Bookends: A Macaron Cake

I danced on a lamppost and smoked a joint on a statue of a snake. I kissed a boy on a stone curb and crammed into the back of a Fiat with four other students. I ate nothing but bread for a week. I thought I was in love with a one-night stand, so I made him tea and milk and lost his number in the morning.  My professor invited me to a roof top party and I got so drunk I sat in a corner, silent, and thought about my uncle’s funeral the next day.

And when fall break hit, I bought a train ticket to Paris. 11 hours, through Lyon. I packed a bag with black t-shirts and a carton of cigarettes. I never made it to Paris, though. There were terror threats in the city that day, so I went to Florence instead. I smoked all the cigarettes in twelve days. I fell in love with every person I saw on the subway home. I got so drunk at the only gay bar I knew about that I ordered two crepes for me and one for my friend who tagged along. I took a shot of vodka from a sweating bottle in the backseat of a cab. I never made it to Paris, but I felt like I was writing a poem during my time in Rome: disconnected, unplanned, high on bummed weed and pills when they were offered. It was a narrative I crafted, harbored in the crawl space of my self-esteem.

It wasn’t so bad, but I wish I had made it to Paris.

Three years later I was unemployed in California. Still hadn’t made it to Paris, though I had promised myself I would when I became a lawyer. I promised myself that every day until I quit law school and couldn’t get a job. I still smoked cigarettes then, and wore a lot of black, but I spent my days on a hammock, thinking about how all my potential was prematurely ejaculated once I graduated high school.

So I fought with my boyfriend about money. About cereal that went stale and if I really needed a lamp next to my bed. About how to raise the dog we bought together in Los Angeles and if love was enough to stay awake in this sleeping relationship much longer.

And in between pretending to learn a language and lying on my resume, I learned to bake. Slowly at first, then gradually I got better.  I watched cooking shows in the morning and stretched a dollar any way I knew how. Egg whites for a meringue cake and then the yolks for a custard. Flour from the dollar store and I’d skip my car payment for a month to buy quality chocolate. I only cooked French food early on, to challenge myself. To prove to myself something. I fucked up a bundt cake pretty bad once and cried about it for an afternoon. When my confidence was so fragile, even that was too much to bear. I didn’t bake for a month after that and I remember I always avoided one recipe in particular: the French sandwich cookie, the macaron.

Since then, I’ve made scones, bundt cakes, and galettes. Cakes, cookies, and ice cream. But never a macaron. Until this week, when I realized how far I’ve come and a thousand of miles in between who I was and who I am now. I don’t wear so much black anymore. I’m writing a new narrative. I use an old Coors Light bottle as an ashtray on my parents’ front porch. I made a macaron cake, pink and tart and nutty because I figured, “Why not?” Because that’s who I am now—someone who isn’t creating identity but poetry. Physical, tangible poetry set between the bookends of an uncle’s death in Rome and a crumbling relationship in California. And who I am now doesn’t say, “No” often, especially when I get the chance to bake or bum a cigarette. 

Macaron Cake with Cherry Buttercream

I am fully aware that this isn't a proper technique and is a more whimsical approach to the French confection. Makes one 6-inch cake.

Ingredients for cake base

• 1 ½ cup almond meal
• 1/3 cup AP flour
• 1 ½ cup confectioner’s sugar
• 4 egg whites
• 1/3 cup sugar
• ½ teaspoon white vinega

Directions for cake base

1. Prep your parchment by drawing your 6-inch circles as your guide for piping. Put parchment on a half sheet
2. Sift together almond meal, flour, and confectioner’s sugar in a large bowl and set aside
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until they are beyond frothy but not quite solid
4. Begin to add your sugar in a stream with motor still running
5. As you continue to beat, the egg whites should solidify and be a little shiny
6. Add your white vinegar to stabilize the meringue
7. Turn mixer off and add about a half cup of the flour mixture to the meringue mixture. Fold it into the egg whites. When mixed, add remainder of the flour mixture gradually, continuing to fold as you go
8. When fully mixed, put into your piping bag and pipe into your pre-drawn rounds
9. Set out for 30 minutes at room temperature
10. Preheat oven to 300*F
11. Bake for one hour, checking at the 40-minute mark and every ten minutes after until you notice a hard shell that is set
12. While baking, move onto the cherry buttercream
13. Remove from oven and allow to cool completel

