A Homemade Life Page 8

  First, there was the squirrel thing. When she closed her eyes, Marlene said, she saw an image of me as a squirrel, stuffing my cheeks with nuts. I’m not sure what she meant by that, but I think of it from time to time, especially when I find myself alone with a pan of brownies.

  Second, there was the bit about delayed gratification.

  “You want what you want, Molly, and you want it now,” Marlene remarked solemnly. “You want instant gratification. You’ve got to work on that. You’ve got to get more comfortable with delayed gratification.”

  I have no idea what she was talking about. I was raised as an only child, so, yes, I guess I am accustomed to getting my way. But waiting for things is okay, too. I’ve never seen it as much of a stumbling block. Or I hadn’t, at least, until I got the idea to make a buttermilk cake scented with vanilla bean. I couldn’t get it right. And I wanted that cake the way I wanted it, right now.

  It started at the grocery store, as trouble so often does. It was early winter, high citrus season, and there were some especially lovely oranges in the produce section. They were heavy, smooth-skinned, and plump, the kind that might have, in another era, inspired Peter Paul Rubens. Unable to help myself, I bought a dozen. Then I lugged them home, cursing myself all the way. What is a single girl supposed to do with a dozen oranges? Eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? That could quickly get old. Make a half-gallon of juice? I didn’t own a juicer. Spike them with cloves and make a holiday centerpiece? Cloves and I keep our distance, especially since I had my wisdom teeth pulled and got dry sockets, which my oral surgeon packed with gauze dipped in oil of clove, which, after a week in my mouth, was NASTY, and I don’t mean that in any Janet Jackson sort of way.

  There was just one answer: cake. There is no problem that cannot be solved with cake. It’s the right answer to everything.

  So upon arriving home, I scoured the cupboards, mulling over what sort of cake this might be and, of course, where the oranges could come in. I vaguely remembered a cake that my sister had once made from an old Martha Stewart book, an almond cake served with glazed oranges. But I had no almonds or almond extract. Instead, I found a lone vanilla bean in the spice drawer and, in the refrigerator, a pint of buttermilk left over from pancakes. I could make a cake flavored with vanilla bean, I thought. Maybe a buttermilk cake, a moist one with a bit of tang. I’d seen a recipe recently somewhere on the Internet. I could do that. Then I could glaze some orange segments in a little sugar and juice and serve them with the cake. That would be perfect. I was so pleased with myself that I opened a bottle of wine.

  It was in the execution, however, that things got a little sticky. It had nothing to do with the wine, unfortunately, although that would have probably been more fun and certainly easier to explain away. The cake was tasty enough, and the oranges were truly lovely, but something was missing. It was good enough for government work, as my mother likes to say, but in truth, the cake was sort of tough and rubbery. With a little time on the counter, I imagined, it might make a fine seat cushion in a diner somewhere. Also, when you slid a fork through it, it made the tiniest, strangest squeeeeak. It sounded like the creaking of a door in a haunted house, if said house were small enough to sit on a dime.

  But still, I loved the idea. The oranges were delicious with the vanilla bean, a little like a Creamsicle in cake form. I really wanted it to work. I reread the recipe. It didn’t call for much in the way of butter, and I began to suspect that was the problem. A cake needs fat for tenderness, the department in which this one was sorely lacking. I would have to try other recipes or fiddle with making my own.

  So began a pursuit that took me through six different recipes, a gallon of buttermilk, more sticks of butter than I would like to say, and two years (with several months’ hiatus, admittedly) of my young life. I will spare you the gruesome details and just say this: I laughed, I cried, and I ate a lot of cake. I made eight different versions before I found the right one. If you turn the number eight on its side, you have infinity. I could have been making cakes for infinity. Talk about delayed gratification.

  Somewhere, Marlene is very proud.

