In the days and weeks and months leading up to her birthday, my girlfriend told me repeatedly that she wanted me to make her a cake, and she wanted a very specific one: box mix brownies, doctored the way I always do them, made into a layer cake with Pillsbury Funfetti frosting. I knew better than to assume she was kidding, but I also really like going overboard, so my task for myself was figuring out a way to put my stamp on a cake made of mass-produced products.
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adventure cake
You may notice in the tags of this post that one says “the beer ran down my mustache.” While I do have a bit of a mustache (hell yeah to Ashkenazi heritage combined with my decision to remove body hair as little as possible) and while I am not always the neatest drinker of beer, that’s not what the tag is about. It’s a common closing formula in Russian wonder tales, where the teller, upon finishing some grand love story, will say: I was at their wedding and drank beer. The beer ran along my mustache but did not go into my mouth. The most familiar English-language formula is Once upon a time, but I’m not interested in battling Disney SEO and it’s far less evocative of food, drink, and the role they have in celebrations and in stories.
Read Morethe summer in baking
As promised or hinted at, a summary of the baking I did this summer. There’s one more cake, but I’m writing up a separate post for it.
This summer I got really into pies, and it shows. Is summer a weird season to be into pies? Traditional pie dough needs to be kept cold at all times and summer temperatures in New York are not especially conducive to that. I had the AC on all season, and when I’d take out a blind-baked crust I would often set it to cool over the grates of my temperature control box (the name is escaping me; it does heat, AC, and a fan) in hopes that would make things go faster.
Read More'that thing you always stock up on in Oregon Trail' Rhubarb (Short Stack 05/12)
I was very excited to try rhubarb for the above reason. For so much of my life (26 years!) (technically more like 20, I guess) “rhubarb” was a mythical creation: my characters in “Oregon Trail” always bought a ton of it, because it was cheap and traveled well; and every spring, I saw food writers sing the praises of rhubarb [pie/jam/crumble/etc]. But until this month, I’d never gotten around to trying it.
Alas, it was not May 01 that I tried it, and that’s why once again it feels like I’ve made very little from this particular Short Stack. I hit the Union Square farmers’ market on May 1, ready to stock up, only to find that spring had not yet sprung quite enough for rhubarb to start being harvested and sold. It was closer to the middle of the month that I finally managed to get my hands on some, and that delay in tandem with my unusually busy social calendar (ha) meant that I didn’t come close to using as much rhubarb as my Oregon Trail pixel settlers did.
It can be hard for me to try new foods (thank god no one took me on the Oregon Trail, I guess); there’s a lot of sensory anxiety and social anxiety wrapped up in it. One of the things that I’ve loved about this Short Stack project (and that I love, in general, about home cooking) is that I can try things by myself, in the comfort of my own kitchen, where no one has any expectations of me. If I don’t like rhubarb after all, I can give the pie to a friend. If it turns out that I absolutely love whole-grain honey mustard, I can hoard it, buy it, or make it again myself. The stakes are low, and the anxiety is minimal. But I liked rhubarb a lot. I’ll be stocking up and freezing a ton before the season ends, so that I can drink rhubarb lemonade in November and think of spring.
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