Ingredients for the cherry buttercream

• 2 cups cherries, pitted
• Juice and zest of a half lemon
• ½ cup white sugar
• 2 TB unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1 TB vanilla
• Pinch of sal

Directions for cherry buttercream

1. In a small saucepan, stir together your lemon zest and juice, cherries, and sugar
2. Boil on medium until juices of the cherry are released and it is reduced by half. You will have a syrupy product
3. Cool completely
4. In a bowl, using either your stand mixer or a hand mixer, beat your butter and confectioner’s sugar together, it will create a thick and dry paste
5. With your mixer still on low, pour a thin stream of syrup into your confectioner’s sugar mixture and beat until it is whipped and a light pink
6. Add vanilla and a pinch of sal

To Assemble: Turn one of your macaron discs over so the flat surface is facing upward. Spread as much of the buttercream as you’d like on top, place second disc on top of first and dust with confectioner’s sugar. Saves for up to two days, even at room temperature.

Ice Cream in the Wintertime

I've gotten used to microwaving water for tea and never having to tell a single person what I'm thinking.  I slept for fifteen hours yesterday, my body exhausted from the flu, and no one would ever have known if I didn't tell people.  For pity, for a connection to someone else.  I've become this different person, a liminal character between two worlds--the moorish memories of California, the Shangri-La future of central Texas.  If the sun hits me at noon, my fingertips become smoke rings, I float away into my own imagination.  I never have to tell a single person what I'm thinking. Last week, I stopped by a Salvation Army and looked for an ice cream scoop.  I wanted an old one, one that looked rustic and used.  One that survived birthday parties and anniversaries, graduation parties and the Y2K scare.  I found a chipped crock and an Ace of Base CD instead.  I forgot my wallet in the car and felt oddly embarrassed, oddly unsure of myself, self-conscious of my windowshopping.  I went back out to the car and noticed how few parking spots there were for how many customers the store had.  It confused me, how people got there.  I left without buying anything.

The reason I needed the ice cream scoop is because I was determined to make ice cream.  Chantilly Meringuèe, to be exact.  I was given twenty-two eggs from a coworker whose fridge was overflowing with them.  So many delicate egg whites, cracked open on the sides of mixing bowls and countertops.  My fascination with the egg white's transformation was last seen with the Italian Meringue Buttercream, but I wanted to take it one step further.  Because, egg whites, too, are so liminal.  So between-worlds.  Too viscous for liquid, too amorphous for a solid.  The more air you incorporate, the more velveteen and shapely it becomes.

I wanted to see this transformation, I wanted to feel as though my sublimated body could border-cross the way this dessert did.  I wanted to create magic without the unnecessary equipment of an ice cream maker.  I wanted something cold on my tongue, the sharp bite of winter melting in my mouth.  I wanted to feel alive this week, after sleeping for fifteen hours and only speaking when I needed something.  I wanted to feel like a kid again, taking change from my pocket and buying ice cream across the street from my school, at a place called Shaffer's Snack Shack.  I wanted to share this recipe with you.

Mountain Cedar and Chicken Noodle Soup

I was five when I told my first lie. We lived in Kentucky then.  In a little ranch house with not enough room.  My sister slept in the laundry room, her bed was by the washer.  The house had one big tree in the backyard, broken bricks in a corner of the lot.  The fence on the left was overrun by blackberry bramble.  My sister and I would see who could fit the most in our mouths, the juices running down our chins like well-fed wolves. In that house, I told my first lie.  I told my mother I was sick, that I couldn't get out of bed, that I couldn't move.  She said I looked pale and I held her hand while we watched a movie on the bottom bunk of a bed I shared with my brother.  My mother had long hair then, thick and that kind of black hair that turns blue in the right light.  She was 29 then and worked in a warehouse for produce and generic-brand food.  Her whole life was over by then, I think.  She was never really her own person by the time I came along.  But she sat on the bed with me and we watched movies.  I lied to her and we both took a nap together.

In that same house, that small little house in Kentucky, with the vinyl siding and it's creaky front door, a tornado hit and my 29-year-old mom drove home to protect us. She drove a green pickup truck.  She tied a sun-bleached red bandana on the mirror the day she got it.  It was a summer then, hot on the skin and the heat broke the sky. She put that same mattress we fell asleep on over our heads and we watched as a tree branch smacked the window pane, leaving a scratch that was still there when we left two months later.

