A Baker's Birthday

I spent the better half of my birthday, and the day before it, in the kitchen. That may sound kind of sad, depending on your own relationship with kitchens. But it just couldn't be avoided. When you're a baker, you make your own birthday cake. 

Okay, I can't speak for all the bakers. If I did this day in and day out, maybe I'd let someone else make it for me. Likewise, if I weren't quite so controlling, I could maybe let someone help. But it's more than that, I think. Baking a classic two-layer cake from start to finish was like my birthday gift to myself. I wanted to take my time. I wanted to get to know this cake. I wanted to own it. And I'm a little bit controlling.

This is a chocolate sour cream frosting. No butter, and the only sugar comes in the form of a bit of corn syrup. The frosting is sour, but it turned out to be pleasant in concert with the yellow cake. If I make it again, I'll replace some of the sour cream with more chocolate.

By 4 in the afternoon, we were properly acquainted. Then I made pizza.

In the past year I've gotten into homemade pizza. I had this one go-to recipe, not because I had any particular allegiance to it, but because I'd never bothered to search for others. Then I came across an article on the secrets to incredible homemade pizza in Bon Appetite. It starts with a no-knead dough of flour, yeast, salt, and water that rises for 18 hours. Yes! Eighteen! And that's pretty much the extent of it. The rest is the little things, like heating your olive oil with garlic cloves; turning your oven to its highest temperature and letting it heat for an hour before baking, then turning it to broil before the pizza goes in; using two types of cheese and crushed canned tomatoes; and finishing each out-of-the-oven pie with black pepper, sea salt, and red pepper flakes. It's intensified the way I feel about pizza, and it's quieted my affections for my favorite Minneapolis joints. Why go to Lola, Black Sheep, or Pizza Nea when I have in my possession the secrets to the smashingest pizza yet? It's a powerful feeling.

The food was incredible. And while the process was long, the final result was so simple: a few people around a table, eating blistered, misshapen pizza and drinking champagne. By cake time we were warm and rosy-cheeked from the food and the heat emanating from the kitchen. But as it goes with birthdays, the cake is cut and a slice is had by all, room or no room.

Okay, that may not be how it goes for all birthdays. But for a baker's birthday, surely.

Vegan Chocolate Bundt Cake

It all happened so fast.

I found this recipe at around 4pm. Up until that point, I had no intention to bake this evening. I would be lazy, watch Sense and Sensibility, maybe make stove top popcorn if the craving was strong enough. But this cake looked so appealing. Maybe in part because it's reminiscent of the cakes I see on Downton Abbey, my newest vice and escape of choice. Mostly, though, it was vegan. And vegan meant easy, in this case. No creaming butter, no cracking eggs (truth: I'm terrible at cracking eggs); and I had everything the recipe called for. Everything, except the bundt pan.

I could've baked the cake in a 9x13 pan or a 9-inch round. But oh, then it wouldn't be nearly as pretty. And it wouldn't look like it just came out of Mrs. Patmore's kitchen. I asked myself if that really matters. Turns out, it does. I remembered the wealth of bundt pans I once came across at value village. At the time I had been tempted, but told myself to wait until I actually needed a bundt pan. This was it! The time had come! And off to Richfield I went.

A half hour later I was back and making hazelnut coffee, the one thing I was quite capable of messing up (truth: I'm terrible at making coffee). The batter came together quick, ridiculously quick. It was only as I poured it into the mold that I realized this cake had the potential to really suck. No eggs? No BUTTER? When I told Josh what the cake would be lacking, he made a face. We decided that if it flopped, we could take the opportunity, momentarily, to make fun of vegans and their "food."

I couldn't sample the batter because I was in the middle of a 2-hour express whitestrips treatment, so I had very little indication of how this thing would turn out.

At half past seven, the verdict is in. A cake without eggs and butter is not an impotent cake, whatever purists may say. It is a pleasant chocolate cake with faint reminders of the hazelnut coffee within. The crust is tightly sealed in a flawless inversion of the mold, the elegant depressions crisp and kissed with powdered sugar.

Okay, vegans. You may have something here.

Banana Cream Pie

In the children's book publishing world, there's this thing called ATOS. It's based on the difficulty of the words and sentences that tell your story. A sentence like this one, with commas setting off a non-essential phrase, is complex, and would incur a high ATOS. A sentence like this one would have a lower ATOS. Ya dig?

Well...I don't. It's prolonging the revision process for the books I've been writing over the past month, and it's got me cringing every time I have to break down a thoughtfully constructed sentence into a slightly less eloquent version that, incidentally, won't discourage our fledgling readers.

Sometimes I'd like to forget about the readers. Sorry kids. You're not my audience of choice.

Luckily, I've managed to slip quietly into the food writing community, where I get to write for adults - using sentences of variable length AND the words of my choosing. Like in here. Only with those stories, I'm guaranteed an audience that exceeds ten people.

