Purposeful Cake

I like to think that I have gotten pretty good at finding the right recipe for very specific occasions. It might be a friend’s Christmas tree decorating party. Or it might be All the Pears Are Suddenly Overripe Day, which occurs several times through the fall harvest season. (You say that holiday isn’t on your calendar? Hm. Very strange.) And sometimes these two fall on the same day, like how Hannukah and Christmas overlap this year, or those weird years where Greek Easter and Protestant Easter happen at the same time. Whatever the holiday, this is not a bad idea for a dessert, courtesy of Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite: 150 Recipes and Stories about the Food You Love. (The recipe is also available on the New York Times website, where the author has a regular column.)

Start with a bunch of pears, peel, cored, & quartered. They get browned in an oven-proof skillet in some honey, and then sprinkled with thyme before going into the oven to let them bake a bit and get really soft.

While they are baking, mix up some sugar (this is hippy sugar, hence the color–granulated white is perfectly fine) with some eggs, lemon zest, vanilla extract, and (if you happen to have some) a little pear brandy.

Add flour, a little salt, and a lot of melted butter.

Pour the batter over the baked pears, scatted some chopped almonds on top, and bake again until the cake is set.

It should be noted that a 10-inch skillet (what I have) is really not the same thing as a 9-inch skillet (what the recipe calls for). If your kitchen is similarly equipped, make sure to cut down the final baking time by at least 5 minutes–the cake had a great flavor, but was a little overcooked.

Somehow I don’t have a photo of the cake once we flipped it out of the pan. Hm. So I’ll just say that it helps to have a really well seasoned cast iron skillet, and also another set of hands. The incredibly patient & dextrous hands of your mother, for example. 

Final note: I bet there is a really good gluten-free version of this recipe that uses almond flour instead of wheat flour and cuts out the sliced almonds…

Boozy Baking

This week’s French Fridays with Dorie recipe is for a rum-spiked apple cake, derived from one prepared by her evidently recipe-averse friend Marie-Helene. I love apple cakes, and I love boozy baking, so this was clearly going to be a winner no matter what.

My friend A. was over for dinner, and she chopped apples while I made the batter. A. is also slightly recipe averse (I think it’s a French thing), but more specifically measuring cup-averse, so it was a good division of labor. I got slightly nervous putting the thing together, as the batter-to-apple ratio seemed very low, but it came out beautifully.

And then we had this exchange (paraphrased).

A: You know what would make this even better? If we sprinkled some sugar on top and caramelized it.

Me: [raising my hand] Um, I have a kitchen torch.

And there was much rejoicing. And a little fire.

A. (who does not fool around when it comes to dessert) also had the brilliant idea that the cake should really be served with whipped cream, laced with a bit of rum, and possibly some ice cream. And so it came to pass, and there was further rejoicing.

A Meeting of the Minds and Stomachs

This was a long time coming.

“This” referring to a food-centric meeting of Moody Food and the CSA Files.

N. was in town last weekend, and miraculously so was I, so we scrambled to get something on the calendar. As it happens, it was Eat Drink Local week, and Something ended up being dinner at Almond followed by dessert chez moi. N. is phenomenally talented in the kitchen, but allergic to measuring spoons and cups, so there is not a whole lot of baking going on in the Moody Food kitchen. So I offered her a few options, and she put in a request for Orangette’s Apple Tart Cake (an excellent choice).

It’s sort of an odd recipe, really. It’s not quite a tart, not quite a cake. There’s a thin cake-like base, and then slices of apples layered on that, topped with an egg-y sugar-y wash of sorts.

For the base, run a food processor with sugar, flour, butter, egg, and a bit of vanilla and baking powder. Press it into a buttered & floured springform pan (mine is 9 1/2″, not 9″, and causes no noticeable problems). Then you will need to peel, core, and slice a bunch of apples. This is the only remotely difficult part of this recipe. Peeling apples is kind of annoying, and slicing them into equally-sized pieces is also sort of a pain. And THEN you have to layer them on top of the base in concentric circles. The recipe calls for three large apples, which will seem like way too much, but it’s ok. Squish them all in anyway. You’ll probably need to go back and add in a few pieces here and there, just to use them all up, and it seems like work, but do it. I like the way it looks if you alternate the direction of the slices on each circle, because every once in a while, I can bring myself to care about presentation.

