Cherry and Beer Poptarts

When I was 7, I got my first pair of glasses. My brother cried because he said I didn’t look the same. We haven’t spoken in three years.

When I was 17, I moved out. Went to college, rode the train. When I was 17, I had my first boyfriend; the string of inconsistencies that have allowed me to know who I am through a process of elimination. When I was 17, I got lost in downtown Pittsburgh, throwing up in alleyways and walking back to campus. The next day, I got my lip pierced. I think to show others I could be tough, even if I couldn’t grow facial hair or hold my liquor.

At 18, I stayed in Italy. I worked at a gas station to pay for my ticket. My mom kept the apron for when she cleans the house. I didn’t keep in touch with those I lived with abroad. I didn’t see a point. They saw me as a child who shaved his head and smoked short cigarettes. I think I spent that time convincing myself I didn’t need anyone. I moved back to Pennsylvania December 16th. I started dating my boyfriend on January 1.

In May, he went to China and I got my first tattoo. I didn’t need him for anything. A small act of rebellion, small needles and antiseptic smell mixed with the blood-rust under the cottonball.

I tanned before moving to California, still wore a lot of black, still smoked a lot of cigarettes. I drank juice and coffee; I ate candy during law school finals.

Got more tattoos, lost a job.

Moved to Texas, put to roses on my arm.

Moved back to California, fell in and out of love. Fell in and out of a understanding of what I wanted, but I know I wanted out.

This time I got the word “eleven” tattooed on my arm for my dad. It was his baseball number. They retired it when he graduated from South Ripley County, Indiana.

And last week I got a nose ring. I’m 24 and still changing things. Still speaking through layers of performance, latent cues and failed attempts at seeming aloof. That’s the beauty of being so young still—I have grown accustomed to being someone else and somehow all the iterations of that person are all still me.

And today I was someone who created photo backgrounds, who propped the board up with an old coffee mug from my week in Belgium. I was someone who made poptarts, handpies, whatever you want to call it—like I used to when I was six and the world was blurry and my skin unblemished.

Cherry and Beer Poptarts

Ingredients for the crust:

• 8 TB unsalted butter, very cold
• 6 TB shortening, very cold
• 2 cup AP flour
• 1 cup almond meal
• ¼ cup white sugar
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• ¼ to ½ cup ice water

Ingredients for the filling:

• 2 cups cherries, pitted and halved
• ½ cup brown sugar, dark
• ¼ cup beer, any variety (can sub red wine if you’d like)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 TB lemon or orange zest
• Juice from half a lemon or ¼ of an orange
• A slurry of cornstarch (1 TB cornstarch whisked in 1 TB water) – do not make until cherries are reduced by hal

Directions for crust:

1. In a food processor, pulse together butter, shortening, flour, almond meal, and white sugar until fats are pea-sized
2. Add vanilla extract and pulse once or twice
3. With motor running, pour ¼ cup of water into feeding tube in a gradual stream until a dough forms. You may need an additional couple teaspoons of ice water until dough clumps and begins to pull away from edges of the bowl
4. Turn out onto a floured work surface and divide into two discs
5. Wrap both discs in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes to res

Directions for filling:

1. In a medium sauce pan, combine cherries, sugar, beer, salt, and lemon, stir with a spoon to ensure liquid is covering everything
2. On medium heat, allow for cherries to release their juices and for sugar to dissolve
3. Continue heating until juices simmer and reduce by half (during this time, whisk together your slurry)
4. Reduce heat to low and vigorously whisk in the slurry
5. Mixture will begin to thicken and continue thickening as it cool

Assembly:

1. Preheat your oven to 400*F
2. Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper
3. Take one disc of dough out of the fridge and roll out onto a heavily-floured work surface into a rough rectangle that is about 12” by 10” (this will vary slightly, so don’t stress it too much)
4. Using a sharp knife, cut your dough into rectangles. For a guide, I actually used a 3”x4” index card, but you can measure with a ruler if you so choose
5. With each rectangle, carefully place onto your prepared baking sheets. You should have 9 rectangles total (if using the very scientific Index Card Method)
6. Now, re-flour your board and roll out your second disc of dough
7. Measure and cut your rectangles out again, but do not immediately place on your sheets
8. At this point, you will have to do three things in succession: make an egg wash to brush edges of the dough, spoon in some of your cherry filling onto each rectangle (I’d say about 2 TB per pie, but this is based on preference mostly), and place second top dough layer on top
9. Do this for each pie
10. Crimp the edges of each pie with a fork, pressing slightly to seal
11. Brush tops of pies with remaining egg wash and sprinkle with a little sugar
12. Using a paring knife, cut a couple small nicks in the top crust to vent dough
13. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown on the edges and tops
14. Allow to cool completely before adding your topping (my glaze was ½ cup confectioner’s sugar, 4 TB half and half, and 1 TB vanilla extract, then topped with almond slices and sprinkles)
15. Can be kept for up to 3 days in an airtight container, but I like them served warm.

