Confections of a Closet Master Baker
Page 14
I spent the rest of the summer conscious of time, looking forward to performing our three o’clock choreography in her small kitchen. I collected the plates and set the table. She rinsed the coffeepot with scalding water and ground the beans. We’d have made a cake together or I would bring one from a trip into town. She told me stories of the war and of my grandfather. And I listened and enjoyed 3 p.m. as I never had as a child.
When I returned home to Virginia, Mom and I started our own choreography. We had to steal time from our American lives, where 3 p.m. sat squarely in the middle of the local custom for hectic extracurricular activity until dinner. But we managed to conjure some magic, setting aside the organic and whole wheat for something scrumptious. Sometimes we shared thoughts and stories. Mostly we sat silently, enjoying each other’s company and savoring small cakes, preferably something laced with almond, and a cup of strong coffee.
Making 3 p.m. happen for the people who live in Montpelier is a living memory of my Omi and my mother. It’s a natural inclination for many people to decompress and treat themselves as the day comes to a close. Before you have to go home and make dinner for your family but after you’ve given blood at the office, sneaking away in the late afternoon is one of life’s great pleasures. At my shop, it’s a respected ritual.
Ann said to me today that she couldn’t quite figure out what it was about our store because it wasn’t just a store. There was something like home about it. She comes in every day, sometimes twice a day, and I’ll see her sitting at the window with a latte and a piece of cake. Then Anne will join her, and Kyle will come around and sit to make a threesome. And they’ll sip and eat and laugh. Occasionally I’ll even pour myself a cup of coffee and join them. I said to her, that what I had always wanted was to bring 3 p.m. to America. Where coffee and cake weren’t inhaled but savored with a lovely setting and kind people. “Yes. That’s it. That’s what it feels like,” she said.
We talk about nothing in particular, we nibble at dense, fudgy chocolate hearts, and we enjoy each other’s company. So while the women who acquainted me with this ceremony are gone, I’m here in the Green Mountains making sure that it lives on at 3 p.m. on the dot. Don’t be late.
Mandelhaernchen
WHEN I STAYED with my grandmother those many summers ago, she and I went to the corner pastry shop the day before I left to stock up on mandelhoernchen to take back to the States to share with my mom at 3 p.m.
My mother missed innumerable things from Germany—the cobblestone streets and the hourly church bells, the Christmas markets and the language. But I could bring this one thing home for her.
MAKES 48 COOKIES
2 pounds almond paste
1 cup sugar
5 large egg whites
Bread flour for rolling and shaping
8 ounces sliced blanched almonds, lightly crushed
Simple syrup (see Note)
Combine the almond paste and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add the egg whites, incorporating them gradually to avoid lumps. Continue to mix at medium speed, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed, until you have a smooth paste.
Lightly flour the work surface and your hands. Divide the paste into 3 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a 20-inch log, using just enough flour to keep the paste from sticking to the table. Cut each log into 16 equal pieces.
Place the almonds on a sheet of baking paper or on a halfsheet pan. Roll each of the small dough pieces in the almonds, at the same time shaping them into small logs. Be sure that the almonds adhere all around; you might have to roll the pieces in your hands first to eliminate excess flour, which will prevent the almonds from sticking. Transfer the logs to the floured table and continue rolling the pieces between your palms and the table until each one is 5 inches long, with slightly tapered ends.
Line a sheet pan with parchment paper. Bend the pieces into horseshoe shapes 2½ inches wide and place them on the pan. Allow the cookies to dry at room temperature for a few hours.
Bake, double panned (two sheet pans together to protect the bottoms from over browning), at 375°F for approximately 15 minutes or until golden brown and baked through. Brush simple syrup over the cookies immediately after removing them from the oven. After they have cooled completely, dip the ends into melted dark chocolate.
Note: Simple syrup is liquid sugar. To make it, combine 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in a microwavable bowl. Microwave for 5 minutes on high and then stir. Continue to microwave 1 minute at a time until the sugar is completely dissolved.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chocolate-Covered Chakras
4 p.m.
’M IMPATIENT. We’re sneaking up on the end of my workday and I’ve finished every conceivable pastry task I can think of. Now I want to close so I can go running, wrestle with the dogs, make dinner, and relax with Ray, and then start off fresh in the morning and play with sugar again.
I’ve given up any pretense that I’ve developed into a serene adult, someone who can be still. I have trouble breathing deeply and thoughtfully; there’s no calming my mind and meditating on nothingness. My chakras are not thoughtfully aligned and evenly spread, resulting in a well-adjusted, patient mien. Mine are tightly bundled and chocolate-coated, resulting in a scattered woman always itching to do something new, now. And I’m always itching for pastries, to eat them or bake them or invent them. I’ll push aside even the most pressing engagement to get down and dirty with sugar and butter.
Even during winter exam week in college, when I knew I had to start cracking the books. I was having trouble staving off a growing compulsion to build a giant gingerbread village. It had been needling at me, this desire, since I detected the first hint of chill in the air. And every time I pretended to care about Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations, I’d drift into a flour-dusted daydream.
