Forward To The Next Half Century (Or: It's My 51st Birthday...Let's Have Tea!)

I have a confession to make: I love celebrating my birthday! I always have and I imagine I always will. Some of my fondest early memories of my birthday include geeky gifts such as a transistor a.m. radio from – get this – Radio Shack and mint chocolate chip ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins (Mmmmmm.... Mint chocolate chip....). As a kid I thought that the two best things about my birthday were 1) it was two days before my father's birthday and 2) it was early enough in December that no one could combine it with Christmas. In all honesty, though, I still think that.

That being said, I remember the year that changed the way I thought about celebrating my birthday: my thirtieth. Thirty was a milestone for me if for no other reason than that I was leaving my twenties behind me. I was so happy not to be twenty-anything that I made up my mind to extend my thirtieth birthday for as long as I could afford to. I decided on a three-pronged attack. First I would bake my own cake and take that to work to share. Then I would have a small group of people over for dinner the night after that (which I would plan and cook). Finally, I'd invite a larger group over for brunch the following afternoon. A day's celebration for each decade of my life. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and had my happiest birthday since I first discovered Baskin Robbins mint chocolate chip ice cream cake. (Mmmmmm.... Mint chocolate chip....)

One of those wildest dreams was the cake I chose to bake. At the time I had a subscription to Bon Appétit and that summer the cover of one issue featured a beautiful wedding cake that really made an impression on me: three tiers, dark chocolate inside, white chocolate outside, with white chocolate ribbons and bows. I fell in love with it and became determined to make it someday. Well, that day turned out to be thirtieth birthday. It took four days to make, what with all the different kinds of chocolate I had to work with and the four different forms it needed to take (cake, icing, ganache, fondant). I needed two trips on the subway, from 96th Street and Broadway to 16th Street and 5th Avenue, to get it to the office. And then it took some minor engineering to set it up. Quite a trial! But it was, and remains, the best chocolate cake I've ever baked, served or eaten.

Look, Ma! No gray hair on my chinny chin chin!

The folks in my office thought I was nuts. And they were right. But that didn't stop them from enjoying the cake! (I know I have other pictures from that day and when I find them I'll be sure to post them.)

So. How did this change my attitude about my birthday, you may ask? My thirtieth gave me my first taste of celebrating by serving. I got such great joy out of planning, preparing, baking, cooking and sharing those meals with my friends that I was smitten with the idea from then on. I found it much more fun than having someone plan a party for me. That extended celebration led to the idea of gathering a group of friends for occasional afternoon teas, which led to what I called my "Big Dinners" (seven-course meals – I'll talk about those at some point). These eventually inspired my Birthday Teas.

For the last twenty years (with only a couple of missed opportunities) I've had a Tea to celebrate my birthday. I invite several good friends (all girls, well, just because), plan the menu, which always includes scones, cucumber sandwiches, some form of ginger cookie and at least a one "show stopper".

2005: cranberry scones, cucumber sandwiches, gingersnaps and apple-pear pie

A Tale of Two (Types Of) Scones: I've been baking scones for more than twenty-five years. Back in my life BNYC (Before New York City), I dated a young lady from England and one year for her birthday I decided to bake her something from her country. I chose scones because they are odd cousins to biscuits (although the English would deny such a connection). I used the recipe from my favorite quick breads cookbook, Carol Cutler's Greatest Fast Breads, and the young lady pronounced them almost as good as what she could get at home. My scones are small, rounded, light and easy to slice and spread with whatever jam, jelly, butter is on the table. That's one type, the correct type, of scones. The other type, the type usually found in bakeries and coffee shops and similar places in America, are gigantic, mutant shaped and generally scoffed at by anyone from the British Isles. I will not eat any of these and I suggest you run like mad if ever anyone tries to serve you one.

Fini

I always have a variety of teas for the tea drinkers and good coffee for those who enjoy their cuppa Joe. The menu is usually pretty easy, since, as I said, I know the dishes that will serve as the anchor of the meal. The surprise dishes are always fun to plan and bake.

2010: I added sweet potato pie and shortbread to the table.

