A Cake Occupies Wall Street*

Baking for the revolution that's happening just a few miles from my house seems the perfect way to show support and a wonderful way to channel both my inner radicalism and inner Betty Crocker.
Plus, those occupiers deserve cake.

To feed more people, I opted to make a sheet cake, inspired by Marty Reimer, who baked for the revolution in Egypt earlier this year.  Commenting on my blog post, Egyptian Cake: When Politics and Pastry Collide, she wrote:
"i've been baking a sheet cake most days of the revolution and distributing it to my neighbors. every day i make a different recipe and call it something related to the revolution: "revolution cake," "tahrir cake," "curfew cake," "perseverance cake," etc."

The chocolate sheet cake I made (also called cookie sheet cake) is from one of my very favorite sources: the Indiana Rural Letter Carriers' Auxiliary Cookbook, published in Hope, Indiana in 1977, and given to me personally by the auxiliary president, Mrs. Howard D. [Katherine] Stewart, as she referred to herself.  Southern Indiana is also home to some of my most conservative friends (that's you, John Beach!), a real contrast to the occupiers of Wall Street.

This is an easy cake to put together and is baked, not in a cake pan, but in a 11 x 16 inch cookie sheet, aka, a hotel pan.  First heat the water, two sticks of butter (use that instead of the margarine called for in the recipe) and cocoa powder.

After a few minutes, the mixture will look like this.  Let it come to a boil before pouring it on the flour and sugar that you have waiting in a mixing bowl.

The cake bakes in just 20 minutes.  It's important to start the frosting about five minutes before you take the cake from the oven, as it needs to be poured over the cake while hot.

I didn't like the way the cake looked with just the frosting (the unfrosted cake is pictured above), so I put some sweetened shredded coconut on top.  It adds flavor, texture and an extra yum factor. The occupiers are going the extra mile, so I thought I should too.

*Credit to DS for coming up with the title of this blog post.

Fearless Baking (and Living)

The best baking advice is often the best life advice:  Plunge ahead, do not overthink and jump off the cliff with joy (even if your eyes are squeezed shut).

Just as things can go wrong in life, baking is filled with its own landmines.

For example, do you know how many ways you can screw up a simple cake? 

It might not rise properly, the center might sink, the sides might collapse, the texture may be too tough or tacky.  It might also be crumbly, or too dry, or have tunnel-like holes or streaks of uneven color or its surface may be peaked or cracked.  The causes?  Oh, the baking powder was old or the butter was too soft (or not soft enough), the sugar was too course, the batter was over-mixed (or under-mixed), the oven was too hot (or too cold.) or the batter did not contain enough fat (or too much fat.) 

These are just a few pitfalls, all beautifully articulated in Great Cakes by Carole Walter, a lovely book that Rochelle, mother of my dear friend Jay, send me as a gift last week.  

Although I've created many a cake wreck and I'm grateful for Ms. Walter's trouble-shooting advice, I tend to not intellectualize baking.  If I thought of everything that could go wrong, I'd never turn on the oven.

And I learned another lesson in fearless baking last week when I saw a pie-making video featuring writer Joyce Maynard.   Instead of the beautiful and well behaved pie dough I expected (Joyce has been making pies for years), I was shocked to see a crust that was well, shaggy, and that frankly looked much worse than mine.  But where I saw imperfection, Joyce saw "future flakiness."  And she confidently put the whole thing together in a few minutes and you know it was going to be delicious.

It was 29 years ago today that DH and I jumped off the cliff with joy (and eyes squeezed shut) as we wed after knowing each other only a few months. And despite everything that *could* have gone wrong in marriage (but didn't), we're still holding hands.

Making Strudel the Old-Fashioned Way (despite my best intentions to go modern)

I promise a new baking post soon, maybe even tonight, but in the meantime, please enjoy this post from the DH, Paul LaRosa, about my baking-related experience this weekend!