I haven't stopped lying since I was five.  I do it every day.  I do it over small things, like if I put cream in my coffee.  I do it about big things, like when I tell people I love them.  I do it as a way to get attention, as a way to hold someone's hand.  I do it for pity and for protection.  I do it for fun.  I lie to my mother more than anyone else.  I tell her I forgive her for everything, for the missed birthdays and the time she hung up the phone on me when I called her from Italy, drunk and alone and only had ten minutes left on the pay phone, only a few cents left in my pocket.  I lie to her to make it easy, because I remember how she sat on the bed and held my hand and loved me even when I was lying to her.

Every time I was sick after that day, she'd stay home with me and watch a movie.  She'd take my temperature with her hand flat on my forehead and at night she'd have my dad carry me to my room.  We had tradition, we had rituals.  We had moments that I haven't been able to share with anyone else.  I lied to her over and over again for seventeen years now, but every time I call her and tell her I'm sick, she always remembers this day, too.

Last week, I called her and told her the mountain cedar was blowing.  I told her that my eyes itched and how I didn't want to go to work.  She told me about her chicken soup with big noodles and roasted chicken.  Carrots and celery and oil.  She told me who I used to eat it and ask for seconds and thirds.  She told me how she wished she could be here now, in my kitchen in Texas, making it for me.  I lied to her again and said, "Yeah, me too."

Instead, I did it myself, like so many things these days.  This soup is an apology, a memory, a souvenir from when we all played sick and tried to get out of school with the flu.  It's a revisionist tale of how life should have gone.  It's to my mother who was 25 and young when she had me.  It's to a little boy who still has family in Kentucky he's never met.  It's to the 1,500 miles in any direction to the closest people I love.  It's a warm soup, a comforting soup.  It's a soup you eat when the tornado heat breaks and you have three small children to stop crying.  It's the soup you reheat when the dollar has to stretch because you're saving up to move out of a house where your daughter sleeps in the laundry room.  It's a soup for a home, not for a house.

Chicken Noodle Soup

Ingredients:

• 2 large chicken breasts, defrosted
• 3 sprigs rosemary, divided
• 2 lemons, cut into wedges
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3 carrots, diced
• 3 stalks celery, diced
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• 1 head of garlic, minced
• 96 oz chicken stock (as always, preferably homemade, but there is a lot of flavor in the soup for store-bought)
• 1 1/2 tablespoon chicken base (found in supermarkets)
• 1/2 tablespoon lemon pepper
• 1 tablespoon pepper
• 16 oz egg noodles, cooked separately in another pot

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 450
2. Rip two aluminum sheets off big enough to wrap your chicken in.  Place chicken breasts on respective foils and rub salt, pepper, and olive oil all over.  Add four lemon wedges per chicken breast and rosemary.  Wrap tightly.  Bake on sheet for 25 minutes or until cooked through.
3. Set chicken aside to cool.
4. Begin on the mirepoix.  In a large dutch oven, heat butter and oil over medium-high heat.  Before butter burns and when oil is almost smoking, add carrots, celery, and onion.  Cook down 10-15 minutes and stir occasionally, until vegetables are tender and onions are translucent
5. Add garlic and remaining sprig of rosemary (diced finely).  Cook only for a minute to release some flavors and not burn, stirring constantly.
6. Pour in chicken stock.  Allow to heat through and bring to a low boil for five minutes.  While waiting on that, tear the cooled chicken breasts into bite-sized chunks with your hands or a fork.
7. Add the chicken base, pepper, and lemon pepper.  Stir thoroughly to ensure that the seasonings have incorporated into the soup
8. Add the shredded chicken
9. Cover and let simmer on low while you prepare the egg noodles in a separate pot (follow package instructions here, but add a little bit of chicken stock to the liquid for some added flavor)
10. Drain noodles and add to soup.  Simmer to warm noodles up.
11. Serve with Laura Calder's Miracle Boule and have for the rest of the week

We have brioche at dawn.