I broke down and abandoned any prospect of infusing my brain with knowledge. I hightailed it out of the library and spent every last cent of food money and the little I had saved for Christmas presents on molasses, flour, and a boatload of expensive spices. I loitered about the candy aisle, fussing over whether Necco wafers or nonpareils would make better roof shingles. I discovered it was nonpareils, hands down. I cleaned the poker chips off our dining room table and scrubbed off a year of beer residue and nacho cheese. I overlapped pieces of parchment so the entire wood veneer surface was covered. I spent a few hours tracing templates onto paper for the walls, roof, shutters, and door. When the gingerbread came out of the oven, I transferred it to the dining table, laid the templates on top, and cut very precisely. Once everything cooled, I mortared the walls together with royal icing, keeping them steady with soup cans until everything set. As I was lowering the roof panels onto the village’s town hall, my roommates started to trickle in. They were inured to my sideshows and stopped only to steal a piece of candy or instruct me that a clock tower was listing a little too far to the right.
I finished, just after midnight. Royal icing dripped off of every surface. My hands cramped from the intricate detail work and my fingers were in such deep spasm, I couldn’t let go of the tweezers I’d used to place little pearls of sanding sugar on the rooflines to add sparkle.
I had two exams in the morning. I fell asleep, economic and comparative religion texts open on my chest and flour in my hair.
This wasn’t an extraordinary episode. My best friend, Christine, and I would regularly leave class midlecture, having spent a half hour passing notes to each other: “Hey, let’s blow this joint and make some cheesecake!” We’d run home and crank up the oven. We’d often engage in an intellectual dialectic regarding pastries and their valuable properties, wondering aloud whether a cheesecake was meant to rise a half foot past its container and shouldn’t we stop it from exploding in the oven?
Pre-Starbucks and espresso bars, we still wanted a little Euro coffee house vibe to go with our hooky pastries. So we invested in a fine selection of powdered International Foods instant coff
ees, Swiss Vanilla being the perennial favorite, took our sweet time in its preparation, and sat down in the late afternoon for cake and coffee.
For a long while these memories have made me antsy for Germany and her pastries. I need to shut down the shop for a solid block of time and go hug my family and eat some cake. The last time I spent any quality time in Europe was with Christine, right after college.
We visited Salzburg, my first hometown. We dropped by the Café Tomaselli, in an open square of the Goldgasse. We had coffee and a morsel. We set off on foot down the road and peeked into Mozart’s childhood home—low ceilings, tiny harpsichord, but no pastries. It took about five minutes to see everything worth seeing. Back on the street, Christine and I both spied a cozy café right across from us. It was on the second floor, red geraniums gushing out of the flower boxes at the windows. Poetic-looking young men, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, perused newspapers bound together with old-fashioned wooden dowels along the seams so they could be hung back up at the front door for the next bohemian.
It was irresistible and we insisted on going in. Another cup of coffee couldn’t hurt. We sat, ordered a groȣer brauner (a generous serving of strong coffee with heavy whipped cream) and, almost as an afterthought, said, “What the hell! Let’s get some cake.” And so it went, from the Café Fürst, which we had to visit because it is the birthplace of Mozart’s balls. That is, the little chocolate named after Mozart, filled with marzipan, pistachio paste, and nougat and covered in chocolate. You haven’t been to Salzburg unless you’ve had a handful. And onto the Café Sacher, the cousin to the original and more famous Viennese institution; it still was the place to get a piece of sacher torte. Then to Café Glockenspiel, a prime people-watching outfit facing the statue of Mozart with a lovely view of Mozart Square. And when we thought we were done, I realized we hadn’t been to Niemetz. Tucked behind the horse well, next to the Festival Halle and conveniently close to where we had parked the car, Café Niemetz was where my mother took us as kids most often. It was the hangout of singers and musicians and housed some great childhood memories.
I couldn’t be denied such a nostalgic trip. And these wonderful cakes—the deep, slightly bitter chocolates and the voluptuous coating of marzipan over delicate layers of a torte—they opened my eyes to what had been missing from my American life. I’d been completely assimilated into Yankee dessert culture, carpet-bombed with corn syrup missiles fueled with hydrogenated soybean oil and red dye #2. No wonder my mother kept that crap out of the house when there was such pure bounty to be had across the ocean. She had told me childhood stories of hiding among the dark pews of her hometown cathedral, the Lorenz Kirche, and savoring a mandelhoernchen from the local baker while she pored over her worn copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. I had always taken the story as proof of my mother’s dietetic hypocrisy, that she was allowed sweet indulgences as a child while I was denied.
But now I saw that she understood the value of forbearance, because if it’s truly worth having you can wait. And in reality, my mom wasn’t completely withholding in the desserts department; she just thought they had a time and place, and they had to be beautifully made and with patience. My mother was anything but impatient.