FedEx delivers from Brooklyn to Manhattan — by air!

Normally, I have no complaints about FedEx. They do a pretty good job with most everything I send but last night I entered into the twilight zone of FedEx and the experience left me feeling like Tom Hanks in “Castaway” without the coconut to keep me company.

My wife is planning an event this week called “Real Housewives of Henry Street” and the idea is to show how immigrant housewives lived on the lower East Side back around 1905. In fact, the event costs $19.05 to get in. Clever, right?

Anyway, one of the treats she’s cooking up is apple strudel and she plans to make a lot of it. She needed a dough hook to knead the strudel dough so she wouldn’t be tied to the kitchen all day like, you know, a 1905 housewife.

Taking advantage of a modern convenience, she went online and ordered a dough hook to be delivered to her by FedEx to her work address which is on Henry Street in Manhattan. That’s where the fun began because there is also a Henry Street in Brooklyn and, for whatever reason, FedEx took it upon themselves to make “an address correction” and sent the dough hook to Brooklyn. My wife found out about the mistake yesterday and told FedEx they had made “an address in-correction” but it was too late. The hook was in Brooklyn, not far from Red Hook coincidentally.

After many phone calls and hours on the phone, she told FedEx she would pick up the package at the FedEx “world center” in Brooklyn. Some anonymous person on the phone agreed.  And that’s how we wound up on a very rainy Friday night on a long line at the FedEx “world center” in Brooklyn in a neighborhood where you definitely wanted to make sure your car doors were locked.

Finally, we got to the front of the line and, after much hemming and hawing, a FedEx gal produced a package. We signed, relieved and were about to walk out when I looked down at the name — it was not my wife’s.

“This is the wrong package,” I said.

The FedEx gal then disappeared into the back again and, when she reappeared, said another employee was doing her “a favor” by looking for our package. This is why I love when FedEx packages just appear and I am not forced to come face to face with this kind of customer service.

Another ten minutes went by and finally, a rain-soaked, frightened-looking FedEx clerk appeared. “Your package is here but I can’t give it to you,” he said. “It’s already been containerized and on the truck.”

Now mind you, we could see the trucks which were in the next room, a garage.

“What does containerized mean?” I asked.

“It’s in a container in the front of the truck and we can’t take it out without taking out a whole bunch of other packages. I’d get in trouble. We have to make the plane but it will be in Manhattan tomorrow.”

There were a couple of things about what he said that struck me. First that the package was going to the correct address, Henry Street in Manhattan but no one would be at my wife’s closed office the following day. She needed the dough hook to make a whole lot of strudel for the Sunday event. It was get it now or forget it.

The other thing that struck me was….THEY WERE PUTTING IT ON A PLANE TO GET TO MANHATTAN?????

“What do you mean, you’re putting it on a plane?” I asked. “There are no planes that go from Brooklyn to Manhattan!”

“Right,” he agreed, “we’re flying it from New York to Newark and then it will be delivered by truck to Manhattan.”

Even Mr. Rain-soaked man could see how insane this was. Remember, the package we desperately needed WAS IN THE NEXT ROOM AT THAT VERY MOMENT!

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “That’s just how we do things.”

I flashed on Tom Hanks with his stopwatch in “Castaway” where he plays a FedEx employee and realized he had nothing on this guy.

What followed were a lot of irritated sentences that ended with the phrase “you realize how insane this is” but he wasn’t budging. Finally, my wife told him to send the package back from whence it came — if she didn’t get it immediately, she couldn’t use it. The irony is that she wound up making the strudel by hand with no help from a motorized dough hook — just like they did in 1905.

I Was a Strudel Virgin

I'm happy to report that I conquered my fear of strudel -- and then ate it!
I had a very compelling reason to practice -- on September 25th, I'm baking apple strudel for the 60 guests attending The Real Housewives of Henry Street, 1905, an event I'm hosting at Henry Street Settlement.