This all happened before I left for Pennsylvania, before I was reminded of the as it was.  Of the constant state of charm and chaos that exists when you visit a family home.  The kind that you can recognize the tired floorboards, the kind that are imprinted with your dad's shape on the couch.  All the good memories flood back and haunt you like a contorted zoetrope, and you're never really sure if you're dreaming or awake. I made these rolls with no intention of making these rolls, with no intention of being up until one in the morning, making sure I had turned the oven light off.  Intention wasn't the cause, but the end goal of having these with ham and jelly kept me going.  The soft pillows were enveloped in a hard crunch and I could taste them before I could smell them.  I knew they were special and simple and delicious.  I knew I wanted them to be impressive, I knew it before I ever intended on making them.

I have always felt that the grey morning light is terrifying.  One of the first poems I wrote, read out loud in the back of my parents' '98 Nissan Pathfinder, was about how I wanted to die when that grey light extended to my southward-facing bedroom window.  That was in Pennsylvania, when the whole month of December is one grey streak on virgin snow.  Out here in California, it can taunt you for two hours and be gone by the time you pull into work.  It's different here, but still frightening.

I've never been one for armor, but you can't hide from the ambient greyness.  Instead, you have to confront it.  Distract yourself from it.  Make it feel invited in a way that it can't smell the sick in you.  I distract myself from it, too.  I serve myself a beautiful breakfast when I realize how much I hate this kind of season, this kind of light.  The mild distortion of ephemera that only comes between the hours of five and seven in the morning.  And that can all be abated for a moment or two.  At the calm of the table, with the coffee pot scorching on the burner.  The small hiss of everyday life while the man you once loved and will love again sleeps in the next room, never aware that you only made the breakfast so you didn't think about your own mortality.  How you, too, could be gone by the time you pull into work.  And after that you would do the dishes, and after that you would take a shower, and after that you would get a towel and sit on the bathroom floor trying to stay warm.  The ritual of these brioche buns meant I was distracted, meant I didn't have to, for one moment, think about how suffocating mornings can be, when all you have is yourself.

Morning Brioche Buns

Ingredients: (this is for six buns, but I had doubled the recipe to share at work, as seen in photos below)

• 8 TB milk, slightly warmed on stovetop or in microwave
• 1/2 sachet of active dry yeast
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut in pieces, room temperature
• 1/2 tablespoon granulated sugar or honey
• 2 eggs, lightly whisked (1 tablespoon of eggs for washing), room temperature
• 1/3 teaspoon salt 
• 2 1/3 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons flaky sea salt (such as La Jolla Salt Co.)

Directions:

1. In a bowl, activate the yeast in the warmed milk until beginning to bloom and bubbles appear
2. Cream butter and sugar (or honey) until light and fluffy with mixer
3. Add eggs and continue to blend gently until combined
4. In a separate bowl, sift together flour and salt for lighter, airier dry ingredients
5. Gradually add these to the wet mixture, stirring with a wooden spoon until crumbly
6. Pour in yeast mixture and stir until all ingredients are wet
7. Oil or flour hands gently and turn onto a lightly-floured board.  Knead by hand until gluten and yeast begin to activate.  The dough will become springy and malleable in about 5-7 minutes
8. Put in an oiled bowl and cover with a tea towel for about two hours, or until doubled in size
9. Put back onto floured board and cut into six equal buns.  Roll and shape into rounds, place on parchment-lined baking sheet for another hour and a half to inflate again and become puffy.  During this proofing period, preheat oven to 375 degrees.
10. When the oven is preheated and rolls are puffy, you can either keep them on the baking sheets or place them in a skillet or other oven-proof bakeware for a visually-stunning breakfast.  Either way, they taste great.
11. Gently brush all balls of dough with reserved tablespoon of egg and lightly salt with flaked seasalt.
12. Bake for 20 minutes or until golden
13. Allow to cool and serve as immediate as possible.  Put in airtight container for morning.
14. Note:  I found that, with all brioche, these dry out really quickly.  To reconstitute them a little, place in a microwave with a damp paper towel for about 10-15 seconds.  The steam should help to soften them up a bit.
15. Serve with jam, butter, or some honey-baked ham I'm sure we all have received in a Pepperidge Farms box from a relative or two this time of year.

And one more thing...

I want to give a special shout out to La Jolla Salt Co. for their great deal on this denim apron I purchased in support of small businesses in my area.  I was lucky enough to have a little bit of their salt for this recipe and I can say it gave it the perfect amount of balance and crunch the brioche needed.  Baking gets pretty messy and I've finally graduated from using old flannel shirts to a full-blown profesh apron now!

