This one is going to be packed with photos documenting the past few weeks--easily the most beautiful spring I've witnessed since I began living here. Jeff and I have been trying to improve our driveway garden over the past couple of years. Last fall I planted a few dozen tulip bulbs and was so excited to watch them bloom. The frilly ones in front are parrot tulips, and I painted the pink one recently. Backing them up are two rows of regular tulips that were supposed to be purple. I think my bag of bulbs was incorrectly marked.
But that's okay--I like these better. They're so cheerful!
We have lots of roses on the other side of this garden and are unsure about how to tame/contain them. The two large rose bushes throw out tentacles that climb up to the sky and then arch down, like dozens of this thing overlapping again and again.
The recent flood washed up a lot of logs in our neighbor's yard, and he set them out by the side of the road to be removed by the city. Jeff saw one of them and thought it might make a nice display element in the roses, so the two of us rolled that heavy thing down the street (Jeff did 90% of the work while I gave it a few kicks here and there) and installed it. We like how it looks semi-human, and I can't wait for those roses to bloom.
This is the east side of our weirdo house. The redbud trees are in bloom!
I love the redbud-blooming week the most.
It's followed by redbud-confetti week.
We have other flowering trees on the south side of the house.
This one is almost embarrassingly gorgeous.
Crab apples and dogwoods decorate the west side next to the garage.
Needless to say, Bun is a very happy little girl.
She mostly stays on the path during her supervised walkabouts.
And when it's sunny, sometimes she'll just lounge.
On rare occasions she becomes SUPER FIERCE MIGHTY HUNTING JUNGLE CAT;;;;
Ohh, the colors. I still can't believe I get to live here...
...with this amazing creature...
...and my sweet girl.
Too. Much.
PS Mom cut three inches from my hair a few weeks ago, diminishing that grizzly-bear-living-on-my-head feeling. Now it's more like I have a grizzly cub up there.
Jeff and I met on Match.com--ain't no shame in it!--and one of the things he liked about my profile was that I had answered the "What was the last great book you read?" question with The Grapes of Wrath. It was one of those books that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading life, and I remember finishing it while sitting on a bench in Chicago's Union Station. The devastating ending made me cry, and then I just stared at things for a while, a character Edward Hopper had forgotten to paint: Heartbroken Lonely Woman Crying Over A Book.
Anyway, one of the characters in that book is named Rose of Sharon, and I always thought that was so unusual--she has a preposition in her name! Last year we were shopping for plants to decorate our new patio, and I flipped out when I came across a rose of Sharon. The man who sold it to us said it was blue, which is not as common as the white and pink version, and after planting it, we waited for about a month for it to bloom. It's in the center of the above photo.
I took a photo of the first rose and saved the picture for a future painting. I started it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't all that revved up to paint it at first, but after a day of work I was excited. I loved the light on the petals, and the variety of blues and purples I used to create the bloom was challenging.
I fine-tuned the white thing and added more details and texture to the petals.
Then I filled in the background with some bloopy, blurry colors, and I started the rocks in the lower-left corner. Most of the white areas would become leaves and branches.
Next
up: I spent a lot of time with that dry grass on the left side. It had
lots of different blurry colors going on. I texturized the rocks with purples, blues, pinks, and browns. Finally, I did some yellow underpainting
on the leaves, masked off the major veins (seen above as yellow lines) and added an
additional green glaze over the top.
More leaf work...
I
added a lot of details to the leaves and attempted to soften and refine
the veins. Leaves in direct sunlight called for bits of blue, permanent green light, and a whole lot of no-paint. The bigger/closer leaves required some micro veins. This process reminded me of the way I painted the colorful leaf from my Mushrooms painting a year and a half ago. The colors in the photo above are a bit too bright--I took the picture during a thunderstorm and got aggressive with it in Photoshop.
On my last day of painting, I added a branch and some grassy shapes in the center. Those were surprisingly complex and colorful. And then, as if on cue, our new scanner arrived in the mail!
Eleven years ago I bought a kind of so-what HP scanner that did a wonderful job with my watercolors and cartoons, and Bun liked to sit on it, too. When it died in 2009, I assumed it would be easy to find a replacement. But that was not the case--the ones we've tried since then can't handle subtle color changes or things like pastel colors outlined in black pen.
