So many more

It starts with an unusual sound – I would have easily mistaken it for a candy foil wrapper.

– How strange, Anthony says looking out of the window across the narrow courtyard.

– What's that? 

– I can see the curtains moving about in the apartment across, and last night I saw the shadows and heard the clanking of the cutlery, but I can't see who lives there, the actual figures, not the outlines, you know. Such a difference from Amsterdam.

– It's an Eastern European thing, I contemplate from the kitchen table where I laid out a couple postcards we picked up at a souvenir shop in the old town last night. Your coffee is getting cold, I say then pour fresh boiling water into another cup and drown in it two full teaspoons of instant coffee for myself. The taste isn't that great but it does the job, hurries up the brain alright. I take a sip and think of what to write on the postcard we are going to post to ourselves.

Next to my coffee I have fresh prune plums, we bought a kilo at the market nearby yesterday. I pick one from a bowl on the kitchen counter, it's small and roughly oval, I look at it before biting into. I expect its thin purple skin to snap under my teeth which will then go on to sink into the juicy glass-green flesh. I'm right about that. I take another, this one looks like a misshapen rain drop. I'll probably end up eating at least a dozen now.

Every fruit street vendor in this beautiful city sells fresh Italian prune plums this time of year, I write down on the back of the postcard. On the front there are three connected images of winding cobbled alleys of the Old Town, and București below them. 

– How is it looking with the rain? Still sounds like a foil candy wrapper? I ask. The phone says it's thunderstorms and showers for the next hour or so, and that the temperatures are going to drop. Maybe we should get a cheap umbrella, and a pair of sweaters, one for each?

I push the chair back, stand up and move towards the window to bring Anthony his coffee. Sugar? He nods towards the cup. Affirmative, I say leaning over the window sill. A mix between a rustle and a swish, the rain drops remain soft and rare. Maybe the forecast is wrong, I suggest. I take a deep breath and notice how the air in the courtyard simultaneously smells of laundry detergent and wallpaper paste, or maybe that's nail polish remover. 

– How is the postcard coming along? Anthony asks between his coffee sips. I congratulated Bucharest with its abundant offerings of purple Italian plums, I say and we both chuckle. And in the next sentence, I'm thinking, we could congratulate ourselves with our wedding anniversary today.

Four years down already? We wish you so many more! With love from Bucharest --

Purple Plum Torte
Adapted from The New York Times
Yield: 8 servings

I'm happy to report that I did track down Italian prune plums back in Amsterdam (last weekend at the farmers' market at Noordermarkt, to be helpful). In Dutch they are known as kwetsen, and it's their season now, and this is the cake for them (and for you if you love plums). I must say the recipe looks too simple to believe it's special. But it is! It's about the plums, only them, how jammy and pleasantly sharp they get after they bake and how it's such a nice contrast to the sweeter crumb, and how, sitting atop the said nutty whole wheat crumb, they gather under themselves pools of their own bright juices to slowly release them the next day down the aforementioned buttery crumb. Purple Italian prune plums (they are sweet and tart at once) are meant for this torte, but if none are around, other purple plums will do too.

Anthony says this torte is "10 out of 10". Sweet but not too much, a little sour (because of the plums), nutty (because of the whole wheat flour), and light so you keep wanting to eat it – “it's got it all figured out”.

120 g cane sugar
115 g unsalted butter, softened
130 g whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder (4 g) baking powder
¼ teaspoon table salt
2 large eggs
15-20 Italian prune plums, pitted and halved
½-1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (depends on how much you like cinnamon)
1-2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

Heat the oven to 175 C (350 F). Line the bottom of a 22-cm (9-inch) or 24-cm (10-inch) springform pan with parchment paper and lightly grease the sides.

Combine the prune halves with the cinnamon in a bowl and set aside. To cut down on washing up, you  perhaps may want to sprinkle the cardamom over the fruit at a later stage in the process once the plum halves are arranged over the batter, but tossing the fruit in spice first allows for a nice and even coating.

In another bowl cream the sugar and butter with an electric mixer until fluffy and cappuccino in color. Add the eggs, one at a time, then the flour, baking powder and salt, and beat well. Scrape down the sides of the bowl; the batter will be rather thick.

Spoon the batter into the prepared baking form and smooth the top. Place the plum halves skin side up all over the batter, it should be all covered. Sprinkle with the lemon juice and a tablespoon or two more of cane sugar, depending on the sweetness of the fruit.

Bake until the top is golden and a toothpick inserted into the a centre part of the torte comes out clean of batter, about 45-50 minutes. Let it sit for ten minutes then remove from the pan. Cool on a rack and keep covered in clingfilm. It get even better on the next day after the plum juices has further permeated into the crumb. Keeps well for up to three days.

It would look decent

Dear Reader, hello –

How are things with you? I got a little bit distracted from here, as you can see. Since my temporary return to the bakery, I’ve been laboring there four consecutive days a week (as opposed to three days spread throughout the week before). Seeing that for most job-bound a working week would usually be comprised of five days, I feel I have no legitimate right to make a fuss now. I’d just say my only beef would be not to pass all my after-work hours in the vacuum of a deep slumber, which is what I’ve successfully been doing lately. I’m not a sloth, really. I’m rather confident my having to wake up for work before the birds – at 5 a.m. on a weekday, at 4 a.m. on weekends -- has a lot to do with my recent fondness of the pillow. Reader, I’d like to do much better than counting sheep before my usual bed time around 11 p.m, so I’m working on it. My latter-day strategy, of which I’m going to tell you in a jiffy, is working remarkably well. It keeps me from falling asleep soon after I get back from work in the late afternoon, which, in turn, raises my morale up a notch, which, in turn, makes me a better-ish person overall.

The afore-mentioned strategy is…cake-making. It’s brilliant. All this whisking, beating, and mixing have me skip around my kitchen area shooing hibernation away. Then it’s (usually) an hour wait for a cake to bake which has the same effect on me as a shot of inky espresso, only it’s milder and more considerate towards my heart rate. And of course it’s the eating of a cake itself that takes the edge off my tiredness completely. (Some irony: baking at work tires me, baking at home perks me up.)

I made my first cake when I was fourteen or fifteen of age (I was a late bloomer). It was an apple cake known in Russia as sharlotka (not to be confused with charlotte Russe). Growing up I was not really encouraged to cook. Reason being, tap water was a pleasant surprise rather than a 24/7 attribute in our household back then (brilliant post-Soviet reality). It’s well understood cooking goes hand-in-glove with washing up, but the latter in our situation was a rather dire endeavor to accomplish, what with the limited water stored in vats and buckets kept in the bathroom. In other words, no need for unnecessary whisking, whipping, and mixing, thank you very much. But I saw that cake on a Russian cooking show, and it seemed an easy one-bowl affair. All the domestic encumbrances be damned, I was so making it. The simplicity of the said confection laid in its use of all the ingredients in equal measure, the ingredients being flour, sugar, eggs and apples. You beat one part sugar with a few eggs, introduce one part flour to the mixture, and round the deal off by mixing in a few apples. The lot was baked in a frying pan, and regardless of one half of the cake going lopsided and the other burnt, my parents and I had a piece each with tea. We all agreed that theoretically it was a good no-nonsense cake, and that I shouldn’t be making it again.