Bake that in a hot oven for 45 minutes, and then pour the egg wash on top–a mix of egg, sugar, cinnamon, and melted butter. I am in the process of switching my whole spice cabinet over to Penzeys, and I have to say, their Extra Fancy Vietnamese really makes a difference. Really, though, just use the best cinnamon you can find, and bake another 25 minutes.

Orangette says this is better made the day before you intend to eat it, and I am not one to argue. I baked this Saturday afternoon for our Sunday dinner, and it was wonderful, with a bottle of Sauternes, and a little Thai basil ice cream and a little raspberry sherbet on the side…

Next time she’s here, we’re going to cook together properly. Which may or may not end up being something for the French Fridays with Dorie project we’ve both signed up for.

No matter what, I can predict that dessert will be my responsibility.

Adaptation

I made this simple summer peach cake from Food52, and it was amazing. Really. You should have been there. Only the seasons have changed now, and instead of an implausibility of peaches, I found myself with a chattering of pears. (There don’t seem to be the same wonderfully odd collective nouns for fruit as there are for animals, so I’m coopting my favorite terms.) I am nothing if not adaptable in the kitchen, and I decided there was no reason I couldn’t make a simple early fall pear cake, with a few small adjustments to the recipe.

Obviously, one needs a bunch of pears (Bartletts here). At least 3, but 4 or 5 would be nice, too.

Keeping the skins on, core & dice the pears, then toss with some sugar & allspice.

Next, take some softened butter and mix it up with sugar. As usual, I’m using palm sugar, which is why this looks so dark. Regular cane sugar would be fine, though. And if you don’t feel like working out your arms quite so much, a hand mixer would probably not be a bad idea in lieu of a wooden spoon and some muscle.

To that, add an egg, some plain yogurt, and a little vanilla extract.

And then a mix of flour, ground almonds, baking powder, and baking soda. If you have almond flour on hand, fantastic. If not, take just under 1/2 cup of whole raw almonds and blitz them in the food processor until they look like a course flour.

Spread the dough into a buttered & floured springform pan. (It will be quite thick, so you WILL need to spread it. It will not just pour.)

Then smoosh all the pears on top of the base. Try to get them more or less evenly distributed. Sprinkle on some coarse sugar for good measure.

Stick the whole thing in a hot oven, and voila!

Simple Fall Pear Cake
Adapted from Food52

4 ripe pears
3/4 teaspoons allspice
1 cup sugar (divided use)
6 tablespoons softened butter
1 large egg
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup finely ground almonds
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Turbinado/Demerara sugar

Preheat the oven to 350F. Flour and butter a 9″ or 10″ round pan (springform is best, but a regular cake pan is fine).
Core and cube the pears. Toss them with the allspice and 2 Tbsp of the sugar.
Beat the rest of the sugar with the softened butter. Mix in the egg, yogurt, and vanilla.
In another bowl, combine the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, and baking soda. Add that into the butter/sugar mixture until just combined.
Spread the dough into the prepared pan, and then pour the fruit on top. Smoosh them into the dough pretty well, then sprinkle a palmful of the coarse sugar over top of everything.
Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 325F and continue baking 45 minutes more, until a cake tester comes out clean.

This would also be good with cardamom instead of allspice. Or if you happen to have some pear brandy, try that instead of vanilla extract and tell me how it goes.

