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. 

Peach and Cornmeal Cake: Inspired by the local flea market

I go to flea markets now and fill a spare closet with things I don’t need.  A blanket from the 1800’s, a cookie jar from Jerusalem. I get cash out of the ATM and buy a coffee to keep my hands idol while I’m walking around. I chat with my mom as she buys toys for her first grandchild, my unborn niece. She’ll be spoiled before she gets here, we joke.

They’re interesting places, flea markets. But, then again, everything has been interesting moving back, feeling like a stranger with a shared zip code. We mill through someone’s trash. I found a love letter to a woman named Ellen once. A lady wanted ten cents for it. Nothing is kept, most things are fingerprinted or cracked; and yet, still I come back. I bring others, I buy gifts.

It’s the promise that I can buy someone’s heritage, someone’s family history. That my own is easily supplemented with that of strangers. That, somehow by buying these jars and napkins and old, old butter knives, I can authenticate myself in this town of mine. At its heart, it’s imperialistic. At its heart, I am lonely here, a foreigner who moved back into his childhood home in February of this year.

 But I’ll stay in this house until the baby is born. Until she can wear the sweater I got her. Until she plays with the blocks my mother found in a cardboard box marked a quarter by a vendor’s red truck. They’ll spell out her initials – LGW, Lana Grace Williams. And I’ll keep making cakes in the meantime, from old cookbooks I found on card tables next to a pile of tangled costume jewelry. And I’ll make my own memories while I’m home. They may not be much, but they’re ours to keep.

Peach Cornmeal Cake

This cake is inspired by one such recipe I found in an old spiral-bound community cookbook. It's probably the simplest cake I have ever posted. Makes one 6-inch cake.

Ingredients:

• 1 ¼ cup AP flour
• ¾ cup fine-ground cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ cup whole milk
• ½ cup crème fraiche
• 1 TB white vinegar
• 1 TB honey
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• 2 TB butter
• 2 TB shortening
• ½ cup sugar (I used the amazing Sweet Revenge Sugar for an aromatic and mellow flavor to the cake) for this recipe, but regular white would be fine
• 1 egg + 1 yolk
• 2 TB dark brown sugar
• 1 peach, sliced

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375*F
2. Prepare a 6-inch round cake pan with parchment paper and butter
3. Sift together AP flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Set aside
4. In a measuring cup, whisk together milk, crème fraiche, vinegar, honey and vanilla extract and set aside
5. In a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream your fats with your sugar, scraping down the sides of the bowl once or twice with a rubber spatula
6. Add egg and yolk, mixture will look a little curdled
7. Alternate between the flour and your milk mixtures until a thick batter forms
8. Scrape again with your rubber spatula
9. At this point, sprinkle your brown sugar at the bottom of your prepared pan, right on top of the parchment
10. Arrange your peach slices any way you’d like
11. Gently pour batter over your peaches and smooth top. Tap the bottom of your cake pan gently on your counter a few times to settle any air in the batter
12. Bake for about 45-50 minutes, until golden brown and slightly puffed

This cake was made through a partnership with Sweet Revenge Sugar Co. All opinions are my own.

In the thick of summer and routine: S'mores Popovers

“Today I woke up to my mom knocking on the door with coffee, she wanted to watch an episode of I Love Lucy with me. The door was open and the cats watched squirrels through the screen door's mesh. Milo sat on my lap and I had some toast. It's been a good day so far.”

I wrote those words to my friends yesterday, in the morning before I worked outside for five hours. I wrote those words to have others share in my experience, to bear witness to the new life I’m living. How I’m not so scared anymore, not running away. I won’t be moving for a while, but I’m sure as hell happy about my decision to be here.

New rituals. That’s how I am living now. In between the concept and the creation, there is this part of me that remains languid, relaxed in this new routine. Wake up, drink coffee, kiss my mother good morning. Check emails, feed the outside cats, feed Milo, and take it a little slow. Get frustrated, take a nap, bake a cake. I go down on my lunch breaks to see my mother again. We talk about my sister’s pregnancy, we talk about how I would beg her to draw stick figures for me when I was little. We don’t ever talk about her mother, her childhood, when she lost her job, but the gaps in conversation do all the talking for us both.

I mowed the lawn for two hours, long expansive lines that waver on the small inclines of the backyard. We cut down trees yesterday, piled them up and set them on fire. The pit my friends and I would roast marshmallows around is now a burn pile for old trash, dead wood, sick grapevines, and junk mail my dad wants rid of.  Melted bottles and pale, pale ash.