Last year I completely ignored a rule I made up on the spot and served two dishes I'd never made before: what turned out to be the first iteration of my ginger lemon creams and my first take on my Nana's egg custard pie.

2011: scones, ginger lemon cream cookies v1.0, apple pie (not pictured: egg custard pie)

This year I had to serve the new ginger lemon creams (since there were several guests who'd had them last year) just to show how they'd evolved. I also baked an apple-pear pie (one of my staples) but this year I used 1) the second of two pie baking dishes Michele got for me last year and 2) an antique porcelain pie bird (c. 1920, if my hasty research is correct) that my step-mother-in-law gave me. Michele told me that this actually belonged to her grandmother (her father's mother).

Royal Worchester, England bird inside the Emile Henri, France dish

Two parts, which is a bit uncommon, I think.

I'd never seen one before and had to ask her what it was for. Once she explained that it was a way to vent steam out of the pie (usually the job of slits cut in the top crust) I knew I had to use it with the very next pie I baked. This one is different from most of the ones I've seen on-line because it's in two pieces and the bird is graceful, even regal in appearance. And it helped make one of the best, if not the best, apple pies I've ever pulled out of an oven!

Not one of the four-and-twenty blackbirds but it did help the pie sing with sweet deliciousness!

2012: slice of apple-pear pie and ginger lemon cream cookie

The other show stopper on the menu was a batch of half-sized ice cream sandwiches. I made something like nineteen of them because I wanted leftovers. I love them so much that I'll eat them even in the "off-season"! They were exceptionally well received...as I knew they would be.

Half the size. All the tastiness!

I do get presents on my birthday and I'm happy to receive them but my biggest present is hosting the Tea. I love finding new recipes for the show stopper(s). I love the smells the inhabit the apartment when I'm cooking and baking. I love it when I pull a batch of scones out of the oven and they've got just the right amount of brown on the crust. I love the smiles and "Ooos" and "Ahhs" as each dish is presented and the thrilled jaw-drops at the show stoppers. Plying my friends with warmth, delicious food and wonderful camaraderie is the birthday present that fulfills me like nothing else in the world.

I want to do this forever.

Currently listening to: Michael Henderson and Roberta Flack – At The Concert

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cattus rumpo baker.

Or, to loosely translated: "The cat interrupts the baker." I was deep in prepping and baking for Christmas Eve gathering of friends and Christmas Dinner with in-laws. While I was waiting for Michele to finish up something in the kitchen a cat suddenly appeared in my almost lap.

This is what I get for slowing down for even one second...

Close enough, I suppose. (And, yes, they're Grinch pants - thank you, big sister Karla!)

Speaking of laps and cats...doesn't every baker research recipes using a cat to warm up his apron?

Lectio per cattus in sinus. (Reading with cat on the lap. I know it sounds much worse in the Latin.)

That is all.

Currently listening to: Little Dragon - Twice (16 Bit Remix)

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Law & Order: SBU (Special Bakers Unit) - Part 2

In the last episode, the lemon pound cake laid the ground work for a baking sequel. This is that sequel. The names of the dishes haven't been changed to protect the innocent. You have the right to remain hungry. Anything you eat may be used to delight your taste buds or add inches to your waistline. Or some such silliness.

When you're on a jury for such a long time, you can grow a little fond of the people with whom you serve. You trudge through the depths of the criminal justice system, deciding the fate of people's lives, having heated deliberations, sharing bits and pieces of your own lives outside of the jury room and when you realize it's almost over you're struck with the sense of an impending loss. As I said earlier, I've served on three other juries here in New York but this was the first time I felt that. Yes, I was going to be happy to get back to my normal routine but I still felt a kind of connection with these people and I wanted to leave them with something that would give them a smile or a fond memory of our time together.

Thus I hatched the grand baking plot. Something savory and something sweet. Since I'd been mulling over a new version of the ginger lemon creams, that was an easy decision for the sweet part of the plot. The savory part initially was to have been scones but I had to shelve that idea for want of buttermilk and clotted cream. I know I could have made both of those items but I really didn't have the time. Corn muffins would have to do. Granted, I'd never made corn muffins before but I had a jury to feed, dang it! I wasn't about to let something like a lack of experience with a dish get in my way.

