The Secret Lives of Baked Goods
Page 14
In 1992, when a toaster failed to eject a Pop-Tart and the would-be eater’s kitchen caught on fire, the Pop-Tart briefly suffered a reputation as a snack that could kill you.
Pop-Tarts were invented in the post–World War II era, when the Post company was developing new products, trying to satisfy a demand for foods that were convenient and had a long shelf life. The now-familiar foil packaging was originally used as a way of preserving a type of moist dog food; Post altered it slightly to accommodate a new people-food treat that they called Country Squares. Unfortunately, loose-lipped employees shared the secret of the product in development before it was released, giving their rival, Kellogg’s, a chance to come up with a competitive product—and obviously to think up a better name.
Kellogg’s was able to bring the pastries to market in short order, with a name that worked on a double level, referring to not only the product but to the Pop Art movement of the era. Pop-Tarts took the market by storm, advertised by an animated toaster named Milton; the company literally could not keep shelves stocked. The first Pop-Tarts came out in four flavors: strawberry, blueberry, brown sugar– cinnamon, and apple currant. The first three are still with us. The fate of Country Squares? Well, when’s the last time you saw a box at your local grocery store?
When the tarts made their 1964 debut, their role as breakfast superstar was not yet clear. Retailers were actually urged by the manufacturer to place the tarts in the bakery or the cake mix section of their store, rather than in the cereal section. The original Pop-Tarts were also unfrosted, the thought being that the frosting might melt and cause problems in the toaster. Happily, great minds were put to work on the issue, and a toaster-safe frosted version came out in 1967.
The life of the Pop-Tart hasn’t been without its share of woes, though. In the early 1990s, there was an unfortunate bout of toaster clogging in the United Kingdom, where it turns out their toasters, like their accents, are different from ours. In 1992, when a toaster failed to eject a Pop-Tart and the would-be eater’s kitchen caught on fire, the Pop-Tart briefly suffered a reputation as a snack that could kill you. Kellogg’s has made some bad decisions, too: consider the ill-fated addition of Go-Tarts (slender Pop-Tart sticks meant for on-the-go consumption) to the line—which is definitely not as fun as cramming an entire Pop-Tart in your mouth, judging by their speedy discontinuation. There have also been flavor hits (the most excellent S’more Pop-Tart), and misses (I, for one, did not find the neon-toned Wild! Berry tarts appetizing).
But like so many things we create ourselves, half the fun of making these treats is getting to decide on the important individual touches—like what kind of filling you want to use. The possibilities are almost endless, so don’t feel you’re limited to jams and other fruit-based products. Who says you can’t have a tart filled with chocolaty Nutella or your sister’s famous rum-spiked caramel? Or how about inventing a savory filling, like an herbed goat cheese mixture?
Toaster-Style Pastries
THESE TARTS ARE A BELOVED PART of our culture—a quick breakfast that tends to be favored by the young but that carries warm memories for us all.
Makes 6 to 8 pastries
FOR THE PASTRY:
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup (1 stick) butter, chilled and cut into cubes
3 tablespoons cold whole or 2% milk
About ½ cup jam, preserves, peanut butter, ganache, or other filling of your choice
FOR THE ICING:
1 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
2 tablespoons milk or heavy cream, plus extra as needed
FOR GARNISH:
Sprinkles (optional)
1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2. To make the dough, combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. Add the butter and cut into the flour using 2 forks or a pastry cutter. Blend until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the milk, bit by bit, gently mixing the dough after each addition, until the dough forms a ball (you may not need all the milk).
3. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and roll it into a large rectangle, about ⅛ inch thick. Cut out rectangles approximately the size of index cards (3 by 5 inches), or smaller if you prefer a more modest portion. Make sure you have an even number of cutouts.
4. Transfer half of the rectangles to your prepared baking sheet (if they’re hard to handle, use a metal spatula to transfer the pieces). On half of the rectangles, place 1 tablespoon of jam or other filling in the center. Add another plain rectangle on top of each piece, pressing down gently to spread the filling toward the edges.
