Bad Home Cooking

Obama cupcakes: Just because we can

Everybody watched Tuesday's historic inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th president of the United States, even the kids. That afternoon I picked my 8-year-old up from school, and he described watching it with his teacher and classmates. We were in Trader Joe's picking up milk and other groceries.

"Look at those chocolate cupcakes," he said. "Could we get some? Because of the special day?"

"Nice try," I told him.

He tried the puppy dog eyes next. He opened his huge brown eyes as wide as he could and put on his most alluring pout. "Please?"

"Those cupcakes are $5," I said. "No."

"But it was the inauguration today," he said. "It's history, you said. And look, they're brown, like Obama."

God. "It's not about color anymore," I said. "It's about ability and leadership. Besides, I could make those cheaper myself."

"Bet you couldn't." My boy knows me too well already. He threw down the dare gauntlet like a pro. "And we can't make cupcakes on a weeknight."

"Yes, we can," I said, in my most presidential voice. "Just you watch."

I'm hardly the first to make an Obama Cupcake. The women at Cupcakes Take the Cake blog did gangbusters with the idea, but then they're pros. My Obama cupcakes are not chocolate. They're golden cake, (like Michelle's dress!) topped with vanilla butter creme frosting, and garnished with orange zest. No particular reason, other than I didn't have chocolate to melt down and make chocolately-goodness from. And why the orange zest? Dunno. It just sounded good at the time.

The result: Millions of Americans would congregate on the Mall to sing Hail to the Chief to these cupcakes.

Here's the recipe. From Mark Bittman's immortal "How to Cook Everything."

Golden Layer Cake

one and 1/4 sticks butter, softened, plus extra for greasing the cupcake tin
2 cups cake or all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups sugar
4 eggs or 8 yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract OR 1 tablespoon grated or minced orange zest
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup milk

For cupcakes, preheat oven to 350. Butter up the muffin tin and then put your cupcakes papers in (the cake will spill over the top when baked).

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth, then gradually add the sugar. Beat until light, 3 or 4 minutes. Beat in the eggs or the yolks (I used eggs) one at a time, then the vanilla or orange zest, and the almond extract.

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt and add to the egg mixture a bit at a time, stirring in milk as needed. Stir until just smooth.

Fill the cupcake papers almost to the brim. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on a rack. Frost and serve without the paper.

And I made this frosting, also from "How to Cook Everything."

Vanilla Butter Cream Frosting - orange variation

1 stick unsalted butter
4 cups powdered sugar (I only used 3 and it was perfectly sweet and still held together)
6 tablespoons milk or cream, plus a little more if needed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon or so orange zest

Beat the butter until creamy and gradually work in the sugar, adding milk as you go as needed. Add the vanilla extract and the orange zest. Frost those cupcakes. For a final splash of color, I tossed on some grated orange peel.

No photo. Just the iconic painting by Wayne Thiebaud, one of my favorite artists.

Maybe these aren't as fancy as the gal who used to do the Cupcake blog could turn out, but then nobody at my house needs fancy. They just need edible. And sometimes they need cupcakes to mark an occasion. I've got two waiting for Malia and Sasha, but they'd better hurry if they're going to claim them. They're going fast.

It was a sweet end to a historic day.

My heart on a plate: Sorta shortbread valentine cookies with jam

I didn't sign up for this housewife stuff.

Self-employment when you're also a mother is often confused with being a SAHM (that's "stay-at-home-mom," for all of you not in the parenting universe, if any. It's the more politically correct term for the outdated "housewife.")

I'm not a housewife. Take one look at my house and you won't disagree. Besides. I'm just not worthy of the title. A woman who can manage home and hearth, cook, clean, budget, schedule and raise  kids is worth far more than rubies, as the saying goes. I'd say more like somewhere in the high six-figures.

I can't do any of that. Or certainly not well. But that doesn't keep me from trying sometimes.

My friend Lynn (worth $350K a year plus bonus if she can learn to pronounce several important Pokemon names), was making these Valentine's Day cookies the other day. "It's so Martha," she shrugged apologetically as she cut perfect heart shapes out of a perfect dough. "I can't stand her really, but she's got a lot of good ideas. My husband and the kids love these."

