sugar (coarse)

Bake at 170 C/ 350 F for quite a long time- 30 to 40 minutes- it is wet with fruit (yet the cake portion bakes up very light). Prick a mainly cake area with a toothpick- if it comes out clean the cake is ready.

The sugar makes a crisp crust with plenty of sparkle, shattering and giving way to a tender crumb and fat chunks of fruit. The almond essence tweaks the fruit tremendously- all the stone fruits take to it (as the butter takes to the salt). If you were using apples, cinnamon and nutmeg would be the classic choice. With pears, a little pear williams or a shot of whiskey. Cherries (frozen pitted sour cherries in winter), bitter almond again (ideal pairing). The cake is fragile and moist, even gooey on the bottom, and makes for inelegant pieces. No one will mind at all. It was not eaten so much as inhaled. The recipe was much asked for and I was very happy sharing it as nothing could be better suited to the novice cook and the student kitchen.

(It was gone so quickly that the second day I scaled it up by fifty percent- half again as much of everything, and made it in the largest pan that fits in our oven, 28 x 42 cm. It could also be scaled down- using one egg,150 g flour, etc. and a 20 x 20 pan.)

*In a makeshift kitchen, use whatever is at hand- a shot of liquor or liqueur, some lemon zest, cinnamon, or nothing at all.

Let us eat Cake!

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The Austerity Diaries... let us eat cake.

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities..."  (Frank Lloyd Wright)

We have been hearing about austerity measures relentlessly for years. What is almost worse, we have actually been living with them. The day to day life of everyone here has been deeply affected. We have unpaid bills robbing us of peaceful sleep, very often no insurance, and are uncertain even of the very roof over our heads. Necessities are no longer a given.

Luxury, on the other hand, flows unabated. There is nothing "austere" about life in Greece- it continues to be sumptuous, dazzling, juicy, abundant in every material pleasure. Such robust pleasures as these are beyond the reach of any sort of measure- one might as well try to legislate the lusciousness out of a fig.

Despite the fact that whenever there is a blackout I think our electricity has finally been cut off because we have not paid the bill, I am having a hard time feeling sorry for myself. The fact is that we live an enormously elaborate, well-appointed life, rich in culture, occasional frivolity, books, and beautiful meals. And this more so than before Austerity became a household word: Elegance has become a spiritual necessity. Depending on your political views, it might even be a moral imperative. 

We are living more elegantly than we ever have, with much less money than we ever had. I had imagined luxury largely a function of money, but strip the money away and this shines like a marquise diamond: Luxury is a function of care, of choice.

Our household budget for four is 100 euros a week for everything that isn't a bill- tomatoes, laundry soap, bus tickets, ouzo meze, biscuits for the dog, milk, tea, outdoor cinema at dusk, lipstick, ice cream cones at one in the morning when it is too hot to sleep. Sometimes the budget is closer to 80. 

In truth I am the least likely of home economists. I adore the material world, and am regrettably not particularly modest in any of my appetites. Yet, they all remain sated. In the Austerity Diaries I hope to share the mixture of prudence and lavishness that enable us to live as well as we do in our beautiful country. Even as means are limited, pleasure surely is not.

As a first measure, listen to Marie Antoinette, who wisely prescribes lots of cake:

Viva Diva!- Truffles with Caramel and Salt.

Breakfast at Alexandra's- Green Acres.

Greco-Austrian Pavlova

Crisp Melting Candy Bar Meringues.

Tangy Cheese Pie with Fresh Mint and Honey

Pear and Chocolate Brownies

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A Buttery Marble Cake and the Reluctance for Lent

A respite from pork is one thing, but butter, that's hard. Or at least I suppose so- I haven't done it yet.

This beauty was visiting San Francisco when I was.

Lustrous, radiant with life, butter is peerless- certainly irreplaceable. For the rest of Lent, I'll try to share recipes that shine when made with oil instead of butter and do not need rich golden eggs. But plain marble cake is not one of those. 

Truly beurre noisette/browned butter is all the rage lately. There's a reason for that- all the dairy richness announces itself with such chutzpah. Still sophisticated, but happily a lot less subtle. In a recipe for a plain cake, like a marble cake, it makes an audible (loud!) difference.

A good plain pound cake is a marvelous thing. Once you swirl chocolate batter throughout anything though, something tricky happens- there becomes a chocolate part and then a non-chocolate part. Chocolate is a bold, attention-getting flavor- it can be hard for more discrete delights to shine beside it. To make a great marble cake you need to make sure that the white part is not just the "non-chocolate" part but that it has a definite personality of its own. Brown butter makes a white batter that stands up to the flashy dark swirl running through it.

