Summer's Cobbler for those Most Nights

Tomorrow, we're off to Vermont; so that means that I have been cleaning out the fridge this week. We've eaten a sandwich for at least one meal a day for the last 10 days, and we're getting pretty creative now. Nolan's favorite is still straight-up MEAT with some balsamic.

The fun part of times like this are that you can be creative with desserts. Necessity is really the mother of invention when you have fruit that needs used up and want something homemade and sweet in the morning. For me, it's all about the ease of baking. I've gotten away from the complications of design and pomp--"fiddly" as they say on The Great British Bake-Off. Most nights, I wait until Nolan comes home at 9:00 from a 14 hour day at work and we sit at the kitchen counter and eat from the pan. Most nights, this is exactly the kind of dinner I want. Most nights, we're tired and we joke and take a shower and on those nights, maybe 4 times a week, we'll eat a bit of dessert before bed and fall asleep with the windows open and the lights off and the dogs snoring.

The crumble is a "most nights" kind of dessert. One that is comforting after a long day, when it's warm and hot from the oven; but also great to nibble at with coffee before work. It's the last of the small and bloody strawberries that we picked a couple weeks ago, and a couple old peaches milling about in a drawer. It's a tactile dessert and, to me, that makes me appreciate it more. I'm not so disconnected from it had I used a stand mixer and threw it all together. 

I can't give Nolan the world, even though I would like to, but I can make him food and most nights, I hope that's enough.

Summer Peach and Strawberry Crumble

You can really substitute any fruit here, but please adjust the cornstarch, sugar, and lemon to taste accordingly.

Ingredients:

• 2 cup strawberry, hulled and sliced
• 2 peaches, sliced
• 1 TB cornstarch (or a little more if fruit is very juicy)
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 TB Grand Marnier
• 1/2 lemon juice (or a little more if fruit is very sweet)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup quick cooking oats 
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup sliced almonds
• 6 TB unsalted butter, slightly softened

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, mix together strawberries, peaches, cornstarch, white sugar, Grand Marnier, lemon juice, and salt
2. Allow to sit and macerate for 30 minutes 
3. Prepare a baking dish (either a pie pan or a small casserole) with butter or oil. Preheat oven to 375*F
4. Pour fruit mixture into your dish and distribute fruit evenly
5. Now, dump all remaining ingredients into another bowl and, using clean hands, mix together
6. Continue mixing until all ingredients are fully incorporated and a crumbly dough forms
7. Pour directly on top of fruit and pat with down
8. Bake for 30 minutes or until top is browned and golden

Lemon Poppyseed Strawberry Shortcakes! (And Strawberry Picking is Cute Too!)

We're deep into Summer and baking has slowed. Instead, I find myself combatting fruit flies that have found their home in the windowsill. I hear the humming of a wasp nest being in an unreachable part of our porch. We worry about the dogs; Murphy is allergic. We have it on our to-do list for this long weekend.

Yesterday, we canoed down the Monogahela. Wine drunk, we floated and made new friends. The rain water stirred up soot and mud and I lost track of how many rocks I skipped when we stopped to swim. And we pulled out the sofa bed and threw on a black-and-white movie and fell asleep to the orchestra of heart beats and dog pants and the air conditioner whirring in the mess of sweat and fog that is 10 o'lock in Pennsylvania.

Two weeks ago, we began this process of running away from the heat in our house and embracing it more outdoors. We went strawberry picking one Sunday. It was Nolan's idea. He's more creative in this regard, having done more things in his childhood, he can recall those times and recreate them for us now. We drove out to a town called Armagh and grabbed a cardboard box for every berry we found. We laughed and forgot about time here again, too. We stayed on the familiar path and pushed the leaves away a bit deeper. We met a collie named Rudy. We left our orange flag, the indication that a row has been picked-through, and we kissed in the sunlight. We took a two hour nap that afternoon.