Usually that kind of attitude sets the stage for some little baking disaster; not so this time. I had the right recipe (thank you again, Good Housekeeping Cookbook), two muffin tins and plenty of cornmeal for the endeavor. 

Assemble the ingredients!

By the by, one of these days I'll have a proper prep counter. This one I got at Ikea many years ago and it has a bit too much lateral shimmy when I roll pastry or use the mixer on it.

Förhöja - how in the heck do you pronounce that?

Still, has its advantages, not the least of which is that I can move it pretty easily if I need it in another room. Also, it's been a boon since we have such a small kitchen, with very limited counter space. It's like having a little kitchen extension.

You know, there's something about the smell of mixing anything involving cornmeal that takes me back to my mother's kitchen. I loved her cornbread and her dressing, which was cornbread based. I used to hang around the kitchen just to smell the cornbread baking after she popped it into the oven. This little project connected me to my mother in a way that I hadn't anticipated and for that I'm truly grateful.

Take all this....

...mix and bake...

...and pop them out!

All of this I did in the morning of my last day of jury duty. It's a good thing I naturally get up early, yes?

As for the ginger lemon creams, I started those days and days before. You'd think by now I would have settled on the definitive version of these cookies but something happened that made me want to refine it even more: I bought (wait for it)...a zester!

(dramatic sting)

Michele and I went for a wander around Brooklyn for flea markets, brunch and window shopping and I ended up in Whisk. It's a pretty cool, if small store, chock-full of gadgets that could get a guy like me to spend a lot of money (if, that is, I had a lot of money, which I don't). I resisted every temptation the place threw at me but I kept coming back to the Microplane zester. Something about hating zesting lemons and oranges and never having a proper tool bubbled to the forefront of my baking brain. It bubbled so hard that I threw caution to the wind and bought this one:

It was the purple handle that did it for me!

I know what Isaid about keeping this cookie as simple as possible but I just couldn't resistthe desire to taste what lemon zest would add to the filling. So there I was,scraping the outer rind of a couple of lemons into the other ingredients. Ihave to admit using a proper zester made all the difference in my experience. Iwas finished in no time -- and not once did I scrape any knuckles orfingertips! Oh the years I've wasted and the skin I've lost for want of an actual zester!

Once I had allthe zest I thought I'd need, I made another recipe-altering decision: use the lemonsto make a little reduction to add to the filling. Why the heck not? In for apenny, in for an even more complicated process, I always say. At this point I was kind of off the beatentrack and had to let my instincts, and what small amount of dessert making skill I've garnered over the years, guide me in.

A quick word about "skill": I think it's important to point out that there are times in my baking life in which I got lucky when I was trying to be skillful. Trust me when I say it's better to be skillful.

A quick word ends.

Luck and skill combined to give me a filling that seemed to have more lemony body than before and that made me very happy indeed!

Adding those two steps increased the difficulty of the process, so I had to devise a way to reduce the difficulty just as much. Fortunately for me, my brain had already devised just such a way. Using the "Just A Guy Who Bakes" stamp causes problems for me because it tends to squish the cookie rounds a bit so that some of them are larger than others and some of them lose their round shape. Not only that but a high level of dexterity and delicate spatula work is involved in transferring the rounds to the cookie sheet for baking. This can also deform them somewhat. Remember, the idea for these cookies is to approximate something I'd buy in the store (but much better all the way around), so I'm a big stickler for uniformity. How to surmount this problem?

Easy-peasy. Cut parchment paper to fit the cookie sheets. 

These are baking tools?

Roll the cookie dough on the parchment. Cut the cookie rounds. Then comes the cool bit: Work with negative space! Stamp the desired number of rounds with "Just A Guy Who Bakes" and simply remove the dough around each round until all you have left are the rounds, already on the parchment! 

Negative space...the final frontier!

See? It works!

