Heaven and Hell Cake

There are certain things I might have eaten when I was 12 but that I'll probably never eat from here on out. I mean, the Cadbury Creme Egg deep fried in funnel cake batter. Bacon, cheese and sour cream on a baked potato. Something wherein the "soup" is really "melted pork fat" (I tried to let it drain out, but I was being watched).

But this cake, this cake gives me pause. Layers of peanut butter mousse, angel food cake, and devils food cake covered in chocolate ganache. It's more of a concept cake, and I'm pretty down with that most of the time. But it seems to cause a kind of insanity or ruckus. I mean, it's a cake that causes TROUBLE.

***

In other news, I made a gluten free blueberry breakfast cake with garbanzo flour and the batter tasted like a dog's ass. I think I was supposed to roast the flour first. Or it will not have that bitter grassy aftertaste after baking. This is the birthday cake of someone who can't eat wheat. But Lord, I am already thinking about the back-up cake I will bake, and I don't have time for a back-up cake. If I did, it would be gluten free one-bowl chocolate cake. I hate that gluten free baked goods are so freaking sweet. But that chocolate cake recipe describes and links to a home mix of gluten free flour and I feel like if the inventor claims it can be used cup for cup as a substitute for flour, Ima try it.

***

Yesterday, I made Martha Stewart's Jewish Apple Cake. Let's be serious, it was the apple cake recipe of Arthur Schwartz' Jewish Home Baking as passed on by Martha Stewart. It reappeared on a different site as Passover Pareve Apple Cake. To be safe, I'm putting it here. For five minutes I couldn't find it and panicked.

INGREDIENTS

• For the topping
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon, or a combination of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and ginger
• For the cake
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 3/4 cup matzo cake meal
• 5 medium apples, peeled, cored, halved, and cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices (about 5 cups), preferably Golden Delicious, Crispin (Mutzu), or other apples that keep their shape when cooked
• 1/3 cup raisins (optional)

DIRECTIONS

• 1. Position an oven rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Lightly oil an 8-inch-square glass baking dish.
• 2. Mix together the walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon in a small bowl; set aside.
• 3. In a bowl with a hand-held electric mixer, beat the eggs on medium speed until well mixed. Beat in the sugar, about 2 tablespoons at a time, beating until the mixture is thick and foamy. Beat in the oil, adding it in a steady stream. Scrape down the bowl with a rubber spatula. With the spatula, stir in the matzo cake meal, blending well.
• 4. Pour half of the batter mixture into the prepared pan. Sprinkle about half the topping mixture evenly over the batter. Top with half the apples and all the raisins. Scrape the remaining half of the batter over the apples, spreading it out to cover the apples. Arrange the remaining apples on top of the batter. Sprinkle evenly with the remaining topping mixture.
• 5. Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until the sides of the cake pull away very slightly from the baking dish and the topping has begun to caramelize. (A cake tester is not reliable. It will not come out clean due to the moist richness of this cake.) Let sit in the baking dish for several hours, until completely cool, before cutting into serving portions. This cake is yet another Yiddish food that improves with age. Keep the cake in its dish, covered tightly with plastic, and the next day the topping will have become a moist, candy-like coating.

***

Me: I'm making the apple cake for Passover.
JW: Oh really?
Me: Yes, a Martha Stewart recipe, so you know that it's been tested, that it will work, and that feelings were hurt to get there.
JW: (Wistful) Yes, feelings were definitely hurt.

Also:

Me: Got any plastic wrap?
S.: No. Should we go get some?
Me: No, it's just supposed to be airtight. It'll get better over the course of two days, supposedly.
S.: (Crimping the foil top over the foil pan of cake).
Me: Also, if an intruder breaks into your apartment, you can just hit him with this cake. Seriously. You're more important.
S.: That is a heavy cake.
Me: That's ten apples my friend. (And nine eggs...and I hammered the walnuts while they were in a Ziplock, oh the therapy).

***

Next: garbanzo cassoulet...

Apple Walnut Whiskey Cake

When I was a kid, my mom used to make a German Apple Cake. Our recipes mostly came from neighbors trying to help out a lady from France who could barely speak a lick of English but had two hungry non-stop sons. It was stiff batter with apples, sugar and cinammon on top. It absorbed more milk than a black hole, almost. Dense, plain, you could taste the salt in some bites of the bottom of the cake, and she burnt it sometimes, so it felt like a kind of penance to eat some, save for the apples being still good.

