Happy Birthday Marilyn

Here's all I want to say about it.

If you need an easy, fancy-looking cake.

Or a dessert to pair with mid-summer strawberries.

Or if you need TWO mixing bowls to wipe clean with a spoon, your fingers, or a fresh strawberry.

David Lebovitz has a damn good chocolate cake recipe for you.

Nonsense Cake

California is a pretty dry place, and though we've come out of our latest drought rather spectacularly, with heavy rainstorms and fog and wet well into the summer, the weather is still rather mild compared to, for instance, Philadelphia. Which is where I was this year as Californians complained about their dreary storm clouds, sopping rain puddles, and thick, lovely snowcaps. Happy as I was to miss the excitement and return to a much better watered state then when I left, I haven't completely avoided the unpleasant side-effects of our return to more sustainable waterways. Because, you see, our delicate agriculture that California so lovingly cultivates was affected by the unusual bounty of rain. Our more sensitive fruits – tomatoes, peaches, strawberries, cherries – have not only been late this year, but less intensely flavorful, less ripe, and far less plentiful. Except the plums.

The plums have been pretty fantastic.

And my mum, who 99% of the time would prefer a fresh piece of fruit over any confection that even the very best local, organic, unionized, free-range bakers might produce, has a deep, uncharacteristic love of zwetsche kuchen, a sort of German breakfast cake where a soft, sweet, spongy dough is generously covered in plums and baked until each plum piece is surrounded by a puffy golden pastry. And my mother is a damn good cook, so when plum season comes around, my mother stocks up on the little purple-green prune plums in the hopes that she'll end up with too many and be forced to bake them.

The recipe is from my great aunt Eva who, despite our family's legacy in the kitchen, was a fantastic cook in her day. My mother, as a child, tried to request Eva's zwetsche kuchen in her informal, phonetic German, and instead asked for schwatzen kuchen – nonsense cake – sending her aunt into hysterics, and providing one of the few family anecdotes about food that actually results in something delicious.

Eva calls for three to four pounds of fresh prune plums, which is about as many as you can possibly fit into your pie pan, plus a few more.

Unlike many German desserts, this cake is primarily about the fruit, not dark spices or rich pastry. It's a summer cake, and the plums should be nearly stacked on top of each other so that even when they shrink in the oven there will be hardly any room for the pastry to puff up around them.

But it is still a German cake, so the plums are lightly sprinkled with sugar and breadcrumbs – or, in our case, leftover ground hazelnuts – before they go in the oven.

In the oven the cake expands, turning golden and crispy around the edges, and the plums become soft and dark. Served hot, the crumbly warm cake sets off each bite of wet, thick plum. Left to itself for awhile, the flavors deepen and the plums imbue the cake with their juices.

My personal preference is to eat it hot right out of the oven it for dessert, and then, after it has sat overnight, again for breakfast the next morning.

Zwetsche Kuchen

adapted from a recipe by Eva Wertheimer

In a bowl, combine 

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/3 cup sugar

1 egg

With hands, work in

4 tablespoons butter

Chill dough for 30 minutes. 

Roll or pat dough into a 9" pie plate (or any approximate alternative). 

Pit and halve

3-4 pounds fresh prune plums (or one 9" pie plate full, plus a few)

Place plum halves overlapping on top of the dough. Sprinkle with

3 tablespoons breadcrumbs or ground nuts

1-3 tablespoons white or brown sugar

Bake at 375° for 45 minutes. Cool slightly before serving. 

Life's been a little weird lately.

Tiramisu has the same number of syllables as hallelujah.

When I was an undergrad I used to take long, five hour bus-to-train trips to Davis, CA where my boyfriend was a student. I loved the train rides, which go through some of the most beautiful landscapes in California, and which allowed me lots of time to do homework, particularly once they started offering wireless internet.

Relaxing and productive! Davis, on the other hand, as a little farm/university town located south of Sacramento, was often rather bland, flat, and hot as all hell. Summers were particularly bad, and we spent a lot of time seeking air conditioning and eating meals that required little or no cooking. One summer, for reasons I've forgotten, we got on an Italian kick and started frequenting the little town's surprisingly abundant Italian restaurants. And we formed a love affair with tiramisu. The cold, sweet, filling dessert was the perfect remedy for the nasty heat that we were suffering through. But somehow, although each restaurant had a different take, with varying amounts of rum and coffee and chocolate, none seemed exactly right.  So we decided to learn its creamy, delicious secrets.