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.

Remembering Rome: Fruitcake Biscotti

This week marks five years since I rode a carousel of gilded horses somewhere in the middle of Rome. I had too much wine and the piazza was celebrating Christmas early. There were witches on strings sold for seven Euro and small keychains where the gold was peeling off. They were one Euro. I bought five for everyone in my family. Good enough. They’d appreciate the sentiment. A week later, I found all five in the trash. All the gold scratched off with fingernails and spare change.

The lights of the carousel swirled manically in my memory and we weren’t even going that fast. We all seemed so much happier than I think we really were. I think it was raining then. I think I had forgotten my coat at the bar we went to later. I think we bought roses from a beggar and gave them to a nun cleaning when we got back to the dormitory (it was attached to a monastery). I think that memory sticks with me now because I felt both so vertiginous seated on the carousel and so grounded to the holiday season. I felt like I was home in a country where I had to carry my student visa to get into any of my classes.

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But it has been five years. Two of those years I didn’t celebrate Christmas. I haven’t done much of anything since I’ve come out to California. But I think about that day, that night, that moment I felt so connected to a world where I still had to nod eagerly and point to order a pastry.  Not too much eye contact, ask a stranger for directions.

I still feel like a foreigner sometimes, like a fraud. There’s a personal dissonance for me when I see strands of lights wrapped around palm trees. I feel like I’m betrayal some primal Appalachian roots being in the West during the holidays. It rains in California more than it snows. So I try to make the best of it, to recreate the moments when I felt most festive. When it felt wholesome and good and I felt worthy to enjoy Christmas.  I’ve felt like a necromancer, resurrecting all those memories back to the surface, those feelings of nostalgia, of carousel rides and white Christmases. This week I made hot chocolate the way my mother does—full of cream and chocolate chips melted in the microwave. I made the sugar cookies my brother likes for a potluck at work. And with the help of West Elm, I made fruitcake biscotti for that night in Rome. And while the memories keep fading away, while they aren’t as bright in my mind as they used to be, I keep trying. 

Fruitcake Biscotti, makes 12-16

Ingredients:

•  1/2 cup flavorless oil 
•  2 whole eggs, plus one yolk
• 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
• 1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon molasses
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 2 tablespoons dried cranberries
• 2 tablespoon dried oranges, diced
• 2 tablespoon candied ginger, diced
• 2 tablespoon heavy cream

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Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325.  Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper
2. In a measuring cup, measure out and whisk together oil, eggs, extracts, and molasses and set aside
3. In a mixing bowl, sift together sugar, flour and baking powder
4. Create a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and slowly pour wet mixture into well, mixing with a wooden spoon until it begins to come together
5. Dump out onto a floured work surface and sprinkle dried fruit on top of dough. Work dough by hand, kneading five or six times until it has come together
6. With a sharp knife, cut dough in half and shape each piece into an 8-inch log that is about 1 inch high. Place on parchment-lined baking sheet. Coat each log with a small amount of cream.
7. Bake logs for 30 minutes, and take out of the oven.  Using a serrated knife, slice both logs into ½-inch segments
8. Lay all slices evenly onto baking sheet with one cut side up.  Reduce oven to 300 and bake on each side for 6 minutes, until crisp
9. Allow to cool before serving. 
10. Buon appetito!

Nostalgia from a crunchy baguette

When I was 18, I lived on my own in Europe.  I rode a subway system that was in a foreign language.  I shaved the sides of my head and wore a rabbits foot around my neck, a gift from a fling I had in the summer with a boy who's now a model.  I lived the life I thought I deserved, the life I thought I wanted.  I lost a friend of eight years that year.  I lost my uncle, too.  I never made it to France during my time abroad, I ran out of money and there was a terrorist threat on the train I was going to take when I could buy the ticket.

I lived in Italy, but never really saw the world for what it was.  Instead, I was born into a secular understanding of cause-and-effect.  The bookends of hard work and the inevitable payoff stood in my mind.  They call that a Protestant work ethic.  I lived this fantasy of being a poet.  I lived the fantasy that being in Italy would make me more lovable.  I came back with bags of chocolates for my family, grey and chalky farewell presents from a bartender in Belgium.  My family saw it as ostentatious.  I came back with a resolute longing to be not only a different person, but a better person.  A person who tries new things, a person who changes with the seasonality of produce and temperament.  