Making strudel dough is fun, much easier than you might imagine and very satisfying.  I was lucky to get a fabulous recipe from Jane Ziegleman, author of 97 Orchard, who will be the event's main speaker and who will demo strudel dough, with audience participation!

Basic Strudel Dough (Jane Ziegleman)
Ingredients
2 cups bread flour
1/2 tsp. salt
2/3 cup warm water
1/2 tsp. white vinegar
3 tbls. vegetable oil
4 tbls. melted butter for brushing the dough
1/3 cup breadcrumbs

Special equipment
clean cotton or linen tablecloth
pastry brush
rolling pin
parchment paper

Combine the flour and salt in a mixing bowl.  Make a well in the center of the bowl and pour in the water, vinegar and oil.  Stir from the center outward in ever widening circles until all of the flour has been incorporated into the liquid.  The dough should look shaggy and somewhat dry.
Turn dough onto a floured work surface and knead vigorously for 10 minutes.  Alternately, you can knead the dough in a standing mixer using the hood attachment for 3-4 minutes.  After kneading, the dough should be springy and glossy.  Coat lightly with oil and leave in a covered bowl to rest for at least 1/2 hour.

While the dough is resting, prepare your filling. (See recipe below.)
Preheat oven to 425.

Cover a fairly large table with a clean tablecloth and dust well with flour.  Place dough on the dusted cloth, flatten with your palms and, using a rolling pin, roll into a 9 inch circle.  Drape the dough over the backs of your hands, you fingers loosely bent, and begin to pull the dough outward, stretching it gently.  Keep rotating the dough so it stretches in all directions.

 When it gets too large to handle, lay it on the table and continue.  Ideally, the dough should be rectangular, 3 - 4 feet long, and thin enough to see through.  The edges will be comparatively thick; trim them off with kitchen shears.

Brush dough lightly with melted butter.  Sprinkle with breadcrumbs.  Spread filling along the bottom third of the dough.  To roll strudel, hold the edge of the tablecloth that is closest to you and gently raise it above the surface of the table so the strudel flops over.  Repeat until strudel is fully rolled.

 Using the tablecloth as a sling, transfer strudel to a baking tray that has been lined with parchment paper.  If the strudel is too long, bend it into a "U" shape. Brush one last time with melted butter.  Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden and crisp.

Apple Strudel
1 recipe basic strudel dough
Ingredients for filling
5-6 tart apples, peeled and finely sliced
1/4 cup sugar (or more to taste)
1 tsp. cinnamon
juice of 1 lemon
1/3 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup currents or raisins

Mix and knead strudel dough as instructed.  While dough is resting, prepare the filling.

Preheat oven to 424.
Toss apples with sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice.  Stir in chopped walnuts and raisins.
Ross out strudel according to instructions in the Basic Strudel Recipe.  Brush with butter and sprinkle with breadcrumbs.
Spoon filing along the bottom third of the dough, leaving an inch or two on the sides to prevent the filling from oozing out the ends.  Roll strudel.  Transfer to baking tray.  Brush the top with butter and bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden and crisp.

Cheese Apple Cake

This cake is like a lot of guys I dated -- they had possibilities, but needed some *work* to reach boyfriend perfection.  And so it is with Cheese Apple Cake -- an excellent and unusual cake, but one whose execution needs a bit of tweaking to make it as good as it can be.

This is, in fact, not a cake but a very large biscuit flavored with cheese.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  I've never been a fan of the cheese and apple pie combination, but if you are, this may be the perfect cake for you.

The bottom (biscuit) layer is made by cutting the butter into the flour, a normally tedious task made easy with a food processor.  Just cut cold butter into chunks, add to the flour and pulse until the butter is the size of small peas, or smaller.

After the butter is incorporated, add the rest of the ingredients, including grated cheese.

When the batter is all mixed and you place it in the pan, it will look like it does below.  You need to gently press it down until it is evenly distributed so that the entire bottom of the pan is covered.