Last month Jeff did some research (and great things happen when Jeff does some research). He found a used Epson Perfection V30 for only $30. A watercolor artist had blogged about this scanner and showed how to configure the settings to work for watercolors. It seemed like such a great deal, especially when you consider that I tend to pay $12-$15 per big scan at FedEx. The only problem was that the vendor was in Hawaii, and the scanner had to endure a month-long boat odyssey and cross-country road trip before it reached us.
We set it up and scanned my painting (which was too big to fit) in two sections. Photoshop miraculously pieced them together--seamless! We were impressed at how the scanner even managed to pick up on the texture (or tooth) of my watercolor paper. Terrific!
And you can find prints of this new painting if you click here!
Imagekind has finally gotten its act together, and now my other new-ish floral paintings are available as prints, too!
Almost every watercolor I paint has a sweet spot--an area that makes me breathe easier once I've completed it. Sometimes this is a section that "makes" the painting. Sometimes it's the hardest part, and if I'm satisfied with it I think, Well, if I can paint that, the rest of this will be no problem. And sometimes it's one of the painting's unsung heroes that nobody ever points out as being especially good, but it's one of the places I focus on.
I thought it might be fun to explore some of these. Readers who are familiar with my work: see if you can recall the painting from which I've taken each chunk! Here they are, in absolutely no particular order (click on the links to see the entire paintings and read more about them, and click on the images to see them a little bigger).
Apple Blossoms: This is the best leaf I've ever painted. I like how the shiny spring green on the top contrasts with the velvety khaki underside.
Glass Gems 3: The area under the red gem seemed molten, and I loved playing with that color range.
Planets and Foil: I like the way this marble seems to be grinning, and I'm especially happy with the window reflection near the top-right. I painted it with pink-yellow-orange, and it felt weird at the time, but I think it really works.
Mushrooms: Ugh! Those little purple fingery things were so hard!
Abandoned Knowledge: Most people focus on the apple, but I'm happiest with this vinyl seat. This was a one-shot, wet-into-wet situation. I really had to nail it. At a juried exhibition a couple of years ago, I was told that the judge pointed at this part and said, "Yep."
The Graduates: This little blue pot was tough. The colors shifted from cool to warm in a very smooth way that, like the vinyl seat, required wet-into-wet. Similar color problems are happening with the plant, too. This whole painting has a lot of individual still-life moments.
Dale's Super 400. The couch my uncle Dale is sitting on had a bunch of velvety pillows, and that's a tough texture to achieve with watercolor. Plus one of them was floral!
Married With Cats. This is Bun's happy pose, and I liked how her tabby pattern makes her blend in with the rug. Plus cute little belleh, sweet haunches.
Mabel. The Roger Ebert book is to the right of this section--I think I did a better job on these books than I did with his, but whatever, he loved it! I was thrilled to paint the magazine that was shoved in there backwards near the left side of this chunk. It featured a truck ad, I think.
Dr. Terry Sherer: I thought this was a cool intersection of patterns: his plaid tie, checked shirt, and the studs on his leather chair. The chair's arm features yet another softly shiny surface that required wet-into-wet.
Art Theater: This painting was very dark, so the bright areas really popped. These are just some orange/yellow lights on the left side of the street.
Ruby Liberty Dragonfly: I like this whole section, but I'm especially proud of the disco ball-looking glass earring. It was hard to draw, and I had to consider each segment individually in terms of color choices. I had the 15-minute version of Voodoo Chile by Jimi Hendrix on repeat as I painted it.
Emily and Cupcake: When my sister was little, I loved the way she looked when she slept, and a lot of that innocence is still there in this picture.
Last Meal in Italy: I painted this watercolor during a couple of snow days back when I was still teaching. I liked this white shell and the way it reflected the turqoise building nearby. Painting those tiny ridges was no joke!
Self-Portrait: I really need to scan this painting. What you see here is from a photograph, and in real life the titles, etc, are more precise. Anyway, this section was such a speed bump, and for a while there I completed one square inch per hour. But I loved the spines of these books, some with creatures and famous paintings and sculptures, some old and falling apart, and some instantly recognizable based on color alone. I painted this during my "I will never use masking fluid" phase, and I made myself paint around all of the white or light-colored words. That really slowed me down.
Treasure: This painting featured several orange glass beads that were incredibly tricky. The darker areas called for muted purple-orange-browns, and as with the earring from Ruby Liberty Dragonfly, the many diamond shapes had to be dealt with one at a time.
Sunflowers: When I see this part I instinctively squeeze my fingers together, mimicking it. I rarely work with this much yellow.