Abracadabra

It surprises me how few of my friends have learned to perform the following simple magic trick:

Step 1 (the pledge): email me a link to a recipe
Step 2 (the turn): say something like, “Mmm, doesn’t this look good?”
Step 3 (the prestige): sit back and wait for me to invite you over to try the food in question

Ok, so it’s not really magic. Even so, my friend S. once employed it with the Unfussy Apple Cake recipe from 101 Cookbooks, and I liked the finished product so much, it became part of my regular repertoire. It is not apple season at the moment, but it is very definitely peach season. And it occurred to me, as I was thinking of what to make as a gift to my hostess in the Hamptons this past weekend, that the recipe could be adapted to peaches very easily.

On the night in question, I was slightly thwarted by the fact that my building was having some power issues. My stove is gas, so that was ok, but the lights in my kitchen? They are definitely electric. So I was forced to use a flash, which I KNOW makes for really ugly food photography, but what are you gonna do?

Begin with some peaches, like these flash-heavy white donut ones.

Rinse off the fuzz, but keep the skins on, and cut them into roughly 1/4″ cubes. You’ll need 2 cups.

A bowl of flour never looks very interesting, but especially not when it’s been blasted with a camera flash. Also baking powder, cardamom (which I think goes better with peaches than cinnamon), brown sugar, and a little salt.

Then, like magic, the power comes back on. But true to stubborn form, there’s a disinclination to turn on all the lights after getting used to working without most of them, so here are some decidedly under-lit peaches, flour mix, and yogurt whisked with eggs and melted butter:

The peach bits get folded into the batter:

and then some coarse-grained sugar sprinkled on top.

Into the oven for a bit, and voila! Cake! Suitable for even the most discerning of Hamptons hostesses.

Unfussy Peach Cake
adapted from 101 Cookbooks

2 c peaches, fuzz washed off, skins on, cut into 1/4″ dice
1 c whole wheat pastry flour

1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp cardamom
1/2 c packed brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 c plain yogurt (not Greek-style; alternately, buttermilk)
1/4 c butter, melted
2 Tbsp turbinado sugar (coarse grain)

Preheat the oven to 400F. Butter and flour an 8″x8″ or 9″x9″ baking dish.

Mix the flour, baking powder, cardamom, sugar, and salt in a bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk the eggs and yogurt together. Add in the melted butter (slightly cooled). Pour the yogurt mixture into the flour mixture and stir until just combined (don’t overmix). Fold in the peaches.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, mushing it around to spread into the corners. Sprinkle the turbinado over the top. Bake for about 25-30 minutes, until just set and lightly browned. Note that the smaller dish will need a little extra time in the oven, and that this cake is better a bit underdone than overdone.

Let Me Eat Cake

As anyone with a farm share–or a backyard garden–can tell you, starting about July, there will be an embarassment of summer squash. It is a wonderful vegetable, incredibly adaptable to just about any recipe you can concoct. It generally just absorbs the flavors of the preparation, which is a nice way of rephrasing my dad’s assessment, that it is kind of bland. But that’s actually a good thing, because you’ll have so much of the damn stuff that you’ll need to be cooking it all the fracking time. And if you only had one or two options, you’d be getting very sick of zucchini very quickly. Like last year when we had neverending cabbage, which meant cole slaw, stir fry, and more cole slaw. But 2 (or even 3 or 4) pounds of summer squash can be put to so many good uses that it’s hard to get resentful. Soups, salads, breads, stews, pasta dishes (you can even use it in place of pasta!). As long as your pantry is well stocked, there’s really no end to what you can make.

For example, you can make this olive oil cake, which comes from Gina DePalma, the pastry chef at Babbo. And it will barely use up a pound of summer squash, so you’ll still have plenty to put in your salad for lunch, thereby justifying baking the cake in the first place. (Cake + salad = balanced diet.) As if I need justification for these things. One bakes a cake because it’s Monday. Or Tuesday. Or because all the pie is gone and one must have SOME sort of baked good lying around lest the earth stop rotating on its axis. (Can I start my own religion with that as the core belief? That the sun will not rise unless we keep baking? Way better than human sacrifices, I think.)

But I digress. Cakeward bound.

I got zucchini this week, but truthfully you can use any variety of summer squash you find. The green flecks in the batter are nice, though, because they serve as a sort of proof that yes! There are vegetables in this cake! It has tangible nutritional value!