Midweek

Time is the trickster god.  A coyote that laugh-howls, lopes into your nightmares, tricks the Snake.  The booming thunder of God-fury, the small church mice that follow the corn harvest like a perennial migration. All of it, everything.  The Bible doesn't mention the creation of time, it could have been the first or the sixth day of manifested divinity. Between the firmament and the sea, deep in the root-veins of the universe.  We live in the world of cause-and-effect, and the only protection of this stifling reality is perception.  My mother said her candy shop was getting too commercial.  My mother said her back hurt so bad she couldn't breathe that morning.  My mother said that if she could tell her seventeen-year-old self to get an education, she wouldn't be "in this hell-hole town" now. And I understood.  I didn't know who I was at seventeen and I was headstrong and coming into a sexuality that was too strong for me to divert.  I was creative in a static way, post-it notes of lyrical sentences, nonsensical until it was in a poem.  I majored in English, a dead degree.  I second-majored in Philosophy, a dead science. And now I work with tension and dream of cooking every day.  I dream that the window is open, the sun highlighting dust motes I'll get to one day.  The dogs dance their carnal dance of play-fight and Nolan sits waiting for me. And I have that life in part-time.

My weekend is Tuesday and Wednesday and after working for days on end, skipping weekends to help out in the office, I finally had two days off in a row.  After dental appointments and job applications, I got the chance to reconnect.  The mornings, grey and amber the way mornings are, were punctuated by small kisses and coffee that cut the cold, silent air with the sizzle of the pot when it went back on the burner.  My shoulders fell, relaxed.  My heart relaxed, grateful.  We put a deposit on a new house and felt the promise of a new life, a new us.  A way to forget the time I yelled so loud my throat hurt, a chance to forget that every cause has an effect, because we live in a world of time.  And sometimes those things don't leave you.

Wednesday night, I made a cake.  I made a cake and planned my future.  I made a cake and recreated a dish we had in Newport last week.  And the small jewels of heirloom tomatoes and the beads of sweat that dotted Nolan's shirt told me how alive I am, how I don't regret who I was at seventeen, because my poetry is different now, but it's still there in the periphery.

Almond Meringue Cake with Clover Honey-Vanilla Icing

Ingredients:

For the cake:

• 1 1/2 Teaspoon baking soda
• 1 2/3 cup flour
• 2/3 cup finely-ground almonds (I used a food processor for a 6 oz bag of plain almonds)
• 1 Teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 ounces soft butter
• 2 large eggs, separated
• 1 Teaspoon vanilla
• 1 Teaspoon almond
• 1/2 Tablespoon white vinegar
• 1 1/4 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 Teaspoon cream of tartar (optional, but recommended)

For the icing:

• 1 cup confectioner's sugar
• 1 Teaspoon vanilla
• 1 Tablespoon
• 1 Tablespoon clover honey

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, Fahrenheit
2. Put a metal bowl and whisk or hand beaters' whisks into freezer to cool while you prep.
3. Prepare an 8-inch cake pan by liberally coating with softened butter and parchment paper
4. For the cake, sift flour, soda, ground almonds, salt, and sugar in a large mixing bowl.  Mix together.  Set aside.
5. In a glass measuring cup or separate mixing bowl, combine oil, egg yolks, extracts, vinegar, and buttermilk by whisking until yolks are broken up.
6. Combine wet ingredients with dry in thirds.  After each portion, beat with hand or stand mixer for 20 seconds or so to combine thoroughly.  Set this batter aside.
7. Take bowl and whisk out of freezer, and beat egg whites until peaks form.  Add cream of tartar and continue to beat until stiff peaks form.
8. To combine meringue with batter mixture, use a rubber spatula and take a small amount of the egg whites and stir them into the batter.  Now, pour all egg whites into batter bowl and fold gently until just combined.
9. Pour into prepared cake pan.
10. Bake for 45 minutes and watch carefully.  The top will be browned, and the center will not be fully cooked.  To ensure nothing is burnt, put aluminum foil over cake after 45 minutes and continue to bake until middle is set and a toothpick comes out clean.  Check in five minute intervals to ensure best quality.
11. Invert cake and cool completely.
12. While cake is cooling, prepare icing by adding all ingredients in a bowl and mixing together.  Add warm water by the tablespoon and whisk vigorously until desired consistency.  Drizzle over cooled cake.  Enjoy!