We've snacked on these berries, fed on them. We've given them to our chickens and put them on a cheese plate when we wanted a light dinner. We had them with oatmeal and Pimm's and this week I'll make them the last of them into a crumble. But the first dish I made with them, my favorite for every year (as seen here, here, here, and here), was to put them in a shortcake and enjoy them as they were--some sour, some sweet, some blood red and some white. 

Lemon Poppyseed Scone "Shortcake"

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 cup AP flour
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 TB baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cold butter, cubed
• 1 egg + 1 yolk (for egg wash)
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 TB vanilla
• Zest and juice of 1 lemon
• 2 TB poppyseeds

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400*F and prepare a sheet pan with a Silpat or parchment paper
2. In a large bowl, sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
3. With clean hands, roll the butter into the flour with your fingers, creating flakes. Continue to crumble butter until fat is the size of peas
4. In a measuring cup, whisk together your egg, cream, vanilla, and lemon
5. Create a well in your dry ingredients and with a wooden spoon slowly mix while you pour your wet ingredients in
6. Continue to mix until fully incorporated and a dough comes together
7. Pat out onto a floured work surface and shape into a rectangle
8. Cut into 9 pieces and transfer onto your prepared sheet
9. Make an egg wash (1 yolk + 1 TB water) and brush onto your scones
10. Sprinkle each with poppyseeds
11. Bake for 25 minutes or until golden
12. Allow to cool while you prepare your whipped topping and strawberries

Whipped topping and preparation: In a stand mixer, whisk 1/2 cup heavy cream until soft peaks form, then add 4 oz creme fraiche (I love Vermont Creamery's), 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Beat until peaks form.

Cut a scone in half, add whipped filling and a few strawberries and enjoy!

Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

I’m finding more beauty in the crumbs, the coffee stains that ring a mug. I found an old textbook about gender and saw the pages, dog-eared and speckled in burns and blood, from a paper cut and ashes dusted aimlessly from my cigarette.

I used to read under grapevines and now I sleep twelve hours some days.

I used to speak Spanish in a timid accent and now I don’t speak it at all.

I used to bite my nails, but I stopped that a long time ago.

I read about 6 sisters who changed the world and I used to think I could, too. I told my mother I was never going to speak to her again, and now I watch the news with her, nursing coffees that grow cold and conversations that became keep memories of her mother alive and warm. She opened a box in a room she turned into a cat infirmary yesterday morning. Inside were thirty-seven napkins, hand-stitched and embroidered in yarn, lace, and scraps of satin.  How delicate they were; carefully folded and not very well made. They did the job and we moved on to other topics, like how my mother isn’t very good at tennis and I’m not very good at forgiving. If my brother was having a boy or a girl. How my mother loves the smell of rosewater and hates how many ants she found in the windowsill in the kitchen.

How many years its been since I last celebrated my birthday with her.

I live for those moments, those mornings. The innocence and the redemption. The fog hands dully until about nine in the morning. It burns off, I go to work. She sits with her cats, with Milo and her Labrador retriever. She watches crime documentaries and lights candles in the heat. She went shopping the other morning and brought home some roses. Strawberries were on sale and she had never seen honeycomb before. So I made her these scones as a thank you for taking me back in. So close to home, so different than who I was. I used to read under grapevines and they’re still there. Giving second chances and strangling the chicken wire fence that surrounds the house.

Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

Ingredients for the Scones

• 2/3 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 1 TB vanilla extract
• ¼ cup honey
• 3 cup flour
• ½ sugar
• 1 TB baking powder
• ½ TB cornstarch
• ½ ts salt
• 8 TB butter, cubed and cold
• 3 TB honeycomb, cut into cubes for topping

Directions for Scones

1. Preheat oven to 450*F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper
2. Whisk together buttermilk, egg, vanilla, and honey, set aside
3. Sift together all dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and transfer mixture into your food processor
4. Add butter, pulse to combine until fat is the size of peas
5. With motor running, add liquid through feeding tube
6. Turn dough onto a floured work surface and pat into a round
7. Cut into 8 triangles, and pat edges to be clean
8. Place on baking sheet and bake for 13-18 minutes or until puffed and golden brown
9. Top with honeycom