There are also toasted, ground walnuts. You’ll want them to cool fully before you grind them up, though, or you just get walnut butter.

Then you’ve got your sugar, flour (whole wheat pastry this time, for no very good reason), eggs, and a pile of spices. For some reason I haven’t bothered to buy ground ginger in, well, ever, so I used fresh ginger root. The only other atypical ingredient is the olive oil, in lieu of butter. 

Wait, zucchini? Walnuts? Olive oil? This is really just a salad in disguise…

Anyway. Mix up the flour, leaveners, and the spices. I might cut down on the spices next time, though the gingerbread-y aroma has its appeal to be sure.

Then use a hand mixer on the eggs, olive oil, and sugar (and ginger root. SIX to 1 replacement rate on this, meaning 2 tablespoons of fresh for every teaspoon of dry).

Mix until the sugar is properly mixed in, and it starts to get a little frothy. Olive oil doesn’t get creamy like butter, but it’s a similar thickened feel you’re going for. Then dump in the flour mixture and stir to combine.

Meanwhile, grate the zucchini, and grind up the now-cooled walnuts.

Mix both of those into the batter and pour it into the dish of your choice. The recipe formally calls for a bundt, but I wasn’t in a bundt mood. A 9×13 lasagne pan works, too, you just need to cut the baking time by 5 or 10 minutes. Just make sure it’s oiled and floured.

While that’s baking, prepare the lemon glaze. I used agave nectar instead of granulated sugar, which definitely made it easier to incorporate all the ingredients, but it probably affected the texture. Which I can live with. It’s just not as crunchy as I was expecting.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the baked cake:

I did not follow the “let it cool” instructions before glazing, because I had no intention of flipping it upside down, so instead I just drowned the thing in the lemon syrup and let it cool in situ. And let me say, I’m awfully glad I followed my new habit of cutting down on sugar in baked goods (I think I used 1 1/2 cups instead of 1 3/4) because that syrup is damn sweet. 

Which fact did nothing to stop me from devouring this slice.

Cook Club 2

[Guest post from M.]

L. has graciously allowed me to post a story to her blog about our most recent cook club.  As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago, L. gathered a group of us with the idea of having regular supper parties.  There are four of us, and we take turns hosting.  Whoever hosts is in charge of all the food.  The other three bring guests and drinks.  L. hosted our first dinner party, which you can read about here.

Sunday night, it was my turn.  Those of you in the New York area know that this past weekend was sweltering.  Disgustingly hot.  All I wanted to do was lay in my air-conditioned bedroom and dream of winter snows.  It felt like we were in Alabama, and as luck would have it, I had planned a menu of southern food from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.  Even more lucky, I had done some of the baking the day before, and two of the main dishes were salads.  Regardless, by the end of the evening, my kitchen felt like a sauna.

So, on to the important things.  We started off with cheese straws (recipe from Mark Bittman; I don’t have a large food processor, and the Lee Bros’ recipe was a bit too reliant upon the food processor for me to feel as though I could adapt it reliably to my food-processor-less kitchen) and deviled eggs (recipe from the Lee Bros.).  I also had a big pitcher of sweet tea, and L. brought a pitcher of unsweetened white jasmine iced tea.  Delish!  I even dug out my grandmother’s hand-crocheted table-cloth for an added Southern touch (am I the only one who associates tablecloths with the South?  We never used them growing up — they seem most at home on a table tied to traditional ways).

After everyone had arrived and had had time to cool off with iced tea or wine, I started the grits.  I had planned originally to make grits with blue cheese, but with the weather, I thought the cheese might make them unnecessarily heavy.  I had already made the collards — vegetarian, but cooked in a smoky tomato onion sauce that gave them a nice traditional flavor — so I just heated those up as the grits cooked.  I had also prepared the two salads before my guests arrived — a succotash made of corn, cranberry beans, tomatoes, yellow squash, and basil;

and a “new ambrosia” made with grapefruit, oranges, avocados, celery, and cucumber — so C. tossed them with their dressings while I cooked. 