But hold on. I like the people who read this blog (shout out to Syracuse!). And I like that I don't have to pitch an idea before I write it, and I don't have to avoid intro clauses or keep the first person to a minimum (on the contrary...). In this minuscule plot of net-estate, I'm the writer, the editor, the baker.

And that's why, through all the excitement of late, I've had this post in the back of my mind. I've waited patiently for the day when I'd feel free enough (in my head, that is) to dedicate the afternoon to a dessert I've been eyeing for some time. It took a while, but last weekend, I reclaimed the baker in me. I tied up an apron and got comfortable in the kitchen. Heavy cream, cinnamon, bananas, and me.

This pie happens in three parts. The crust is easy, chocolate cookies pulverized, bound by butter, and baked crunchy. The pastry cream is an adventure: sugar and eggs, seasoned with cinnamon, tempered by hot milk, strained, flavored, cooled. The recipe I was following used a cinnamon pastry cream with sliced bananas mixed in. But I don't believe you can call it a banana cream pie if the only bananas involved are in a sliced state, suspended in some cinnamon cream. No, no. It's BANANA cream, people. So I, trailblazer that I am, cut the cinnamon in half and mashed up two bananas to fold into the pastry cream. Next time, I'll mash a third.

These were the only chocolate cookies I could find. Bye, little bear friends.

This simple ganache adds an extra layer of bittersweet chocolate, and it seals the crust from getting soggy. For a while, at least.

Finally, a word on whipping your own cream. It leaves you with a soft vanilla cloud that just might draw attention, ever so briefly, from the denser mass below it. It also might be the simplest way to feel like a for real baker. Long-time, in the making, or recently reclaimed.

Apple cinnamon coffee cake

It's November. The day is new, the kitchen is cool and morning-lit, and there's a 15-inch roll of sweet dough spiraled around an apple marinade of brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, walnuts, and lemon juice, risen and ready for the oven.

And I'm sick.

I have a nose stuffed to capacity with who knows what (I guess I know what) and a cough that won't quit. But what am I to do? 

The coffee cake is waiting.

I brush some melted butter over the dough and make up a small bowl of sugar and cinnamon. My intention is to recreate the crust of my beloved cinnamon rolls that owe their glory to those three ingredients. I lift the bowl to my nose to see if I added enough cinnamon, and that's when I realize my handicap. I can't smell a thing.

I look at the apple-cinnamon-sugar-nut parcel that's about to be treated with the baker's trinity and sent to tenderize and bubble and caramelize in a 350 degree oven, after which it will cool off and get sliced and I'll have nothing to do but get lost in the turns of bread and filling because  I can't taste a thing.

I snap out of my sickly torment. What can be done?
The coffee cake is waiting.

Into the oven it goes. See you in thirty minutes.

But not two minutes go by and it takes me by surprise. Melting cinnamon and sugar, ever so briefly. In my nose! A second later, it's gone. It returns in fleeting waves, penetrating the unwelcome monster in my nasal cavity and greeting my olfactory receptors like an old friend. So nice to see you again.

Thirty minutes later it's out of the oven, and the cinnamon sugar runs rampant. I don't mind. Run along, I say.

It runs across the parchment paper. It runs to the corners of the apartment.

The apple filling is creeping out of the slits in the dough, and the just-from-the-oven warmth will only last so long. I know I won't pick up the more delicate suggestions of my morning treat, but there is nothing more that I can do.

The coffee cake is waiting.

Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread

I've been doing a lot of business talk. And cupcake talk, and vetting cupcakes for the business talk. It's exciting stuff, indeed. But we must continue to practice that part of baking dearest to us: the one that leads not to publicity, or profit, or a bakery, or even a blog post - but to comfort, and catharsis, and aesthetics; to uninhibited indulgence; to a warm oven and the smell of melting brown sugar and chocolate on a rainy evening; and in this case, to the unmistakable current of caramelizing cinnamon and sugar, slowly filling our fall morning.

This is why we bake.

So let's regroup with some bread.

After some basic sweet dough preparation, this process gets fun. The dough is rolled thin and coated generously with butter, cinnamon, and sugar. Then it's sliced into strips that are stacked and sectioned. Those sections are placed in a bread pan to rise.

Each individual slice does its own thing in the oven. Some recede into the pan, others tower over the runts; some lose themselves in the loaf and become indistinguishable from the rest; and yet others push hard to set themselves apart from the group. I'd imagine putting a pan of these little dough squares in the oven is much like sending your kids off to school. You've done your best to shape them, and now you've got to let them grow. As their parent, of course, you love them all the same, and will eat them indiscriminately.

Warning: it's hard to quit with these things. Every slice is different from the last and appetizing in its own unique way. Your mental workings go something like this:

"Okay, last piece."

[Eats slice]

"Oh, look at this one! Okay, last piece."

This could easily go on until the loaf is gone, so watch it. I managed to freeze a third of the loaf, and it reheats beautifully. But really, if you eat it all and you feel warm and full and happy, then well done to you.

After all, that's why we bake.