I avoid direct contact with Martha Stewart media, much like I avoid staring directly into the sun. But I agree that her ideas are often clever, when they're not totally over the top. And because I'm always looking for new ways to prove to my kids that their mother loves them, even though she can't cook or bake, I scribbled down the recipe from Lynne's photocopy and brought it home to try myself.

Here it is, in abbreviated form.

Shortbread Raspberry heart sandwich cookies

1 cup softened unsalted butter (that's two sticks. I find that kind of detail useful)
3/4 cup confectioner's sugar, plus some for dusting
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
seedless raspberry jam for filling

Beat the butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in vanilla. Beat in flour and salt a little at a time.
Form the resulting dough into discs, wrap them in wax paper, and chill them for at least three hours.
Preheat the oven to 300. Roll out the dough and cut out your hearts, half with an additional heart (or whatever you have) window in the middle. Cook for 10-15 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before moving to a cookie rack. Warm the jam, and spread on the whole cookie. Place the cookie with the cutout window on top, for a little sandwich with the jam showing.

Or something like that. My hearts were uneven and sloppy. I think I let the dough get too warm, or I handled it too much, or I didn't roll it out right. Pick your reason. It would seem I need one of those newfangled  silicone baking sheets. After a lot of effort and the best intentions, the final product just wasn't what it could have been. 

But the kids didn't much care.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Igor, bring me the brain...CUPCAKES

October was an odd month. It was as if somebody dipped me in estrogen while I was sleeping. I became terribly, alarmingly family-minded and domestic. I went with my daughter on a Girl Scout camping trip (yeah yeah so I only lasted one night. It was the effort that's important here, yes?). I took the kids to visit my cousin and her family in leafy New Hampshire. I made their Halloween costumes. Actually sewed them, under the ever-patient, only slightly mocking eye of Audge. A Jawa robe and hood may look simple, my friends; it is anything but.

By Oct. 29 my brain was on housewife overload, coked up on the promise of delighting my children further and blind to the time/space continuum constraints bestowed upon me by the need to make rent. It was on that day I decided to make brain cupcakes for Halloween.

forget-me-not

As often happens, this so-called bright idea started with Audge.

Last time I was at my kitchen Goddess friend Audrey Smith's house, she had just a few bites of a blackberry cobbler left on her counter top. She's the kind of woman who whips up things like fruit cobblers for her family. And on weeknights. If my family gets desert at all, it's usually several squares of Ritter Sport chocolate and biscuit, and more often than not, it's usually stolen from the refrigerator by my nits without my knowledge.

She gifted me with a bite. It was, not surprisingly, delicious.

It was also, she said, "obscenely easy to make."

"For someone like you," I muttered. This is my standard refrain whenever Audge tells me how easy something is to make.

"No, no," she said. "It even says it here." She pulled out a copy of Cuisine at Home, Aug. 2005. There, on page 49, was the recipe for Summer Blackberry Cobbler with Coconut and Pecan topping. And in the intro, plain as the nose on my face, were the words, "...plus, it's obscenely easy to make."

In journalism we call the final paragraph or sentence of a piece the "kicker." You can see why here.

Call me naive. Call me gullible. Call me impressionable. But I am easily convinced, and yes, I could probably be the one convinced to buy that bridge in Brooklyn. I re-read these final words, and I looked at the picture, and I ruminated on the taste of that cobbler, seeds still in my teeth, and I thought, "This is obscenely easy to make. I can make it for my BBQ next week."

Gentle readers, I can almost hear your hand slapping your forehead. Silly girl, you're saying. Don't waste your time. Buy a pie if you must. Better yet, buy half a dozen Dove bars and call that dessert. And in any case, you're all going to be eating steaks and potatoes and drinking beer and wine and really, who's going to remember anything about any desert? And you'd be right.

Alas.

Here's the recipe:

8 cups blackberries, fresh or frozen,thawed slightly if frozen. (I bought three bags of frozen.)
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup instant tapioca (good luck finding this item. I had to borrow Audrey's)
Juice of 1/2 lime
Pinch of salt

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1/2 cup cold unsalted butter, cubed (1 stick)
1 egg

Preheat oven to 375 degree F.

Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, lime juice, and salt in a bowl.  Spoon into a 2-quart baking dish.