Nigel Slater’s apple cake reminds me of my first baking affair, sharlotka. Similarly to the latter, it also calls for the equal quantities of the ingredients, only in addition to flour, eggs, sugar and apples it also cordially invites butter to the premises. Besides that, another difference is that nobody in their right mind would ever think of not making it again. You cream the butter with the sugar first, nudge the eggs in second, fold in the flour and baking powder third, and lastly, once the mixture is scraped in a baking tin, put spiced apples on top. At first you’ll most likely think that the cake batter is a dud, on the account of it being too thick, almost cookie dough thick. But go on notwithstanding -- the heat will take care of everything. The apples will surrender and sink in the batter, their juices trickling down and moisturizing the crumb. And the crumb, it will spring up a bit, carefully closing in around the apple pieces. The result is a loveable slim, tender, open-crumb apple cake that stays moist for a few days, no assistance of aluminum foil needed (as I accidentally discovered). It’s not overly sweet, with a quiet tart voice coming out from a little bit of lemon juice used with the apples. Last time I baked it I subbed whole wheat for plain flour. That is not necessary at all for the taste enhancement -- the cake is good as it is; I just think apple and whole wheat together make a fine autumn treat. In case if apple pies start to rub you the wrong way by now, give a chance to this apple cake. Some whipped cream on the side, it would look decent on your Thanksgiving table, that.

Happy Thanksgiving, Reader!

Nigel Slater’s Apple Cake

Adapted from The Kitchen Diaries
Yield: 8-10 servings

Slater calls the afore-mentioned sweetness English Apple Cake, but I’m not sure whether it’s because he uses local English apples for the recipe or because it’s originally an English recipe. I tend to think it’s the former, for the recipe is included in an entry christened A Basket of Apples. On the grounds that I’m not using the English fruit here and, generally, for the sake of clarity, I’ve taken to call this cake quite simply as Nigel Slater’s Apple Cake.

I don’t mind the apple-cinnamon flavor combination as such, but I personally prefer fresh vanilla as a spice for an apple. If cinnamon would be your choice, disregard my call for half a vanilla bean and use ½ tsp ground cinnamon instead, or use both, perhaps.

Slater uses a 24-cm square tin for this cake, but since I don’t own one I utilize a 24-cm round spring form here. It seems to work just fine too.

3 medium-size apples (I used Santana)
juice of ½ lemon
seeds from ½ vanilla bean
2 Tbsp demerara sugar
130 g (4.4 oz.) butter
130 g (4.4 oz) light brown sugar
2 large eggs
130 gr (4.4 oz) whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
a little extra sugar (optional)

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (355 degrees Fahrenheit). Place a rack in the lower third of the oven. Butter and flour a 24-cm (9 1/2-inch) baking spring form; shake off excess flour.

2. Cut the apple into small chunks, removing the cores as you proceed and dumping the fruit in a small bowl with the lemon juice. Add the vanilla bean seeds and demerara sugar and toss well. Set aside.

3. Sift the whole-weat flour and baking powder together, set aside. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Fold the flour mix gently into the butter mixture (the mixture will be very thick). Scrape into the prepared baking form and smooth out. The cake mixture will be very shallow in the form. Put the spiced apples (together with the lemon juice, if you wish) on top of the cake mixture and scatter a little bit more demerara sugar, if desired.

4. Bake for 55-60 minutes. The centre should be firm and the edges should be nicely browning. Cool for 10 mins, still in the baking tin. Run a sharp knife around the cake and take off the side of the spring form. To remove the bottom of the spring form, you might want to run a long serrated knife under the cake. This cake is best eaten warm – reheat in a gentle oven before serving. Keeps well for two days.

There it was

What is there to say about carrot cake? I don’t have much, except that it frequently makes me wonder why it’s so named if carrots can only be found through a magnifying glass. Some say it’s for the moisture that the carrots are drawn into the business, but I’m not into buying that. Plus, it’s always cinnamon or ginger or allspice or whatever that steals the show, or rather, takes the cake (note: I’m not anti-spices, I just find it rather confusing when carrot cake is pulled into gingerbread’s dress, that’s it). All in all, I like cake and I like carrots, but should I see a carrot cake in my vicinity, most surely I wouldn’t reach for it.

Not so long ago I attended one potluck party. Actually, it was a goodbye bash for me and a few of my colleagues at the bakery. I don’t quite know how to better explain this, so here goes nothing: a while ago I decided it is time for me to learn and try new things, so I quit my job this past September; got a collection of farewell gifts; remained unemployed for a few weeks; and as October started, came back for a tad longer, until this year’s end, to be precise. More about that in due time, for now there is another thing to tell. There in one corner of the long white-clad wooden table set with the edible provision sat one carrot cake -- and I was going to lay my hands on it. It wasn’t an impulse. I knew the cake would be there. I couldn’t wait to try it.

Months before the party, in truth, months before anybody would start talking about the party at all, I was given this recipe. I got it from Marijn. An official paper would describe Marijn as a retiree, but I don’t want to go down that route. I like to think of Marijn as a life volunteer. Having reached a certain age, she refuses to sit at home and do “nothing”. She would volunteer at the bakery every Wednesday for years making tartlet shells in numbers that on a given day would exceed a hundred, whisking lemon cream to the point you don’t remember you have arms and they can move, doing the dishes, grinding and sieving kilos of nuts, sorting out the macarons, and the like. We would be in that boat together, elbow to elbow. And despite being on the opposite sides of the age road, we sometimes called each other “sister”. One Wednesday past summer, Marijn came and gave me the recipe, a reaching gesture of her hand accompanied by the words, “This cake is so sticky, so full of carrot. It is so good – make it!”, or something very similar. I took a ruled piece of paper with the hand-written recipe, brought it home, studied the text very carefully, put it in a plastic sleeve, and forgot all about it. I don’t know what I was thinking, I don’t remember now. One thing is certain: I would not be writing about this carrot cake now if Marijn wouldn’t have brought it that evening, a farewell party for her too.

So there it was, resting on a glass cake stand, observing the ignorant me. It was impossible to see through the snowy cap of its cream cheese icing, but it looked different from the carrot cakes I’d seen before. It didn’t have the height or the volume of a normal, leavened, carrot cake. The one I was looking at was rather short, stubby almost. It didn’t seem cake-y at all. It didn’t taste cake-y either. Lugging no flour nor butter, the cake had only three vitals -- carrots, nuts and raisins. It was like a moist carrot granola bar, if there is such a thing, but only without the brick-like density of the latter. I think I want to say that the cake was nubbly, what with all those shreds of carrot and studs of nuts and raisins poking out from the cross section. In one swift brushstroke, it was what it’s called: carrot cake. It wasn’t a piece of beauty, but one bite had me like it quite a bit, so much so that I decided right there, almost a month too early, to make this sweetmeat for Anthony’s birthday, which I did this recent week.

I grated carrots; ground nuts; simmered raisins in some wine; beat egg yolks with lemon zest and sugar, and a dash of flour. I then whisked egg whites; combined the whole lot; and finally consigned it to the oven, waiting for it to emerge beautiful and graceful, ready to be coated with a sleek vanilla seeds-dotted cream cheese frosting. A few hours later, when the clocks were striking midnight, Anthony was Happy Birthday-ed with a manly piece of the confection. We had a friend visiting for a game night/pre-birthday drinks (hello, Charlie!), and with them two nibbling the cake all night long the said baked good was nearly gone by the early a.m. When I pulled out two remaining pieces from the fridge to be had with our late morning coffee, I was met with ferocious exclamations, Where is my cake? Why did you throw away Anthony’s cake? Yes, why did you throw away my birthday cake? My foot!

Nubbly Carrot Cake
Adapted from Marijn
Yield: 10-12 servings

Marijn’s recipe uses trail mix, the kind that contains four or five sorts of nuts and dark raisins. I prefer to choose for myself what nuts will go into the cake, so I use only two types – almond and walnut. I find dark raisins too sweet, which is why I sub white raisins for dark ones. I don’t grind them together with the nuts. I want the dried fruit plump and juicy, so I simmer the stuff in just enough white wine over lowest heat for about fifteen minutes. If there is any liquid left after that, I drain it.

Contrary to the original instructions, I didn’t add hot water to my cream cheese frosting, and I cut back the amount of sugar used. I also used fresh vanilla bean seeds in place of vanilla extract.

Lastly, don’t use a cake form smaller than 24- or 25-cm (9- or 10-inch) in diameter. This cake is meant to be short. There is just a smidge of flour, almost nothing to hold the stuff together, so if it’s tall it wouldn’t hold its own under the knife at all.