Ingredients for Rose-Strawberry Jam

• ½ pint of strawberries, hulled and halved
• 1 cup sugar
• Juice of 2 lemons
• 2 TB fruit pectin
• 2 TB rose water
• Zest of one lemo

Directions for Rose-Strawberry Jam

1. In a medium-sized saucepan, combine strawberries, sugar, and juice. Heat on medium.
2. Stir occasionally (I like to use a wooden spoon) so that the mixture does not burn, but you want enough heat that the juices bleed from the berries and the sugar and lemon juice condense slightly
3. Allow to boil for a good 2 or 3 minutes
4. Add your fruit pectin and stir vigorously for a few seconds to combine
5. Resume your boil for another minute
6. Take off heat, stir in zest and rose water
7. Jam will continue to thicken as it cools, when slightly warm to the touch, you can put in your jar. This recipe makes one pint of jam and is not a proper canning technique, but a quick jam recipe
8. Store in fridge, use often and plentifully

An Updated Strawberry Shortcake

So suddenly the old feelings come. Always when my mind stops wandering. Always when the chances come and I lose the gull to roll the dice. I’m more fearful now than I used to be, so suddenly when those feelings come. A well, an aquifer, a rain gutter. A response to gravity. A need to flow.

I remain lazy this summer, sleeping past my alarm. Hitting snooze so often, the sound harmonizes with the early birds. I fell asleep on the porch swing one morning, my coffee grew cold and so did I. I got seasick in this landlocked state. I washed my face with cold water when I woke up and found a spider in the sink.

I mowed the lawn while everyone is away. Two blisters and a callous because I don’t work often. I take care of nine cats while I’m here. We keep the gasoline in a small barn that used to house chickens, then ducks, then a wild pheasant that broke its leg. I don’t think much of those days now; the grapevine strangled what was left of the coop.

I think I used all my potential on healing these last few months. Wasted, but perhaps not squandered. Exhausted, but perhaps not exploited. I think I have a bit farther to go. I sit out and lay in the sun most days on my lunch break, trying to escape the Freon cold of air conditioner window units. I think back to a year ago, when I made my parents dessert in a house that had an outdoor kitchen. I think back to how every promise was broken within a year. I think of who I am now, if I’ve really grown at all. And I bake to combat the Freon cold of the air conditioner, too.

Victoria Sponge Strawberry Shortcake

An update on a classic with another classic. This recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawson's in How to be a Domestic Goddess. Makes one, 2-layered cake out of two 8-inch square pans.

Ingredients for the Cakes:

• 1 ¼ cup AP flour
• ½ cup almond meal
• 4 TB cornstarch
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ cup milk
• Zest of one orange
• 2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 5 eggs

Ingredients for the Cream:

• 1 cup heavy whipping cream
• ½ cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt
• ½ cup mascarpone cheese

Directions for Cakes:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F, prepare two 8x8 square cake pans with parchment paper and butter
2. Sift together the flour, almond meal, and baking powder four times, until very airy and light. Set aside
3. In a measuring cup, whisk together milk, extracts, and zest
4. In a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy
5. Add eggs, one at a time. Turn off and scrape with a rubber spatula when all eggs are in mixture. It will look slightly lumpy and curdled, but it is just fine
6. With your rubber spatula (not with the stand mixer), lightly fold in flour mixture, a half-cup or so at a time
7. When all flour is incorporated, your mixture will be pretty thick. Thin it out with your milk mixture and beat for fifteen seconds with the stand mixer on medium-high to aerate slightly
8. Split batter in half between the two prepared pans
9. Put both pans on a half sheet and bake for 22-25 minutes, or until golden brown and sides have pulled away from the pan
10. Allow to cool