Wilting Parrot Tulip: The challenge here was to paint extremely bright colors in shadows. I toned them down a bit with some greens and browns, but they're still pretty blazing.
Hey, I enjoyed that! I have lots of other paintings I'd like to chunk-ify, so maybe this will turn into a series.
Imagekind update: as of right now (Sunday, May 5), it's still having problems, so in the meantime please visit my merchandise store for all your Cinco de Mayo/art-related needs. Thank you as always for your support!
After a month of gray-dominated paintings involving grandparents, I was overjoyed to return to vivid colors. In August I'm going to have a one-person show at the Decatur (IL) Area Arts Council. I had applied for a 2014 exhibit, but their August 2013 artist had to back out due to--I think it was a house fire...? Talk about one of my greatest fears. If our house was burning down, I know which paintings I'd try to save first, but I definitely wouldn't be able to rescue all my work. I can't even imagine how that would feel.
Anyway, the Decatur people asked me if I could display my work in just a few short months, and I said yes. So between now and then, I'll be producing as many new paintings as I can to bulk up my body of work. That kind of rules out creating month-long paintings like Treasure or Ruby Liberty Dragonfly, although I plan to paint more jewelry still-lifes for the show. But each of these paintings will feature four or five sparkly things instead of something like eighty.
But back to the flowers! This is a wilting parrot tulip after I had worked on it for a couple of days. I planted ten of these frilly, fancy tulips a year and a half ago and was beyond excited to watch them emerge last spring. They were even more beautiful as they wilted, and their petals created interesting and dynamic shapes. I took several dozen photos and saved this one, the queen of them all, for the next time I felt the urge to paint something floral.
That super-hot red is a combination of opera (out of control pink) and cadmium red light (stupefying orange). I can't tell you how pleasing it is to mix those two colors. Something scientific/magical happens.
I tightened up the petals a bit and added some freckly spots. The background came together quickly, and I painted some of that during my watercolor workshop a few weeks ago (also at Decatur). It's been a while since I've had an audience, and it took me back to my teaching days when students would watch me work. I took some photos of people at the workshop, and here is my favorite one:
On to painting two! This is a passion flower I spotted at Kevin and Natalie's home in Orlando. Jeff and I visited them last month, and as soon as I saw this strange blue flower/mini-spaceship, I knew I would paint it. To create its dozens of stringy blue petals, I masked off those parts and painted the petals and leaves behind them.
Next I worked on the flower's amazing center, a fun combination of magenta and acid green, and painted the petals a flat blue (with dark purple and white areas). I don't even want to know how many petals are on this flower.
I added shadows to each petal (painstaking!) and lifted some highlights with a combination of tiny brush/water/paper towel. That took the better part of an afternoon, and I fell into assembly line mode. Done, done, on to the next one.
And here's the finished product!
It was smooth sailing once I finished that flower, although I began to suffer from dark green fatique. The bud/pod and the little springy things provided some relief. Both of these paintings are 10.5"x13.5", and I'm eager to pop them into frames.
We've reached the part of my new-painting posts where I link to Imagekind and beg you to buy prints, but Imagekind has been having site-wide technical problems for several weeks (!!). They've assured their artists that they are working on solving the problems, but many of us are understandably disgruntled. I make most of my money in November and December with a little Mother's Day bump in the spring. So the timing here is bad for me, especially now that I'm in portfolio-building mode and not painting people's grandparents for cash.
While we wait for Imagekind to get its act together, I have this gifty alternative for you:
It's my CafePress merchandise store, and last night I spent three hours uploading images and creating new products for you to peruse and enjoy. I'm sorry, but I want that bag so damn much! Please consider supporting me by picking up a thing or two, and I'll let you know when Imagekind is back to normal.
Please like my Facebook art page if you haven't already! I update it every few days with in-progress paintings, and let's face it, commenting is easier there than it is here. No stupid Captcha thing, and I respond to just about everybody, too!
Oh, it was tornado watch weather for sure. Wednesday afternoon Bun and I went outside to take in the hazy, finally legitimately warm weather. I took some photos, including this one of our sort of flooded backyard stream. Normally this stream is easily jumped or even stepped across, but thanks to a wetter-than-usual early spring, the stream has been wide and boggy for about a month. I've enjoyed watching Canadian geese, blue herons, wood ducks, and even beavers swimming and nosing around in it. Near the top of this photo and running from right to left is the Salt Fork river, and beyond that is our town's wetlands area. It's about the size of six football fields (totally guessing).