For the cake:
150 gr (5 oz) walnut, coarsely ground
150 gr (5 oz) almond, coarsely ground
200 gr (7 oz) coarsely grated peeled carrots
80 gr (2.8 oz) white raisins (see headnote)
zest of one medium lemon
120 gr (4 oz) sugar (divided use)
3 eggs, separated
50 gr (1.8 oz) flour

For the icing:
125 gr (4 oz) cream cheese
30 gr (1 oz) butter, softened
120 gr (4 oz) powdered sugar
seeds from ½ vanilla bean

1. Position a rack in the bottom third of the oven and preheat to 200 degrees Celsius (390 degrees Fahrenheit). Liberally butter a 25-cm round cake form. Flour and shake off any excesses.

2. In a large bowl, combine the nuts, carrots and raisins together.

3. In a medium bowl, rub the lemon zest into 60 gr sugar (use your fingertips), until the sugar is fragrant. Beat in the egg yolks until the mixture is pale. Mix in the flour. Add the egg-flour mixture to the carrot-nut mixture and stir well (the mixture will be thick and dry-ish, so use your hands, it’s faster).

4. In a separate bowl and at high speed, beat the egg whites to the consistency of shaving cream. Add the remaining 60 gr sugar, and continues beating until stiff peaks form, 2-3 minutes. Using a rubber spatula and working in two or three additions, carefully fold the egg whites into the carrot batter.


5. Pour in the prepared cake form and gently smooth out the surface. Slide into the oven and immediately turn to 150 degrees Celsius (300 degrees Fahrenheit). Bake until the cake starts to pull away from the sides of the form and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45-50 minutes. Let cool in the form for 10 minutes, after which turn out onto a rack to cool completely.


6. When the cake is cool, prepare the icing. In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese, vanilla seeds, and the butter until smooth. Sift the powdered sugar, and beat on low speed until incorporated. If the sugar starts forming lumps, increase the speed and beat until smooth again. Spread the icing all over the top of the cake.


7. Store in the fridge, but bring to room temperature before serving.

In retrospect

Today I’d like to share with you a vanilla and lemon pound cake I made for my birthday that rapidly came and even more rapidly went a little bit over a week ago. To be accurate, I made the cake the day after my birthday, because my birthday was nothing as I’d planned. Now, in retrospect, I see that as a good thing to have had a calm, unfussy, non-obliging twenty-seventh birthday. But on the festive day itself I found it emotionally challenging, somewhat, to go with the flow, especially when the flow meant sprawling on a couch for the most part of the day, and watching the Travel Channel.

In a few brushstrokes: Anthony and I had an idea to start the day with a small picnic in a neighborhood park. Equipped with the two requisite birthday accessories – this cake and a bottle of champagne – we were going to pass early afternoon hours by alternating sweet nibbles with fizzy sips, shooting the breeze, and watching boats and ducks sailing up and down the nearby river. Later into the day the picnic was to be followed, according to the plan, by a celebratory meal in an Indonesian restaurant (well-executed Indonesian fare is presumably the best part of the Dutch cuisine, owing to Indonesia’s once being a colony of the Netherlands). On my birthday eve, I made a reservation, studied thoroughly the restaurant’s menu online conjuring up in my mind’s mouth the exotic tastes and flavors, told Anthony repeatedly how much he’d like the place and the food, and, overall, got hyped up about the day to come. And to be fully prepared, I even laid out all the imperishables for the vanilla and lemon pound cake on the kitchen counter before we’d head out for pre-birthday drinks.

This year my birthday fell on a Saturday, and so it seemed right to start toasting to the good and everything in the preceding Friday’s gloaming, stepping into the wee hours of my new year with a bright cocktail in my hand, you see. We went to our favorite visit-on-a-special-occasion cocktail bar and did a great job acquainting ourselves with a new summer menu – as well as reconnecting with our all-time favorite. I don’t know how to relay this with self-tact and dignity, but I’d had one too many. Was I thinking that the morning after -- the morning of my actual birthday -- my skull and its contents might be hurting so much I couldn’t possibly detach myself from a pillow for fear not to pass my soul from a headache? The cake, the picnic, the Indonesian meal – all thrown to the wind; lying deflated on a couch – what a shame, what a shame!

On the upside, though, I got to have a great pre-birthday that had started with a fresh chocolate pizza as a special sweet from Anthony, continued with long walks around sun-speckled town, and got magnified by some fine drinks. Why would I want to do almost the same the next day, doesn’t make any sense! Why not to make a restorative day in out of my birthday? I was talking myself into a better attitude, don’t you feel. And because actions speak louder than words, as we all know, I got up from the couch, cancelled the dinner reservation, and went online to order an expansive sushi take-out for two.

And the next day there was the cake: this fine vanilla and lemon pound cake. I’ve been wanting to make it since I came across the idea a moon or so ago. And although it’s not a usual birthday cake model – no layers, nor butter cream frosting – the sheer flavors of the concoction made me want to have it for my festive day. Originally the recipe is for either a lemon or an orange pound cake, but Dorie Greenspan, whose recipe this is, relays it’s also meant for “a wonderful vanilla cake”. I couldn’t pass on a chance to enjoy the heady vanilla and the refreshing, enticing lemon in one bite, so I combined the two, tweaked the recipe ever so slightly, and made what I’d planned long ago to be my birthday treat: a rich, incredibly, almost illegally, fragrant cake. Happy belated birthday to me!


Vanilla and Lemon Pound Cake

Adapted from Dorie Greenspan

Yield: serves 12

It is to a great advantage that this cake speaks well with coffee and tea, is extremely confident on its own, is happy to be utilized as a snack, and keeps a while. Just think, vanilla, lemon zest, and, shazam, rum together, seeped into the tightly-woven, moist crumb. You take a bite and it gives under your tongue with no objection. Vanilla, of course, rushes in first, followed by exciting lemon zest that has metamorphosed into some floral sensation, and then rum, which you don’t taste as much but feel. Please don’t disregard rum, nip out for a bottle if you have none! It’s worth it.


250 gr (2 cups) all-purpose flour
¾ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp table salt
300 gr (1 ½ cup) sugar
2 plump vanilla beans, seeds only
2 tsp lemon zest (one medium-large lemon)
5 large eggs, at room temperature
150 gr (2/3 cup) crème-fraiche or heavy cream, at room temperature (I used crème-fraiche)
30 gr (2 Tbsp) dark rum
110 gr (7 ½ Tbsp) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1. Position a rack in the center of the oven and pre-heat the oven to 180 C (350 F). Butter a 22.5 x 12.5 x 7.5-cm (9 x 5 x 3-inch) loaf pan – I used a 22-cm (8 ½ -inch) springform – and put on a regular baking sheet (seeing that the baking time will be rather long, this is done to prevent the bottom of the cake from browning too soon). Set aside.

2. Sift together the flour and baking powder. Add the salt and mix well.

3. In a separate large bowl, combine the sugar with the vanilla seeds and lemon zest, and rub them together with your fingertips to infuse the sugar with the flavors. Beat in the eggs until the mixture looks pale and foamy. Add the crème fraiche (or heavy cream) and rum; mix well.

4. Using a rubber spatula, fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture in three additions. Pour in the butter, and stir just until incorporated. The batter can be rather runny, but that’s ok.

5. Immediately pour the batter into the prepared baking pan and send the baking sheet into the oven. Dorie Greenspan instructs to bake it for 1 hour and 25 or 30 minutes, but in my oven the cake was done after 1 hour. I’d say start keeping a close eye on it after the 30-minute mark, after which you might want to cover it loosely with a foil tent in case the top is browning too fast. The cake is done when a thin knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool on a cooling rack for 10-15 mins before unmolding.