5. Crimp all 4 edges of the pastry with the tines of a fork to ensure that the filling doesn’t ooze out. Poke the top of each pastry with the fork to allow steam to vent.
6. Bake for 7 to 9 minutes, or until light golden on the edges. Remove from the oven and let cool completely.
7. To make the icing, in a medium bowl, mix the confectioners’ sugar with just enough milk to make a glaze that is thick but still pourable. Drizzle it over the cooled pastries. Garnish with sprinkles immediately.
8. These tarts are best served warm. Since the homemade treats are not necessarily “toaster stable” (I know, I know), reheat in a toaster oven on a low toasting setting for 2 to 3 minutes rather than in a conventional toaster.
CURIOUS CONFECTIONS
SOME BAKED GOODS ARE A LITTLE DIFFERENT from others. In this chapter, we celebrate these items, ranging from sweets with strange names to unusual urban legends to pies associated with political-religious movements. There’s even a bit of sex and drugs thrown in. These unique desserts may first grab your attention with their stories, but they’ll reward you with great taste, too.
I KNOW, I KNOW. IT READS LIKE AN URBAN LEGEND: pot brownies named after Alice B. Toklas. But believe it or not, the famed salon hostess and longtime Gertrude Stein companion and secretary really does have a legitimate connection to the cannabis-infused treats—though when you get down to it, they’re not brownies at all; they’re hand-rolled, vaguely health food–esque nuggets of confection with a Middle Eastern spice flair.
Toklas claimed ignorance regarding the secret ingredient, later protesting that she didn’t recognize the Latin name.
As the story goes, Toklas, while being a vital part of the arts scene, wasn’t necessarily the writer in the family—her “autobiography” was written by her lifelong companion, Gertrude Stein, for instance—and when it came time to hand in the manuscript for her popular autobiographical cookbook, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in the 1950s, many of the stories and recipes from her book were actually contributed by her bohemian buddies.
One of the artists she hit up was Brion Gysin, a sort of avant-garde Renaissance man who worked as a painter, writer, performance artist, and “sound poet.” Followers of the Beat movement may recognize him as the inventor of the “dream machine,” made famous when written about by William S. Burroughs. So why ask him for a recipe? Turns out, among his other talents he had been a restaurateur in Tangiers for a time. This was Gysin’s entrée into Tangiers society and culture, including some of its many hallucinatory delights.
The restaurant went out of business after a few years, and Gysin went to live in Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse that would later become famous as the Beat Hotel. It was in Paris that he became one of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s pets.
Of course, he hadn’t forgotten those delightful Moroccan discoveries, and when asked to produce a recipe, his entry was for something called Hashish Fudge. In the book, it’s described as “easy to whip up on a rainy day” but warns that moderation is key and that one should be prepared for an onslaught of visions and thoughts on “many simultaneous planes.”
Needless to say, the readers noticed this subversive sweet right away, and it caused quite an uproar. While it was too late to remove the recipe from the UK printings, it was edited for the US release. For her part, Toklas c
laimed ignorance regarding the secret ingredient, later protesting that she didn’t recognize the Latin name. Still, you can’t un-ring a bell like that, and the naughty recipe was apparently great PR: the book went on to become a best-seller, and is considered a classic in the biographical cookbook genre.
Toklas’s name became associated with not only the brownies, but with cannabis-infused foods of all sorts. The pop culture connection was sealed with the 1968 film I Love You Alice B. Toklas, in which a character portrayed by Peter Sellers leaves behind his boring life after falling in love with a pot brownie–baking free spirit. He goes on to become disenchanted with the hippie culture—but that’s another story.
