Happy Accidents

Sometimes accidents turn out to be happy ones.

This seems especially true with creative projects of all kinds. There are plenty of stories of people trying to write songs and ending up with penicillin by accident. Okay, maybe not plenty and maybe nothing like that has ever happened but sometimes what seems like a bad situation can morph into an entirely unexpected good one.

You probably think I’m about to go deep with this concept but alas, no. I’m just going to talk about frosting. Specifically, mocha buttercream frosting.

Last year a friend came out to visit and was joined by several members of her extended family for a big reunion/birthday celebration. She (very generously, I might add) commissioned three cakes from me for the big event—one for each of the two birthdays being celebrated and one big one for the whole family. We agreed on the themes for the two smaller birthday cakes fairly quickly but it was more difficult to come up with something that would work for the whole group. Everyone liked chocolate but not too much chocolate, there were some nut allergies, some dislike of fruit flavors, and we needed something fun for the kids. I was still unsure of the final design—though I had a few of the elements—up until the day before when I decided to make the frosting at least and hoped the rest would come to me. I’d decided to go with a two-tiered chocolate cake with a mocha buttercream (why mocha buttercream, I still don’t know, but it seemed like it would balance out the chocolate a bit) and since mocha buttercream was not one of my specialties, I searched around for a recipe that sounded good. By the way, untried recipe before a big event/dinner party/etc.? Very. Bad. Idea.

Imagine my dismay when I made the recipe and the buttercream, which was supposed to be “smooth, whipped, and dreamy” looked grainy, wet, and nightmarish. I had made a large amount of it and it was too late to start over. I tasted it. Delicious. But what to do about the look of it. I stuck it in the fridge hoping it would firm up and smooth out when it got a bit cooler and worked on the other elements of the cake—some chocolate shells and homemade lollipops. But when I reached back in for it, I saw that the buttercream, while firmer, had become even grainier looking and was flecked with espresso and cocoa. It looked, in fact, very much like…sand.

Hmm. Sand. Family reunion. Beautiful Del Mar. And so the Back to the Beach Cake was born—a big sandcastle of a cake with shells, scattered brown sugar sand and golden lollipop suns on top.  Despite the fact that everyone liked the cake and that the buttercream was actually the best part (not too sweet and with a complex, rich flavor), I was so rattled by the experience that I put the recipe away and didn’t even think about using it again. Until yesterday.

Yesterday another friend came to visit this beautiful paradise where I live and to welcome him I decided to make a much smaller version of the same cake. This time I halved the recipe but made it exactly the same way. As I was preparing it, the thought did occur to me that this time it would turn out to be smooth and dreamy and nothing at all like what I was going for.

But although the buttercream looked decidedly creamy right after I made it, a few hours in the fridge got it back to the sandy look I was going for (it was still buttery and smooth on the tongue). After the addition of a chocolate starfish and chocolate shells that I made (and some Cadbury Flake "driftwood"), it was done.
A happy accident. A tasty cake. 

Oh, It's August

Oh dear. I see it has been over a month since my last blog post. So long, in fact, that I appear to have completely missed the entire month of July.

This was not planned, alas. The forced hiatus was something I worried about when I began writing the blog but I knew it would happen eventually. To be honest, it’s been such a swirl of activity around here that I don’t even know what I’ve been doing. Working. Plenty of that. Baking. Quite a bit of that as well—a birthday cake for my dad, Cuban pastries called “Refugiados” that required the scouring of two counties to find guava paste, and a birthday cake for my son that involved creating a scene from Fantasia out of sugar and fondant to name just a few. I recorded a song with professional musicians. I also managed to crack a tooth in half and then had to have it extracted. That was painful. So it was a busy month—suffused with I’m-not-updating-my-blog guilt which kept building until it hardened into a sort of paralysis. But here it is, August 1, and well past time to post. Fortunately, I have just the thing and it involves neither teeth nor cake. Today I want to discuss a couple of books (books!), both of which have been self-published and deserve, in my humble opinion, an audience. I’ll provide links to their Amazon pages here because, well, that’s where you can find them.