Then take pick up the parchment, put it on the cookie sheet, and pop the whole kit and kaboodle into the oven. Once the cookies finish baking, put them on the cooling rack and reuse the parchment for the next batch. I couldn't believe how much quicker things went after I started using this process.

I guess I was on a roll because another idea hit me. Actually, it's something that should have occurred to me for my first ever batch of these cookies. I was staring filling, ready to spread onto the cookies and it hit me. Why use a spatula when you can use a pastry bag? Actually I had a pretty good answer to that question: "Because I forgot I had a pastry bag! I pulled it out, loaded it up and squeezed out dollop after dollop of icing. It's a crappy pastry bag, plastic and slippery, but it worked like a charm.

Use the bag, Luke!

The pastry bag made for much less mess and also made it easier to gauge how much filling I was putting on each cookie. I love learning things as I go! I will be procuring a couple of better pastry bags in the future. I already know of at least two other uses for them, so they're now a necessity for me to have.

Finito!

I packed everything up and took it downtown to the courthouse. Getting it through security proved no problem. I envisioned having to bribe the court officers with a muffin or a cookie, but fortunately the X-ray machine doesn't register baked goods. Once upstairs I placed it all in the little break room and let everyone know that there were goodies to be had. And had they were! At the end of the day, my baker's heart was light and happy because there wasn't a muffin or a cookie left!

Case closed. (Oh, come on! You knew I'd have to do that!)

Currently listen to: The Temper Trap - Sweet Disposition (Alto Remix)

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Law & Order: SBU (Special Bakers Unit)

(Preface: I started this post a couple of months ago but am only just now getting around to posting it. I had to recreate the dishes I prepared because at the time I didn't have the time to photograph them. Oh. And there was a giant super storm that swooped in on us. Oh. And then there was the snowstorm.)

In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These aren't their stories. This is my story of baking and jurisprudence.

You know what comes next (click here)!

The mailbox is an amazing thing. You open it up, reach in and pull out all manner of missives from people who want your money. Every so often, though, you pull out something that causes your heart to seize, your stomach to drop and your blood run cold: "Official Notice: Grand Jury Summons". Yeah, that's the one. Over the twenty-odd years I've lived in New York, I've had jury duty three times and I've been picked to serve on a criminal jury each time. No one else I've talked to has that kind of, for want of a better word, luck. For some reason prosecuting and defense attorneys seem to love me. Come to think of it, I've never gotten out of serving, even when I lived in Dallas. This was, however, the first grand jury summons I'd ever gotten. Sure enough, I got picked and had to serve for ten, count them, ten days. Not a complaint, mind you; I happen to think jury duty is one of the most important responsibilities we have as members of this society, so I was happy to serve.

I can't tell you about the cases we saw because grand juries are sworn to secrecy. I also can't tell you about our deliberation process because grand juries are sworn to secrecy. Furthermore, I can't talk about the witnesses, undercover cops, victims or defendants from whom we heard testimony because grand juries are sworn to secrecy. There's a lot of secrecy swearing involved with grand juries, apparently. However, we weren't sworn to secrecy about what prosecutors were wearing: really unattractive ties, ill-fitting suits, badly-chosen hairstyles and ill-advised shoes. 

The other thing about which I am not sworn to secrecy is how cool I thought the other jurists were, even the ones I didn't get to talk with much. We had a broad range of ages, varied backgrounds, and careers that ran the gamut. And there was not one of us who took the duty lightly. I have to take my hat off to my associates. And that's where the baking comes into the story (Took me long enough, didn't it?)

Just like in the show! 

After having convened for almost a full week, I figured that I could help ease our deliberative burden by bringing in something delicious, but not too decadent. Pound cake was the obvious choice. I say that because it's the dessert I've been working on lately.

A Brief Personal History of Pound Cake: My pound cake experience begins and pretty much ends with my grandmother's version. The summer before I entered the first grade – 19 and 69, I believe – I took a cross country car trip to from San Antonio to L.A. with one of my aunts and her family. It was quite a journey which included a stop in Arizona, a gift of a rubber bladed tomahawk/flute and a deep appreciation of an overnight stay in a  motel (my first, if memory serves). The highpoint, however, was helping to devour the pound cake my Nana baked for us. This is a memory I'm preserving for both of us, since she says she doesn't remember it now. At any rate, the cake was moist, buttery-delicious and has been the gold standard for pound cake for most of my life.

