White Rabbits, Figgy demerara snacking cake, or something

Saturday was about enjoying slices of the chicken, really one of the best I've had, tender, and the flavor of the herbs just right, with shells tossed with my mayo, broccoli bits and capers.

Then I made a figgy demerara snacking cake, Melissa Clark, NYT. Except I used plums, natural cane sugar and extra vanilla because I didn't have brandy, or figs or demerera sugar. The sugar is sprinkled on top as well as mixed in the batter. 

I love this recipe, which makes quite a few pieces, the cake part rich with butter especially if you use lovely Irish butter which I did, then the plums just a bit tart and juicy. 

Here's the cast of characters, the plums prepped a couple of days ago, when I felt like it.  I used part white, part chickpea flour. 

Here it's going into a 400°f oven for about 40 minutes. 

It's a sort of sheet cake, which I slice with a pizza cutter, approx one plum quarter per piece.

I completely forgot to take pictures of the baked result, but a couple of pieces with a pot of tea went over so well. 

I've put a box of them in the freezer in case Handsome Son visits this week. He's working the holiday, as usual, but it's time and a half $$ Sunday and Monday, nice boost. His day off is midweek.

Then a neighbor came over to give me more dill, she's got a glut, and I gave her sage and thyme. We talked hearing aids and she's decided since I'm doing well, she'll go to my doctor and try to get my audiologist, nice Dr Han.

Her situation is different,  since cancer treatment caused her hearing loss, but the result is the same. She was impressed at the almost invisibility of the aids. I'm mainly happy they don't fight with my glasses!

Maybe Gary will also get around to it. He did get them made, but never went to pick them up! Men seem to be much more reluctant to use them than women, for some reason.

Anyway up to now they're going smoothly, and there's a significant drop in tinnnitus when I wear them. Right now I'm listening to crickets cricketing away. I thought we hadn't any this year. 

Turns out I wasn't hearing them, peaceful summer evening sound. At first I even thought it was tinnitus, until I realized how it varied. Oh, kerrrickets.

And now lookit, suddenly it's September. With Edith Holden showing it to us. That's a European goldfinch. 

And a favorite poem

Happy day everyone, I hope your crickets are the good kind, not the being ignored variety.

Busy day for better and worse

 I'd decided to make sausages rolls, my mom's way, small, rolled and sealed with pinching, no egg wash. Not the doorsteps with a handle on of the Budget Baker. But he gave me the idea, so there's that. 

Also the apricots were soaked and all plump for the cake.

So I embarked on a marathon of baking. I made my yogurt based pastry, always just crisp enough but not all flakes everywhere. I used this for pasties a while back and liked it a lot.

It's years since I made sausage rolls, decades even. Handsome Son will probably have a stroll down memory lane when he tries them.

The sausage is the very spicy plant-based stuff, no need to do anything to it other than shape it and roll it up. Served here with great tender Florida pole beans (!) and pickled red onions.  A dozen rolls, from one roll of the sausage stuff.  Really good too.

Meanwhile I was making the batter for the apricot snacking cake. It uses two sticks of butter but it made 32 pieces of cake, so, when amortized, fine. It's also not very sweet, which I like.

Notice the clean curtains from upstairs while you're strolling round the kitchen.

 

Apricots halved, ready to stud the cake batter. 

This was originally Melissa Clark's Figgy Demerera Snacking Cake. I've used various fruit including plums in the past, but ripe figs aren't a thing here, and I didn't have Demerera so I sprinkled regular white, and I didn't have brandy so I did without.

But it's really good and supplies enough for a battalion or a couple of neighboring kids plus Handsome Son, Gary and me.

In the middle of this I got an alert to tell me the special online lecture on Ndop cloth was not at 1pm, as I'd thought, but at noon.

So I ended up pushing tablet buttons to get screenshots while rolling pastry and sausage and wielding bench scrapers, and generally trying to do several incompatible things at once. 

In the middle of lunch, sausage rolls hot on my plate, while the cake was in the oven, and I'd finally sat down to watch the presentation as planned, a neighbor stopped in.

Gary's in the hospital, sudden pulmonary thing, yesterday morning. They're keeping him three days, he's seemingly doing okay, but everyone is worried.  Neighbor and I may visit tomorrow if he's up for it. Definitely uneasy. 

So I missed a bit of the Ndop program but I think I got the gist for you, and blogged about it in a special post.