The recipe for the ambrosia is available online here.

I was most fond of the collards and grits, but I thought all the dishes turned out well.  It was nice, in this heat, to have cool dishes and to avoid the heaviness that comes with meals featuring too much dairy or meat.  Next time, I think I’d use less dressing on each of the salads, and I think I would de-seed the tomatoes before adding them to the succotash. 

But, of course, the most important part of any meal is dessert.

I had cooked a buttermilk pound cake the day before.  It was my first attempt at making a pound cake, and it turned out beautifully.  I’m still slightly traumatized by the amount of butter that went into it, but the results were divine.  I topped the cake with some plain whipped cream, a sauce made from blueberries that I had picked in New Jersey the weekend before, and fresh blueberries (sadly, not fresh picked). 

So, all in all, a lovely dinner with old friends and new.  We survived the heat and proved that a vegetarian southern feast is not an oxymoron.

Baking Therapy; or, a lemon pound cake the Obamas can have every day

I did not have the greatest weekend, if you want to know the truth. But it’s ok.  And that’s not really what I meant to write about, anyway.  The first purpose of this post is to talk about how food is medicine.

I really do believe that is true.  Food is your first line of defense against any number of ailments.  If you have allergies, insomnia, migraines, depression, high cholesterol, chronic colds, you name it, I bet your health could be improved if you change something in your diet.  And it’s not just a question of cutting down on sugar and upping the leafy greens.  I know people who swear that getting a certain amount of salmon every week keeps all kinds of potential issues at bay.  And nearly everyone can agree that a small piece of high quality chocolate can solve most problems (small wonder it is the remedy used against dementors…).

Now, I have had some experience that would indicate that a gluten-, dairy-, sugar-, etc.-free diet is best for me (experiment to be repeated soon to see if I can replicate the results), but the truth is that it is not a way I can live.  I like cheese, and cookies, and coffee, and beer, and cookies, and even the occasional hamburger. And cookies.  But lucky for me, the flip side of “food as medicine” is “cooking as therapy” (the second point of this post). There are theories that if you limit your diet to eating only things that you cook yourself, you would be extremely healthy and probably lose a lot of weight.  That is not true if you are me, because I am someone who might use my ice cream maker 5 times in one month.  But still.  There are other benefits to standing in front of a stove for a few hours every week. Or sometimes every day.

Case in point: Saturday was kind of a crummy day. I spent Sunday and Monday compulsively cooking and baking everything in my kitchen. And today I feel much better. Successful therapy session complete, no co-pay required.

And now I can get to the third, and (oddly) primary purpose of this post, which is Bill Yosses’s famous lemon pound cake, once readily available at Bouley Bakery (now closed). I have to thank my friend M. at the dojo for the inspiration here. I had asked him if he had any requests for something I might bake and bring in for after class, and he started going on about this lemon cake he used to get at Bouley but sadly cannot anymore. And I said, “David Bouley is famous. The recipe must be published somewhere. Find it for me and I’ll make it.” And then I went home and found it myself, because I am impatient and love culinary detective work.

So it turns out that this cake is really the creation of the aforementioned Bill Yosses, who currently spends his days in the White House kitchen (and who has a new cookbook coming out next week). Which means that this is a cake fit for the Obamas.  And as if I needed any further convincing that I should try this recipe RIGHT NOW after reading all the raves about it on Chowhound and Serious Eats, that was enough to send me out to Whole Foods to buy a bag of lemons and some creme fraiche. And some Plugra butter, because why NOT go all out?

Traditionally, a pound cake calls for a pound of flour, a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, and a pound (?) of eggs. This one is slightly more complicated, and has the most ridiculous baking instructions I’ve ever seen.  It involves three different kinds of sugar and three different lemon-derived ingredients (zest, juice, and fruit segments). And I think it’s worth the effort. 