  The winning cake is one I adapted from Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of The Cake Bible. (I should have known that someone with that kind of title to her name would have the solution.) It’s a tender, delicate cake with a hint of milky tang, just enough to give the sweet vanilla a good-natured elbow in the ribs, and with its fine crumb, it’s perfectly suited to sopping up plump oranges and their warm syrup. It begs for a second helping.

  VANILLA BEAN BUTTERMILK CAKE WITH GLAZED ORANGES AND CRÈME FRAÎCHE

  i may have stumbled upon this cake because of some oranges, but as it turns out, I like the cake itself so much that sometimes I don’t even bother with the oranges. They are lovely with it, though, especially with a dollop of tangy crème fraîche.

  Oh, and you might consider saving the egg whites left over from this recipe to make a batch of Coconut Macaroons.

  FOR THE CAKE

  4 large egg yolks

  2/3 cup buttermilk

  1 cup sugar

  1 vanilla bean

  2 cups cake flour

  1 tablespoon baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  TO SERVE

  Glazed oranges (optional), recipe follows

  Crème fraîche (optional)

  Set an oven rack to the middle position, and preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-inch springform pan with butter or cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with a round of parchment paper, and grease it, too.

  In a small bowl, lightly whisk the egg yolks with about ¼ cup of the buttermilk. Set aside.

  Put the sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Alternatively, if you plan to use handheld beaters, put it into a medium mixing bowl. Using a sharp knife, split the vanilla bean in half from tip to tip. Run the back edge of the knife down each half of the pod, scraping out the tiny black seeds. Dump them into the bowl with the sugar. Using your fingers, rub the seeds into the sugar, taking care to break up any clumps. Discard the spent pod. (Or bury it in a container of sugar to make vanilla sugar.)

  Add the flour, baking powder, and salt to the vanilla sugar. Beat on low speed for a few seconds, just to combine.

  Cut the butter into pieces and add it to the dry ingredients, along with the remaining buttermilk. Beat on low speed until the ingredients are moist, then increase the speed to medium and beat until well combined, about 1 minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula, then add the egg mixture in three doses, beating well after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, and beat for 30 seconds on medium speed. The batter should be thick but airy, very pale and smooth.

  Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

  Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for 15 minutes. Run a thin knife around the edge of the pan, then remove the sides. Position a wide, flat plate upside-down atop the cake, and invert the cake onto the plate. Remove the bottom of the pan and the parchment. Place a wire rack over the cake, and turn upright onto the rack. Cool completely.

  NOTE: This cake is best on the day it’s made. But if you have any leftovers, I find that they make for a nice “dessert” after breakfast.

  Yield: 8 servings

  GLAZED ORANGES

  4 navel oranges, at room temperature

  ½ cup sugar

  Using a small, sharp knife, supreme 3 of the oranges. To do this, slice off the top and bottom ¼ inch of each one, revealing the flesh at either end. Working with 1 orange at a time, stand the fruit on one end and cut closely down the sides, trimming away and discarding the peel and white pith. Holding the peeled orange over a medium bowl, carefully cut between the membranes to remove the individual wedges of flesh. Let the wedges, called “supremes,” a
nd their juice fall into the bowl. Discard the core.

  Juice the fourth orange: it should yield about ½ cup juice. If it comes up a little short, add a bit of juice from the bowl of supremes to make up the difference. Pour the juice into a heavy 2-quart saucepan, and add the sugar. Place over medium heat, and cook, stirring frequently, until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture bubbles and reduces to deep orange–golden syrup, about 10 minutes. Add the supremes, stirring them gently in the syrup, and cook until warmed through, 1 to 2 minutes.

  Serve immediately, with wedges of vanilla bean buttermilk cake and spoonfuls of crème fraîche.

  Yield: 8 servings

  QUITE THAT MAGNIFICENT

  To most people, I guess, turning twenty-one is all about booze. To me, turning twenty-one was all about coconut. Booze is nice, but coconut is chewable, and when push comes to shove, I will always like eating better than drinking. Everyone has their priorities.