Also in the local news 

The scallions are growing!

And I found in reading the current Sacks, that Humphry Davy, the chemist, inventor of the miner's lamp, was also a poet. In his time, early nineteenth century, academic disciplines weren't so separated.

Here's what stunned me 

He had great respect for the elegance and inventiveness of Davy's use of language. And he too was a chemist as well as a poet.

Also a later improved version of the miner's lamp was invented by an ancestor of Oliver Sacks. The stuff you learn from books.

Anyway I did get to sit and stitch, after all this activity today.

I've been dreaming about this book, all kinds of new ideas for stitching the next page,  as well as anxiety about how to construct it! Brain never rests, despite the daily chair yoga.

About which I'm happy to say my hip is much happier, which seems to confirm my thought that's it's the cartilage, not the joint, complaining. Stretching is working. Neck, too, is doing better. All's good. 

Happy day everyone, don't do all the things at once like me. A person gets tired.

Red plum alert, raspberries too

The black plums having all gone into jam, I can now attend to the red plums which have been ripening on the counter.

I made one of those Melissa Clark Figgy Demerera Snacking Cake deals. No figs, no Demerera sugar, but that's fine.

It occurs to me that my Inner Me needs four workspaces to make a simple cake.

The instructions

One lot of ingredients

The plums

The buttered, floured, tray.

But I do get plenty of steps in, whipping back and forth.

And I get a cake organized with red plums.

And sampled, with a cup of tea. 

I have ordered another supply of tea, this time Scottish Breakfast, in honor of Glaswegian Handsome Partner whose 89th birthday is tomorrow. He stopped ten years short but who's counting.

And I have this year's raspberries, so expensive but I'm worth it, in the freezer for some purpose TBA. Three pints. Picked by the farm yesterday a few hours before I froze them.

It's a short season, just a few days now, more in September when they bear again.

If you have ideas other than jam,  please let me know. 

Long time no figs, and other shouts from the past

Ages since I made Figgy Snack Cake, and I've had great Misfits dried figs in the freezer for a while. So last night I got one package out and left the figs overnight in water to soften and shape up.

Which they did, then I hauled out the Melissa Clark recipe, which you see here, not to squint at in order to use, just to get the reference if you're interested.

 

Usual disclaimers: I don't have demerera sugar and couldn't be bothered to mix molasses with white as a sub, so white it was. I don't have brandy, so added in extra milk for the liquid missing.  None of these makes a discernible difference, to me.

So here's the dough in process about to have an egg added. After this, alternating flour mixture and milk, and it's done, a spreadable dough. This makes a ton of cake.

And you halve the figs, press them in cut side down. The whole container did it. You could use any sturdy stone fruit.

And since I noticed the oven temp needed was 400°f, just right also for a pasty, I put the cake in the oven, then rolled out a chunk of dough to make a chicken pasty.

The cake was in for 45 minutes, so the pasty went in for the last 20. Worked fine.  

The filling was the rest of the chicken salad I'd made using a fancy flavored spreading cheese I found at a terrific price in my recent grocery outing. Close to sell by date, but I planned on using it right away, it was reduced from 4.99 to .99 that is not a typo. And it's Rondele, a brand I haven't thought of for years. 

You forget these little occasional treats when you don't shop at Western supermarkets for years. Between farm and Asian store and Misfits, I'm a stranger in the supermarket. 

Not a sad heart though. Do you know Randall Jarrell's A Sad Heart st the Supermarket? Wonderful writing, wonderful person, gone too soon.

Anyway here's lunch ready to go in.

And the cake and pie a while later. Both pretty good. After the cook's sample, there are containers in freezer and fridge. We're caked to saturation point for now.

It's fruit and whole wheat flour, milk, all suitable for breakfast. Or any time really.

Which is good because I have plenty of stuff to attend to. This is the latest Maisie Dobbs, and it's excellent. Runs from 1940 to  late 1941 in Britain. 

Great complications of spies being smuggled into occupied France, French spies in Britain liaising with secret operations, you never knew who would turn out to be an agent. 

Historically accurate even to the fast running little schoolboys acting as foot couriers for MI 5, under bombardment, everything, incredibly brave little kids, news to me. But the author's father was one of them, so she can attest.

And since I'm ready to assemble these pieces any time now, I need listening material, too.