When it would be crazy not to

I don’t know if it is appropriate to be talking about apple pie as we are rapidly approaching the junction of May and June, the time when apples and pies and apples in pies seem so irrelevant, so unrelated to what is happening right now as we talk: fresh local juicy stubbly deep-red strawberries galore, soon to be followed by the myriad of other berries, so long-awaited, so bright. All right, it is crazy to just think about apple pie at this point of year. Insane, even.



Yet, I made Russian apple pie twice past week, strawberries notwithstanding. I don’t know how to classify it.

I was randomly re-reading parts of A Year of Russian Feasts, by Catherine Cheremeteff Jones, and a chapter on Russian tea ceremony accompanied by a recipe for a yeast dough apple pie (a.k.a. apple pie, Russian style) got me to recall my maternal grandmother’s delicious apple pie that she would make for me as I was staying with her in our river-bank country house for a week at the beginning of each summer as I was a kid, years and years ago. But however tasty the pie was, I also recalled I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I guess for many a kid, to stay in the country side with their beloved grandmother would be nothing less than fun. Not for me, though. I was terrified of it.

My maternal grandmother, Aglaya, is a high blood pressure patient. Every day of the week I had to spend with her in the distant picturesque summer country side was marred by my fearing that she would suddenly expire from a heart attack – please, no! -- in the middle of the night, and I would be left in the scary nocturnal darkness not knowing what I would have to be doing to get help for her, for myself, or whatever (that wasn’t yet an era of mobile telecommunication). Oh, doesn’t it sound dramatic! But hey, I was a sensitive kid, and I guess you can say troubled too!

The first two or three days of that bonding week, as my mother usually thought it be, would almost always go easy, to my relief. My grandmother and I would prune and water the vegetable patches in our garden, go swimming in the river, pay visits to the remote neighbors or the unwatched gardens close by, drink tea with store-bought sweets, watch black and white TV, and play cards. But then on the fourth day – mysteriously, it would always happen on a Thursday -- my grandmother would wake up to a bad headache, high blood pressure starting building up. As the day progressed, the symptoms wouldn’t budge, even despite the large medicine in-take. By midnight, my grandmother wouldn’t stop her I’m dying-s. I felt morbid. (I’m sorry, but at the age of seven, eight, nine and ten I took those proclamations very, very, very literally.) There was one thing, the last frontier, believed to be able to help: vinegar (a lot of which would be poured onto a small towel that would be applied to feet). I was eager to go and bring a bottle of it from our kitchen downstairs. To get down to the kitchen meant I had to take the outdoor stairs and then go around a corner of the house to reach the arched heavy kitchen door. At night with nature making weird unnatural sounds, a trek of a mere couple dozen steps felt like going down into a deep dungeon. I was ready to do it for my grandmother. I was happy I could help. Often vinegar did the trick lessening the blood pressure. Eventually my grandmother would fall asleep. I would regularly come out from my room to see if she was breathing.

The next day my grandmother would be on her feet again, preparing for my parents’ visit over the weekend. For me, it meant nothing else but joy: I would be going home soon. But besides the approaching weekend and the nearing this-year-I-don’t-have-to-do-it-anymore delirium, there was another thing for me to get pretty darn excited about: apple pie.

My grandmother has a thing with yeast dough. She is a yeast dough whisperer. If I remember rightly, never did I see a scale or at least one measuring cup in her vicinity when she would start the dough. All measurements were intuitive and always (!) worked. Of course, my childhood memories may not be crystal clear by now, but seriously! To see the dough risen and eager to crawl out from under the lid of a dented white pot was kind of arcane – and fun. My favorite part was to punch the dough down imagining I was a ghost buster at task of taming a cute monster. The sour-ish yeasty wisps emanating from it were full of promise of something good and safe and warm and lovely.

While the monster/dough was resting/rising, I’d get busy picking apples (an early summer sort) fallen from our apple tree and now lying idly on the shadowy ground. My grandmother would use them, cooked with sugar until just soft, for the filling. It was a simple apple pie. And it was tasty. Sweet apples, slightly tart at the heart, encased and relaxed between and into the two layers of the fragrant, a touch buttery, dough. Made with gusto, it was also a sign that my grandmother was doing ok again, and that she is a fighter.

I wanted to share my grandmother’s apple pie recipe with you today. I called her to ask for guidance. But she is an intuitive baker, and so it transpired she doesn’t need nor does she have the recipe. It’s why I resort to the one from A Year of Russian Feasts. Having made it twice by now, I’m happy to say the resulting pie is as good as the specimen from years gone, except that no drama and only dry active yeast is required.

All you need to do is to mix dry yeast with melted butter and a mix of lukewarm milk and water, add sugar, salt and flour, and knead it until the dough comes together and forms a ball. You then let it rest until it doubles in size, about an hour, give or take. Meanwhile, you cook tart baking-friendly apples with light brown sugar, for a deeper flavor, until they have released their juices. We tend to think that apples and cinnamon is a match, but try apples with fresh vanilla seeds. With them, an apple taste like its quintessential self. Should I be a Granny Smith in my next life, I’d spend it with vanilla seeds, I decided. Anyway, when the dough has puffed up and looks ready, form it into a ball and cut in half. Roll out the first half, place in a pie pan and send in the apples. Roll out the second half, slightly larger than the first, and cover the fruit. Pinch the dough edges together, brush the top with egg wash and bake until the pie is golden.

The pie is down-to-earth, and even basic, yet there is some simple magic going on in there, the moist fruit has bonded together with the dough, vanilla and yeasty aromas merged into one. And the butter, it’s quietly letting you know it’s there but that it’s not going to steal the show. As Cheremeteff Jones describes the pie: “a wonderfully delicate “apple sandwich”. Try it for yourself. If it seems – and it does! – insane to compel strawberries and the likes to wait, bookmark the recipe for the colder months then, when it would be crazy not to make it.

Russian-style apple pie
Adapted from A Year of Russian Feasts by Catherine Cheremeteff Jones
Yield: Serves 6-8

For the apple filling:
900 gr (2 pounds [about 5 large or 6 medium]), tart baking apples, such as Granny Smith, peeled, quartered, cored, and diced in big chunks
120 gr (4 oz) light brown sugar
seeds of one vanilla bean

Combine the apples, sugar and vanilla seeds in a large saucepan, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples are soft and the apple juices have evaporated, about 10-15 mins. (Drain if the apples are soft but the liquid is still there.) Remove from the fire and let cool. (The filling can be made up to three days in advance; keep covered and refrigerated).

For the yeast dough:
8 gr (0.4 oz) active dry yeast
60 ml (1/4 cup) whole milk
60 ml (1/4 cup) water
30 gr (1 oz) sugar
1 large egg, beaten
120 gr (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and still warm
310 gr unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more as needed
Egg wash (one more egg, beaten)
Light brown sugar for sprinkling, optional

1. Put the yeast in a large mixing bowl.

2. Heat the milk together with water until lukewarm. Add the milk mixture to the yeast and stir until the yeast has been dissolved. Add the sugar, salt, egg and butter (still warm!) and mix well until combined. Add half of the flour and using a mixer with the dough hook attachment work on low speed until combined. Add the remaining flour and mix until incorporated. Up the speed to medium and continue mixing for the next 4-5 minutes (scrape down the sides of the bowl after 2-minute mark), or until the dough is no longer sticky and forms a ball. If the dough remains sticky after 3 minutes of mixing, add more flour, 1 tablespoon (15 gr) at a time, until the dough comes together (the amount of extra flour needed can be between 1 to 3 tablespoons). Cover the bowl with plastic film and let the dough rise in a warm place for about 1 hour, or until doubled in size.

3. Pre-heat the oven to 175 C (350 F) and butter a 22- or 24-cm (9- or 9 ½-inch) pie plate.

4. Lightly flour a work surface. Take the dough and shape it into a ball. Cut the ball in two equal parts. With a rolling pin, roll out one part of the dough into a circle wide enough to fit into the prepared pie plate (if needed, continue to lightly flour the work surface and the dough to prevent sticking). Transfer the dough gently into the pie plate, and using your fingers, create an even 1-cm (1/2 inch) overhang. Place the apple filling evenly over the dough.