To make this marble cake I did four things differently than a marble cake recipe usually calls for. The first thing was browning the butter. As I had girls impatient for cake, I started with cool but still liquid butter so I could not hope for volume from creaming the butter and sugar together. Instead I beat it long with the addition of the (many) cold eggs- they chilled the butter and gained great volume. The second was preparing the pan- thick layer of butter spread in with bare fingertips and coated with coarse sugar rather than flour- the cake slipped effortlessly from the deeply fluted (cheap and poor-quality) pan and had a glittering crunchy crust. The third was to use melted dark chocolate to flavor some of the batter- rather than using cocoa powder and water as most recipes do, and the fourth difference was to add some finely chopped dark chocolate to the chocolate batter for punctuation and texture. The effect of all this was that each batter made the other shine- that dark contrast with the chunks of chocolate running through it highlighted the rich buttery purity of the lighter batter.

For this very generous cake (rising to the top of a large bundt pan), we will need:

225 g/1 C butter, plus an extra small lump for the pan
350 g/ 1 3/4 C sugar

6 eggs (yes, 6!)

10 ml/2 tsp. vanilla (homemade here)

390 g/3 C flour

20 ml/4 tsp baking powder

5 ml/1 tsp. salt

330 ml/ 1 1/3 C yogurt or buttermilk

150 g/6 oz. melted dark chocolate + 50 g/ 2 oz. chopped chocolate

some coarse sugar for the pan

First prepare the pan- using just your fingertips smear the soft butter all over the pan in a not very thin layer. Coat it all over with coarse sugar. 

Now we can brown the butter. I melted over medium heat and then kept dragging a silicone spatula over the bottom of the pan so as many of the milk solids as possible would have a chance to turn toasty bronze without blackening. Be gentle with it- take it off when it smells rich and a little like hazelnuts (noisettes!)- it can blacken suddenly.

Pour the butter into the mixing bowl and let it cool (I set it out on the veranda). Even if it is still liquid, you can beat in the sugar. Adding the eggs, one at a time and beating hard, will see the volume increase tremendously:

Those rich brown flecks are from the butter.

Add the salt and the vanilla.

The butter, sugar, and eggs beat up very fluffy.

Now mix the flour with the baking powder, blend in half, add half the yogurt/buttermilk, the rest of the flour, then the rest of the yogurt:

Now set aside a little less than half of the batter. Chop the dark chocolate, melt the 3/4 of it gently, and blend it into the batter, along with the bits of chopped chocolate.

Put some of the lighter batter into the pan and top with dabs of the chocolate batter, and then dabs of the rest of the lighter batter:

Swirl the batters together gently with a butterknife, and put in the 170 c/350 f oven.

Note there's plenty of room for the batter to rise- we're going to need it. The rich, heavy batter rises slowly to the top of the pan:

It needs over an hour for a wooden skewer plunged in to come out clean- this one took and hour and ten minutes. 

Let it rest a few minutes before turning it out onto a cake dish- it slips easily from the pan, The glittering, almost crisp crust makes a nice contrast to the moist interior, and saves the cake nicely from drying out should it stay around longer than a day.

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Applesauce Cake (... for I am sick with love)

"Sustain me with cakes of raisins, refresh me with apples...." 

-Song of Solomon 2.5

Cake- disregarding perhaps the Song of Solomon (and Marie Antoinette)- is not an essential thing. It's a beautiful thing. When you walk into the house and there is a sheet pan with a knife next to it and a rectangle cut out- it does not scream "Cake!"- no matter how luscious it is. It's so worthwhile to go the extra distance- buttering 2 pans instead of one, slathering some cream on one layer, and topping it with another, more cream, some jam, some chocolate shavings... a handful of paper-thin apple slices dried in the oven and scattered like the fall leaves tumbling outside the window. Put it on a cake stand. You can even serve lentil soup for dinner and no one will notice- because they will be saying "Oh! Cake!" Does cake deserve anything less?

Applesauce cake with raisins is a perfect example of a cake longing for this treatment. Instead of a lunch box afterthought, it's a festive, elegant dessert- the kind you clear the table for before you present it after dinner. 

Here it is:

First, line two 24 cm/9" round cake pans with baking paper- butter lightly, dust well with flour, and give them a good tap upside down over the sink. Take a handful of currants and sprinkle some rum over them- heat gently so they soak up the rum. Then grate a piece of fresh (peeled) ginger- the size of your thumb.

Then, in a small bowl:

300 g/ 2 1/2 C flour- (using half whole wheat- as long as it is soft/pastry flour- adds a sweet nutty flavor.)

5 ml/ 1 teaspoon baking powder

2.5 ml/ 1/2 teaspoon each salt and baking soda

a little ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove (careful with the clove- it can overpower very quickly)- we can tweak it in the final mix.

In a large bowl, beat:

225 g/1 C butter 

400 g/2 C brown sugar (you could start with a little less and, depending on the sweetness of your applesauce, tweak it later.)

then add: 

4 eggs, one at a time, beating until blended in. 