Bun lounged in the mulch near our daffodils.
I took photos of pretty blooming things. This bush was humming with honeybees.
These little guys were finally coming up. I'm so happy that spring is here!
Later on Jeff and I took a walk uptown. I wore a dress that showcased my unapologetically pasty white calves to motorists on Main Street and route 150.
While we were on
our relatively short walk, Jeff and I experienced the
following: a sauna-like humidityfest (seen above in red), a few steamy romantic sprinkles but no
clouds overhead (blue), a cheeseburger break while monitoring alarming new clouds
in the northwest (end of blue), some uneasy double-time walking towards home (purple), followed by flat-out
running from a very dark squall line and a sudden 20 degree temperature
drop (green). It was awesome.
It rained all night and Thursday--nonstop thunderstorms with torrential rain. I didn't take any radar screen caps while this was happening. Basically a massive, seemingly endless, chicken strip-shaped blob of yellow, orange, and red doppler radar was working its way up Illinois from soutwest to northeast. Here, let me illustrate that for you.
(The red dot there is our house. The chicken strip radar shape was even bigger than this, too.)
So northern Illinois was getting hammered, and we eventually got hammered as well. All of that water had to go somewhere, and flood watches and warnings were popping up left and right. Jeff and I usually shrug off flood alerts, but this seemed major, like one of those 100-year floods that we've started experiencing every five years or so. We live in the lowest part of the lowest part of Champaign County. Back in January 2008--Jeff and I had been dating for almost a month!--a combination of major snowfall and epic thunderstorms caused flooding so severe that Jeff and his daughter Melissa had to evacuate the house that Jeff and I live in now. There was a rescue with boats and everything. <--I'm making that more dramatic than it was, but still. Boats were involved.
Thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey, we were able to monitor the situation online. They have some charts that show how high the river is near our house--so glad that this site exists. Jeff knew from experience that anything over 19 feet meant that our sunken living room would flood. Anything over 20 feet meant that the rest of our house would flood. We went to bed on Thursday night looking at this chart.
And we were feeling like bad, bad things were going to happen in the morning. Jeff set his alarm clock for 2:00 a.m., saying we'd probably have to get up and start moving furniture and books out of the living room. At 1:30 we were awakened by a bumping sound--I'm not sure what that was, but Jeff sprang out of bed to look outside. I got up, too. The water level had risen considerably over the past few hours. Throbbing with adrenaline, we abandoned the idea of going back to sleep.
Thinking it might be a while before he could do it again, Jeff took a shower while I rather insanely put on some makeup (I'd taken my shower before bed). I guess I didn't want to be one of those bagged-out storm survivors you see on local news reports. I wanted to look like I at least had my act together once the cameras inevitably descended upon Jeff and me, area homeless flood victims.
During the pre-dawn hours we moved as much of our living room furniture and books as we could upstairs to my studio. Oh man, we have too many books. The cats were bewildered. As I went up and down the stairs 400 times, Jeff did what he could to rig up a sump pump outdoors in the dark. He monitored the rate at which the water was rising with a tape measure and did a lot of heavy lifting. At around 3:00 it seemed like we had done all we could do, and we were able to sit down and watch everything that was happening in Boston. What a surreal morning.
As the sky started to brighten in the east, this was what we saw.
The water was about ten feet from the most vulnerable corner of our house. "We're fucked," Jeff concluded, and we called both sets of parents. My folks wanted to come help us in some way or another, but they live on the west side of the state, where a number of roads were closed due to flooding. So they couldn't reach us. Jeff's parents live 45 minutes away, and they drove over in their truck. Jeff moved my car to higher ground (the school parking lot). Meanwhile, I promised myself that I would cry about this later and started packing a couple of go-bags. I couldn't get this silly but great song out of my head:
Jeff's dad drove to Champaign and purchased another sump pump--Jeff had the idea to set it up near the corner of the house along with our other smaller one. They eventually got it going, and then all we could do was monitor the situation. It was an awfully helpless feeling.
But happily the curve on the graph made it seem like things might be slowing down. At around 9:00, Jeff's parents didn't feel like they could stay much longer, as the one road out of our neighborhood was flooding. All we could do was watch and wait, and I called my parents about every half hour to let them know what was going on.
And I took some photos.
I fed the squirrels who are bottomless pits of seed-want no matter what's going on.