My parents moved on, took over the things that were once ours, made it their own. The house wasn’t kept how I left it when I moved out seven years ago. My old bedroom now houses a cat that is too old and sick from surgery. The quilt my great-aunt made me hangs like a tapestry in the stairway. And the pool we received from donations when my brother had cancer now has a wrap-around deck. Unfinished, only half painted, the wood a little rough and the towels snag.

This is my routine now, to be complacent with where I am. How I live. What I am doing. I’m raised in the meeting point of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and the Appalachian Mountains.  I smelled the apple trees’ smoke on my clothes and there was soot underneath my nails. And I didn’t know why my eyes were watering so bad, but I didn’t bother to wipe them right away.

S'Mores Popovers

While you do not need a specialty pan for these, they do make for a nice presentation and a more consistent baking. With a popover pan, this recipe yields 9. With a muffin pan, it yields 12-15.

Ingredients

• 1 ¼ cup AP flour
• ½ cup graham flour (I love Bob's Red Mill's for this recipe)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3 TB brown sugar, dark
• 2 TB molasses, dark
• 1 TB clover honey
• 1 TB pure vanilla extract
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 1 ½ cup whole milk, room temperature
• 3 TB unsalted butter, melted
• ½ cup store-bought marshmallow fluff
• ½ cup milk chocolate chips
• 1 graham cracker, processed to dust for toppin

Directions

1. Sift flours, salt, and brown sugar in a small bowl
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together molasses, honey, vanilla, eggs, milk, and butter until yolks are broken and liquids are a pale yellow
3. Whisking slowly, add flour mixture to wet
4. Whisk rapidly until bubbles begin to form
5. Let rest at room temperature for 30 minutes
6. Preheat oven to 450*F, prepare popover pan (or muffin tin) with cooking spray
7. When resting is complete, spoon mixture into pans ¾ of the way full
8. Top with a spoonful of marshmallow fluff and a few chocolate chips
9. Bake for 20 minutes at 450*F
10. Reduce heat to 350*F and bake for an additional 15-17 minutes (do not open the door, but check through your window to see tall sides that are golden brown)
11. Remove from oven, cut a slit into the popovers immediately to allow steam to escape
12. Turn popovers out of pan, sprinkle with a little graham cracker crumb and a few more chips and serve warm

Have all that graham flour leftover? Try making these graham crackers and milk waffles

And have you nominated Fig+Bleu for the #Savblogawards? If not, would you please?

A Tour through Family History: My Fourth of July Weekend at JQ Dickinson Salt-Works

Family history doesn’t run that deep for me, but for Nancy Bruns of JQ Dicksinon Salt-Works, it runs about 350 feet below her family’s homestead in rural West Virginia. Through the veins of the town, through the crags of the aquifer. Just outside of Charleston and spanning a hundred and eighty years. Through trial-and-error, through old crumbled inventories and rheumy, ancient jars. Through the Civil War and the recession.

Through it all, the water of the underground Iapetus Ocean has ran for millions of years—ambivalent to man, to woman, to the dollar store sales and graffiti on the bridges in the next county over. It flowed when the world was hot, when the world grew cold. It created an industry that sustained West Virginia for decades. It became the business of the Dicksinon family, who took hollowed tree trunks and created wells for the water. For the lifeblood, for the salt that preserved and seasoned the heritage at the heart of this Appalachian landscape.

And in the long, long stretch between 1945 and 2013 when the salt production ended, the world moved on. It no longer became a means to live. It no longer became a necessity, but a ubiquitous afterthought on the table. Throw a little over your left shoulder for good luck when it spilled and forget about it the rest of the day. An everyday talisman that lost its power.

Until Nancy created magic again. Until she and her husband researched their history and dug the old wells again. Until they tested the salt, again and again, until the crystals were pure and white and flavorful. Until the industrial wheels began to turn again for this one family, in this one town in West Virginia. And until they decided to create a product that is elemental in every sense of the world: NaCl; sun, water, earth.

And after hearing of this story, of this town whose axis was balanced on the production of salt, I wanted to visit. To see the crystals, the bite on my tongue. I drove down the highway, passed a gas station with carpeted floors and an ice cream stand that sold two-for-a-dollar hot dogs. I stayed in a hotel that was under construction and woke up Sunday to witness it all myself.

Below are a few images from this process. How the water is brought up from the well and evaporated naturally by sunlight in greenhouse tents. Then sifted, inspected, and packaged. Flavored, if they choose, and sold to top chefs. This was the way I spent my Fourth of July weekend, and how I saw the American Dream be reiterated once again. In a small farm in West Virginia.