Toklas “Truffles”
THIS RECIPE MAKES MORSELS THAT ARE QUITE PLEASANT: dense with dried fruits and chopped nuts, not too sweet, and fragrant with distinctively Middle Eastern spices. Here’s a “toke-less” recipe adapted from the famous one, because as the recipe itself notes, “Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties …”
Makes 20 truffles
1½ teaspoons ground black peppercorns
½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon freshly ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground coriander
¼ cup dates
¼ cup dried figs
¼ cup almonds
¼ cup pistachios
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons butter
1. Mix the peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, and coriander together in a small bowl. Set aside.
2. Chop the dates, figs, almonds, and pistachios very finely; stir them together in a medium bowl. If you’re including the special ingredient, now is when you’d add it. Just saying. Mix in the spices. Set aside.
3. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the brown sugar and stir until it has mostly dissolved into the butter. Take the pan off the heat; add the rest of the ingredients and stir until the mixture comes together.
4. Roll the confections into small balls, or press the whole amount into a lightly buttered pan. Let set for about 30 minutes, or until it cools to room temperature. If you’ve pressed the mixture into a pan, cut it into small pieces before serving.
IT WOULD BE HIGHLY APPROPRIATE to place cakes in the category of pleasures such as pizza and sex, in that even when they’re bad, they’re still good. Still, there’s a definite difference between good and so-bad-it’s-good. And in the case of Better than Sex Cake, we’re definitely into the latter territory.
Though foodies may balk at this stellar cast of bad-decision ingredients, it’s really quite tasty.
There’s a magnum-sized spectrum of varieties of this cake, but in its purest form it’s comprised of cake mix, crushed pineapple, vanilla pudding mix, whipped topping, pecans, coconut, and—if you’re lucky—a cherry on top. Though foodies may balk at this stellar cast of bad-decision ingredients, it’s really quite tasty. If you want to get kinky, it even has an evil twin—one that features chocolate cake, caramel, sweetened condensed milk, crushed candy bars, and once again, whipped topping. Both versions are characterized by the method in the making, which includes poking the cake with the tines of a fork so the fillings can seep in, making for a cake that is somewhere between a trashy tres leches cake and a souped-up pudding cake.
It’s a cake that has, over the years, been called other things: Almost Better than Sex Cake, Better than Robert Redford Cake, Finger Lickin’ Good Cake, Earthquake Cake, Holy Cow Cake, OMG Cake. So why would it still be best known as the Better than Sex Cake? Probably for the same reason that Sex on the Beach is a cocktail favored at bachelorette parties over, say, a gin and tonic: it’s far naughtier and more fun to say.
The originators of the cake are hard to pinpoint, as it seems to have taken off as a home-baked phenomenon, primarily in the 1970s. But—and this is important—it does seem to be closely connected to the invention of Cool Whip, that presweetened science experiment of a dessert topping, in 1967.
It’s been a political cake, too: there’s an amusing tale I heard from the Charlotte Observer’s associate editor Jack Betts about Michigan politician Ruth Easterling, a tiny powerhouse of a woman who always left an impression on people. Apparently, at a House Rules Committee meeting, one of the other politician’s wives had brought a tempting cake, to which a seventy-something-year-old Easterling replied, “Well, I make a pretty good cake too … it’s called Better than Sex Cake.” Upon the response that a cake must be great with a name like that, live-wire Easterling shot right back, “It’s not that good.”
No, the feisty little old lady didn’t invent the cake. But it’s stories like these, along with the titter-inducing name, that have kept this recipe going. Perhaps the best summation of the cake comes in a hilarious 1990 article by humorist Erma Bombeck who, after having read about the cake, made it and— scandal!—served it to her kids. But instead of moaning and saying “Yes! Yes!” as the writer fantasizes, they sum it up rather matter of factly: “Mom, it’s just a cake. You understand that, don’t you?”
My recipe uses real whipped cream rather than the chemical-laden topping called for in many early recipes. Also, while the recipe calls for cake mix, you can substitute a cake made from scratch; Yellow Birthday Cake, works beautifully—but remember to increase the baking time by about five minutes, as the pan size is different.
Better than Sex Cake
THIS GUILTY-PLEASURE DESSERT WILL definitely leave you with equal parts regret and satiation (and even better: this recipe uses real whipped cream rather than the chemical-laden whipped topping called for in many recipes).
