A Dreamer's Wedding Cake

I thought I saw a rosebush moving once.  It was covered in aphids.

There were always mirages in the meadowlands.  Fog rose off my fingertips and ink formed puddles in my nail beds.  I think I used to sweat through the morning, I used to sip coffee from styrofoam cups.  We used to wake up at six for doctor's appointments and to get taffy at the gas station.  Ingots held against my chest would burn at the collarbone and the toll roads didn't seem so long and narrow once you've been through it enough times.

I used to think about my wedding day and I'd scream into the ceiling fan.  We were poor then and I shared a bunk bed with no one.  We got it at a yard sale.  I'd think about my wedding day and these flowers my sister would make from folded newspaper.  She'd spend hours on them at the dining room table and then crumble them all up.  Mandalas made from the Penny Saver.  Mandalas for only herself and the future she saw as alone.  My sister would never take the ingot, but she'd fight a magpie for a nickel.  My sister worked at a coffee shop for seven years.  She had a plastic bouquet for her wedding.  A Tuesday in October at the closest waterfall, the tags still hanging out.

I used to only date boys whose eyes showed my reflection in the high beams.  Parking lot eyes. The hairs on end, we'd stumble in broom closets, the beaded chain that struck the lightbulb when you pulled down too hard.  Fog on my fingertips, ink on my callouses.  I kissed a boy when I was 8 and it didn't count for anything.  We poked a hornet's nest and hid in a truck bed.  That night I was a hairy knuckle dreamer and shucked corn for dinner.    

There are still bandanas that hang from rearview mirrors.  There are still smudges on my glasses from last week, when my mother pinched her shirt sleeves and tried to clean them up.  There's no fog left in her bones, her skin cracks on the seams of her smile.  She ran away to the Smokies when she got married.  She was 25 and had three kids by then.

The summer my mother dyed her hair a blue-black, I saw a rabbit's heart still beating when it was ran over by a Ford.  My sister kept walking and I tripped on my shoes. 

The summer she wore a green suit to my brother's wedding, I heard a rumor that there are horses that still roam free, somewhere in the Carolinas.  I think I've known one or two.

And I sat and baked a cake and thought about all those moments that I loved and how romantic I think it is to feel vulnerable.  That ingot was a splinter that's dug in my breastbone, and even verdigris only gets greener.  I'm tough and a puddle all in the same sentence.  I forgot how loud I could yell into that old ceiling fan, but I know how bad I want to make a cake like this one for my own wedding day.   I don't know if my heart will still beat when I'm ripped open on the road, but I'm excited to find out.

 

Oat, Almond, and Fig Cake with Duck Fat Caramel Italian Buttercream

Fig, Oat, Caramel Buttercream Cake

This cake inspired me to write more, to use the grey wall I was avoiding.  To keep the oven going in the dark rain in San Diego this past weekend.  It is a Victorian remark on figs and dried flowers.  It's simple and fulling.  It's sweet and aromatic--oat, almond, fig, and duck fat.  It's everything you'd want to remember on a day you wouldn't want to forget.

Fig, Oat, and Caramel Buttercream Cake

For the Cake (makes 3 six-inch layers or 2 nine-inch layers):

Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups flour
  • 2 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2/3 cup rolled oats
  • 2 1/4 c sugar
  • 1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 6 tablespoon butter, softened
  • 4 egg yolks (reserve whites for buttercream below)
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
  • 1 1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
  • 1 3/4 cup whole milk (or buttermilk)

 

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350*F and prepare your cake pans with butter and parchment
  2. Sift together flour, soda, salt, and sugar twice into a large bowl.
  3. Pour in oats, stir well with fork
  4. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, mix oil, butter, yolks, extracts, and vinegar until well-incorporated
  5. Create a well in the dry ingredients and slowly pour wet ingredients into the middle, stirring with a fork or wooden spoon
  6. Allow to sit for 5 minutes, then beat with hand mixer on medium for 2-3 minutes until slightly whipped and batter creates ribbons
  7. Bake for 40 minutes (add aluminum foil in the last ten minutes to avoid further browning)
  8. Allow to cool before turning out and assembly
Fig, Oat, and Caramel Cake

For the Duck Fat Caramel Buttercream:

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 2 tablespoon duck fat
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 1/2 cup light corn syrup
  • 4 egg whites, as cold as can be

 

Directions:

  1. In a medium saucepan, mix sugar, fat, water, and syrup together and heat on medium high until bubbling
  2. As the mixture thickens and begins to give off a nutty aroma (about 10 minutes), beat egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment
  3. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form
  4. When caramel mixture is ready, turn mixer on medium-low and pour caramel into meringue in a thin, steady stream, beating constantly
  5. You will see egg whites begin to take on a glossy sheen and peaks will further stiffen
  6. Once all caramel is incorporated, beat on medium-high for an additional minute to reconstitute buttercream fully
Fig, Oat, Caramel Cake

To assemble: Allow all cakes to cool completely and freeze for ten minutes.  Scoop some of the buttercream into a small bowl and use this portion for the crumb layer. Stack cakes.  Lightly frost the cakes with a thin layer of buttercream.  When completely covered, put back in freezer for 5-10 minutes.  Remove from freezer and add second layer of frosting, smoothing edges carefully with an angled knife.  Tip:  You can scrape off excess icing or smooth out buttercream easily by continuously cleaning off knife/spatula by dipping it into a glass of warm water between icing periods.  Finally, top with figs (fig or peach jam would also be good between the layers!) and add some flowers to make it pretty!

Fig, Oat, and Caramel Buttercream Cake

When my Parents Visit

We played poker that week, we'd draw the cards and shuffle them around.  All the lives I used to live were buried in the compliments my parents gave me.  To show the growth I've gone through to get to the house I live in now, with all its struggle and timid mid-century beauty.  There was a distinction in how they talked to me, sometimes a whisper, sometimes cautiously.  We talked until our voices were hoarse, all about how much I've changed, grown, become something.

We played poker and it kept my attention all week long, the dexterity of conversation.  How we wouldn't dwell on any one subject for too long.  How anything anymore is too painful to bring up, too trivial.  It's easier to ask if the weather is always this nice and not ask if I'm happy that I moved back to San Diego.  Time was short and days ran long.  I've said it before, but time is just a trickster god.  A coyote yelping in the distance, telling me I wouldn't see them again for another six months. 

There's a thing in poker called a "tell".  When a player can't mask his intent.  When his subconscious twitches at the fingertips.  When a player touches his nose, rubs his ear, clears his throat in the silence.  I wonder what my tell was that week.  I keep turning this over in the silence before I fall asleep:  What was the hint I gave them all?  What did my body say that my tongue could not?  How well do my parents this person I've become to be able to pan through the fools gold of conversation for what they really were.  How to navigate the minutiae to find the nuance of my biting lip.

The truth was that it's been six days since my parents left and it's been hard to stay positive, to keep my mind off how much I miss them.  I think it read on my face, the truth is the tell was present in every movement, in every frown, in every smile I gave that stretch across my face whenever I caught my mom looking at me.

My parents left six days ago, but I cherished it all.  Every moment, every heartbeat, every eyelash my mother would pick off my cheek and blow into the wind.  I'm more like my mother than I ever thought possible, in our temper and our careful approach to love.  I think about how much I've hated her before and I can't seem to find the reason for all of that anger.  My father sat at the tail end of conversation.  He's a good man, silent and awkward.  My parents left six days ago and that happiness couldn't have lasted forever. 

Our life out here is so different than my parents, I had to preface everything i showed them. "We don't normally go here." "We don't normally spend this much." "We usually just sit at home."  I couldn't lose that connection, to remain down in the salt of the earth with them.  I'd be buried in it, if I could.  Preserved, cured.  Perhaps in more ways than one.

We got seasick on a boat ride around the bay I arranged for Father's Day, they ate In 'n Out for the first time.  We drank milkshakes and kept our eyes on the horizon.  We ate at a Chinese restaurant where our waitress spoke Spanish with no accent and English with a heavy one.  We sat on the edge of the world and watched the water crash on an outcrop of houses in La Jolla.  We ate leftovers in our swim suits.  My mother made coffee too weak; she got frustrated that the coffee pot wasn't like hers.  My parents napped with our dog, Elsa, and then my dad slept for 12 more hours.  We got tattoos to commemorate my continual, chronic years of not appreciating my mother's love.  We hugged at the airport and my mother whispered in my ear at the terminal, "I don't know how much longer I can do this."

We drove home in silence.  Her words still are ringing in my ear.

My parents bought a house in North Carolina, surrounded by forests in a town that only has a pizza place and a Dollar General.  My parents called it a homestead.  It'll be willed to me and my siblings.  My mother is decorating it in greens and blues, colors of the ocean.  My mother is going to get another rescue dog.  She's decided on a lab.  A boy.  My dad wants to quit his job in ten years' time.  They have plans, lives I only intersect at the periphery.  They miss me in their own way, and I, myself, don't know how much longer I can do this.

