May Flowers

I’ve been hoping that recent April showers will bring some May flowers. The April flowers have been lovely, but it’s always good to have more.

I’ve been trying to think in general about how to celebrate the advent of May; I participated in some memorable Maypole events as a kid which piqued my interest in all things pagan, and I would kick myself every year for failing to wake up at dawn and wash my face in morning dew collected from some nearby shrubbery. I don’t think New York has any morning dew – and even if it does I’m certainly not getting it anywhere near my eyes – so I’ve had to come up with alternative plans.

Many May Day traditions involve the bounty of flowers that appears at this time of year, so as a small preliminary celebration I decided to bake something florally-inspired. There’s been a jar of lavender sugar sitting untouched in the cupboard for several months now, and spring seemed like the perfect excuse to test it out. Though some people find them too “soapy,” I’ve always liked flowery flavors – candied rose petals, jasmine tea, the violet ice cream they sell at the Jardin de Luxembourg. I was hoping that the lavender sugar would infuse a batch of cornmeal cookies with a substantial perfume.

The final result was less dramatic than I had envisioned, but the cookies turned out pretty damn good nonetheless. I increased the ratio of cornmeal to regular flour to ensure a satisfying gritty crunch, and the buttery flavor of corn (and ten tablespoons of butter) was complimented by lemon zest and a subtle background of lavender. What surprised me most was the texture: I’ve gotten used to baking dense, shortbread-like cookies, and the addition of an egg created the perfect degree of tenderness for pairing with a cup of coffee.

Lemon-Lavender Cornmeal Cookies

¾ cup unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup sugar (I used half lavender sugar and half regular sugar, but using all lavender sugar would probably be excellent)
zest of half a lemon
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt

Beat together butter, sugar, and lemon zest until very creamy. Add egg and beat until well-mixed. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl, and slowly add to butter mixture. Form dough into a log and wrap with wax paper or plastic wrap; chill for at least an hour. Slice into ¼-inch rounds and bake on parchment paper at 350 F for 10-15 minutes, until edges are just beginning to turn golden. Remove from baking sheet to cool.

Necessary Stops

The flight from New York to California is between five and six hours long if you have a direct flight, seven or eight if you have a layover. Add two hours to that for the time it takes to get to the airport, either via the rickety C train to the slightly more reliable A train to the JFK AirTrain, or by the N/Q/R to a lonely corner in Astoria where a bus to Laguardia appears every once in while, in no connection to the posted schedule. At the other end, I usually face about a forty-five minute wait outside of baggage claim, since my mother generally has trouble realizing that it might take more than negative-ten minutes to get to the airport.

I spend most of this travel time looking forward to certain stops to be made on the way back from the airport. Only certain stops, because with my mother driving the ride home inevitably involves several. These might include but are not limited to: picking up mail from our old house, long discussions with four of the seven Balkan tenants about why they have to pay for the heat that only the Serbian woman requires and when they might be able to get a ride to Canned Foods, detours to houses in the hills where my mother can steal roses, lemons, and, once, a trash can (it looked like it was free). During these trips I try to use the volume and timbre of my voice to affect the car’s steering mechanisms, to make it veer away from garage sale signs and towards the places I’m more interested in. This has limited success.

The stops I want to make are, usually, Acme Bread Company, the Cheeseboard, and Monterey Market. These are the places from which separation is almost intolerable. These places provide things that, though in some ways luxurious, seem basic and necessary to humane life, yet are impossible to find elsewhere. Acme makes baguettes as good as what you find in France, huge slabs of spongy foccacia, and loaves in all shapes and colors, at prices that make it possible for normal people to exercise their basic right to good quality bread. The Cheeseboard is slightly fancier, and perhaps it’s understandable that creativity at their level isn’t ubiquitous, but they still go far with the simple principle that cheese is great, and need not be used sparingly.

While trips to Cheeseboard and Acme were exciting to me as a child, I didn’t fully realize what Monterey Market had to offer until I was a bit more grown up (or maybe it was the experience a few years of grocery shopping in Manhattan). In October, of course, Monterey Market was the most exciting place in the world, since it was home to a giant mountain of pumpkins that you could climb up to find the best one. But year-round, the market sells beautiful produce at prices that enable you to actually buy things, not just the basics you know will be delicious, but exotic new things from all over the world. Instead of just looking and oohing and ahhing, you can go home with some cherimoyas, purple kohlrabi, abalone mushrooms, turban squash, and all kinds of other knobbly and brightly colored plants that you can only assume are edible. These days, the internet can always tell you whether something should be peeled, chopped or grated, boiled or roasted, sweetened or seasoned.

This will be the last time I write about Berkeley establishments in the context of so much longing and complaint, since I just found out that I’ll be moving to the Bay Area in a few months. I had been back in New York for less than 24 hours, and had just started in on a personally imported Zampano roll from the Cheeseboard, when I got a call saying that the philosophy department had decided to offer admission. Chase, at the other end of the isle of Manhattan, was eating a cheese roll at the same precise moment, and I’d like to think that Professor Mancosu had just finished a Greek shepherd’s roll when he called.

Cheese Cake

Today I made a cheese cake. Not a cheesecake, but a cheese cake. A cheese-like cake. A cake that looks like cheese.

There was an occasion for this cake. It was Mike’s birthday, and his 23^rd year needed to be celebrated in some suitably sophisticated way. And just in time, the perfect plan dawned on me: a cake designed to look like a wheel of brie.

A little back-story: Mike came home from work a few weeks ago with a nine-pound wheel of brie in his backpack. His employer, it turned out, had decided that cheese was now an acceptable form of remuneration for his hard work. I’ve never seen myself in the film industry, but the pay scale does seem attractive.

Nine pounds of brie was almost more than our refrigerator could handle, but we dutifully (and happily) whittled away at the wheel at an impressive pace. Even with our enthusiasm for brie and crackers, brie sandwiches, brie quesadillas, and just plain brie, it’s taken almost a month to get down to the last wedge, and I don’t think any of us will be running out to buy more for a while. So I figured that coming home to something that looked like another huge wheel of brie would make an impression.

For the cake, I used a simple recipe for carrot cake, omitting the pecans in the original and adding coconut instead. Since I didn’t have a round cake pan, I had to do a little engineering to create a circular cake. After baking the cake in a rectangular sheet pan and letting it cool, I inverted it onto a wooden board and used a paper plate as a template to cut out two semi-circles. After sliding them into place, I covered the cake with cream cheese frosting and adorned the top with some customized and very convincing cheese labels, carefully Photoshopped by Chase. A bunch of grapes on the side of the cutting board completed the effect.

I was thrilled that the final product turned out so realistically cheesy, but I didn’t expect to have discovered such a deliciously moist carrot cake. I’ll be going back to this recipe for all kinds of occasions in the future, for trompe-l’oeil purposes and otherwise.

Carrot Cake

4 eggs

1 ¼ cups vegetable oil

3 cups grated carrot

1 ½ cups sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease and flour a 9 X 13 inch baking pan. Beat eggs, sugar,vegetable oil, and vanilla together. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Stir in carrots and coconut. Pour into baking pan, and bake for 40-50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

For frosting: beat together 1/2 cup butter, 8 ounces cream cheese (both at room temperature), 4 cups confectioners sugar, and one teaspoon vanilla or other flavoring.