And I realize it's winter now, but Keith is in town, and I'd promised another friend tiramisu over the summer and never got around to it.

It's a surprisingly easy thing to make - there's only a tiny bit of actual cooking, and the most difficult part of the whole process is getting the layers of ladyfingers to fit right.

I can't remember where the basis of this recipe comes from - or whether there was a single original recipe at all - although I do remember that I use significantly more rum than any recipe I read called for. The eggs, sugar, chocolate, and three different types of dairy are pretty standard though.

I halved the recipe when I took these photographs, not something I recommend (whipped cream whips a lot better the more you have, and why would you ever want less tiramisu?), but certainly doable if you, like me, can only find three eggs.

Some recipes incorporate the egg whites as well, or combine the Mascarpone and cream layers, or have complicated temperature instructions probably to prevent salmonella poisoning (thanks Joy of Cooking), so it's a rather versatile dessert and you can mess with it as you like. As long as every single ingredient is unhealthy and full of either fat or sugar (or both), you're probably doing fine.

The only cooking in the process is a custard - it takes a couple of minutes, cooks the eggs, and then promptly goes in the fridge to cool completely.

After that, it's just about making layers.

 

They won't be very neat, but that's okay, because you're going to cover the entire thing in cocoa powder (or grated baking chocolate, depending on what's in your kitchen). You're actually going to cover the entire thing in cocoa powder twice. That's how you know it's good.

An added benefit of making this in winter - one which had not occurred to me in California - is that carrying it to your friend's house in the snow is an excellent way to chill the it!

Tiramisu

In a medium saucepan, mix together:

6 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

Whisk in:

2/3 cup milk

and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the mixture boils. Boil for one minute, remove from heat, and chill, tightly covered, in the refrigerator, for an hour (or until completely cooled).

In a medium bowl beat until stiff peaks form:

1 1/4 cup heavy cream

1/2 ts vanilla

[optional: a little additional rum]

Stir into chilled yolk mixture until smooth:

1 lb Mascarpone cheese

In a small bowl, combine:

1/2 cup strong-brewed coffee/espresso

4 tb rum

In a 7x11 dish (or something of a similar size, with sides at least 3 inches tall) arrange in a layer:

12ish ladyfingers [You will make two layers, so you need about 24 total. Exact numbers depend on the size and shape of your dish, and how many you eat during the assembly process.]

Drizzle half of the coffee mixture over the ladyfingers [if you like really mushy desserts you can double the coffee in the recipe, and make sure the ladyfingers are really soaked.]. Spread half the mascarpone custard mix over the ladyfingers, then half the whipped cream. Cover with a thick layer of

unsweetened cocoa powder

Repeat the layers, cover, and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Moroccan Misgivings

I was back in California for a few weeks during the winter holidays, which gave my West Coast baking group an opportunity to celebrate Misgivings - our version of Thanksgiving (kindly delayed until my participation was possible) where instead of being thankful, everyone talks about all the shit life puts them through, and we eat delicious, non-turkey-and-potatoes food. This year we went Moroccan.

My fellow made a nice eggplant thing we found on the internet (authentic!), and our first challenge was deciding which type of eggplants were appropriate for a Moroccan dish. The Berkeley Bowl has an entire eggplant section, so it was a difficult decision. And I don't remember which kind we ended up with, except that it was one of the skinnier ones, not the fat kind. And I doubt it mattered.

While he was doing that, I made a chunky cake, also from the internet.

Then this lovely lady came by and made homemade pita bread, which was so good that we ate the half-cooked test pita and the slightly burned test pita, and almost didn't have enough pita for dinner.

And another lovely lady grated carrots until both her hands hurt, for her fresh carrot salad; and still another lovely lady made a warm, chunky couscous salad; and we wrestled with the chicken-phyllo dough pie, coming to the conclusion that phyllo was not meant to be in unbroken pieces; and I didn't take very many pictures because I was peeling the phyllo sheets apart.

Bowser helped by imitating a kitchen island.

Finally everything - pita bread, coucous, chicken thing (covered in powdered sugar and cinnamon), eggplant, carrot salad, and cake - was done.

So we took out all our misgivings on the food.

And after dinner we were treated to this lovely little video, made by one of our dinner guests and featuring beautiful felted creatures made by the creator of the very same carrot salad that appears in this blog post.