Turns out this will be my Martha Stewart skirt, it evidently being a MS pillowslip, nice quality cotton, drapes well.

So here's an Angela Thirkell, she wrote a lot and you think of the books as thirkells like a unit of currency. 

I can't read her much in print, but with a terrific narrator like this one, known under various names, Nadia May, Wanda McCarron probably because she did a lot of work, it goes well.

She is excellent, well worth finding. Great perception of the subtleties, knows how the rhythm goes, plenty of energy but doesn't draw attention to herself. 

Thirkell wrote comedies of manners, similar social context as Austen, Pym, Benson, very wry, gentle but astute. Great to sew by.

And here's an ancient one I put on my Kindle for old times' sake, classic advice to writers which I read long ago, as a kid, and even then the library copy was tattered. 

This is a bit of memory lane as much as a reading event. It's about writing without trying to impress on the reader how hard it is to write material that's easy to read. She realizes there's no need, they'll find that out soon enough. It's encouraging instead, what a concept.

The decks are cleared for the arrival of the Misfits box this afternoon, all being well.  Then it's a frenzy of washing and slicing and chopping and freezing. And gloating, don't forget gloating.

Fast breaking news everywhere, including upcoming events for me, but meanwhile..

There's always cake.  To be exact, Blueberry Snacking Cake, a variation on Melissa Clark's recipe.  You can find this online.

Always turns out well, and today's blueberries burst in the cake very pleasingly, and now it looks like a constellation cake!  The gap you see on one corner is the cook's privilege. Two privileges, but who's counting.

She uses brandy, I used red wine, not having any spirits available, ever, really, and she uses Demerara sugar, and again, not having it, I used regular white granulated. She uses figs, and I didn't.  It still comes out well.  And when you see two whole sticks of butter, whoa, a lot, but this 18 x 12 cake makes about 30 slices, more if you're stingy.  So the butter divided across that many isn't a lot after all.  And it uses whole wheat flour. One instruction I particularly like is where she says to "nestle" the fruit on top of the batter.  The nestling part is good.

I separated out a little group to freeze for some future teaparty. I finally realized that I can do this, then not have all the work to do right before the little event. And it is little. One guest!  I like to chat and listen at whatever length the guest likes, and I think it's a sort of interval in busy lives for the people who've accepted. And they get to wander about looking at what's on the walls, no need to be polite.

This one was baked in an interval of great art related busyness, everything happening at once,  more about that later, when things have fewer moving parts.  I swear one day I will retire, but then I wonder what I'd do if I didn't have unnerving things coming at me all the time...I may never know.  This is not in the nature of a complaint, more like humble bragging, really!

Back in the Kitchen, with the Cake as Big as a Football Field

This month the Bite Club selection is Melissa Clark, whom I've often heard on WNYC talking at such speed that I rarely get more than a word here and there.  But her books are entertaining and very conversational in tone, and today I took a shot at a recipe from Cook This Now.  This was for a figgy demerara snacking cake.

Except I don't have fresh figs, nobody does in this region right now, and I didn't have brandy, which she puts in her baking.  So I used black plums, quartered and pitted, and subbed the brandy with merlot, figuring that if she's after an alcohol touch, that should work. And I didn't have demerara sugar for sprinkling over the top, so I used ordinary granulated.

And I had to buy a new baking pan to accommodate this giant cake, which she explains is so big because you can't reduce the recipe without ruining it.  Because -- one egg! etc.

Her instructions say, after making the batter, to nestle the fruit on top all over it.  And as I was nestling away, I realized I was making a giant version of Marion Burros plum torte...oh. I make hers in August using prune plums, but other than that, not a lot of difference.

Except that I actually like this one better, grainy with wholewheat flour, and at 18 x 13, enough cake for the foreseeable future, which suits me fine, needing a little something when I'm home in the afternoon for tea.  I did feel as if I were cooking for a summer camp, though. But I'm glad to have the new baking pan, since my old ones are not quite up to the task after decades of use.

I'm listening to The Big Short, about the financial prime mortgage collapse and what led up to it, very good stuff to bake by, even if I did get a bit lost in the financial technicalities, but since I remember it all coming down, it in fact worked fine for me, explaining a lot of what was mysterious when it was in the news. 

And when you're hearing about the blind greed verging on lunacy that brought about the housing finance collapse, it's good to be grounded and baking and generally doing something sane and part of civilized life, and with a desirable result.