5. Flour the work surface again and roll out the second part of the dough into a circle slightly smaller in width than the first one. Carefully place it on top of the filling. Pinch and twist the edges of the dough together to seal them. Make sure to seal the wedges well, otherwise the top will disconnect while baking. Prick the top, cover with a clean dish towel, and let rise for 10 mins. Brush the top lightly with the egg wash. Sprinkle some light brown sugar (about 1 Tbsp or more), if using.

6. Bake for 30 mins, or until the top is golden brown. Let cool before unmolding. Wrapped up in plastic, the pie will keep at room temperature for up to three days.

I would love to

Dear Reader, my drama with that chocolate cake (remember?) is over.

As a foreword, let me tell you that I made the cake ten times within the past fourteen days, which means the cake was seen in my kitchen almost daily for the last couple of weeks. I would love to explain the cake’s frequent appearance by its exceptional taste, so exceptional that each time the sweet thing was gone sooner than I could bring it to the table. Oh how much I would love to say that all that is true. But brother, it’s not! This cake, it was unruly. It drove me crazy. It exhausted my patience. I’m not exactly happy to relay all this, but nine times out of ten I flipped it the finger and furiously sent it into a trash bin. Why I kept making the stuff was that I can be stubborn -- if I want to. And I love chocolate cake. Plus, I believed a Moosewood restaurant cookbook that said that this six-minute chocolate cake is “an economical, low cholesterol, delicious dark cake that goes into the oven in 6 minutes with no mixing bowl to clean, because the batter is mixed directly in the baking pan”. I want to think that somebody somewhere did as the recipe has them to -- and loved the results. Me, I only made my trash bin full.

The only thing that I can agree with is that the cake is “low in cholesterol”. True -- no eggs, no butter, just vegetable oil. I would think twice before nodding in agreement about the creation being “economical”, as the recipe advertises. Good-quality cocoa powder (you need it for the batter) is not entirely inexpensive, right? The same goes for chocolate (you need it for the glazing). So calling the cake “economical” is not fully accurate, I noticed. As to the deliciousness of the cake, well, the past few weeks I spent nearly all my free time looking for it, that deliciousness. I found it not.

Like I mentioned, the recipe comes from a book by the Moosewood restaurant collective Moosewood restaurant cooks at home whose primarily focus lays on the food that’s fast and easy to make, and above all, the food that’s natural (Moosewood restaurant is a natural foods eating establishment).

(I borrowed the book from my baker boss Issa Niemeijer who is a vegetarian. When it came time for me to return it and I hadn’t yet copied said chocolate cake recipe, I hastily made a picture of it. I couldn’t wait to make this cake.)

I feel I should say now that I made it a point not to deviate from the original recipe too much. The cake was intended to be simple and quick. Its main ingredient is unsweetened cocoa powder, no chocolate in the batter. An innocent observer could now notice that I could have used chocolate ganache or chocolate chips in addition to the cocoa powder to try to make the cake close to being heart-rate accelerating, but I chose not to. If I did, it would not be that “economical, low cholesterol, delicious dark cake” any more, was my reasoning. I didn’t want to complicate anything about the stuff. I just hoped it’d be delicious. Alas, it never tasted as much to me. Reader, I don’t want to come off as a Negative Nancy around here, what with all the complaining and everything. The cake wasn’t bad. But it didn’t cut it for me, either.

As I said, I didn’t inject the cake with the ganache and whatnot. Yet, in my desperation, I kept adding things to it -- such as lemon syrup which I’d spoon over the cake before covering it with chocolate glaze -- trying to make the cake flavorful and interesting, attempting to create a bomb of flavor out of it. But now as I think of it I can see I kept forcing this cake to be what it’s not. In a few brushstrokes, it’s an easy cocoa-based cake whose attraction may be hidden deep down its nude simplicity. On its own, cocoa can never be as rich in flavor as chocolate, but I didn’t want to see it then. I had my grand expectations which would never match what this cake is all about: decency. Instead of accepting it, I was getting continuously upset: it’s not what I want it to be, it’s not what I want it to be, it’s not what I want it to be. Finally, I figured it’s better if I stop looking for something that’s not there. I’m not going to make this cake anymore.

Yet, I’ll post the recipe. Maybe somebody will get to make it, and will love it, and will tell me that I am crazy to “dis-love” it.

Six-Minute Chocolate Cake
Adapted from Moosewood restaurant cooks at home by Moosewood collective

Despite it being said in the book that the cake batter “can be mixed directly in the baking pan”, I’d recommend you don’t do that. It’s not entirely convenient to try to mix the batter in a square cake form; a good amount of flour can be left unincorporated in the corners of such pan. Of course if you are using a round baking pan, that’s not a problem anymore. Yet, it’s better to first mix the wet ingredients together in a separate bowl, this way you will not over-mix the batter adding wet ingredients one by one. For those reasons, it’s better to use two separate bowls – one for dry and another for wet mix. Which, I agree, is at odds with the original idea for the cake preparation to be only six-minutes long. Still, a few more bowls notwithstanding, it’s fast to whip up.

Dry mix
1 ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt

Wet mix
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup non-fragrant vegetable oil

Bittersweet chocolate glaze
½ pound (250 grams) good-quality bittersweet chocolate
¾ cup warm milk

Preheat the oven to 165 C (365 F). Butter a 8-inch square or 9-inch round cake form.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour and salt; mix well. Continue sifting in the baking powder and cocoa powder. Mix again.

In another medium bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, sugar, and vanilla extract. Whisk in the oil. With a spatula, stir the wet mix into the dry mix just until incorporated.

Pour in the prepared cake form and bake for 40-50 mins, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cake comes out clean. Let cool for 15 mins. Take out from the cake form and put on a wire rack.

While the cake is cooling down, prepare the chocolate glaze. Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a pan with boiling water. Once the chocolate is melted, stir in the warm milk. Spoon the glaze over the cooled cake. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before serving (as you can see from the photo, I didn’t wait that long.)

"Quality baked goods for festival people"

Last year, I beefed about what madness, at least from a sober pedestrian’s perspective, Amsterdam becomes on April 30th – Queen’s Day – when seemingly everybody in Holland pours out onto the narrow cobbled streets of this tiny city with seemingly one purpose -- input and output of all things alcohol. I don’t imagine what I would do this year for Queen’s Day if Anthony, a bright-minded man with a habit to burn spinach gratins and some other dishes, didn’t come up with an idea to set up a stand for Queen’s Day and sell, quote, “quality baked goods to festival people”.

It’s a good thing that Queen’s Day is the only day around here when one does not need official permission to go out and sell things after one’s own heart. As long as you don’t sell animals, weapons, works of art, or perishable goods, you are most welcome, says the City Hall of Amsterdam, to try your luck in commerce on said day. Somehow we reasoned that it’d be more of a social event filled with fun than an earnest business endeavor. We were not exactly right. The whole thing would actually call for proper thinking.

We started brainstorming what to make for Queen’s day weeks before the event. Besides ten calls Anthony had to make to his carpenter friend to ask, and then to remind, if he could please get us some rickety table we’d later set our goods on, our “business plan” included multiple visits to a kitchen equipment store where we’d get needed baking forms, bowls, electronic scales and a hand-mixer. It was in that crammed shop with old dark wooden cracking floors that Anthony saw this man-shaped cookie cutter and got a brainwave -- to make, quote, “men-shaped cookies covered in orange icing to look like the Dutch Nation football team”.

Dutch national colour is orange, so it was imperative to make something orange-y on Queen’s Day. Next, we agreed that we should also make cocoa brownies (because they are always a crowd pleaser and such an easy-peasy thing to make), white wine cake (because it is my favourite!), and orange marmalade cake (because it has orange in it, which, we thought, would appeal to Dutch). For a while, I also got obsessed with what tablecloth to use for the table. I wanted a checkered tablecloth of mild colour, something like light blue. Anthony disagreed. We should look festive and bright, he insisted.