The first is Westof Babylon by Ted Heller. The book first came to my attention because of this article in The Guardian about the challenges Heller faced getting his novel published. It was a good piece, I thought, and the book sounded intriguing and especially appealing to me, who considers rock and roll bios/memoirs/novels one of my most pleasurable guilty pleasures. I’ve read many excellent rock and roll memoirs and bios but have yet to find a rock and roll novel that can do the trick. This is a tough thing to write about in novel form because one of the key components of a rock and roll book is the music. Even if one isn’t familiar with the band, the songs or music being described can be accessed and listened to. That soundtrack is essential to a good rock and roll story. I read the hilarious interview Heller did with himself here and some of the reviews of the novel and I was sold. So I bought a copy and started reading.

I love this novel.

The story follows the lives of four members of a rock band—The Furious Overfalls—who, once at the top of the charts, are now in their late fifties and still plugging away; juggling aches and pains, existential crises, families, and a growing sense of futility as they continue to tour. There is plenty of irony and humor here leavened with honest emotion but there is no cheap sentiment in sight. What I love most about it, though, is that Heller nailed the hardest part—getting the “music” right. The Furious Overfalls don’t exist, but they certainly could. By describing the kinds of songs they sing, the musical influences that shaped them, and the shifting currents of pop culture surrounding them, Heller manages to create a soundtrack for the reader. A groove if you will. But even without that it’s a great story. And it’s well written. I’d never have known it existed had someone not posted that link to The Guardian story on Facebook, which sends me into a mild panic wondering about what else I’ve missed and will miss and might have missed and whether or not the ever-changing landscape of publishing will ever settle into some kind of recognizable form. Too many questions. The best answer, perhaps, is just to keep reading.

I’m much more closely associated with the second book I want to recommend, Death NeverSleeps by E.J. Simon. Full disclosure: this is a novel I edited for the author and one I saw develop over several drafts as he worked on it. I have worked with many authors, all of whom put heart and soul into their projects, but Simon is surely one of the hardest working when it comes to putting in the sheer hours it takes to hone and re-hone a manuscript. From the start, I loved the idea behind Death Never Sleeps, which gives an unusual and original twist to a traditional crime thriller. It’s the tale of two brothers, Alex and Michael Nicholas, both of whom run successful businesses, one of which happens to be illegal. When Alex is murdered, Michael must attend to his affairs and finds that the world of gangsters and thugs is much closer to his own corporate boardroom than he knew. And as it turns out, Alex has left behind a virtual version of himself in the form of an artificially intelligent avatar that becomes “smarter” as it/he is fed more information. It’s a clever premise and Simon executes it well. There is humor here as well—often in places where you least expect it—and it moves fast. (An excellent beach read if, unlike me who lives two miles from the ocean, you get to the beach at all this summer.) More importantly, though, this novel is an entertaining read. And though I can’t be considered objective on this one, I believe that Simon’s dedication to and simple joy in the process of writing this novel comes through on every page.

So happy August, everyone. Soon, a return to our regularly scheduled cakes and things.

Pans and Sisters and Tarte Tatins

My sister Maya and I have lived together all but seven years of our lives.

(Which would be more impressive if you knew how old we were, but I’m not going to tell you.)

I went off to college at eighteen, took a year off, graduated, moved into a little studio apartment in downtown Portland, Oregon, worked several jobs, and then had a baby. When he (the baby) was almost a year old, Maya and I moved into what would be the first of six dwellings we would share. It was the basement apartment in the building where I lived—dark, labyrinthine, and many-roomed (there were three we never even used). It was also cheap, nestled as it was next to the apartment’s laundry room (imagine the laundry room from Rosemary’s Baby where Rosemary meets the soon-to-be-deceased neighbor and you’ve got it) and untouched since the pre-electricity days when it had been built.