First, you mix up some flour, superfine sugar (=sugar + cuisinart + 1 minute, because I am not buying ANOTHER kind of sweetener this month), baking powder, and creme fraiche:

My sugar of choice these days is palm sugar, which has a lower glycemic index than cane sugar, and a much deeper flavor, almost caramel-y. 

Add in 6 eggs and some melted butter:

And then the lemon zest and fruit segments:

Then there’s this neat trick that I’m going to have to try on all my quickbreads from now on, where you bake the loaf for a short period and then run a knife through the whole thing, lengthwise. I didn’t really get where Yosses was going with that instruction until I checked on the cake later. Clearly, the man knows what he’s talking about, which is why he’s working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and I am cooking for friends in my galley kitchen in Manhattan (not that I’d have it any other way). Because it creates this perfect break down the middle, just like when you slash the top of a loaf of yeast bread. 

Anyway, you bake for 15 minutes, make that slice, and then bake longer and then lower the temperature and bake a bit more.  And THEN, you pull it out, let it cool, soak it (really really soak it) in a lemony syrup made with a cup of lemon juice, confectioner’s sugar, and granulated sugar (I did a mix of palm sugar and avave syrup), and bake ANOTHER 10 minutes. 

This is pre-soaking:

I’ll take a picture of the actual final product when it gets eaten, if I remember. Final verdict tk tomorrow. Preliminary verdict is 4 stars. Conveniently, my loaf pan is smaller than the one the recipe calls for, so I got 4 cupcakes out of it in addition to the loaf (though I’m marginally concerned I overbaked the loaf…). And my friend C. and I quite enjoyed them, I have to say. The suggested serving is with a raspberry coulis and mint ice (presumably something like a granita?) but they were also excellent with strawberries mixed with a little balsamic vinegar and some julienned basil.

Final note: given Mrs. Obama’s push for healthier eating, it is unlikely that the First Family ACTUALLY eats this every day. But I bet if Sasha and Malia went down to the kitchen and ask Chef Bill for a slice, they would not be turned away empty-handed.

Theories & Experiments

I have this theory that if I go more than a week or so without having people over for dinner, I start to get all twitchy. But it’s hard to test, because generally, I don’t go more than a week without having a dinner party of some kind. Sometimes it’s a big fancy to do, with 8 people and multiple courses, but more often it’s just a simple dinner with, for example, two dear friends whom I’ve known since we were born. 

M. and R. were having a pretty rough week for reasons I don’t need to share, and it was a chilly, rainy, March-like day on Tuesday. So the comfort of a roast chicken seemed the way to go. I had picked up a bunch of radishes in the greenmarket on Monday, and I’ve been reading about roasted radishes everywhere this month, so I thought I’d give that a try. And for dessert, the plan was one of my typical missions, responding to a challenge to make red velvet cupcakes, but since I’m me, I needed to find an alternative to red food dye.  So there’s your menu.

And now a brief aside: someone, years ago, presented to me the pyramid theory of relationships. According to this theory, there is one person in the world, one in 6+ billion (what’s the count these days?), who is essentially your soul mate. And if you should be so lucky to find this person, the capstone of your pyramid as it were, you would be so blissfully happy that you wouldn’t even know what to do with yourself. But then, there are a small handful of people (the next level of the pyramid) where, if you found any of them, you would be such an incredibly happy couple that you’d think you had found that first person, the capstone. And so on down the levels, with more and more people fitting each decreasing level of happiness (I visualize the world’s population all standing on each other’s shoulders). The trick, of course, is that you don’t ever really know where someone is on your pyramid, so you never really know if there’s someone out there better suited to you. (The other trick is that most people are not on the same level of each other’s pyramids.)

Anyway. I’m not sure how deeply I buy into this theory, but it has stuck with me for many years. And the thing is, I have no idea who originally presented it to me. None. I’ve asked around and no one is taking ownership. This method of roasting a chicken is similar (see? I had a point in telling that story), in that I no longer remember where I read about lining the roasting pan with slices of bread and sticking the chicken on top.