We got a red checkered tablecloth in the end.

Another thing to think of was a place where to set up our stand. What location would make us stand out from the crowd? A small arching bridge, a few meters off a main artery clogged with human traffic, seemed to be just fine.

Anthony, being a graphic designer, also developed clasps for cookie bags with Godful Food logo on them. Tons of effort, time and energy -- plus, a bit of our money -- was put in the “quality baked goods for festival people” campaign, is all I’m driving at.

I should as well tell that I don’t own the oven, still. Neither does Anthony. So we took over the kitchen at Rene’s. Rene is a very, very, very patient person; he is a friend of Anthony. Actually, Rene is a saint of patience. He did not mind us baking non-stop for two days in a row before Queen’s Day. He didn’t say a word about how uncomfortably hot it became in his small-enough-for-one-person studio apartment after we’d told him not to open the windows because of the flies. Sipping on cold dark Belgian beers, he just jokingly referred to this whole bonanza as “a sweating bakeshop”.

As to the oven, it was a microwave contraption with a function of the convection oven. And in that oven, from the inside slightly bigger than two shoe boxes put together, Anthony baked four hundred and thirty five man-shaped cookies that he’d later have to ice in orange.

In that oven, I baked five white wine cakes, one after another; four batches of brownies, one after another (eighty brownies in total); and one orange marmalade cake. Funny, how little, in comparison to the rest, of that orange marmalade cake we made. Its orange-ness seemed fitting for Queen’s Day. It was unusually delicious, zingy, moist, and bright. For some reason, we didn't see it as a best-seller.

We were very wrong. Please stay with me; I will get back to that in a minute.

Before, I just want to tell you what a disaster our “quality-baked-goods-for-festival-people” enterprise turned to be. On the Queen’s Day eve, the weather made a U-turn. It started raining, pouring even. And it did not stop until late afternoon the next day. And who would want to buy sweets which one could not even see because they were all wrapped up in foil to protect them from soaking? I’ve got the answer for you: n.o.b.o.d.y.

A few hours into rain, Anthony got, quote, "a brilliant idea" to wrap the brownies and the slices of the cakes in plastic film individually. This way “we could showcase what we’d got”.

After what seemed like a century, we got our first customers: two Italian ladies. They went for two pieces of orange marmalade cake. The ice was broken. For a moment, though. We couldn’t know those Italian women would be our only customers well until late afternoon. Not that there were no people on the streets to buy our sweets. It was just that those who were passing by weren’t interested. Plain as that. It being Amsterdam, people kept asking us if we were selling hash brownies and everything. Having learned that no, it was normal sweets, they sniffed and walked away.

It kept drizzling on and off. I was wearing a woollen dress, body warmer and raincoat; Anthony had on a flimsy orange t-shirt and hoody. Both of us were cold. My back and my feet hurt from standing for hours. At some point, I remember, I even wanted to pack everything back and leave. We should stick out and be patient, Anthony insistently suggested, his teeth chattering. But me, I could take everything with thin tolerance by the time. Anthony gave me a few of his orange cookies to cheer me up. I squashed the cookies. I did that on purpose. Knowing how much effort he had put into baking and icing each one of them, on the spur of the moment I figured that to squash a few would be a fireproof way to upset him. I became bitter.

Around 1 pm the sun broke out through the thick layer of clouds the colour of quick mercury. Boats loaded with people wearing orange and drinking something strong or other had filled up the canals’ waters. Some boats even had a dj playing live onboard. Everybody was waist-length deep in fun. Sadly, I didn’t feel jovial. I told Anthony as much, put my sunglasses on to hide betraying tears, turned and went away. I folded.

The rest of the day I spent sipping hot Earl Grey with lavender and nibbling on white wine cake I’d kept for us. I felt ashamed to go back. In a way, I let Anthony down. I gave up on our plans. I failed, I kept thinking.

In about an hour after I’d left, Anthony gave me a call -- he was still talking to me, blimey! -- to say that there was this young Italian couple who bought a piece each of orange marmalade cake, white wine cake, and a brownie; and that after a while the guy came for more orange marmalade cake. We had a repeat customer, I was told. “Think for a moment how amazing that someone, at a citywide fest like Queen’s Day, took the time and effort to weave back though all that madness just to get another piece of your orange marmalade cake! You should be immensely proud of that”, said Anthony.

Although it pains me that I didn’t see that guy’s face, it’s still better that way. I think it will do for me to simply know that there is somebody who loved what we’d made and showed that in deed. No matter how bumpy the road, it is the people you travel with -- those you know for long and those who are there just for a moment -- that make it less hurtful, less uncomfortable to keep going.

(Anthony spelled "marmalade" wrong!)

Orange Marmalade Cake

Adapted from Molly Wizenberg

Like I said, it was the cake we had the least of for sale. We had even less after I’d had one piece as my lunch, standing there in the drizzle. I even wished, in secret, it wouldn’t sell at all. I wanted to keep it for myself (I am a fox!). But it so happened it was a hit. That Italian guy, our repeat customer, said that he had “to have another piece of this orange marmalade cake. It is the best”. I don't know if that was what the quy really said, or Anthony exaggerated a little. But anyway...The cake is truly something else. Imbued with fragrant orange and lemon and toasted almond, all moistened by olive oil, it does really taste of summer -- a great thing to have on a rainy day, on any day! It probably explains why it sold well on that gloomy Queen’s Day. That and the fact that it is undeniably delicious.

1 medium orange
1 small to medium lemon
180 gr (6 oz) coarsely ground almonds
110 gr (1 cup) all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
4 large eggs, at room temperature
½ tsp sea salt
340 gr (1 ½ cups) sugar
2/3 cups olive oil
Powdered sugar for serving (optional)

1) Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F).

2) Put the orange and lemon in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, cover. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer until the fruit is soft, about 30 mins. Drain and let cool.

3) Spread the ground almonds on a clean baking sheet and toast until the almonds slightly take on colour. I learnt that it is a way more convenient to toast already ground almonds; whole almonds become quite oily once toasted, which makes them much messier to grind.

4) Once the fruit is cool, deseed the orange. Cut the lemon in half and scoop out the pulp and seeds. Discard. Put the deseeded orange and lemon rind in a food processor, or a blender, and pulse until finely ground, almost like a puree. Set aside.

5) In a small bowl, sift the flour and the baking powder. Whisk.

6) In a medium bowl, combine the eggs and the salt. Beat until foamy. Keeping beating, add in the sugar. Add the citrus, almonds, and olive oil, and beat on low speed after each addition. Finally, add the flour and with a spatula, or a wooden spoon, mix it in until just incorporated. It’s ok if there are streaks of flour; they will dissipate while baking.

7) Pour the batter in a buttered 9-inch round springform pan; an 8*8-inch square baking pan will work here too. Bake for about one hour, or until a toothpick plunged into the center immerges clean. If the top of the cake browns too soon, cover it with aluminum foil and continue baking until ready. Cool the cake before unmolding.

8) Serve, if you wish, with the dusting of powdered sugar on top.

A synonym for health

One year zipped past, but I haven’t got any cleverer than I was in the january of 2009 when I, just like now, went to Russia wearing a flimsy woolen coat, hoping that it would solely protect me against perky way-below-zero frosts and merry snowfalls.

Oh silly, silly me!

Up there is a preamble to say that last fourteen days I spent in tight embrace of a nasty cold and its bosom friend -- misery. Not too much of a good time, you understand. Especially so, when more than ever do I now need my brains crystal clear. The whole January I have been tackling a task that requires a condition of an undiluted mental concentration on my part – I had to write three academic essays before February dawns. But no, the universe thought I’d have a time of my life penning those with my mind in thick haze and my nose dripping like a leaking faucet (sorry!). It was no fun, is what I want to say.