Combine flour, coconut, sugar, pecans, baking powder, and salt in a second bowl. Using your fingertips, knead in the butter until incorporated. Mixture should look like coarse sand. (this was fun, and made me feel like I knew what I was doing)

Blend in the egg. It will get very sticky, like wet Play-Do. Do your best to arrange this over the berries.

Bake cobbler for 45-50 minutes, or until topping is golden and crisp, and filling is thick and bubbly. Cool on a rack for at least 1 hour before serving. Dang. Will your kitchen smell great.

Serve with creme anglaise or ice cream. (Yeah, righto.)

A couple of problems. First, I had no lime juice, having thrown away one, withering lime about a week ago. I did have lemons, though, so I used half of that. Was this a bad idea? Probably. But isn't citrus citrus? 

Secondly, I inexplicably ran out of sugar after the first cup. Since it was 11 p.m., I had no choice but to call Tamlin, the only close neighbor I knew who was still likely to be up, and beg a cup of sugar off her. Luckily, she had it. She had a good laugh at my expense, too.

By midnight I was finished. And there was no way in heck I was going to attempt no stinking creme anglaise.

I would not describe this as obscenely easy to make. If it is for you, don't mention it to me.

Thirdly. We did indeed drink and eat meat and potatoes at the BBQ the next night. And I also forgot all about the cobbler. Two days later, I pulled it out and served a chunk to my kids, who ate part of it with interest, but then said it was too cold. I ate the rest of their portion. Not bad. I could taste the coconut, which I didn't entirely care for.  I put it back into the refrigerator...and forgot about it until now. I'd throw it out tonight but for the daunting task of having to wash the dish.

Sigh. It all seems a tremendous waste. I might try this again later in the summer, with fresh blackberries. And I'll halve the recipe. And use a pie tin instead of a deep dish. Oh, and I'll have a lime. And enough sugar. Maybe at that point it will have become, if not obscenely easy to make, then at least perhaps not too hard.

Audrey, meanwhile, asked for the recipe back, (hope she doesn't mind all the smudges), and has since made it again. Her husband and kids have already eaten it.

Eliza, who writes Notes from my food diary, makes a beautiful version of this. Please note that mine did not turn out this beautiful, hence the generic picture of blackberries.

Look at that cobbler. Can you blame me for trying?

Me and my almendrados

Before I tell you how I rocked my own world and made almond-lemon macaroons that actually turned out, I should inform you of several Bad Home Cook standards:

Sunday morning I went to make toast for Tony and burnt black the last piece of bread in the house. Not long afterwards I forgot to watch the half and half warming on the stove for coffee, and it boiled over, making a mess of my stove top.

At least I had the sense not to try and make eggs or anything. Tony swore up and down he wasn't actually hungry, but I think he was just being smart, in the Darwinian sense.

It's my tendency to botch the simplest things that pisses me off most. That's why the Almendrados so delighted me. They've restored my faith in myself. Maybe I can be taught.

Tony, ever helpful, had sent me a link to the New York Times' food section piece about Sephardic cooking from Morocco (I wish the link were still free, it was a wonderfully-detailed article about a woman collecting old Jewish Moroccan recipes that were in danger of being lost forever). One recipe jumped out at me for some reason: Almond-lemon macaroons, or Almendrados.

Four ingredients. Three steps. The name alone had me tasting the Levant. If I closed my eyes I could almost feel the Sirocco wind on my face, smell the lemon tree outside my window and hear a distant  Muezzin wailing away the appointed hour.

I opened my eyes again. There was a Santa Ana blowing debris around the yard. I could smell the Lemon Pledge underneath my sink. I listened to the distant drone of the leaf blower. And I knew I'd make these macaroons, damn it. They were calling me.

Here's the recipe, adapted from "Dulce Lo Vivas," by Ana Bensadon (Ediciones Martinez Roca)

2 cups whole blanched almonds, plus about 30 for decoration
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
zest of one lemon

The recipe calls for grinding the two cups of almonds, but that's much too difficult for someone like me, even if I did have a working food processor. I scored a bag of ground almonds from Trader Joe's and used that instead.

Mix the almonds together with 3/4 of the sugar. Add the egg and the lemon zest. Mix together until you have a cohesive dough.

Cover and chill for at least 12 hours. I chilled mine for almost 48 hours because I couldn't get around to baking any sooner than that.