Directions for Cream:

1. While cakes are baking and cooling, work on your cream
2. In the bowl of your stand mixer, now fitted with the whisk attachment, whip your cream until soft peaks form
3. Add your vanilla and continue beating on medium
4. Slowly add your confectioner’s sugar and your pinch of salt
5. Turn mixer off
6. Gently fold in your mascarpone cheese. The whipped cream will deflate slightly, but the cheese will thicken the mixture to a nice, heavy consistency
7. Set aside until ready to assemble cakes

To assemble: Lay one layer on your work surface and dump your cream mixture into the center of the cake. Using an offset spatula and working from the center, spread your mixture toward the edges, being as rustic as you so choose. Add about 5-10 chopped strawberries on top of this and a squeeze of orange. Sit your second cake layer on top of this. Sift confectioner’s sugar on this layer and sprinkle almond slices as a finishing touch. Serve warm or allow to refrigerate for a couple hours for flavors to mellow. Best within two days. 

Strawberry Almond Cake

I still pan for gold in other’s stream of conscious. I still make an effort to read between the punctuation of others, too. Words hang on my tongue, sometimes they crawl out like silverfish. Sometimes they escape, fast and poisonous. They hang in the air, dragonflies stuck in amber. You’ll turn them over in the palm of your hand a million years from now.  

I’m almost coltish when it comes to apologies; but I hardly ever think I’m wrong. I stumble, knock-kneed at the outskirts of empathy. I wait my turn, then play the victim. It’s worked this way for a few years now, but I’m giving up the plan these days. I’m saying sorry more, I’m hurting others less frequently. I take my time now and think of the electrons that must be passing between us when words come in asthmatic pulses. How finite the electricity is, but how it won’t run out anytime soon.

I’m more grown up now than I thought I would be in the two months since I’ve been back home. I still have a teddy bear on a chair by my closet. I still have a thousand love notes left in me. I still have an old receipt from a turnpike when I thought I’d run away tucked in my wallet. I still keep track of the cigarettes I hide in my glove compartment when I think quitting is for losers. I’ve forgotten to water the flowers by my bed again, but I’m too busy drinking my fourth cup of coffee to notice.

Strawberry Almond Cake

Yields one 6-inch cake, can top with creme fraiche or whipped cream.

Ingredients:

• 3 large eggs, separated
• 1 cup almond meal, as fine as you can get it (I used Bob’s Red Mill)
• ¾ cup AP flour
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon almond extract
• 1 ¼ cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon orange juice
• ¼ cup strawberry jam
• ½ cup whole milk
• 3 large strawberries, hulled and chopped

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F and prepare a 6” cake pan with parchment paper and butter
2. In a bowl, sift together almond meal and flour. Set aside
3. Using a stand mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment, whip egg whites until stiff peaks form, set aside
4. Switch out the whisk attachment and replace with the paddle attachment. On medium-high, mix yolks with sugar, vanilla and almond extract. Beat until light and fluffy (ribbons will not form properly, as the sugar ratio is too high)
5. Turn mixer speed to medium-low and add juice, jam, and milk. Continue mixing until well-incorporated
6. Add flour mixture, a half cup at a time, until all flour is mixed into batter
7. Turn mixer off and, using a rubber spatula, spoon in a small amount of beaten whites into the batter. This will lighten the batter. When first spoonful of egg whites are incorporated, mix in remainder, folding gently so as not to deflate
8. Pour in strawberries. Fold twice to mix in
9. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 30-35 minutes, but begin checking at the 25 minute mark for browning. Tent foil over cake if too much browning occurs
10. Cake will be done when a toothpick comes out clean (the meringue component of this may cause middle to not set as timely as the outer part, be congnizant of this). Berries may cause pockets and dents in cake when cooking, but it will be gorgeous nonetheless
11. Allow to cool completely before taking out of pan and top with crème fraiche and a small amount of honey or suga