Measure out 500 g/2 C applesauce.

Now we'll add half of the dry ingredients, then half the applesauce, then rest of the dry ingredients, then the rest of the applesauce, and the rum-soaked raisins. Taste for spices and add more if it needs it.

Spread the batter in the prepared pans (and if you have a kitchen scale out- go ahead and weigh them to see that the batter is even between them), and bake at 175 c/ 350 f  for about 15 minutes, switch racks, and bake another 10-15 minutes, until the cake springs back and a toothpick comes out clean.

While the cake's in the oven, you can make these:

They tumble over the cake like fall leaves.

Slice a whole apple as thinly as you can on a mandolin/slicer- don't worry of they don't all come out whole- they shrink in the oven anyway. Lay them in a single layer on a metal dish, and let them dry and brown in the oven alongside the cake. They will not be completely dry, but have a lovely color on the edges.

before...

after (about 10-15 minutes- keep watching)

Even without the apple leaves, the cake is impressive with a tall crown of whipped cream, sweetened as you like and with a little vanilla or rum to scent it. Make sure the cake is completely cool before you assemble it. If you can let it sit for an hour or two in a cold place before serving, the cream will sink into the layers a bit and soften them. It is a wholesome thing in truth, but you'd never know it.

That's a little golden syrup drizzled over the top-
 maple would be nice, too.

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The Legendary NYT Plum Cake but with Peaches instead- It's Better with Butter

Antoine Vollon: Mound of Butter (1875-1885)

How could something so vibrant, so luminous ever be called a still-life? The best portrait in the Impressionists show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (in beautiful San Francisco) is of the Queen of Baking.

I had some peaches yielding so invitingly to the thumb they were screaming to realize their destiny in a sunny galette. (Why not just enjoy them fresh? Well, they were quite small- bought firm, at an excellent price, first to fill the bottom tier of our very large tray, and later to see what might come of them in the course of the week). There is little finer than a rich buttery crumbly pastry crust stained with the sticky thickened juices of ripe fruit. The galette provides lots surface.

The food processor does such short work of making a flaky crust that I don't even mind hauling it out and washing it afterwards. I put in a very scant 2 cups of flour, about 3/4 of a pack of butter (3/4 C- 190 g), a half teaspoon of salt, a large spoonful of sugar, and pulsed until I had pieces of butter the size of a lima bean. Then I drizzled in some ice water mixed with an egg yolk (I find it gives more structure to the galette without taking anything from the tenderness). It was not quite holding together, so I added more, stirring the onions frying in the pan next to me all the while. Then it came together, and what I had was this:

Note how it stretches rather than crumbles. alas. 

I've been through this before- baking in haste and distracted- so I know that this sticky mound of dough is unsalvagable. As a pastry dough, that is...

It is upsetting to waste a good amount of butter, not just the (considerable) expense, but the very wrongness of waste, to say nothing of this being my favorite ingredient in anything always. Favorite substance really.

What's in the bowl, unpromising as it now looks, is really very useful- again- that's just under 2 cups of flour, an egg yolk, the 3/4 c of butter, and some water. In short, the makings of most any cake. And what of the peaches? They will stand in for plums in the (actually legendary) Italian plum cake from the New York Times. Why do I say legendary? Because after 4 pages of options I got bored scrolling and just picked my favorite place to get recipes which is Smitten Kitchen because she is wonderful. My mother and I made this when it came out in the New York Times in the 1980's and we loved it and have made it many times since, but I did not quite remember it by heart.

The original recipe- getting its moisture from the juices of the fruit- contains no milk, as other cakes so often do, so the water was a little problematic. Apart from that, having already nearly twice the flour as the original (modestly portioned) recipe calls for, I just scaled up and doubled it, adding:

a little more flour

1/4 C butter

2 teaspoons of baking powder

a little salt

a little less than 2 C of sugar

the leftover egg white plus 3 more eggs.

That gave us the original recipe. As I love almonds with peaches, I added a half cup of ground almonds, tweaked their flavor with some bitter almond essence, and added some lemon zest and some vanilla to round the flavors out. I then spread the batter in my largest pan to the get the highest fruit : cake ratio. This I covered with peaches, halved but with their pretty skins on, and covered the surface with some sliced almonds and some raw brown sugar for sparkle and crunch and sweetness.

ready to put in the oven

still warm, a pronounced almond fragrance mingling with the tangy scent of peaches

As in life, in the kitchen, things often do not go as planned, but they can still be really wonderful.

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Junior League of Legends

            (Cake saves the day: here, a Grand Champion Sponge Cake with apricots and cream brings a note of festivity to an otherwise dreary kitchen plumbing emergency.)