The kitchen was the happiest (also, brightest) room in the place and once Maya and I moved in together, actual cooking took place in it (I was almost entirely disinterested in cooking, let alone baking until I moved in with Maya). As a housewarming gift, our dad gave us a set of cast iron pans—a ten-inch and a six-inch. They weighed about 5 tons combined and at first seemed to me more like potential weapons than kitchen utensils. My dad had gotten the pans on sale at Fred Meyer and they were the first cast iron pans that anyone in my family had ever bought. Maya was pretty excited and went through a long, involved seasoning ceremony complete with explanations of how much better it was to use cast iron because of the iron it imparted to the food and how they were naturally nonstick without any of the horrible chemicals and how they cooked more evenly and stayed hot and…

Okay, I thought, it’s just a pan.

Mais non.

These pans (the good kind—because there are always shoddy knockoffs) are so sturdy that they turn up occasionally in venues like The Antiques Roadshow. They can turn into heirlooms. And some of them have indeed doubled as weapons which gives the meals made in them the flavor of that much more history.

We don’t often use the smaller one, but the ten-inch pan gets a workout in our house. We cook almost everything in it. Twenty-five years later it’s still going strong—blackened and seasoned with age and countless sautéed rounds of tofu, vegetables, fried rice, pasta, and much more. Nothing we have cooked in this pan has defeated it. It comes clean every time and is ready for more.  I love this pan. It is easily the most consistent element of my domestic life. Well, and my sister. 

When I started baking seriously, it was inevitable that I would drift into experimenting with tarte tatins, which are best baked in pans exactly like this one. Tarte tatins start with fruit cooked with sugar and butter in the pan and arranged in a pretty pattern. The fruit is then covered with puff pastry and finished in the oven. Then you flip it over onto a plate and hope for the best. My first effort was a bit of a disaster. Unfortunately, I’d opted to try a mango tarte tatin—a big mistake for a neophyte. I’d used too much sugar or the mangoes were too ripe and I didn’t have a good feel for pastry of any kind. It stuck and burned horribly and I feared for the life of the pan. This happened a dozen years ago and I still remember the flop sweat I was covered in as I tried to scrape the burned bits off my warhorse pan without destroying it. This episode scared me off tarte tatins for a while but eventually I took the plunge again. Firmer fruit, less liquid, more caution with the sugar.

Last night I tried it again—making a cherry tomato tarte tatin with a recipe I’d modified from one I found in The New York Times years ago. The original recipe made a delicious but very sweet tart so I cut the sugar, added a little more vinegar, and played with the seasonings a bit. It looked great going into the oven but, as ever, there was that frisson of worry as I went to invert it (using two hands and a great deal of care) onto the plate.

Perfect.

The pan? Completely clean.

Success. 
(If you want the recipe, let me know.)

This Post Has Not Been Mimitized

Once, during a particularly busy lunch shift at the Italian restaurant where I waited tables, the manager (an Italian from Italy whose favorite American restaurant was Goofy’s Kitchen in Disneyland) said this to me:  “Those people on Table 42? They are mimetized!”

Okaaaaay.

This wasn’t the first time he’d said something unintelligible.  In fact, most of what he said was unintelligible, but I was—as I had been on many other occasions—forced to work out what he meant. Table 42 was my table and clearly they needed something because they were…mimetized.

I made a brief attempt at getting him to explain. “Um, mimetized? What do they need?”

“You know,” he said, getting angry at my lack of understanding something that was so obvious, “what like they look. Mi-me-tized.”

Well, that helped.

My mind went to work. “Mimetized” sounded like “mimetic,” which I knew meant copy or imitate. Like mimes. Immediately, the image of mimes popped into my head, distracting me momentarily with their stripy shirts and annoying faces. Shoving that aside (since I had been to Table 42 and they clearly were not mimes), I asked myself; what is it that mimes do? They pretend? No. They imitate? Sort of. This was getting me nowhere so I went back to mimetic. To copy…or…resemble. One thing resembling another. They looked like something. They looked like something else. They copied something else. An exact resemblance. So close a resemblance you wouldn’t know it from the original. I thought about Table 42. They were wearing colors that matched the décor of the restaurant. They resembled it so closely in fact that they were…camouflaged.

