Pumpkin Tahini Snack Cakes

This is our first Fall in the new house, and I am ready for it. We can keep our windows open again soon, having spent the last month sealed up in a freon cold of our air conditioned house. It's been in the 90's lately. It's been so hot the grass has dried up. Leaves are falling while I'm still in short sleeves. It's confusing, but I'm trying to be patient.

The dogs can't seem to notice the difference. They lay on the deck and catch bugs in their paws. Release them. Curious. They're from California, so they like the heat. We bought them sweaters this year, a size larger than what we think will fit them, so they have room to grow, to get older, to fill it out in five or ten years.

I'm ready for Fall. I'm ready to be reintroduced to the hues of colors I hadn't seen since California. Yes, I was in Pennsylvania last year, too, but I was so caught up in my own self-pity, I was distracted. This year, it will be different. This year, I won't let that happen again. This year, I know how it feels to wait and wait and wait and to appreciate the beauty when it's all around you.

Fall has always been my favorite season and I'm ready to keep the windows open and the oven on and to bake again. Bake more. To create the things I haven't had since I was a kid, because it's time for me to look back and realize it all wasn't so bad.

Pumpkin Tahini Snack Cakes

This recipe is an amalgamation of one from Nolan's mom and a little bit of classic snack cake elements - a bit more oil to keep it moist, and a bit of decoration on top to keep it fun. This is a great recipe that can be done in one bowl (though I broke the recipe up below into two) and can freeze pretty well too!

Ingredients:

• 2 cup AP flour
• 2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 teaspoon cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup tahini (or peanut butter)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 eggs
• 2 cups pumpkin

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F and line an 18" by 13" baking sheet with parchment paper
2. In a large mixing bowl, sift together all dry ingredients
3. Whisk together all remaining ingredients until smooth
4. Fold your wet mixture into your dry ingredients and continue to blend until everything is fully incorporated and there are no lumps
5. Pour into prepared pan and smooth evenly. Tap a couple times on a tabletop
6. Bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean
7. Allow to cool before decorating (see instructions below)

Decorating Instructions: In a stand mixer, beat two egg whites on high until soft peaks form. Add 1/3 cup white sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. Continue to beat until glossy peaks form. Transfer to a piping bag fitted with any tip you'd like. Create your pattern on your cake. Bake for 5 minutes in a 300*F oven to set meringues. 

An Easy Li'l Cake for Sunday!

This week was easy, it went by fast. The chickens are growing, the dogs ran themselves exhausted in the field this week. Our friends had a baby and he is beautiful. We had a mid-week stay in D.C. to see Feist. And today, we went out for breakfast and now we're planning our trip to Vermont this summer. So, for Sunday, I'll keep it easy. Make this cake--it is good!

Strawberry Meringue Mini Cake!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup AP flour
• 2 TB cornstarch
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 TB white vinegar
• 3 TB unsalted butter, softened
• 3 TB shortening
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 egg + 1 white

Directions:

1. Prepare your 6 inch cake pan with softened butter and parchment paper
2. Preheat oven to 350*F
3. In a bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, corn starch, and salt
4. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk together extracts, milk, and vinegar
5. In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together fats and sugar until light and fluffy
6. Add egg and white with motor running--mixture may look a little curdled, but will come together with remaining ingredients
7. Now, take bowl out of stand mixer and, using a rubber spatula, alternate in thirds between your flour and your milk mixtures until your batter comes together
8. Pour into your cake pan, bake for 22-25 minutes or until slightly puffed and golden, pulling away from the pan a bit
9. Allow to cool completely before decorating

Directions for Decorating: Clean our your stand mixer bowl while cake is baking and cooling and beat on high two egg whites. When soft peaks form, slowly pour in 3 TB white sugar and continue beating until stiff, glossy peaks form. Transfer to a piping bag. When cake is completely cooled, pipe meringue onto cake top in any decoration you'd like. Toast with a kitchen torch, top with sliced strawberries and serve.

Springtime Cupcakes!

After three weekends of plans, we finally got a day to relax! Today, we're going to try to convince Nolan's parents to come over to mow the yard (we don't have a mower yet), and then maybe go into town to put our order in for our chickens!!

This is my first recipe of the new year with lemons. These cupcakes also have a unique ingredient that I think add value and flavor to them, so don't knock it 'til you try it!

Okay, gotta go drink another cup of coffee and get ready to prep the barn! Have a great Sunday!

Lemon and Mayo Cupcakes with Toasted Meringue!

So! You might be a little grossed out with the addition of mayonnaise in this recipe, but I think it really does add a richness that is sometimes lost in plain Jane lemon cupcakes. Also, as you may have seen in my instagram story, I used a small lighter that I got from the dollar store to toast the meringue and it worked perfectly (I'm kind of scared of kitchen torches). 

Ingredients: 

• 1 1/2 cup AP flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoon baking powder
• 4 TB unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs + 1 egg white
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 TB lemon zest
• Juice of 1 lemon

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F and prepare large muffin tin (or regular sized!) with paper liners
2. Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder in a mixing bowl
3. In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together butter and sugar
4. Add eggs. It will look slightly curdled, but that's okay!
5. Add remaining ingredients and mix until smooth and a pale yellow
6. By hand, mix in dry ingredients, a quarter cup at a time, with a rubber spatula
7. Divide evenly into your prepared cups
8. Bake for 25 minutes or until browned for large, 18-20 minutes for regular-sized cupcakes
9. Allow to cool before topping with meringue

Ingredients and Directions for Meringue: In a clean bowl of a stand mixer, whisk 2 egg whites on high and continue to beat until soft peaks form. Add a 1/3 cup of sugar and 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract. Keep beating until you get to stiff peaks. Use a piping bag (or even a regular ol' freezer bag!) and pipe onto your cooled cupcakes. Use a torch to toast meringue and serve!