I tried to make a healthy apple cake from Heidi Swanson's blog, but it was too dry and healthy for us, probably because we are not from California or used to cakes so crumby and dry. I mean, 2.5 cups of whole wheat pastry flour! I think she undercooked it, said she undercooked it, and then gave a time for it to bake that was *not* undercooking it. My mistake.

So then I took my standby Martha Stewart Saffron Pear Cake and made some serious adjustments. To avoid confusion, here's the recipe in its entirety:

9 X 13" ceramic or metal pan (aluminum makes a more caramelized topping for some reason -- hotter).

3 apples sliced thin and put in lemon water
a bag of crushed walnut pieces
1 stick of butter
1.5 cups sugar
1 7/8 cup flour
scant 2 t baking powder
3/4 t cinnamon
1/2 t cloves/nutmeg
3/4 t salt
7/8 C buttermilk
1/3 C vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 1/2 t vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Let butter be very soft. Mix it with 1/3 C of the sugar, a third of the cinnamon, and dashes of cloves and nutmeg. Mix until fluffy.

2. Put parchment paper in the bottom of the pan. The strip of it can be a little narrower than the pan.

3. Spread this butter mixture evenly over the bottom of the pan.

4. Sprinkle walnuts in a pretty thick layer over the butter and sugar mixture, but leave about an inch free of nuts all the way around the edge of the pan. Move a nut if you have to. If you don't do this, the apples will slop out when you flip the cake: it'll look like a dog got to it.

5. Layer apples thinly over walnuts. Leave that perimeter of butter alone.

6. Mix the rest of the sugar and everything else together. Pour carefully over the nuts and sugar/butter mixture.

7. Bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Make sure toothpick comes out pretty clean, maybe a little crumb or two on it.

8. Let cake sit for 10 minutes. IMPORTANT.

9. Find a platter big enough to turn the cake over on. Do it. Peel off the parchment.

10. Let this cool.

11. Then, while it's cooling, drizzle some Jim Beam on it somehow. Poke little skewers in it and soak it through or give it a Jim Beam IV. Whatever it takes, maybe even the way they get whiskey into a drunk fruitcake. You wouldn't want it to cook it off either.

I'd serve with plain whipped cream, or if you can't imagine drizzling Jim Beam directly on the cake, put it in the whipping cream where it can be present more subtly.

The top should be between a sugar syrup and a carmelized sauce.

Someone else thought apples and whiskey were a good idea: Butterscotch Whiskey Sauce. Indeed.

Braised Cabbage and Garbanzos

Super cheap vegan budget meal for all your friends. Take out the butter and you've practically got spa food on your hands. Low grocery bill. Oh yes.

Serves 4 hongry people.

Ingredients:

5 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium head of cabbage
2 carrots
2 cans garbanzos
black pepper
salt
cumin
paprika
olive oil
butter (okay, that's not vegan, but you can just substitute more oil if you want it vegan).

Make some brown rice.

You could just buy shredded cabbage, but this way of cutting the cabbage makes the dish seem special, for some reason. And the cabbage cooks in a really delicate way:

Wash the outer leaves of cabbage. Lay several leaves at a time one on top of the other, kind of like a wad of money or measuring cups that sit inside each other. Now roll them together like a cigar. Cut the cabbage into one centimeter strips. Cabbage ribbons. You can keep the thick white middle part of the leaf. Use the whole head. You can chop the heart, just not that really tough stem.

Put this cabbage aside.

Scrape two carrots. Then, take a knife and flick off slivers of carrot in the Italian fashion, i.e. as if you are whittling the carrot into a pencil, except you keep whittling until there is no carrot left. (Sorry, no youtube). Or you can also just julienne them, but that is bow-ring. Not to mention it's supposedly attracts good qi to your food to have irregular shaped pieces. Hey, I said your hippie friends were coming over. Put the carrot slivers aside in their own bowl or dish.

1. Put a Dutch oven on high heat until it's pretty hot, then put half a stick of butter (*whistling*) and about 2T of olive oil. Put in the carrot and saute until a bit soft. Put in two cans of garbanzos, drained-ish*. Sprinkle on about 2t of cumin and a generous sprinkle of paprika. Let this cook on almost high for about 3-4 minutes.

2. Add half the minced garlic and toss the garbanzos until the garlic is fragrant. Pour this out into a bowl.

3. In the same Dutch oven (don't wash it), put in about 2T butter and 2T olive oil (or less if you are worried about these things -- I think less would work just as well). Put in the cabbage and turn it until it is really coated. Let this cook for about 3-4 minutes on high while you stir every so often. Don't go anywhere.