Yeah, there's no hopping across this thing.
Bun: WHERE ARE ALL THE STUFFS;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Freaky!
Sometime during the late morning hours, and after coming within a couple of feet of the house, it seemed like the flood had stopped rising. Bun wanted to see what was happening, and she sat on our deck in the cold watching the water for five minutes as if hypnotized and bewitched.
Slowly over the next couple of days, the water receded. We both felt so relieved.
Meanwhile, one of my paintings was in the Skip Watts Memorial Exhibition in Springfield. I even won an honorable mention along with some money! The reception was Saturday afternoon, but Jeff and I were too wiped out to drive all the way over there to attend. And anyway on Friday I had informed one of the people in charge that we were dealing with flooding, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to leave the house. So I was sad to have missed the show, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Instead we watched a lot of teals and coots glide around our backyard, and that was pretty wonderful. The light was always lousy while this was happening, so I didn't get any photos.
And here's what our backyard looked like this morning. After the flood all the colors came out, as somebody once said. I didn't have my promised cry, as it turned out, but Saturday morning I enjoyed a celebratory post-traumatic-stress migraine. It's a fun little custom of mine. We also went out and had pizza.
For the first time in two years, a medium-sized snowstorm hit our town yesterday, and today as Jeff and I wolfed down our lunch, I mentioned that I wanted to make a snowman. Surprisingly, Jeff was into the idea--"Let's do it now!" Of course, we couldn't do the same old played-out normal snowman. We made a snowBun.
It took us a little while to get on the same page as to how this snowBun would come together, but soon enough we established the Garfield-ish main form and began fine tuning it.
I messed around with the photo settings on this one to make the profile more visible.
We took turns making the face--I roughed in the main shape and eye sockets while Jeff refined the ears and added the features. He was charmingly businesslike while I emerged as the project's cheerleader.
It's my belief that if Bun had existed during Biblical times, people would have created golden idols in her image. So it was all too appropriate for Jeff and me to make a snow sculpture of a creature that we basically worship every day.
That face cracks me up.
This is the view of our snowBun from the house. She's not long for this world--this weekend we'll have highs in the fifties with a good chance of rain.
But this was so much fun, and for about an hour we felt like a couple of kids. We came inside soggy and gleeful. Bun groggily hopped downstairs, glanced at her giant likeness out in the yard, and demanded some wet food.
I can sum up February in two words: antibiotics and Treasure.
Antibiotics: Bun is urinary infection-free after we struggled to find antibiotics that didn't make her sick. The first was a brutal regime of 56 pills that made her sick every time we successfully got them in her. We switched to a second type--28 doses of a pink liquid in a rather hilarious cherry flavor (because everyone knows cats love stuff that is cherry flavored). This delightful concoction caused Bun to drool and foam uncontrollably for ten to fifteen minutes after Jeff squirted some down her throat, during which time I followed her around with a billowing handful of paper towels, sopping up the drool as she hustled from one room to another. Thanks to all who donated to Bun's medical fund and even sent her valentines. Jeff and I were blown away by your kindness and generosity.
Between my drool cleanup sessions, I painted and painted. This was the main reason why I haven't updated the blog in a while. I became obsessed with my unusual and challenging still life. It's another cluster of jewelry along with other items including an old photo of me as a baby. My mom put it in my birthday card back in late Janurary. I whimsically added the photo to my still life setup and loved the idea of painting a tiny girl surrounded by objects she would eventually own. I spent the first couple of days painting my baby self. My head is about the size of a nickel. I'm in my parents' dining room holding one of Dad's college books. I had trouble sleeping during this first week of painting--I found myself repeatedly waking up at 4:00 aching to get back to work on it.
Next I added most of my turquoise bracelet (I wore it everyday during my early teaching years), some coral beads, and an antique dragon that might be made of ivory, but I'm not sure. I like how the orange-red beads resemble fire shooting from its mouth. In real
life the dragon is about an inch and a half tall. The
painted version is about five times larger in this 20"x26" watercolor.
During one productive week, I
finished the dragon and a lot of fussy jewelry in the lower left
corner, including an antique orange bead necklace that was nothing but
trouble! On our first Christmas together, Jeff gave me the swirly silver charm on
the right.