But in this case, I can attest with certainty that it is a brilliant idea. Stuff the chicken with something flavorful (a lemon sliced in 2, a few cloves of garlic, some fresh herbs), season it with salt & pepper and drizzle with olive oil, and pour a good amount of olive oil on the bread, too. Shove some of the fresh herbs under the skin of the chicken, too, if you like. And what you wind up with is something like deconstructed stuffing. Or (as M. suggested makes more sense) un-reconstructed stuffing. Either way, an hour at 400F later, it’s amazingly good. The bread will get a little singed, probably, but it doesn’t really matter. Also there is no basting, because all the juices that you’d normally use for that get soaked up by the not-stuffing. And if by some chance you don’t eat all the bread at dinner, chop it up as croutons the next day for the best salad you’ve ever had.

(It should be noted that R. served as my staff photographer for most of the night, which is a good thing for several reasons. One, I often forget about the camera altogether when I’m cooking, which makes blogging about meals kind of tricky. Two, he has an excellent eye, even with my little point-and-shoot.)

Now let’s move on to the radishes. I had used the greens for dinner for myself on Monday, in a stir-fried rice inspired by a recipe from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (more on this book later–Farmer John runs a CSA somewhere in Illinois and on the cover of the book he is wearing a bright orange feather boa, which should be enough to make you want to buy the book right now). But that left the plump jewel-like radishes themselves. Leite’s Culinaria (a blog you should read if you don’t) offered up a recipe from Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that seemed designed for this dinner.

Clean the radishes, leaving on a little nub of the greens, and if there are any that are ginormous, cut them in half. Toss them in something oven-proof with a bit of olive oil, a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and some thyme (yay windowbox!), and roast at 400F for the last 10-15 minutes that the chicken is cooking. And you’re done.

Then came the tricky bit: dessert. I love dessert, and I love to bake, but I’m a better, more confident cook than baker. I have mentioned, perhaps, that I’ve been bringing in the extras from recent baking experiments to the dojo where I practice aikido. This makes everybody happy, because it means I don’t wind up eating an entire loaf of banana bread myself (with the justification that it would otherwise go stale), and the uchi deshi, who spend 32 hours a week training, and are therefore perpetually hungry, get homebaked whatever-the-hell-I-felt-compelled-to-make-that-week.

Last week, when I asked one of the other members if he had any requests, he said, without so much as pausing to take a breath, “red velvet cupcakes.” And initially, I said, “um, no, that’s not really my thing.” But then I thought about it, and realized that it’s mostly not my thing because of the food dye (standard recipes call for 2 entire bottles of red dye in a batch of cupcakes). So I started hunting around for alternative, natural recipes. And pureed beets seems to be the thing to do.

I started with a recipe from Beauty Everyday, but thanks to the keen eye of M., who is a much more experienced baker than I am, we made some substantial alterations. She suggested cutting down on the sugar and the eggs, and also realized that the volume of icing was totally out of proportion with the amount of cake we’d be making. So I wisely stepped aside and let her take the culinary reins.

After the last step of folding in the pureed beets, we concluded that the batter was sufficiently cake-like to proceed. So into the muffin tin went this beautiful, almost magenta mix.

And we crossed our fingers for 17 minutes as we sat down to dinner.

But it turns out we needn’t have been so worried. The recipe was a hit (though it occurs to me that if you slather cream cheese icing on cardboard, it would be declared a success). The comparison we came up with is that it’s like carrot cake, just with beets, and chocolate flavored instead of spiced.

And most importantly, the cake is indeed red!

Final side note: I learned in my search for this recipe that originally, the color in red velvet cake came from a reaction between the cocoa powder and the acid of the buttermilk. It wasn’t a super bright red, more like brick or rust. But then cocoa powder began being manufactured using a process called “dutching,” which serves to stabilize it but also changes the pH so much that the reaction couldn’t happen. And by that time, red food dye (a.k.a. cancer juice) was widely available. And then there was no going back, because Americans for some reason like their food to be as brightly colored as possible.

Ok, class dismissed.