I've kept that promise.  I call my parents and beg for the same gratitude in others that I wish to give them myself.  I was going to be a lawyer and profit off the misfortunes of others.  I took up cooking and raised three dogs instead, acting on the impulses of creation rather than the slow and steady toxins of tit-for-tat successes.  I took up baking and paint my palette in floral hues, clipping roses that grew wild in the Texas humidity and sprinkling them on a finished cake.  I surprise myself every week by baking something I've never made before--beet pasta, an almond cake, a rosemary soda--and I do it to remind myself that the takeaway from my time abroad wasn't that I was in any way better off than those I left behind, but I need to constantly evolve, change, develop into the person I want to become.

And this week, I wanted to be a bread baker.  To be the kind of person who can create a baguette in triplicate.  I found the recipe on food52 and paired it with the Lee brother's radish butter.  I sat with this delicate snack on the chaise lounge, in the sunset where Murphy sleeps, and I thought about how the last time I ate a radish, it was at the housewarming party of an aunt who now lives in Indiana.  How the sun melted the sherbet and my sister and I played badminton while the sun settled in for the night.  I thought about all the delicate memories that hang by a thread and how easily we can forget them.   I wonder what will trigger my memory of this morning, stretched out with mint tea and a baguette smeared with radish butter, and if I'll remember it fondly or with the sudden urge of nostalgia, like the kind that still grips me when I think of all the missed opportunities I spent hating my family for never just taking those damn chocolates and appreciating that the effort was there all along. 

A five year reflection.

I've become the boy with the Weimaraner eyes, I've surrounded myself in fog and ice.  I used to think I was tough and happy, loved in every language that existed.  I used to think the hunting rifles wouldn't sound.  I used to think it was God laughing when it rained too hard and the thunder rolled into my small valley town in the Laurel Highlands.  I used to think a lot of things, but now I'm a boy that sits in coffee shops at the periphery of downtown.  There are a lot of people that bump my table, sometimes the coffee spills on the saucer plate.

I've become the boy with the peach pit soul.  Surrounded by a fleshy pretext that I'm anything if not bruised.  The peach pit looks vestigial, ancient.  It has the bloody aura of tendon and tissue around it.  You hold it in your hand and throw it against a tree, trying to crack its ugly skin.  You leave it for fifty years until a new soul grows, verdant this time.  Something you'd tell your mama about.

I've become the boy with the spyglass touch, extending out ad finitum.  Brassy and cold, I look for any kind of celestial connection.  I find none.  Its all a novelty, everything we see is out of reach somehow.  All of it colossal smoke rings from some ancient carved pipe.

I'm a dust mote in the morning and by night I'm a matchstick.

I'm a ring of salt to keep the hell out, I'm the water stain on your coffee table when you forgot to use a coaster.

I'm a promissor, a confessor, a coyote.  Each breath I took these last five years have become dandelions left on the step of some child dove's grave.

Five.

Five years since I met Nolan.  Five years since I went to Florida with my parents and kissed them on the cheek at the foot of the ocean, the edge of the world.  Five years since I started a fire out of nail polish remover and vodka for the Fourth of July.  Five years since I dated a model.  Five years since I worked at a gas station, so I could save up and run away to Italy for all the wrong reasons.

Five years of connection, five years of solitude.  It created the boy in front of you.  The one who eats alone at diners with free refills on coffee, who orders a water and a piece of pie for dinner.  Who makes plans and then ignores the phone calls. I needed this solitude, I regret not having more of it.  I make breakfast alone for myself, I lick the spoon when I'm alone by myself.  

I made biscotti this week and had a tea party for myself.  I thought about all the people I used to be and how I have vertigo thinking of all the lies I've told.  I sat at my table and snapped the biscotti between my fingers.  I crumbled them up because I wanted to be alone.  Absolutely alone, if only for one more week.

Almond Biscotti

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Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375.  Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper
2. In a measuring cup, measure out and whisk together oil, eggs, and extracts, set aside
3. In a mixing bowl, sift together sugar, flour and baking powder, create a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour wet mixture into well.
4. Mix with a wooden spoon until comes together
5. Dump out onto a floured work surface (pref marble) and knead five or six times by hand, until fully incorporated.  If cracks a little, add a scant tablespoon of cream (or oil) to moisten at a time
6. Flatten dough out a little, sprinkle almonds in and fold over a couple times to incorporate
7. With a sharp knife, half dough
8. On parchment-lined sheets, mold dough into two logs that are about 8-10 inches long and about 3/4 inch high
9. Bake for 30 minutes, and take out of the oven.  Using a serrated knife, cut on a diagonal slices of the log that are about 1/2 inch thick
10. Lay all slices onto baking sheet with one cut side up.  Reduce oven to 325 and bake for 10 minutes.  Flip and repeat, until crisp.  
11. Allow to cool before serving and can be made three days in advance, if sealed in container

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup flavorless oil (vegetable)
• 2 whole eggs, plus one yolk
• 1 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
• 1/2 tablespoon anise extract
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 2 tablespoon heavy cream, optional
• 2/3 cup slivered almonds