Next, slice some apples -- I used about three or four medium ones -- and arrange them atop the bottom layer. The arrangement, like most relationships, need not be perfect to work.

The next step is where the recipe can use some tweaking.  Instead of using confectioners sugar, as the recipe calls for, use regular old white sugar.  Confectioners sugar, which contains cornstarch, does not melt in the heat of the oven, leaving the just-baked product with an odd and kind of displeasing powdery topping.  You can see it in the picture at the top and below.  (I ended up over-baking the cake because I kept waiting for the sugar to melt -- don't do that!)

But after I let it sit for a day, some kitchen magic happened:  the confectioners sugar dissolves into the apples, creating a lovely European pastry-like glaze on top. That was a nice and unexpected surprise, which tends to happen a lot more in baking than in relationships.  (Although DH turned out to be a nice and unexpected surprise, so it does happen!)

Brownies (Best Recipe)

A new study from the University of Cambridge touting the health benefits of chocolate sent me right to the kitchen last night to whip up a batch of brownies from a recipe in Olive's collection.  The recipe, attributed to one Babe Gregware, is labeled (Best Recipe), so I just had to try it, health benefits or not.

The verdict?  Excellent, very chocolate-y brownies.  DH called them "old-fashioned," quickly adding "not in a bad way."   They are not exceedingly sweet and have a lovely, fudge-like texture that hold together much better than more modern versions.   The recipe didn't specify what size pan, so I used a 9 x 12 one, thinking that because of the four eggs, they would rise.  But they didn't, yielding a thin brownie.  I do think this recipe would work well in an 8 or 9-inch square pan if you want a heftier brownie.

Whenever chocolate is the star of a recipe, as it is in brownies,  I suggest using a high quality product (like Scharfenberger or Valrhona) as opposed to Baker's.  The result is well worth it and, after all, it's for your good health, so splurge a little.

Two Zucchini Cake Wrecks

While Hurricane Irene was "raging" outside, inside my kitchen I experienced a natural disaster of another sort. Not one, but two, cake failures.

Both were for zucchini cakes.  Never a fan of serving vegetables (in any form) for dessert, I nonetheless relented when I found two seemingly good, and intriguing, recipes in Olive Facey's collection.

The bottom half of the cake *finally* released from the pan after much banging and maneuvering.

The top half clung to the pan.

In fact, one of them was quite delicious -- it just didn't release from the pan, a "fancy" bundt pan I had purchased at a garage sale.  Even though it was non-stick, I went the extra mile to grease and flour it, so as to insure a smooth release. That pan is headed for the recycling bin, just as soon as we scrap every last bit of cake out!

(Failures like this probably deters a lot of people from baking --you can do everything right, but make one mistake (like choosing the wrong pan) and all effort seems for naught.  But that's not the case, because each mistake is one you'll never make again.  And most times, you can eat your mistakes and sometimes even serve them!)

Serving an intact cake with the orange glaze I had made (fresh-squeezed orange juice with confectioners sugar) dripping down the cake's crevices would have been the perfect send-off for evacuees DD and her boyfriend.  They had stayed with us during the storm, and were just about to go back to their apartment when this came out of the oven.  But, despite its unappealing appearance, everyone loved it -- even DD's boyfriend who told me he does not like zucchini cake.  If only I had used my tried and true aluminum bundt pan, this story would have had a happier ending.

And it almost did.  I had them wait a few more minutes, while I took cake #2 out of the oven.  It looked ok at first, but then the center of the cake sunk deeper than a tropical depression.  Plus, despite the promise of a really interesting flavor (ginger and orange peel), it just wasn't that great. And oddly, even though there was just 1/2 cup zucchini in this cake (as opposed to two cups in the other one), it had a much more pronounced vegetable taste, not always a good thing.  Still, I've saved it and hoping the flavors will develop into something delicious overnight.

Both recipes are below. The first one is definitely worth another shot.