beginnings, endings

I have reconciled with the chocolate cherry cake. It has been much maligned in these pages of late, and so I'm glad that we have come to terms, because people really do like chocolate and cherries and flourless chocolate cake substances, even if they're not especially captivating to me.

When I originally made the cake I used David Lebovitz's recipe from Ripe for Dessert, substituting cherry conserve for the candied cherries, and I think this was actually my favorite version, but it didn't sell well at all. Next step, once cherries arrived of course, was cherries cooked in syrup with David's cake...too moist, and too dominated by chocolate.

The next step was to find a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe and add in the cherries. The chocolate was less dominant (actually only used cocoa powder), but it was too challenging to handle.

For the birthday cake it was requested I use up some of the ancient, pre-divorce Guittard semisweet from the Berkeley Bowl (there's a Bay area mouthful). I took (if you love me, buy me a digital scale) approx. 2/3 cup of the Guittard chips and approx. 3/4 of the bar of Scharffen Berger 70%. The blend of chocolates worked really well, ad the Guittard tamed down the winey intensity of the Scharffen Berger and allowed the cherries to really come through. A much better balance of flavors. It was really appreciated by the party guests. Which was nice, yknow, cause it didn't really look like much. Flourless cake or any souffle like cake tends to look like crap. I left it unadorned. We ate it with chocolate mousse and ice cream. It's been a very, very long times since I had a non-Sonsie chocolate mousse.

However, it is still too moist. There really isn't any liquid, aside from what little the cherries ooze out...maybe if I make it again I shall drain them well...Not really sure how to correct that otherwise. Cake being too moist, what an odd problem.

I've got lots of odd problems right now. Lots of things on the brain. I took a long bike ride tonight through Fruitvale and again was reminded of Poughkeepsie. There's even a building on International that looks just like the old mental health hospital on Route 9 right across from the CIA. Poughkeepsie, maybe I will see you in the fall? When there's not much growing on the farm except for bitter greens and my farmer friend is tired. But nevermind that. I'll never get to Poughkeepsie without a car. So it will be my last meal was here, and my last adventure was the chocolatier. Poughkeepsie. I've got to get back. Maybe the farmer will fetch me? Bus to New York and the the familiar train ride from platform 36? The places we love aren't always pretty and who can possibly understand my deepest love for Poughkeepsie, New York?

The east is coming to me, in packages and in persons, all month next month. I want to smell the salt on the water; I want to feel the heat heavy in the air.

Lately I've been thinking about intentionality and cooking. What we are cooking out of. What is on our minds during the actual act. I'm trying to cook only from positive places. It's a struggle to always hold on to that love and compassion for strangers. Cooking is giving away the best parts of yourself. So is writing, but you can't see words or their effect on people, and so it's almost still your guarded secret. In cooking the things you make are real, tangible, and to the outside eye not defined by or created by anything per se. But it really should come from the best place, because otherwise there's just so much heartache in the business, why bother?

Cooking. Making me a nicer person? I dunno, you tell me.

moving to the leeward side

Change is always hard. There are the inevitable recriminations; you think it's not that bad it was never that bad.

You remember all the good times. And the bad ones. You begin to notice everything, reading fortunes in patters and adding up things that go down.

Yesterday was homey. Today was like this:

And things have been stressful at home. Your roommate comes into your room and asks if there is anything she can do. She has clearly seen the birthday cake, baked.

There is nothing she can do. The birthday party is tomorrow, and your boxes will be gone by then. All of the really fun stuff is packed. The books, the cooking things. The useful drawers all gone empty.

Or nearly so. (lemon verbena ice cream, cantaloupe sorbet, pear sorbet, pear ginger scones for Sunday, rose petals, lemon verbena, coffee, frozen chicken broth, frozen enchilada sauce, pistachios, more coffee)

You are quiet while she stands in the doorway. You know you will remain friends but that things are weird right now. You are not sure how the information current works in this house. You cook the birthday cake and then to use the half and half that is two days passed and the eggs you had to buy for the cake you make butterscotch pudding. The flavor is complicated in your mouth. You like the distraction from packing up, but then you have to pack up your kitchen things, most of them. Food is something level to hold on to, but it is also emotional currency. Food is something concrete, food means you are still here, cooking is a thing you can do where the rules are always the same (and always clear). And you don't like the way your body feels when you eat out every night, or at least the kind of meals that are readily available to you where you live now.

You take the dog out. You know the Fruitvale house was only a temporary option. It's hard to believe you've been here four months already. When you moved to Oakland, you had three boxes and a station wagon. You had nothing, but now you have so much more. You can't move across the Bay Bridge in one trip, this time.