4. Season the cabbage the way you did the garbanzos: lots of black pepper that you've ground further with your fingers, salt, cumin and paprika. Throw in the garlic. Let the cabbage get a little brown here and there.

5. Pour 1/4 cup water into the pan, cover and let the cabbage braise on medium high for about 5 minutes. You should really actually go away and forget about the cabbage for like, 8-10 minutes. Stir once in between there, if you can. The cabbage should have wilted, gone whitish, and gotten browned and started to look caramel colored along some edges. It should not be soft and mushy, just wilted and easy to cut with a fork.

6. Pour in the garbanzos. Check seasoning. Serve on brown rice.

Mmm.

*it'll be good if some of that juice from the can gets into the dish, but get most of it drained off...

Achiote Hot Sauce

Mr. Svalina says this will work. I can't even find the peppers though.

1 cup achiote peppers
1 head of garlic, cloves skinned and cut in two lengthwise
1 head of garlic, cloves skinned and chopped roughly
White vinegar
A bowl
A mortar and pestle
A bottle that closes well, about the size of a hot sauce bottle, or a jar, very clean.

Take about a cup of achiote peppers.
Clean a head of garlic so you have cloves, uncrushed, but cut in two.
Soak the peppers and the garlic in white vinegar for a week.

(Time passes).

Saute a chopped, cleaned head of garlic in olive oil.

Put the achiote peppers, vinegar, and raw garlic plus the sauteed garlic in a blender or mortar and pestle. Grind. Bottle.

Autumn Fruit Salad

I first saw this on Cookbook , a twitterer who posts teeny tiny recipes. I thought it would look beautiful as a painting, but never knew what persimmon and pomegranate taste like. Now I know. And now I am hellbent.

It comes in two tweets:

1.

Autumn Fruit Salad: toss c grn+rd+blk grape/¾pomegranate/2kiwi&pear&fuyu persimmon/1-3T VanillaSyrup&lem. Chill; top w ¼pomegranate. Yld~8c.

2.

Vanilla Syrup: speckly magic for desserts/drinks. Scrape½vanilbean in c h2o/2c sug; +pod. Stir@med to dissolve. Rmv pod. Yld2c; refrigerate.

Let me know what you think if you try it.

Addendum:

I made this for Thanksgiving in Los Angeles at my friend's house. People appreciated having fruit to eat, I think, after three kinds of pie. Here's the long-winded version:

The vanilla syrup really doesn't need to be explained more. I just boiled it until it had really big bubbles, then waited about five minutes until it started to get faintly yellow. It's a simple syrup.

The fruit salad of course can be varied according to what you find. Because I knew that if I bought a big sack each of green, red and black grapes it would be hard to get them all eaten, I just bought black thinking they would look good with the rest. Here's how I got them on the platter, 12 by 9 inches oval, and it didn't look bad. Tossing everything together is an option, followed by putting the reserved 1/4 pomegranate on top.

I had to get artsy, see above photo, and directions below. Have fun figuring out your own way.

Open the pomegranate and loosen all the arils, put them in a bowl. Pick out the membrane.
Peel and slice two kiwi.
Peel and slice four Fuyu persimmons like you would an apple for apple pie.
Wash peel and halve 2-3 cups of black grapes and put them in a bowl.
Peel and slice up 2-3 pears. Keep them together in a row if you want, like a little deck of cards.

Plate it this way if you like: persimmon fanned out around the edge of the platter, points out. Kiwi circles on top of that. Rest of persimmon over the center. Pomegranate, most of it, over the middle, and a little on the perimeter. Pear slices along one end of the oval's center, pears on the other end of the central oval too, with a little space in the middle for black grapes. The reserved 1/4 of the pomegratate on top.

The syrup can be passed since some people don't like super sweet things.

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies: Variation

Usually I think of perfection as a sickness, except when it came to these cookies.

This is the New York Times recipe for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Thems good cookies. No denying it. But they started my dreaming about something a little more to my taste. So I've been tweaking the recipe progressively with each new batch. Here's todays:

Instead of 20 oz. of dark chocolate, I put in:

2 3.5 ounce bars of dark dark chocolate, chopped with a cleaver to half centimeter chunks
2 3.5 ounce bars of dark chocolate with toffee (Ghiradelli brand) (also chopped)
6 ounces of pecans chopped to small bits

I put in about 1 cup and a smidge of white sugar instead of 1 2/3 cup.

Splash of Jim Beam. This will probably not even be detectable. But why not.

7+7+6=20, right?

Homemade Thin Mints

Thin Mints made from scratch. I think they're really chocolatey and best frozen.