I selected the jewelry pieces mainly because I liked the way they looked together, and the setup came together shockingly quickly. Some of the stories behind the jewelry are meaningful, and some are not. For example, one
morning I was on my way to school when I noticed the beginnings of a
wardrobe malfunction and needed something to pin myself together. I popped
into a drugstore and bought the above purple pin for $4.95. It may have been cheap, but it took an entire day to complete. The orange beads run through the bottom half of the painting. They had many diamond-shaped facets and were difficult but fascinating to paint. I loved producing every bead in this painting, but the many connecty things here were a chore.
Not wishing to annoy my Facebook friends with daily in-progress photos where I had covered maybe a couple of square inches, I limited myself to Friday-only updates. The above photo shows some new objects: a
sparkly gold charm that is the focal point of a statement necklace,
most of a turquoise ring that is too heavy to wear while painting, and a
perfume compact of a leaf with a dragonfly on it. Because the gold
charm was so impossible, I couldn't make myself work on it all day, so
during the afternoons I painted fun stuff. The dragonfly/leaf
and the circular gold compact in the lower-left corner were gifts from my friend David,
who is a makeup artist at Estee Lauder in Bergdorff Goodman, NYC. I
bought the ring in Santa Fe, and the gold necklace is from some catalog
or other.
The next week I
finished the turquoise ring and dragonfly/leaf compact (that took a lot
longer than I thought it would). Then I worked on the space above those
two things. I referred to this area as "the little garbage."
Finally I painted the silver Eddington necklace, which I
thought acted as a kind of fun signature, a pearl, and some more beads.
Note the tiny chain draped over that red bead. Why didn't I think to
hide it when I put this still life together? Those links were so impossibly small, even on a large-ish painting.
Last
week I took care of the little items in the lower right corner,
including a raspberry-shaped earring composed of small garnets. Most of
the items here are resting on foil, except for those on the right side.
You can see where the foil ends and the table begins. (If you click on the picture above, you can see the details more easily.)
I adore Venice and was happy to find the above matchbox at a local antique store. It shows the Ca' d'Oro ("Golden
House") and was painted in a jazzy
style that I had fun mimicking. The lettering and skinny black lines made me so nervous that I kissed my right hand after I finished them. I devoted the last day of
painting to the turquoise chunks in the top right corner and tightening
up the gold floral piece in the center.
For a while the
working title of this painting was Treasure Chest, awesomely suggested
by Jeff. A couple of weeks ago we decided to shorten it to Treasure. I
liked that idea because it can be a noun and a verb. I'm so happy with
the painting and think this could be a great new way for me to create
portraits--a photograph of the subject surrounded by beloved objects--and I want to do more.
Prints of this brand new painting can be found here!
This centerpiece has occupied our dining room table since probably Thanksgiving. Last week Jeff put our omnipresent plastic deer (deers?) on its two highest peaks for no real reason, but they reminded me of that scene in The Lord of the Rings when representatives of every--I don't know, I barely paid attention--every type of creature?--climbed to the top of mountains and lit things to signal each other that--what? A war or maybe something awesome was going to happen? This scene:
Again, LotR is not my bag and I don't care enough to investigate this further. Please don't bother to tell me what's happening, but I'd like to think that maybe those are signals of celebration. And that's what our plastic deer (deers?) are doing up there: they are lighting their party beacons because holy Moses look at that cake!
Yesterday I wanted to plunge myself into a major baking project. Jeff's been feeling just sick enough to not want to do anything, Bun's on the mend (thank you for asking) but a little wiped out by antibiotics, I've been alllll about painting lately and harboring some low-level feelings of dread regarding an upcoming medical checkup. My parents' crotchety but beloved and ancient cat Robert died on Friday. This winter has been a complete washout as far as snow is concerned, and I'm jealous of the east coast's blizzard. I just really needed to do some next-level baking. This recipe from Christina Tosi's Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook had been haunting me for months. The fact that Valentine's Day is coming up was reason enough to make a cake that tastes like apple pie.
Here are the cake's six components: a "barely brown" butter sheet cake, pie crust crumbs, apple pie filling, an apple cider soak, pie crust frosting, and something called liquid cheesecake. Special equipment is involved. Don't bother making this if you don't have a stand mixer. Christina Tosi is a culinary genius and an entertaining writer, and I felt like she was coaching me through the entire process. She's the kind of coach who is not going to put up with your bullshit shortcuts, though, and I was on my best baking behavior all afternoon. I didn't want to let her down!