So with all that freezing, sneezing, shivering and coughing, I found myself obsessively hankering for oatmeal raisin cookies too. Isn’t oats a synonym for health? See?

Could there be anything easier on earth than to make oatmeal raisin cookies? You only need to schlep-schlep-schlep in the kitchen to cream some butter with some sugar; to beat in some egg; to fold in some flour, oats and raisins; and to mix all that well to form the cookie dough which you’d then scoop out onto the baking dish and send into the oven for fifteen minutes. Simple?

Not so.

The problem is that I chose the wrong recipe which, as I learnt, is better suited for a dustbin than for anything else. It was no fun to make oatmeal cookies that would look as bad as I felt. It wasn’t oatmeal raisin cookies. It was oatmeal raisin spookies. I even can’t call it that, because there was so little oatmeal in the dough that the only place where you could find some was in the recipe’s title.

Terrified, but not defeated, I took the recipe and tweaked it as I pleased, which included reducing the sugar level; upping the oats contents; swapping all—purpose flour for oat flour (we are talking health here, no?); and shaking a firm no to the original instruction to add water to the flour. It took me three batches in total to bring these poor souls to their normal cozy, pretty selves: chewy in the pale center, crisp around the slightly tanned edges, sweet enough to please but not to cloy, and most importantly, cold- and stress-eliminating. And isn’t it what we want from a cookie?

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Adapted from Yuliya Vysotskaya, a russian cookbook author

Yields 8-10

100gr (1/2 cup) butter, softened
100 gr (½ cup) light brown sugar
1 Tbsp vanilla sugar
1 medium egg, at room temperature
100 gr oat flour (which you can easily make by grinding oat flakes in a coffee grinder)
100 gr (3/4 cup) raisins
70 gr (1 cup) quick oats (not steel cut!)

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F) and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl – you will only need one bowl for this recipe; isn’t it sweet? -- beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugars; keep beating until fluffy. Beat in the egg.

3. Sift in the oat flour; stir. Fold in the raisins and oats and mix well. The dough will be sticky.

4. Using a tablespoon, scoop out the dough onto the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 15-20 mins; the cookies should be golden brown at the edges and pale in the center. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool. Upon exiting the oven, the cookies will be somewhat soft until fully cooled.

For cake's sake!!

Sugar, I need a break from you. You are sweet and I like you to insanity. But familiarity breeds contempt, remember? So stay away from me. Not for too long though, for a while. See you very soon. Maybe tomorrow.

Holy baking powder, why only now do I see that for the past two and a half months I’ve been feverishly writing about nothing else but desserts? From this, you would think all I’ve been eating is sweets, no?

Well, yes. Sort of. Cake here, pie there, nothing much, really. But recently instead of basking in pleasure, I found myself cringe at the sight of yet another, however lip-smackingly delicious, dessert. A ‘sugarization’ syndrome, let me tell you. An awful, hair-splitting thing, that. For cake’s sake, mouth-watering desserts should be revered, not pulled a face at! So I decided I should un-sugar myself before getting loaded up again. As soon as I’m finished with this beggar, that is.

I have my priorities, don’t you know.

In other news, two years ago today I started Godful Food. Or Godful Food started me. I don’t know. I’ll try to avoid overwhelming sentimentality here, so I’ll just say oh boy, does this little blog means loads to me. Foremost, because it, quite simply, brings you, Dear Reader, into my life!

It also teaches me to share. Take this Napoleon cake, for example. Under different circumstances, I have no doubts I’d lock myself in a room, pull up the window curtains and toss the stuff down – all by myself. Instead, I hasten to log on Godful Food and share my treasures with you. True, I may stumble along the way and turn the cake into a mess, metaphorically speaking or not. Or I may turn up too late so nobody wants a dessert any more. No matter what, you keep coming back, making this place feel like home to me. Thank you, folks!

Now, I’m not going to have to deal with this Napoleon myself. Reader, please, be my ally! It has come time that this thing, this delicious bastard, finally knows where it belongs -- on our dessert plates.

Forks up, friends!

On a curious note: they say Napoleon cake, French by origin, is so named not after the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, but after Naples, a city in Italy. Whichever, Napoleon is just one of the many nicks of the mille-feuille, the puff pastry with the vanilla cream.

My Napoleon is called Russian for a reason (we always seem to want to have everything our way). Basically, Napoleon is made of three layers of puff pastry jacketed in two layers of vanilla cream, just as befitted the tradition. Russians figured it’s better to make ten or even more puff pastry layers, each blessed with the custard cream. Like I said, being so labour-intensive –and, by extension, swear-words inducing -- this one is meant for big days, like Christmas, or birthday, or blog’s anniversary, no less.

Russian Napoleon Cake

(my family recipe)

Serves 16-18

For the pastry

4 cups (500gr) all-purpose flour, sifted
3 ½ stick (400 gr) butter, cut in ½ inch (apprx. 1 cm) dices
½ cup (125 ml) crème fraiche, cold
½ cup (125 ml) ice cold water
1 large egg
a pinch of salt

For the custard cream

4 cups (1 L) whole milk
2 large eggs
2 cups (400 gr) sugar
5 Tbsp (40 gr) all-purpose flour
2 sticks (250 gr) butter, cut in small pieces
1 Tbsp pure vanilla extract

To make the pastry:

1. In a large stainless-steel bowl, and using two sharp paring knives, cut the butter into the flour. The mixture should look pebbly, and lumps of butter should not be larger than a pea.

2. In a small bowl, beat the egg and the salt together. Add the crème fraiche, followed by the water; mix well.

3. Pour the crème fraiche mixture, ½ cup at a time, into the flour-butter mixture. Mix until just combined. Tap the dough out onto a floured surface and knead the dough until elastic and smooth (don’t overwork the dough!).

4. Divide the dough into 10 parts. Form balls. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours, or preferably overnight.

5. Preheat the oven to 425 F (220 C).

6. Take the dough out of the fridge, one ball at a time (the butter that’s in the dough should not melt before it goes in the oven, otherwise you won’t get flaky pastry at the end). On a well-floured working surface, roll out each ball into a thin – as thin as you can -- circle, about 10 inch (24 cm) wide. Roll the dough circle onto a lightly-floured rolling pin, and then unroll it carefully on a baking sheet, covered with parchment paper. Prick with a fork and put in the oven for about 3-5 mins, or until the dough gets lightly golden. Remove from the oven and put aside.

7. Repeat with the remaining balls of dough.

8. Bake the last circle a bit longer than the rest -- until it turns brown. Later you’ll use it, crumbled, for decorating the cake.


To make the custard cream:

1. In a medium non-stick pan, bring half of the milk (1/2 L or 500 ml) to a boil over a low flame.

2. In the meantime, beat the eggs and the sugar together. Add the flour and whisk until the flour is fully incorporated (there should be no lumps left). Pour another half of the milk; stir well.

3. Starting with 1 cup at a time, slowly add the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Working on low heat, stir constantly to avoid burning of the milk. Keep stirring until the mixture becomes thick. Take off the heat. Let cool.

4. When the mixture is still warm enough to make the butter melt, add the butter and the vanilla extract. Stir well until fully dissolved. Let cool completely.

To assemble:

1. Using the back of a soup spoon, spread a ladleful of the cream evenly on every crust, except for the brown one.

2. After every two or three layers, press gently on the cake to make the cream moisturize the crusts.

3. Crush the brown crust by running it over with the rolling pin. Sprinkle the crumbs over the top and the sides of the cake. (You can also use ground walnuts for this).

4. If your Napoleon has uneven edges, you can easily fix it by cutting them off with a sharp knife. (Although I prefer my Napoleon rustic, with all its ruggedness).

5. Let stand for a couple hours. The cake keeps beautifully in the fridge for up to one week.

Readying myself

For some, Christmas and New Year’s holidays have become a glowing memory by now. For some others, a festive table is still set, and a blood sugar level keeps increasing by the day. I’m writing this from Russia (visiting my family), knee-lengths in candies and baked goods, readying myself for yet another massive intake of all things sweet. Say I’m sick I won’t. It’s Orthodox Christmas around here today, after all.