Caramel Corn Popsicle (in honor of Popsicle Week!)

My parents left on a plane yesterday and I am not sure if I will see them next at Christmas or in the summer of next year.  It was a good trip, bittersweet in its shortness and seeing more lines crack around my dad's eyes.  Wounds run as deep as roots in my family, and I can't speak on their absence much right now.  

Except those small sidestories my mother told to fill the gaps in conversation reminded me of home.  Even the trip to Wal-Mart right after they landed reminded me of home, the amount of snacks they bought, their insistence to pay for everything.  I remember when I brought my first boyfriend to my parents' home in Pennsylvania, I was 15.  He grabbed a handful of snack cakes and a bag of chips and we hid ourselves in my room, watching movies and holding hands in the blue light of the TV set.  I remember when I took a boy to New York for Christmas the first year we dated and we took a bus back to my home at three in the morning.  We sat up watching a dog show and eating pickles and caramel popcorn out of those old holiday-themed tins.

It all came back to me, because those times were relics of home.  The old brass bed I slept on, cradled in boys' arms.  The trips to New York.  Bags of groceries from Wal-Mart.  Those old tins of popcorn that were reused as robot bodies and yarn storage.  My mother knitted me a scarf once in the dead middle of August, making use of her sabbatical from the candy store and I sat in the air conditioned room and modeled it for her, my peach slices in one hand and a popsicle in the other.  She had some leftover candied popcorn from my brother's wedding the month before and munched on it while we watched TV.  It was caramel-flavored, "just like the kind you." 

Home has become sense-memories now.  It can get confused between season and even year.  Novelty popcorn in old dented tins, syrup running down my wrist.  The TV in the background and the love for home in the foreground. I realize I won't have those moments back anytime soon, they left on a plane, departing San Diego to Albuquerque in the second terminal a little over twelve hours ago.

And to fill the time today, I made popsicles for Billy's Popsicle Week.  I might not have found my home yet, but I am amassing a community of bloggers that keep me distracted, entertained, inspired, and laughing all at once.  Wit and Vinegar is one of these bloggers.  Because of this, I was happy to recreate a memory through this popsicle, to make a caramel corn popsicle that was a fun twist on a classic from anyone's childhood.  Maybe home is just in sense memory, but maybe I can recreate those moments whenever I want.  And you can, too!  Recipe is below.

And if you don't know what Popsicle Week is, then go check out Billy's blog for more details.  Here's last year's list of participants, and I am so happy to be a part of it this year! 

Caramel Corn Popsicle

This recipe is for four popsicles, because that's as many as my mold made, but you can double this recipe easily

Ingredients: 

  • 1 cup coconut cream
  • Kernels from two ears of corn
  • 2 tablespoon honey
  • Store-bought or homemade caramel, brought to the softball stage for dipping (approx 1/4 cup)
  • Pinch of flaked sea salt

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 450*F and roast kernels on a baking sheet for 10-15 minutes until fragrant
  2. Take out of oven and allow to cool
  3. In a blender, blend cream, honey, and roasted kernels until as liquified as possible
  4. Use a fine mesh strainer to remove any large fibrous bits of corn, but reserve corn-infused cream mixture in a bowl or measuring cup (for easy pouring)
  5. Lay out popsicle sticks onto a sheet of parchment paper and dip then halfway into a cup of caramel, return to parchment and allow to dry as much as possible
  6. Pour strained corn mixture into popsicle molds and freeze
  7. Allow to freeze for 45 minutes to one hour before putting sticks in, to ensure they are frozen enough to hold the sticks up
  8. Allow to freeze 6+ hours or until hardened
  9. Sit at room temperature for 3 or so minutes or dip in warm water for a few seconds.  Remove popsicles from molds and sprinkle with a little salt.  Enjoy!

Morning Scones

My parents are coming into town for the first time in three years.  The last time they were here, I was in law school, living in a studio with no lamps or tables.  I was living someone else's dream, someone else's reality, too.  They stayed for four days and we drove up and down the coast, my mom took a nap and we didn't talk much.  I'm not sure what happened in those four days, but they left me at the airport and didn't call for a month.