The end result (which Jeff and I tried after the prescribed 12+ hours of freezing and 3 hours of thawing) was as good as any non-chocolate, fruit-based dessert gets. We shared one of the cake's six triple-decker megaslices and were stunned by its complexity. The recipe is below, along with my notes in italics, just to give you some idea of what you'd be dealing with should you decide to take on this lunacy. Please buy the book if this kind of thing appeals to you. The entire book is that way, and the photos will make you cry.
Dude. I think I just heard a robin.
Barely Brown Butter Cake
Makes 1 quarter sheet (9x13) pan
2 tablespoons or 40g brown butter, see recipe for instructions
4 tablespoons or 55g butter
1.25 cups or 250g sugar
1/4 cup tightly packed or 60g light brown sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup or 110g buttermilk
1/3 cup or 65g grapeseed oil <-- unavailable here; I used vegetable oil instead
1/2 teaspoon or 2g vanilla extract
1.5 cups or 185g cake flour
1 teaspoon or 4g baking powder
1 teaspoon or 4g salt
Preheat the oven to 350F/175C. To make the brown butter,
microwave the 2 Tbs of butter in a microwave safe bowl covered with a
microwave safe plate, for 3. The butter will pop while browning, so
don’t worry if it sounds like your microwave is going to explode. If not
browned enough after three minutes, continue to microwave at 1 minute
increments. Be very careful when removing the bowl and plate from the
microwave – it will be very very hot. While brown butter is cooling,
stir occasionally to melt the caramelized bits of butter. Cool
completely in the refrigerator. There is something decidedly weird-ass about brown butter. I've yet to put my finger on it.
Combine the butters and sugars and beat on medium-high for 2-3
minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs and continue
to beat for 2-3 minutes. Reduce the speed to low and gradually add the
buttermilk, oil and vanilla. Return the speed to medium-high and beat
for at least 5-6 minutes, until the mixture is very light and has
doubled in size.
If the mixture hasn’t reached this stage by 6 minutes, continue to beat it.
Reduce the speed to very low and add the cake flour, baking powder
and salt. Continue to mix on very low for a minute or two until all the
batter is smooth and free of lumps.
Pam-spray and line your quarter sheet pan with parchment. Bake for 30 minutes, until the cake holds its shape when
poked and the center is no longer jiggly.
Cool the cakes on a wire rack and store for up to 5 days, well wrapped in plastic wrap, in the fridge.
Note: this cake baked perfectly flat (no doming) tastes almost exactly like Twinkies. The batter alone is delicious and lets you know that you're making something special.
Liquid Cheesecake
Makes one 6” square baking dish
8 ounces or 227 g cream cheese, room temperature
3/4 cup or 150 g sugar
1 tablespoon or 15 g cornstarch 1/2 teaspoon or 2 g kosher salt
2 tablespoon or 25 g milk
1 egg
Preheat the oven to 300F/150C.
Beat the cream cheese on medium for a couple of minutes, scraping
the bowl once or twice. Add the sugar and continue to beat for 2
minutes, until completely incorporated.
Mix together the cornstarch and salt, then gradually whisk in milk, then egg, until the well combined.
Whisk the cream cheese on medium-low and slowly add the egg/milk mixture, until the batter is smooth.
The recipe says to use plastic wrap to line your baking
pan, so that's what I did, and it was kind of strange and melty around the edges when I took it out of the oven. I've read other takes on this recipe where parchment paper is used instead, and I will do that next time. Also, who has a 6x6 pan? I used a standard loaf pan and it was perfect.
Pour the cheesecake into
your lined dish and bake for 15 minutes, or until the edges are set but
the center is still jiggly. Remember, this is supposed to be a
spreadable liquid cheesecake, so you don’t want to over cook it, but if
the edges aren’t set, continue to bake for up to 25 minutes, checking
every 5 minutes. Do not allow it to brown at all. Mine took 15 minutes.
Cool completely in the pan, then store for up to a week in the fridge.
Pie crumb
Makes about 350g (2 ¾ cups)
1.5 cups or 240g flour
2 tablespoons or 18g sugar
2/4 teaspoon or 3g salt
8 tablespoons or 115g butter, melted
1.5 tablespoons or 20g water
Preheat the oven to 350F/175C.
Combine the flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl and mix well, then
add the butter and water and continue to mix until small clusters form.
This can be done in a mixer with a paddle attachment on low speed, but
it isn’t necessary.