When I moved into my new apartment, one of the greatest changes was having a kitchen that is a room unto itself, a way of living I had not experienced since 1978, when we lived in a rambling mansion-like Victorian house near the border of Canada. We had nearly no furniture, certainly not enough to fill the five bedrooms and three living rooms and den and dining room. As befits a house of that scale, the kitchen was not only separate, but had its own porch, and own stairs to the basement and up to the back of the house. (But you shouldn't be thinking me of a grand background- my parents were college professors- this is why we had no furniture- and the house had cost 27 thousand dollars. And there was ice on the inside of the windows all winter long.). It had no bookshelf, but as I was only 11, I had not yet amassed the library I now have. Now, after three and a half decades, I had not only a lot of books, but a place to put them.

Honestly, I have a place to put a third of them- those most worn and tattered. The rest are in the living room- respectable and useful books all, but not necessary. One of the most often consulted of the necessary books is a Junior League cookbooks from the family home state of my dearest friend Sarah, which luckily for us all is Louisiana.

Junior League cookbooks are to commercial cookbooks as a candid snapshot is to a posed formal portrait- vivid, alive, and a little voyeuristic. It's like the best handwritten green index cards all the homes in a community- the recipes of memory, the county fair entries, the legendary cakes- touchingly, the things each entrant is famous for, is most proud to share. Of course, some of them are bizarre (pork sausage cake- that is a sweet, iced, two-layer cake made with a significant amount of crumbled pork sausage. I have not tried it.). Some are breathtakingly practical (and terse!: an alien visiting our planet could safely infer from these alone that our species has two distinct genders)- many of these are in the drinks section : Refrigerator Martini- 2 cups gin 1 cup vodka 1/2 c vermouth. "Mix in an empty fifth bottle. Store in the refrigerator. will keep as long as they last." Still others are nothing less than the distilled wisdom of an entire culture's devotion to quality cake:

Grand Champion Sponge Cake:

6 egg whites

1/3 C sugar
pinch cream of tartar or a dash of vinegar

Beat the egg whites until frothy, then add the vinegar or cream of tartar and a little of the sugar. Keep beating, adding the sugar a little at a time, until they form nice peaks. Not too stiff; you'll want to keep them soft enough so as not to have to work too hard folding them into the rest pf the batter, which is:

6 egg yolks
1/4 C water
1 1/4 C flour
1 C sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

We'll blend these quite well with the same mixer- no need to clean the whites from the beaters. It seems like a stiff mixture at first but it will lighten with a little beating. Fold in a third of the whites to lighten the mixture, then carefully the rest, turning the bowl and lifting from the bottom with a rubber spatula. Bake at 170 C/350 F, until a toothpick comes out nice and clean, no crumbs.

I have used this for faux twinkies, Swedish princess cake, mad tea party cupcakes, petit fours, and subdued, subtle nut tortes. It is magnificent. Its pronounced egginess gives a richness of flavor (note we've no butter to rely on for those), and it stands up well to anything I've paired with it (and it loves anything with liquor in it.). There's also nothing pricey or obscure in the recipe- you likely have everything on hand, and you won't be out much.

Most recently (today in fact, as my kitchen wall was being ripped open from the outside), I made this in a large springform pan (26 cm, 10"), which I lined with parchment but did not bother to butter, as it clings nicely to the sides but comes away easily as well with a swirl of a knife. The cake- this size baked for about 35 minutes- rises up impressively. Don't ooh and ah yet though, as this cake- like all of its cousins who also get their volume and height chiefly from beaten whites (chiffons, genoises....)- will quickly fall by about 20%, losing its dome as it does so.

This one I split horizontally (it cools in just 20 minutes, owing to its being made mainly of air), and filled and topped with apricots. (Why apricots? I had lots, but also in contrast I found them more luscious and tangy and dense than the strawberries I generally use) I cut up the apricots (about 20) into pieces and mush in a bowl and mixed them with a little coarse raw sugar (for the taste) and some vanilla and some bitter almond. (Why bitter almond? The stone fruits have a small kernel within their pits that suggests this fragrance, and it marries very well with them). I put half between the layers and half on the top layer. Don't be worried about moving the layers around- they are quite springy and elastic and if one does break it will tear rather than crumble, so it just fits right back together- the cake is a model of behavior. Of course, it could be ready to eat at once. But, if you can spare the time, an overnight in the refrigerator will make it evenly moist all over, and even more delicious. I topped mine with whipped cream sweetened with more raw sugar. The whole ensemble has a very warm look. Here's how to make it come together nicely:

Splitting the layers with the help of the removable bottom of a tart pan.

The apricots with raw brown sugar to taste and a splash of vanilla extract.

Pouring the macerated fruit over the layers.

The top layer with fruit, ready for the whipped cream.

This whole thing took way longer to write about than to make.You'll be surprised by all the fuss everyone makes at the table for so little trouble.

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