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.

Heaven in the Form of a Peppermint Pavlova

Heaven in the form of Terminal One. St. Peter’s gate with a metal detector. I came prepared, I didn’t wear any shoes. No obols on my eyes. No eye contact in general. I keep my head down, my headphones on. I think I listened to a podcast. Ambient noise. Women talking about war or famine or how to make the best gravy in the world for her family of five. Ambient noise, it drowned out the kids circled around their mother. It drowned out the loudspeakers of any changes, the subsequent groans of tired passengers who didn’t want to move three gates over.

Heaven in the form of stretching, getting my luggage, seeing the way the blue velvet of morning frays into a grey threadbare against the trees. A layover in North Carolina for two hours. I bought a McDonald’s coffee and I think the last time I drank coffee from McDonald’s was when I moved to Texas. When I tried to run away from a tether that choked a little sometimes. I think it’s all still a little raw, a little real. The coffee smells like motor oil and my fingertips smell like cigarette smoke. It’s all a little sensorial; I threw the coffee away. I think I was living in a dream. It was only 5:30 in the morning when we hit the tarmac.

Heaven in the form of silence. Solitude. Grey light and warm hand dryers in the mens room. The metronome of my breathing. It’s too early for kids to scream, too early for television sets. It’s too early for the world to start and I like it this way. I feel an otherness to it. My being here isn’t disrupting any order, any regimen, any existence. I threw the coffee way. I sat behind a column, charged my phone, rubbed my head until I couldn’t feel my pulse behind my eyes anymore. I sat alone and I liked it that way.

Heaven when I saw the yellow porchlights expand and grow into a thousand sunbursts along the rivers. How the shadow skipped across the fields like creek pebbles. How the jolt in the landing meant I was there. I was alive. I wasn’t dreaming. I was home. I met my dad at the baggage claim, he had a hot coffee waiting for me. He hugged me with one arm, he grabbed my luggage with the other. We didn’t say much on the way home. But I felt alive. I felt good. It all felt like home.

I’ve tried to create home in so many different boys, in so many different houses, in so many different recipes. But nothing beats the windows down in my parents’ “new to them” SUV. Nothing beats the cats that watch me, owl-eyed, from the stairwell while I bring my bag up to my old room. I see my mom’s knitting in a basket by the fireplace. I see boxes of Diet Coke by the fridge. All the lines in my mother’s face are new, but the same floorboards creak reassuringly that I haven’t missed too much. I haven’t been gone that long. The world here hasn’t forgotten me just yet, my dad hasn’t forgotten me yet. No matter how prodigal his son has been.

Peppermint Pavlova

Simple, eye-catching, and stunning for a last-minute dessert for a holiday party. Makes one large 9-inch pavlova or three 3-inch pavlovas.

Ingredients for Meringue:

• 3 egg whites, cold
•  1 cup sugar
•  1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
•  ½ teaspoon peppermint extract
• 1/2 teaspoon white vinegar
• ½ teaspoon cream of tartar
• 3 teaspoons red food coloring (gel preferred)

Directions for Meringue:

1. Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper and draw either a 9-inch or three 3-inch circles for your meringues.
2. Preheat oven to 300*F
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with the whisk attachment, beat egg whites on medium-high until they become stiff and peaks form (may take a few minutes—don’t rush and continue at the foamy stage)
4. Add sugar, a little at a time, with mixer still running. Peaks will continue to stiffen and egg whites will appear to have a glossier sheen
5. Turn mixer down a speed or two. Add extracts, vinegar, and tartar. Beat for about ten seconds to incorporate.
6. Meringue should be stiff and hold a peak on the whisk attachment
7. In a piping bag, or a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, drip a thin line of red food coloring on three sides of the bag. Use the tip (or a corner if using the Ziploc) as your vertex.  These will provide the coloring for the peppermint swirl of the meringue base.
8. Carefully spoon egg whites into bag (if using Ziploc, cut the tip of the corner), making sure not to disrupt the food coloring lines
9. Work from the center of the circles and pipe outwards, raising the outer side slightly to create an edge. Be generous and use entire egg whites, but be slow and steady with piping, as you don’t want the red lines of coloring to begin to mix and your whole meringue turns a more homogenous pink instead of a mixed red and white striped appearance.
10. Bake for one hour and continue on with making the whipped cream while meringue is baking.
11. When finished, gently remove from oven. Cool for ten minutes before transferring to a wire rack to continue cooling.

Ingredients for Whipped Cream:

• ½ pint heavy whipping cream
• ¼ cup confectioner’s sugar
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract 

Directions for Whipped Cream:

1. In a mixing bowl or bowl of a stand mixer, beat heavy whipping cream on medium-high until thick and peaks begin to form.
2. Add vanilla and sugar and continue to beat until thick, glossy, and holds a peak

Assembly: Place meringue on plate, dump a generous amount of whipped cream on top, smoothly slightly. Then, top with crushed Ghiradelli’s peppermint bark (or a similar brand) and a few crushed candy canes for added texture and flavor. ow go enjoy your holidays!

And while I did the 9-inch pavlova for the shoot, here are a couple shots of the three-inch pavlovas!