Preheat oven to 350.

Pinch off dough about the size of a walnut and roll into balls. Roll the balls in the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Place them on parchment paper on a baking sheet. Gently press the decorative almond into the center and reshape if necessary. This step made me deliriously happy for some reason. Even my son got into the game.

Bake for between 8 and 10 minutes. Don't touch them until they're cool. This makes them firm and crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside.  Oh. My. God. I was so impressed with myself.

I want you all to be impressed, too. Of course, they could look fancier. They could be bigger. And I probably should have used whole almonds instead of the slivered blanched I had in the back of my pantry. But one thing at a time. Besides...the taste....

Macaroons make good monsters, too.

Ways to make your house smell

There they were. Two black bananas curling like shrimp in my fruit bowl. Nobody else was going to touch them. So I did. I moved them from the bowl, where they threatened to spore up my apples, and onto my counter top, where I let them sit another day. I had a plan. But I didn't know if I could pull it off.

Then on Wednesday night I was struck with a fit of ambition. This happens from time to time. I am truly fearsome to behold when I'm on one of these streaks: I mop the kitchen floor. I finish all my assignments. I write a chapter of my novel. I clean my kids' room. I am organized and clear-headed, capable and up for anything. In these rare moods, nothing is beyond my ability!

Not even banana bread.

And so it was that I brought the kids home from school with a playmate in tow. "Hey kids!" I chirped as they threw their backpacks and sweaters on the living room floor. "Let's make banana bread!"

The two girls didn't say anything, only cast me grave looks that suggested the middle-school years were coming to get me soon.

From my son: Euuuuuwuwwwwww!! Gross! Blechhhh!!!

My children are miserable cretins who don't understand about life-affirming experiences like warm, fragrant banana bread. They don't know from the joys of the thing toasted, and then smeared with peanut butter. They most certainly don't grasp the greatness that is something wonderful made from something horrible and wretched, like two blackened bananas drawing fruit flies in mid-winter.

There is no consensus on what makes the perfect banana. Some like them unblemished, green-tinged, and pulled from the refrigerator. I like them moderately speckled, like this. These are some perfect, fleshy, flavorful specimens. Of course, Deb at Smitten Kitchen writes that these bananas were long gone and so perfect for her banana bread. Hmmm. She does know what she's doing, so who am I to question? (warning: Don't go near her blog if you're at all hungry. The photos alone will do you in) The bananas I used were, um, further along than these. And as has already been well-established here, I don't know what I'm doing. Nevertheless, I had it in my mind that I was not going to waste two perfectly good, nearly rotten bananas.

So out came my How to Cook Everything.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees
grease a bread tin with butter - not too big. What, you think I have measurements on hand?

One stick butter
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, smashed with a fork until smooth
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/2 cup grated dried unsweetened coconut

Amazingly, I had most of this stuff on hand. But only two bananas. And no coconut.

Mix the dry ingredients together
Cream the butter and beat in the eggs and banana. There were no instructions on which order this action should take, so I, being stupid, creamed the butter in one bowl and mashed the bananas in another, added the butter to the banana and then added the eggs...
The eggs were cold, so the butter clumped, so I had to get out the mixer.....
Anyway...dump this into the dry ingredients and don't mix more than necessary. Add the vanilla and walnuts.

Plop all of this into the bread pan and put it into the oven.
Bake for between 45 and 50 minutes. A toothpick or a knife inserted into the middle will tell you if

it's done or not. Mine wasn't, so back in it went. It ultimately took about an hour and five minutes. But my stove probably sucks.

But half an hour before this my kids started lifting their little noses to the air. "What's the delicious smell, mommy?" And then they started to get excited. The playdate was upset that she had to leave before the bread was done. But I promised I'd bring the loaf to my daughter's Girl Scout meeting the next day. Mostly to get rid of it. It wasn't going to be any good anyway, I reasoned. Might as well fob it off on a bunch of other people's kids. I'm such a bad mom.

I let the bread cool for 15 minutes before turning it out onto a plate. I cut two small slices and offered them up to the fruit of my loins, with milk. They fell on it. They begged for more. I had a piece. Not bad. Functional banana bread. I wondered how it would taste toasted.