To learn more about JQ Dickinson Salt-Works, listen to the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy podcast here. You can also visit their website and their Instagram.

The video below was created during my Snapchat takeover for the Feed Feed. You can follow the Feed Feed on snapchat with their username: thefeedfeed. I am happy to be an editor for the Nostalgic Desserts feed as well!

The well and derrick

The solar greenhouse that evaporates the water naturally

The naturally-produced crystals

Look at these gorgeous crystals!

The old Salt-Works

The beautiful farm and store

Corn and Cherry Blondies: in Partnership with Bob's Red Mill

The summer days I’ve slept through sit at the periphery of my mind. I like when the sheets are untucked. I like when a boy is curled up next to me. I like when the sunlight wakes me up. I drink some water, fall back to sleep. I don’t do it much anymore. I have too much on my plate, but not that hungry anymore.

I think of goosebumps as marginalia. I think they’re a secret language I haven’t learned to read yet, scribbled in the corners of someone else’s mind. I think about all the secrets I’ve kept—how I used to hide cigarettes underneath a bridge by my house, how I kept warm beer in my closet and threw the cans away at work, how I’ve forgotten my grandmother’s name and the last thing my grandfather said to me was when he called me the wrong name.

I’ve learned to be someone else while home in Pennsylvania. Cautious, careful. I’m alone more often than I should admit. I may eat chips for dinner one day; then barely rinse out my coffee cup. I don’t think much of my future right now, I just like the idea of being free.

So that’s how I’m spending my weekend—independent. Cautious. Lazy. Alone. Secretive. Curled up. Smoking. I’ll spend a day at a lake and a day at a river. I’ll spend it eating what I want and hardly rinsing the dishes off. And I’ll be grateful for the three-day weekend. Grateful for who I am today. Grateful to be more myself than ever before. And grateful to make food that represents who I’ve always been: cornfed and Appalachian. Born in the Rust Belt, a little freer than I thought I would be this time last year. 

And below is a recipe for a corn and cherry blondie. But first, a couple reminders...

•  I will be taking over the feed feed snapchat on Sunday at 10:00 am EST. Make sure to watch me tour the JQ Dickinson Salt Works in West Virginia! Snapchat username: @thefeedfeed. Make sure to follow along and see this amazing company in action. And if you are interested in learning about the JQ Dickinson Salt Works, I suggest the Southern Foodways Alliance's Gravy podcast they did, found here.
• Secondly, have you all nominated this blog for the Saveur Blog Awards? If not, please do so! It would mean so much to me!

Corn and Cherry Blondies

These are cakey, crumbly, and a cross between a cornbread and a brownie and perfect for the 4th of July. Makes 9 in an 8x8 inch pan.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup AP flour
• ½ cup Bob’s Red Mill corn flour
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¾ cup light brown sugar, packed + more for sprinkling
• ¼ cup white sugar
• 8 TB unsalted butter, softened
• 2 eggs
• ½ TB clear imitation vanilla (can use pure vanilla extract, but I like the palatable kitsch this brings to the blondies)
• 1 ear of corn, grated with pulp and liquid reserved
• 2 TB whole milk
• ¼ cup dried cherries (I do not recommend fresh cherries for this recipe solely due to the amount of liquid the cherries bleed)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F and prep an 8x8 cake pan with butter and parchment paper
2. Sift together flours, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together sugars and butter until light
4. Add eggs, one at a time, then vanilla
5. Add the pulp and liquid of one ear of grated corn. Some kernels may get into this mixture and that is expected and even welcomed for this dish
6. Your mixture may look a little curdled, but it will come together when you add your dry ingredients
7. With mixer on low, slowly add your flour mixture, a little at a time
8. Dough will form, but may be a little dry; add your milk
9. Turn mixer off and use a rubber spatula to scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to ensure everything is fully mixed, but make sure not to over mix or your dough may get tough
10. Fold in dried cherries
11. Turn dough out into your prepared pan and smooth out with spatula. You may want to pat it into the pan with floured fingers
12. Sprinkle a little more brown sugar on top and bake for 25-30 minutes
13. Blondies are done when golden brown, the brown sugar is slightly caramelized, and the middle is puffed but set
14. Serve immediately or store for up to 3 days

Note: I am fortunate enough to be a Bob's Red Mill brand ambassador this year and will be partnering with them more and more throughout the year. While Bob's Red Mill supplied the ingredient, corn flour for this post, all opinions are my own. Check out their website for more information on all the amazing products they have to offer! You can also find them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!