“You mean camouflaged?” I said.

“No,” the manager said, “their clothes. Mimetized.”

“The word is ‘camouflaged’ in English,” I pointed out.

“Are you sure? Because in Italian…”

But I didn’t stick around to hear the rest because by then the people at Table 42 actually did need something; coffee refills, water, or an imaginary glass box to get out of. Later, I discovered that one of the Italian words for camouflage is mimetizzare. My Italian manager had thoughtfully “translated” it into English so that I would understand. I would have gotten there sooner if I’d had a good working knowledge of Italian, but at that point I was mostly just fluent in food and curses—long, elaborate curses that involved people driving off cliffs and having their entire families suffer because they were such lousy tippers and shorter curses that mostly involved variations on the theme of male genitalia and <fill in the blank> Dio/Madonna (ie, porco Dio, Dio cane, puttana Madonna, etc.)—and my vocabulary was limited. So I had to go through the convoluted mimetic/mime/imitate route before figuring out that the piece of information I was being given wasn’t even important. For a half-second I’d been kind of proud of myself for decoding what Mr. Goofy’s Kitchen had said but then I just felt like an idiot. Who had time for this?

I’ll bet you want to know what my point is, don’t you?

My point is that if you are writing in English, your reader should not have to know Italian to understand what you are saying. To be more specific, while I’ve never believed that writers should spoon-feed their readers, nor should writers make readers work so hard that said readers get irritated and give up.

I’ve been giving this quite a bit of thought lately since I’ve been doing a great deal of editing and whenever I’m dispensing advice about writing I think carefully about what I’m saying and whether or not I’m just missing something in the text. Because maybe it’s… mimetized. And in some cases, I do catch myself and find myself seeing brilliance in, say, a metaphor that had heretofore been incomprehensible. Most of the time, however, it isn’t brilliant—it’s the result of trying too hard or sloppiness or simple attention to whatever it is that the writer is trying to say. I’ve run into this often of late—metaphors and similes that are so far out I wonder what the writer was (or wasn’t) thinking when s/he typed them out.

There is a list here of some hilarious examples of what can go wrong with metaphor/simile. But I have also seen things like: “The sea was as still as melted ice.”

So let’s think about that for a minute… Right.

Or, how about this one: “They snapped at each other like two hyenas playing backgammon.”

Note: the above example is one I just made up but it is very similar to some I have seen recently. First of all, let’s think about hyenas. What are they known for? Laughing, not snapping. Snapping is more the domain of turtles or dogs. So fight away the thing is a bit off. But more importantly…playing backgammon? Why are they playing backgammon? Why would hyenas play backgammon? Is there something I’m missing here? Some connection between hyenas and backgammon that I should know about but have completely missed? What is wrong with me? This book is too hard for me!

No…wait…

 It’s just really bad writing. Now I’m annoyed. And I’m leaving.  

Nobody loves a good metaphor more than I do. Not only that, but I enjoy odd metaphors, unusual connections. My son has helped me with that because he sees connections between things in the world that I never would have noticed. But even before my son came along, I was hopeless at those exams that tested one’s knowledge of analogies. The analogy tests were always multiple choice and I could never figure out which was the correct choice because if you stretch (and it isn’t much of a stretch) you can see how any one thing is to another thing like any third thing is to any fourth thing.

My point: I’m okay with metaphors that aren’t obvious. But as a reader I get annoyed when a writer makes me work to see a connection and then I realize that I’ve given the writer too much credit and that the writer hasn’t even taken the time to think about whether or not what s/he’s saying makes sense and is just throwing words against each other for effect.

Read it out loud. Think about it. Does it make sense? No? Then simplify. Yes? Go for it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go mimetize some cake.