Makes one 9-by-13-inch cake (12 to 15 servings)
One 18.25-ounce package yellow cake mix
One 20-ounce can crushed pineapple with juice
¾ cup light brown sugar
One 5.1 ounce packages instant vanilla pudding mix
3 cups whole or 2% milk
1 cup heavy cream
¼ cup confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¾ cup flaked coconut
½ cup chopped pecans
1. Bake the yellow cake according to the directions on the box for a 9-by-13-inch cake pan.
2. While the cake bakes, combine the pineapple (with its juice) and brown sugar in a medium saucepan. Cook over medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has reduced to the thickness of honey. Remove from the heat.
3. Once the cake has come out of the oven, place the pan on a wire rack. Do not remove the cake from the pan. Pierce the top of the still-hot cake with the tines of a fork at approximately 1-inch intervals. Pour the pineapple mixture over the cake. Spread it evenly, then let the cake cool completely.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk the pudding mix with the milk until smooth. Spread the pudding over the cake.
5. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, or using a large bowl with a hand whisk, whip the cream until slightly thickened. Add the confectioner’s sugar and vanilla, then whip until soft peaks form. Spread over the top of the cake. Chill the cake for several hours or overnight to allow the flavors to meld.
6. To toast the coconut and pecans, preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Spread the coconut evenly on a baking sheet and toast for about 5 minutes, until golden brown and crisp. Once or twice during the baking, toss the coconut so that it browns evenly. Then toast the pecans for 7 to 10 minutes, or until fragrant and lightly browned. Cool both at room temperature.
7. Just before serving, sprinkle the cake with the toasted coconut and pecans. Cover and refrigerate any leftovers; the cake will keep for about 3 days.
HERE IS A FANTASTIC AND TRUE STORY about Katharine Hepburn and her slightly cakey, slightly chewy, lightly chocolaty, nut-studded, and highly pleasant brownies. In the early 1980s, a Bryn Mawr student dropped a bombshell on her parents while home in New York City for the holidays: she was going to drop out of school, move to Scotland, and write screenplays. Needless to say, h
er father was the opposite of pleased. And so he did exactly what any worried parent would in such a situation: he wrote a letter to Katharine Hepburn, who had also attended Bryn Mawr, asking for help convincing his daughter to stay in school. “She’s a great admirer of yours,” he implored, “and perhaps she’ll listen to you.”
The recipe proved popular beyond a fad, and with good reason: these chewy brownies beautifully straddle the middle ground between cakey and fudgy brownies.
As oddball a thing to do as this may seem, in this particular case it wasn’t totally out of left field. As it turns out, this distraught father was a neighbor of Hepburn’s, and would occasionally exchange pleasantries with her while, say, heading to the grocery store; let’s say they were friendly acquaintances. And, well, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Upon receiving this cry for help, the imperious Hepburn didn’t waste any time. She phoned at 7:30 the next morning, demanding to speak with the would-be dropout, who was sleeping at the time of the call but certainly awoke rapidly. Hepburn didn’t mince words, admonishing, “What a damn stupid thing to do!” She then proceeded to deliver a stern lecture, after which she demanded that father and daughter come to tea at her home.
Upon arriving at Hepburn’s nearby townhome on the date of the tea, the guests were greeted by Hepburn in her famously authoritative manner. She presented her guests with tea along with a plate of her famous brownies.
The brownies were already famous, of course. They had first surfaced in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1975, accompanying an article by legendary gossip writer Liz Smith. The recipe appeared side by side an interview with Kate, who called them “the best brownies ever!” Where Hepburn got the recipe has always been vague, but no matter—the recipe was an instant hit, probably at first because the article provided an unexpected view into the life of the notoriously private Hepburn. But the recipe proved popular beyond a fad, and with good reason: these chewy brownies beautifully straddle the middle ground between cakey and fudgy brownies (perhaps tipping slightly more toward the fudge-like side).