If you had stuck to the original plan, this is about the time you would have been heading back to Boston. Your internship would have been over and you would have maybe been kicking around for one more month or so. If you hadn't like it here, finally, that is. And now you've been in California for double the amount of time you previously had (always in the East Bay, though). You got fired from the internship. You got a job at a cute bakery, which uses locally sourced products and makes cupcakes that taste good. You think about the internship, turning it over in your mind. You would be done by now. You wonder what happened with the other interns, if things were different for them. You avoid the Food Mill because you don't want to run into Miette people but sometimes you do and stories trickle down to you. You think about all the reasons this move is right for you. You think too much. A woman steps out of a car in a marijuana haze and starts talking to you or mostly to the dog. In between coos she chats you up I like your belt, ooh, I like your shorts and you try to have a reaction other than ...... She wants to see you around again and you nod like this is normal, shake your head at Oakland as you walk down the street, walk slowly home. You let yourself have some of that butterscotch pudding you made earlier. Your dog passes out at the other end of the bed. All around you the emptinesses glare out. You are trying just to be a little still, in the middle of the craziness around you, but you wonder if you've taken advantage of every opportunity. If you've had all your last looks. You know you'll come back at least occasionally, after all it isn't that far and you have actual friends in the East Bay but still you return like a lover to your favorite spots. As you walk, you never fail to be surprised by seeing something, or someone, differently, even as everything else changes shape.

yes, those are checks!

Walking past this thrift store tonight on the neverending apartment hunt, I found a male mannequin dressed in a blue vest and the regulation houndstooth. When i saw the checks I thought a uniform store, maybe, so maybe I could get new duds, but it was no such thing. I would seriously love to see some dude sporting the checks as part of a fashionable ensemble. I do, weirdy enough though, see many uniformed chefs swarming around the Civic Center BART. 4 total in a week. What do they do there? Will they take me with them in my baker-regulation jeans and dirty black clogs?

Today at Frog Hollow we scooped free samples of cherry granita, and I told them I'd sell it at Market if they got me an ice cream cart. Actually, my first suggestion was that they approach Ciao Bella about carrying granita +/or sorbet under the Frog Hollow name. There isn't enough collaboration in the FB and I think it could do better that way. Of course, I did almost deck my supervisor when she suggested we serve ice cream every week, but before I had to grit my teeth and explain how I wasn't going to be able to bake if I was spending Saturdays scooping, she reassured me it wouldn't be my job.

I made custard for bread pudding today, and vanilla simple syrup to lighten it. I bought pan de mie from Acme

Amazing how much easier it is to make bread pudding when you're not dealing with a custard base of 8 quarts cream, 2 c. milk, 90 yolks plus chocolate, making 96 servings at a time. Considering a peach leaf bavarian with peach gelee and peach compote. But the goal for tomorrow is pared down, nothing to finish or Saturday. Simplicity. I am not going to worry about not having enough, because I really can't count on finishing things on Saturday anymore. I'm going minimal for a few weeks, at least to figure out the rhythm of market days now that there's actually fruit.

I'm nervous about the bread pudding. I want it to be creamy, vanilla-laden, tossed with cherries and manybe something else. But I so rarely like bread pudding. In fact there are two I like: the brown butter milk jam + mulberry concoction from Oleana, which should one day appear in a national foodie magazine or else Sara Moulton's cookbook, and the white chocolate challah from Figs, even though I'm not into Todd English. And I know that it will be fine--really good, in fact--whether or not I like it, but I so want to like it.

so nice to have a job I like finally

I was just drooling over the Tartine cookbook today in Sur La Table while I waited for my knives to get sharpened. Absolutely and without shame drooling.

The girls who work the farm market are really taken with my strawberry lavender tarts. I brought some out today and they got all "oh, yay! you made those! i was hoping you did!" and then later, sidled up to me all flirty asking were there more of them? not just cause they wanted to eat them, but cause they recommended them to customers. I've been dolloping them with a really fatty quenelle of lavender whipped cream and a sprinkle of dried lavender on top. I really have to bring my camera and start taking pics for my portfolio. But it's really rewarding to see things sell. Like the rhubarb orange upside down cakes, which are so PRETTY with the dark red of the blood oranges and the pale rhubarb pink, and sold down to 2.

I'd like my things to sell more although it's difficult to get a lot of things made, what with all the standard baking off and mising for saturday items. I guess I'll just have to get through my prep faster, but it has been difficult to get a lot done when each time I want to do something I'm getting the frozen butter and heating it up until it's soft enough to cream. Oh well.

There's an apricot jam and hazelnut tart I'd like to try, and I still do want to make a bavarian and do some chocolate cherry tarts when the cherries come in. Maybe this week I'll look for something I'd be really excited to try out. I should look through Chef's recipes, too. I've got all this great French training and I'm just running around after Elizabeth Faulkner, Lindsey Shere and Claudia Fleming like and wondering what Maura would do. Maybe it's just the aesthetic of traditional French pastries that don't appeal to me or maybe they're too involved. But there's got to be something I can adapt...a lot of Cheffy's stuff was really, really good.

I am glad to finally have a job I enjoy and look forward to. Especially when I get to be so creative. Hopefully I'll learn a lot from it, but I still would like to go somewhere else and get the organic bakery experience thing, though the being-my-own-boss thing will be useful down the line too.