That was three years ago, when I was steeped in my indecisiveness and anger at my life in California.  When there was no TV to drown out the voices of regret in my head.  And if the couch was uncomfortable, I'd move to the bed, and if the bed was uncomfortable, I'd move to the bath.  I smoked a lot back then, I think it was just a way to burn off the words that hung on my tongue that I was constantly biting.  I think I was trying to smoke out any thoughts of leaving again, to keep those buzzing regrets at bay by making them fall asleep, like those men who forage for honey that you see on documentaries.

Now, it's all different.  I'm different.  I bought a candle and thought about how this will register to my mother as a totem of domesticity.  How a sewing kit looks like I have everything together.  I keep making jokes of what my parents will say when they see bookshelves with books, a stocked fridge, the three dogs that lay at our feet.  How different this is than the year I spent in a studio apartment outside of Camp Pendleton. 

I feel it all bubbling up, though, all the emotions I feel when I have to say goodbye.  It's a distinct flavor of rage, a desperate wanting that is between the atoms of my marrow and my bloodshot eyes.  It will come in passages throughout the week, bursting at the ill-made seams when we take the car to the airport and I walk with them to the security line.  I always hold my mother's hand, I don't want to wander too far off.  I think 3,000 miles may have been too far.  

My parents visiting is a sort of anachronism, they don't seem to fit into my life when they visit.  It's awkward, but endearing at the same time.  It's uncomfortable, too. The multiplicity of all my past lives reflect in their eyes, in their stories that somehow seem like fables to me.  Was I the boy missed school when a fox got in the chicken pen?  Was I the boy that ran away for a summer to Baltimore and returned with a pierced ear?  Was I the boy who would chew his mom's hair to fall asleep until he was three?  They don't seem like me anymore, but maybe that's because my parents have become the anchors of all my past selves, all my tantrums, all of my mistakes, all of my triumphs line their face in worry-wrinkles and laugh lines.  Maybe that's what I'm scared of when I leave them at the security gate, not only losing them, but losing all the pieces of this broken and repetitive pattern that were the sums of my adolescence.  

And today, I bake in preparation for their arrival.  They'll be driving to Baltimore at three in the morning, and getting here early enough for breakfast.  I'll have these scones waiting for them, scones that are made from hand, with homemade butter and homemade jam.  Homemade, a word that describes my very character when I think about how homespun my roots lie when I'll hug my parents goodbye.

Jam Scones

With homemade jam, butter, and buttermilk.  Makes 8 scones.

Before I begin, I want to point out two (technically three) of the ingredients were made wholly from scratch and they contributed to the flavor and crumb of these scones.  Firstly, as  you can see from my last post, I did a collaboration with Dulcet Creative.  Go over to their blog to see how to make the jam that became more of a sweetener than a flavor for these scones.  

Secondly, if you are like me and never took a third grade science class, then you have probably never made butter yourself.  I had some extra cream and decided to give it a try.  I put two cups of cream into a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and beat on medium-high until the stiff peaks of whipped cream separated into solid and liquid fats.  The liquid (the buttermilk also used in this recipe) were reserved, while the fats were pressed and washed with ice water a couple times.  I added a pinch of salt and stored in an airtight container until I was ready to use.

Of course, you don't have to do these steps, but I cannot promise how tender the crumb or how sweet the scone will be without them.  They're fun and rewarding projects, so give 'em a shot either way!

Ingredients:

  • 2 1/2 cups flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 tablespoon shortening, cold
  • 4 tablespoon butter, cold (see note above)
  • 3/4 cup buttermilk, cold (see note above)
  • 1/3 cup jam, warmed to be a little runny (see note above)
  • 2 tablespoon cream 
  • 1 tablespoon turbino sugar 

Direction:

  1. Preheat oven to 450*F and prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper
  2. Sift flour, baking powder, brown sugar, and salt in a large bowl.  Repeat.
  3. In the bowl of a food processor, dump dry ingredients and add butter and shortening
  4. Pulse 4-6 times until fats are incorporated and pea-sized
  5. In a small bowl, whisk together buttermilk and jam by hand to incorporate one another
  6. With the motor running, pour wet ingredients into feeding tube.  A dough should begin to form.
  7. Dump dough out onto a floured surface and, with floured hands (dough will be sticky), pat into a circle that is about 8 inches wide and 3/4 inch high.
  8. Cut into 8 segments.  Separate and space evenly on parchment paper.
  9. With fingertips or a pastry brush, lightly coat scones with cream and sprinkle sugar on top.
  10. Bake for 13-16 minutes or until cracked and barley golden on top
  11. Enjoy with more homemade butter or jam.  Store in airtight container for up to 4 days.