The next day I brought the bread to the Girl Scout meeting as promised. There was only enough for a half slice for everyone, and several sniffed dismissively when they heard what it was. "I don't like banana bread," said one girl.

She changed her mind later on, however. In fact, this was the highlight of the year thus far: fourteen 9 and 10-year-old girls loved my banana bread. MY banana bread! And they thanked me. And they asked me to make some more next week. Wow. It filled me with hope. Maybe this will be a breakthrough cooking year after all.

Or not. I'm eyeballing a celery-root puree. Sounds fancy. And where the hell does one buy a celery root, anyway? Stay tuned.

You say potato, I saw potawto...

Christina Bess, a kitchen Goddess I worship, once told me that there are two kinds of people. Pie people and bread people. I am, according to her, a pie person. I went through a phase years ago of making apple pies from scratch at Thanksgiving time. These, to my delight, seemed to turn out deliciously, and won the accolades of everyone who dared a mouthful. Alas, peeling and cutting a bag of apples and making pie pastry by hand takes patience and focus I no longer seem to have, so I haven’t made a signature pie in a long time.
But apparently I still have the baking stuff. For someone who’s a bad home cook, I can bake surprisingly well. Not like Audrey Smith, of course, but I can make edible Christmas ginger snaps and passable Toll House cookies. It’s also a little known fact that I make a mean zuchinni bread.
So the other day my daughter was looking through her “World Cooking” book and asked if we could make scones. I’d made these once before, using the recipe from Mark Bittman’s marvelous “How to Cook Everything” book, and presented them, along with tea and a dozen chipped and mismatched tea cups, for snack to her Brownie Girl Scout troop. They were a huge success. And not too hard, as I recall.
Funny thing about scones. We here in the states pronounce them “Scones,” with a long O, and joke about the hoity-toity British, who pronounce them “Scawnes.” Actually, though, in Britain, where accent dictates who you are and where you sit on the economic and social pecking order, only Sloanes, or the wretched upper classes, pronounce “scones” with a long O. “Only ponces say Scones,” sniffed Annie’s Dad, Luke, a Brit from North London. Non-ponces (middle class and below) pronounce it “scawnes.”
Well. Who knew? I tried to say “scawnes,” for a long while, but in the end, it just sounded too, well, poncey for me, so I reverted to my Yank diction.
At any rate, darlings, making the bloody little things is dead easy.

From Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything”

2 cups all purpose flour (plus some more as needed when it’s time to knead the dough)
1 scant teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons cold butter
3 eggs
¾ cup heavy cream
1/3 cup raisins, cranberries or blueberries
1 tablespoon water

Preheat oven to 450
Mix the dry ingredients together, reserving 1 tablespoon of sugar
Cut the butter into bits and work them with your fingers into the dry ingredients until you have an ever-so-slightly moist mix.
Beat two of the eggs with the cream. Using a few swift strokes, blend this into this mix. Use only a few strokes to beat your raisins or whatever into the mix.
Turn the now sticky mixture into a ball and place it onto a floured surface to knead, no more than ten times
Press the dough into a ¾ -inch thick rectangle and use a glass or a biscuit cutter to cut into rounds
Place the rounds onto an ungreased baking sheet. Reshape the leftover dough and cut again. You’ll get about 10 scones.
Beat the remaining egg with the 1 tablespoon of water and brush the top of each unbaked scone with this mixture. Sprinkle each with a little sugar from your extra tablespoon.
Bake 7 to 10 minutes or until the scones are a golden brown.

It couldn’t be easier. But of course, you must pay a little more attention to details than I do if you want perfect success. My scones came out OK, but a little dry. When I went back over the recipe, I discovered a few mistakes I made:

I preheated the oven to 350, not 450.
I read the part about withholding one tablespoon of sugar, and withheld one tablespoon of butter instead. So of course my dough was going to be dryer than it should have been.
My daughter was helping me knead, and got carried away, because let’s face it, kneading is fun. Like playing with Play-Dough. I think over-kneading changed the consistency of my dough.
Feh. How typical of me. Christina wouldn't have made such trifling mistakes.
In the end, the scones were OK. Good enough for the kids, anyway. But it was another humbling moment for me, reinforcing my knowledge that a little concentration goes a long way in the kitchen.