  For the first two decades of my life, I absolutely hated coconut. I associated it primarily with the scent of cheap tanning oil, the kind that comes in brown plastic bottles at the drugstore, bottles the color that your skin is supposed to turn, apparently, upon application. I always hated those bottles. My mom occasionally had one kicking around in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, and after one trip to the pool, the whole thing would be slicked with a thin film of that pungent oil, a magnet for grit and dirt. I hated opening the cabinet, because it reeked of coconut. My aversion was especially pronounced because, as a redhead, my skin has only two settings: pale and burnt. Though my parents gave it their best, constantly slathering me with SPF 45, I had my share of sunburns as a child, and most were incurred at beaches and pools where the scent of tanning oil hung heavy in the air. Needless to say, coconut had a long row to hoe with me. Twenty years long.

  But then along came Max’s Café. The summer after my sophomore year of college, I was working at a grocery store in Mill Valley, California, and living with my aunt Tina, whose house is only a few minutes from an outpost of Max’s Café, a California-based deli chain. Actually, the word deli isn’t really strong enough; Max’s is more like a deli-meets-pleasure dome. They serve cakes and pastrami sandwiches as big as your head. One night, after picking up a movie at the video store, we decided to stop by for something sweet. That was when I saw Max’s enormous chocolate-covered coconut macaroon. It was conical and imposing, the size of a beehive hairdo, covered from head to toe in a rippling sheath of chocolate. There was coconut under there somewhere, I knew, but it certainly was skillfully hidden. I felt myself starting to succumb. We bought one and brought it home, and that night, I was converted to coconut worship. A one-pound macaroon will stand for nothing less.

  There would be no turning back. That summer, I bought those macaroons more often than I’d like to admit, and I’m willing to admit to a lot. They were dense, toothachingly sweet, and rich enough to cause hot flashes. I’d usually cut one into quarters and savor it over a couple of days. Only once did I throw caution to the wind, tucking away three-quarters in a single evening. I barely lived to tell the tale, and with much, much regret.

  But the near overdose only dampened my enthusiasm for a few weeks. By my birthday in mid-September, I had recovered enough to request a cake-sized macaroon as one of my birthday cakes. There would be two that year: the macaroon and a four-layer lemon cake with lemon curd. It was my twenty-first birthday, so excess was in order.

  I called Max’s central bakery in the South Bay. They had never taken an order like mine, so I really had to spell it out, and they questioned my resolve more than once. But in the end, they pulled through admirably, creating the biggest and most horrifyingly beautiful macaroon I have ever seen. It was made from four layers of macaroon batter, thick and sticky and piped into a spiral, and after baking, each layer was dipped in chocolate. Then they were stacked one upon the other, with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top, so that, together, they looked like a jumbo version of a more standard-sized macaroon. Then the whole thing was doused in chocolate again. For all that, they charged me only thirty dollars, and they delivered it to the house. It was a coup. I haven’t seen anything quite that magnificent since.

  There’s a picture of me taken that night, with the macaroon cake. In the photograph, I’m blowing out the candles on my other birthday cake, the lemon one, and I’m wearing some very aggressive purple eye shadow and a streak of lemon curd on my cheek, the latter coming courtesy of my cousin Sarah, who, even at the age of twenty-three, had to put her hand in the cake and then smear it across my face. The macaroon is sitting next to me on a glass cake stand, unfazed.

  But then, a couple of years later, I would graduate from college and leave California. I would lose access to Max’s macaroons. But that’s okay, as it turned out, because I found a recipe that I like even better. (Max’s always were a little too sweet.) They’re incredibly easy to make—though I haven’t attempted a cake version yet, so I make no claims there—and they’re so moist and chewy that they’re almost closer to candy than they are to cookies. Which, though it may sound strange, is a good thing, I assure you.