[However surprising or confusing or both, but Christmas in Russia is celebrated on January 7th. Don’t blame the vicar (hello, Anthony!), blame the old Julian calendar.]

They say kutya (KOO-TYA) -- porridge made of wheat or rice grains (symbols of immortality) and honey (a token of happiness) – is an iconic Russian Christmas dish. I can’t attest to that, because in my family, it’s not Christmas without a Napoleon – many-layered cake enrobed in vanilla-scented custard cream, a symbol of my happiness.

Flaky, moist and tender, it’s the-heart-takes-a-lift-to-heaven good. It’s worth every swearing word (on Christmas Eve!) you may hiss while rolling out the gossamer sheets of dough, one by one, ten in total. Insane. Delicious.

The recipe I’ll post soon, I promise. Right now I’m rushing to my grandmother’s for a festive family gathering. But before I go, please take a piece, Dear Reader. It’s for you!

Serious measures

I always believed that pie-eating should be a friendship-binding, not a friendship-mudding, experience. I now realize I was deeply, deeply misguided. Past Thanksgiving showed me that dessert time can be – to quote my friend Anthony the Thinker, a pecan-pie aficionado -- ‘a dog-eat-dog environment where one must react in a micro-instance. It’s like the dog fighting in Top Gun’. True. True. True. Every crumb is going to be fought over.

This is what happened. You make a pecan pie with bourbon and chocolate for a quiet Thanksgiving gathering with friends, and the pie turns out so nicely that the speed at which it is devoured makes you realize that if you don’t take serious measures to procure yourself a piece, nay, a chunk soon enough before the whole thing disappears, you may end up staring at an empty pie plate. So when one of the eaters announces, mouth full and all, that he is going to take a piece to work the next day, you, weirdo, get barbarous, and greedy, and crazy -- you say no. Don’t touch my pie, for if you do -- the consequences will be formidable. I’ll poke you in your ribs, I’ll let you know you are garbage, you are an animal.
I’m exaggerating here, but not really.

Frankly, it’s hard to remain friendly to your dearest and nearest in the vicinity of this beggar, this bourbon pecan pie. Please, don’t get me wrong, cooking and eating with friends is a number 1 route to contentment, I know that. And yet, and yet…there are moments when solitary eating is a must. Just imagine: you gingerly cut a piece of that bourbon pecan treasure, gingerly because the crust is so fragile your heart thumps at the thought you can ruin the pie. Phew, you don’t. You successfully crown with it your plate, and the plates of those around you, those who eye the pie like birds of prey. You take a dessert fork and drown it in the toffee-like filling color of amber, even darker, with speckles of melted chocolate and shards of pecan here and there. You – everybody -- take a bite. Silence. Your tongue rolls in silkiness and sweetness of the filling that gives away its rich, and buttery, and bright, and slightly bourbon-y taste. Warmth. Somebody says this is the best pecan pie they’ve had so far. You fret a little bit over the pie crust, it looks somewhat messy, you say. Oh but the taste...the taste is really, really good. That’s why your heart sinks when you think of sharing the rest. That’s why you turn into a pooper. You want the leftovers all to yourself, so you scribble down your ‘no’ on a piece of buttered paper to tell to a potential pie-snatcher to back off when you are not there to watch.

Apparently, some people can’t read. The pie is gone. You curse flamboyantly, and rejoice at the same time. Heck, people loved what you baked, people wanted more. Smashing.

Pecan Pie with Bourbon and Chocolate (a.k.a. Hoosier Pie)

Adapted from A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg


I chose this recipe for past Thanksgiving dinner for a number of reasons. First, I wanted something fancy but not fussy. Second, I was itching to apply to practice my newly-born skills of pie-crust making that I’m learning in the bakery. Finally, it’s all about bourbon. I don’t know how about you, but if the recipe calls for that, I’m all sold. Hands down.

The recipe is unquestionably a keeper, be it Thanksgiving, Christmas or just a winter-cursed Monday. Next time I’ll only skip chocolate (oh the horror!). The reason behind is that chocolate’s soprano steals the show, it somewhat shoos the pecans and the bourbon offstage. It, even the bittersweet kind, makes the filling a tad too sweet to my taste, although Anthony, among the others, begged to differ. Better skip it. Rather, up the amount of bourbon, just a bit, to achieve a more homogeneous flavor. Whichever way you prefer, boldly sweet or politely so, just make this pie. Please. You are going to love it. You are going to fight for it.

And before I finally move to the recipe, a few nibbles of science. When I assist in the bakery, I keep a close eye on what my crafty colleagues do. So here is what I learnt: when making a piecrust, cold butter, as well as ice-cold water, is a must. This way the piecrust, once baked, will be tender and flaky. The butter has to melt in the oven, not earlier, since only this way the water from the butter will create steam. The steam, in turn will rise pushing the dough and thus creating tiny pockets of air in it. What will emerge from the oven will be flaky pastry.

Also – rather than using food processor to cut the butter into the flour (another reason to use the cold butter, or else you won’t be able to cut it in), give preference to two paring knives. It will help you to have a better control over the procedure, and also it’s fun. You might look like a maniac, but who cares when the flakiness of pastry is at stake.

Phew, now the recipe…

For the crust:

1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp confectioner’s sugar
¾ tsp salt
1 stick plus 1 Tsp (4 ½ ounces, or 120 grams) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
4 Tbsp ice-cold water, plus more if necessary
¾ tsp apple cider vinegar (this will seize the development of gluten)

For the filling:

4 Tbsp butter (2 ounces, or 56 grams)
1 cup confectioner’s sugar
3 large eggs
¾ cup light corn syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp salt
2 Tbsp bourbon (good enough to drink on its own)
½ cup bittersweet chocolate chips
1 cup pecans

1. Into a large stainless bowl, sift together the flour, sugar and salt. Whisk well to mix. Add the butter and cut it into the flour, making brisk criss-cross movements with two knives. The mixture should look sandy; there shouldn't be bits of butter larger than a pea.

2. In a small bowl, combine the ice water and vinegar. Sprinkle the water over the dough, and fold it in with a rubber spatula. This way the dough will get moisturized without being overworked. If the dough is dry – it should hold together if you squeeze it – add more water, start with 1 tsp at a time. It’s better to have dough that’s a bit too wet than too dry – dry dough is difficult to roll; it can tear.

3. Remove the dough from the bowl, form a ball, flatten it into a 1 ½ inches (about 3.5 cm) disk and wrap it up in plastic film. Chill for at least 1 hour. (The dough will keep for up to 3-4 days in the fridge and for up to 3-4 weeks in the freezer).

4. Bring the dough out of the fridge 10-15 mins before rolling out (the dough should soften – not get warm! -- a little bit).

5. Preheat the oven to 375 F (190 C).

6. Roll the dough into a circle, it should be wide enough to fit a 9- or 9 ½ inch (24cm) pie plate. Drape the dough over the pie plate, lift up the edges and tuck them gently into the creases of the pan. Press carefully to make the dough hold to the sides of the pan. Put the prepared pie plate back in the fridge while you are busy with the filling.

7. In a medium bowl, cream the butter and sugar. When the mixture looks creamy and the sugar is fully incorporated, add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add the corn syrup, vanilla and salt. Beat well. Add the bourbon and beat again. At this point, the batter should look pale yellow and be thin.
8. Remove the pie plate from the fridge, sprinkle chocolate chips and pecans evenly over the base of the crust. Pour in the batter. Bake for 35 to 45 mins, checking every 5 mins after 30 mins of baking time have passed. The pie is done when the edges are firm and caramelized, the top is deep brown, and the center seems almost set (it might jiggle a little bit, though). Transfer the pie to a wire rack to cool.

9. For serving, whipped cream on the side will not hurt.