A Brief Personal History of Pound Cake ends.

As I said, I'd been working on pound cake recipes before my jury duty stint, mainly because that L.A. trip memory bobbed to the surface of my mind when I was fishing around for a new baking project. The first recipe I tried came from my copy of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible.

I got this years and years ago but have barely touched it because I've been more of a pie/scone/tart baker than a cake baker over the years. I've only recently started going through it again and it's proving to be very interesting in its lessons on technique and attention to process detail. I figured if there was any place I'd find an excellent pound cake recipe, it would be between the covers of this book. I was only partly right.

When I told my father that I was baking pound cake, he laughed and suggested I not use the traditional recipe of "a pound of everything", which I'm sure is close to what Nana did for her cake. Fortunately the recipe in The Cake Bible substantially reduces the chances of a coronary incident for anyone partaking.

I have to admit that I wasn't pleased. Despite the description of the cake being velvety smooth and moist, mine turned out drier than I wanted. It was tasty but not what I was looking for. I'm going to have to give the recipe another shot later, because I'm sure something in my technique screwed it up. Still, I learned a bit from the book. For example, according to Ms. Beranbaum, sugar in a recipe also serves to cut up flour in the mixing to help release gluten. Baking is science!

Learning is fine but I still needed a cake I felt good about sharing with folks. I wanted something as rich and moist as my Nana's cake but without the heavy ingredients. Unfortunately the Good Housekeeping Cookbook wasn't any help. It's perfect for many things but sometimes it just comes up short. Once again, it was up to the Internet to lend a helping hand. Searching turned up several interesting recipes but only the one from King Arthur Flour caught my eye.

Another quick aside: Something I discovered years ago when I started doing my seven course, sit-down "Big Dinners" (again, remind me to tell you about some of them), is that I have the ability to read most recipes and tell if they are in the ballpark of what I want from a dish. It's a kind of recipe sixth sense ("my dessert sense is tingling...") that seems to keep me on the right track. It kicked in when I found the King Arthur recipe, and saw the addition of cream cheese; I just knew it was the right one. Also, any recipe that calls for lemon oil can't be bad! I mean, in case you haven't noticed yet, I do enjoy lemon-flavored foods.

Another quick aside ends.

The recipe was easy to make and the end product, especially with the addition of the lemon glazing, was delicious! Just the right amount of moist for the desired texture but not heavy at all. It wasn't as fluffy and tall as a Sara Lee pound cake (which used to be very good and even Ms. Beranbaum talks about it in her book) but it certainly had a superior taste. The lemon glaze hits your tongue with an initial "zing" and then the buttery sweetness of the cake just melts in your mouth. Days later, it's still moist and tasty. This one is certainly a keeper for sure.

Interestingly enough I baked two different versions of this recipe: a round, bunt-style, for lunch with a friend of ours visiting from San Francisco, and the standard loaf pan-style for the Grand Jury. I love a recipe that gives me pan options because that helps with presentation and transportation. I very much enjoyed baking both versions and rekindling certain cake skills from memories of watching my mother, such as using wax paper coated in shortening to grease the pans – which suddenly reminds me that she also dusted the pans with flour to further keep her cakes from sticking. The advent of non-stick pans practically eliminates the need for these steps but the traditionalist in me wants to keep them – to honor my mother and grandmothers and all the bakers who preceded them. And I shall.  

At any rate, here's how the cake turned out:

Deliberate this!

I pre-cut the cake, boxed it up and carried it downtown to the ccourt building in which our grand jury was impaneled. My fellow jurors were pleasantly surprised when they saw the cake on the table in the break room (yes, there was a break room; I wasn't sworn to secrecy about that). It warmed my heart every time someone came out of that room with a slice and a smile. That's the best payoff for me as a baker.

This, of course, set the stage for a SBU sequel.

Currently listening to: Stevie Wonder - Free

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