Christmastime was a well-planned orgiastic festival of butter cookies and cinnamon stars. Easter was fertile with chocolate eggs and those beautifully rendered, lifelike Easter bunnies. And on birthdays, she became a baking sorceress, creating cakes and tasty party favors my American friends never imagined. She spent months leading up to the big day planning and consulting, asking what type of cake I was leaning toward and what type of party favor I’d like for the table. She created lush flower arrangements, daisy-shaped sugar cookies on Popsicle-stick stems, for the centerpiece. She sculpted woodland creatures from almond paste and arranged them around the flowers. And the cake was always beautifully homemade, filled with bittersweet chocolate, European butter, and free-range eggs.
But she never, ever made these things outside of the confines of the proscribed occasion. And me with my pastry impatience, I couldn’t understand what the big deal was. Why couldn’t I have a nice butterzeug in the heat of summer? Or a slice of layer cake for an afternoon snack? Why hold back on me and make me wait?
Dessert for my mother was sacred. It wasn’t an afterthought, a procrastination ploy, or a craving but the pinnacle of great celebration and a pure expression of love. For her, the sweets I wanted every day ruined my appreciation for the weighty and potentially dangerous magic of sugar. She harnessed it for the grand gesture, while I was looking to dilute it into its base parts for an impatient fix. The impact of her message didn’t go unheard, but I was still too young to appreciate its full substance; I wanted the magic, no matter how diluted and impure, whenever I was feeling antsy for it.
It took a while but I’d come full circle. Standing in the middle of a busy Getreidegasse in Salzburg, a young woman with a grotesquely distended stomach packed with an army of desserts, I began to understand my mother’s truly high regard for pastry and why it’s wise to practice restraint and patience. In no small part because I felt terribly sick. And right now, a slightly older woman standing in my very own bakery, although I’m still impatient when it comes to the details of my own life, I’ve learned to bring a bit of stoicism to baking for my neighbors, because I want to create the grand gesture born of patience and love that will become a treasured memory, just as my mother did for me.
Apfelkuchen
OMI MADE AN apfelkuchen for afternoon coffee when I was hiding in Germany after college. She, like me, had ants in the pants. She whipped up this cake in less than an hour. But here’s one of the drawbacks of suffering bouts of antsy: she whipped it up so quickly that she folded a fly into the batter. That requires some major speed and impatience. So while this cake works in a pinch if you’re antsy for a delicious dessert fast, just take a little time to avoid incorporating wildlife into the mix.
MAKES ONE 8-INCH CAKE
For the batter
11 tablespoons (1 stick plus 3 tablespoons) unsalted butter, plus additional for greasing the pan and sautéing the apples
8 apples (Granny Smith or an equally tart and firm apple), peeled, cored, and sliced Juice of 1 lemon
1½ tablespoons Calvados (apple brandy)
⅔ cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
For the glaze
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons milk
FOR THE BATTER
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter an 8-inch round cake pan and line it with buttered parchment paper.
Sprinkle the apples with lemon juice. Melt an extra knob of butter in a large skillet. Sauté the apples with the Calvados, tossing occasionally, until golden, about 5 minutes.
Place the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment; cream on high until fluffy. On slow, add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla. Slowly add the flour, salt, and baking powder, mixing until just combined.
Transfer the batter to the prepared pan. Smooth the batter and arrange the apples on top in a circular pattern.
Bake for 60 to 75 minutes until the batter is browned and is springy. (I don’t know how Omi managed to make this in an hour because mine always takes longer.)
FOR THE GLAZE
While the cake is baking, combine the confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, and milk in a small bowl. Whisk until smooth.
Gently brush the glaze over the apfelkuchen when it is almost cool but still a little warm. Then allow the cake to cool completely. Mahlzeit!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
And Did I Mention We Were on the Food Network?
5 p.m.
E RECEIVED A VISIT from a camera crew. It was on Monday, when we close early, so no one was the wiser in town.
I put on a clean shirt and took my hair out of a ponytail. We’d been cleaning the kitchen for weeks in anticipation. Tim and I even scrubbed the glass of the oven doors. They were going to be on TV too.
The last time I was on television it was a local news thing. Not as fancy as the Food Network. We hadn’t opened the store to the public yet and I was still sleeping, exercising, and sitting down to eat. Just a little puff piece, human-interest stuff. My macaroons had been featured in In Style magazine, and that was a minor deal in these parts.
A reporter and a cameraman came by. Asked me a few questions. Had me talk about my macaroons and the other delights I’d be offering in my shop.
REPORTER: “So, your macaroons. They aren’t the usual coconut we’re all used to? They’re almond? No coconut at all?”
IDIOT (ME): “That’s right! They’re traditional French almond macaroons. NO coconut WHATSOEVER. Just almonds, COCONUT, sugar, and egg whites.”
If you listen very carefully to the tape of my pathetic news debut, you can hear Ray in the background laughing his ass off.