  In fact, I once baked a batch of them for a friend’s party, and I heard later that one of the guests actually hoarded some inside a plastic cup and sneaked them home in her purse. I don’t blame her. I can’t be left alone with these things, not even when they’re hidden in the freezer. Each time I walk into the kitchen, I feel like Odysseus, during the part of the story when he is sailing past the Sirens. For my own good, I sometimes think that I should ask my husband to remove the macaroons from the house—to secure me to something solid and heavy, like the dishwasher, and to ignore my screams as he tosses them into the trash can outside. Coconut and I have come a long way.

  COCONUT MACAROONS WITH CHOCOLATE GANACHE

  my favorite chocolate for this recipe is Valrhona Manjari 64%.

  3 cups lightly packed sweetened shredded coconut

  ¾ cup sugar

  ¾ cup egg whites (from about 5 large eggs)

  1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

  4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped

  ½ cup heavy cream

  Place the coconut, sugar, and egg whites in a heavy 2-to 3-quart saucepan and stir well. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring frequently, 10 to 15 minutes. The mixture will look very creamy as it heats, and then it will slowly get a bit drier, with individual flakes of coconut becoming discernable. Stop cooking when it no longer looks creamy but is still quite sticky and moist, not dry. Remove from the heat, and stir in the vanilla. Scrape the mixture into a pie plate or small baking sheet, spread it out a bit to allow it to cool quickly, and refrigerate until cold, about 30 minutes.

  Preheat the oven to 300°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

  Using your hands or a small, spring-loaded ice cream scoop—I like to use one with a capacity of 2 tablespoons—scoop and firmly pack the coconut mixture into small domes. (If you’re using an ice cream scoop, keep a bowl of warm water nearby. The scoop will need a quick swish every now and then to keep it from getting gummed up.) Space them evenly on the baking sheet.

  Bake the macaroons until evenly golden, about 30 minutes. Cool completely on the pan on a wire rack. Then remove the macaroons from the baking sheet, and set them on the rack. Set the rack over the baking sheet.

  Put the chopped chocolate in a medium bowl. Heat the cream in a small saucepan over medium heat, swirling the pan occasionally, until it is hot and steaming. Do not allow it to boil. Remove the pan from the heat, and pour the cream over the chocolate. Let sit for 1 minute, then stir until smooth. Spoon the warm ganache generously over the macaroons, shaking them gently, if needed, to coax the ganache down their sides.

  Refrigerate the macaroons on the rack until the ganache sets, at least 2 hours. Transfer them to an airtight container, and refrigerate or freeze.

  NOTE: Macaroons will keep in the refrigerator for up to 5 days. Frozen, they will keep
for a month or two.

  Yield: 14 to 18 macaroons

  WHAT FRANCE WOULD TASTE LIKE

  I am one of those people for whom college was just okay. I liked my classes and my professors and the people I met there, but I never felt completely at home. I always imagined college as a place where I would tumble, not unlike Alice falling down the rabbit hole, into some sort of lovely, wacky, self-contained world: a close-knit group of friends, a fully-formed post-teens family of sorts. Instead, I found myself living in on-campus theme houses with people who largely kept to themselves, and where the cook put a padlock on the freezer so we wouldn’t eat the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough he kept there. I learned a few things, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be.

  So when the opportunity arose to study abroad during my junior year, I pounced on it. I applied to my university’s Paris program, writing a breathless essay about le Quartier Latin and that visit when I was ten. That fall, I packed an enormous suitcase, hugged my parents, and flew to Paris, where I was greeted by my host family.

  My host mother was tall, trim, and proper, with a singsong voice and a name that, when properly pronounced, rang like chimes at Sunday mass. She moved through the house as though en pointe—softly, gracefully, decisively—and wore silver bangle bracelets that clicked sweetly against each other when she lifted her hand to secure the barrettes in her long brown hair. She was Catholic, very Catholic, in fact, as these things go. She had four children, ages nine to seventeen, a Labrador puppy, and a husband who’d lost his job and had gone to Canada to find work. Things were complicated. It must have been exhausting. She did an admirable job, but she often fell asleep in the bathtub after dinner.