Spread the clusters on lined baking sheet, and bake for 25 minutes,
breaking them up occasionally. When ready, the crumbs will be golden
and a little moist--they will dry as they cool. Mine seemed too dark after 25 minutes. They still tasted good, but I'd check them at 20 minutes next time.
Cool the crumbs completely, then store in an airtight container for
up to a week at room temperature or up to a month in the fridge/freezer.
Pie Crumb Frosting
Makes about 220 g (3/4 cup)--this is enough for one very generously frosted 6-inch cake (with plenty of leftovers--Christina Tosi recommends you snack on it with apples). Also, Christina's cakes typically have no frosting on the sides, just the tops, because she likes people to be able to see what's going on inside.
1/2 recipe Pie Crumb
1/2 cup or 110 g milk
1/2 teaspoon or 2 g kosher salt
3 tablespoons or 40 g butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup or 40 g confectioners’ sugar
Blend the pie crumbs, milk, and salt in a blender or food
processor on medium-high until smooth, scraping down the bowl a few
times. The mixture was shockingly thick and smooth!
Cream together the butter and confectioners’ sugar using a stand
mixer on medium-high until pale and fluffy. Reduce the speed to low and
add the crumb puree. After a minute, increase the speed to medium-high
and blend for another couple of minutes, until very the frosting is a
very pale light brown.
The frosting can be stored for up to a week in the fridge.
Note: this frosting is like no other frosting I've ever tasted. Not too sweet, it's basically a spreadable pie crust. Bizarre and amazing.
Apple Pie Filling
Makes about 400 g (1 3/4 cups)
1 lemon
2 medium or 300 g Granny Smith apples
1 tablespoon or 14 g butter
2/3 cup tightly packed or 150 g light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon or 1 g cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon or 1 g kosher salt
Half fill a medium bowl with cold water, then add the lemon
juice.
Wash and peel your apples, then quarter and core them. Cut each
quarter into three sections, lenthwise. Then cut each of these skinny pieces into
four small chunks. Store apple pieces in the lemon water.
Drain the lemon
water from the apples, then put them in a medium saucepan and add the
remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, gently, over medium heat and
stir the apples occasionally. Once they have begun to release their
juices, simmer for 3-5 minutes, until soft but not mushy. Cool completely before cake assembly.
Store this filling for up to a week in an airtight container in the fridge, but do not freeze it.
Note: I had some very juicy apples, I guess, and the sauce never quite thickened for me. I used all of the apples in the cake but not the liquid. I strained that off and drizzled a bit over the apples when assembling the cake. Maybe if this happens next time I will add some corn starch while cooking.
Apple cider soak
Makes about 60g (1/4 cup)
1/4 cup or 55g apple cider
1 teaspoon tightly packed or 5g light brown sugar
pinch or 0.25g cinnamon
Whisk together all of the ingredients in a small bowl until the sugar has dissolved.
Assembly!
Invert the cooled cake onto a piece of parchment and cut out two x 6’’
circles of cake, using a 6’’ ring as a guide. Use the remaining scraps
to form another layer of cake.
Lay a piece of parchment paper on a sheet pan or cake pan (I used an 8-inch round cake pan). Clean the 6" ring and place on top.
Line the 6” ring with a 20"x3" piece of acetate or another type of strong but
flexible plastic sheeting. Place the cake scraps inside the ring and
flatten them into an even layer. Brush half of the apple cider soak over
this layer, then layer over half of the liquid cheesecake. Sprinkle
over 1/3 of the apple pie crumbs, then half of the apple pie filling.
At this stage, you can use reinforce the walls with another layer of
acetate, overlapping the bottom one slightly and tucking it between the first piece of acetate and the cake ring. This is delicate, awkward work.
Place another layer of brown butter cake over the apple pie filling (waaay easier said than done) and
brush on the remaining apple cider soak. Cover with remaining
cheesecake, then half of the remaining pie crumbs, and all of the leftover
apple pie filling.
Top (awkwardly; that acetate is not easy to deal with) with the last sheet of cake, then add the pie crumb
frosting. Decorate it as you will or smooth it flat. Use the remaining
pie crumbs to make a border around the outside of the frosting.
Transfer the cake to the freezer and leave it there for at least 12
hours, or up to 2 weeks. 3-4 hours before you want to serve the cake,
remove it from the freezer and slide off the metal cake ring. Peel off
the acetate and stick the cake in the fridge, where it can stay for up
to 5 days. Wrap it in plastic or cover it with a cake box if you are
going to leave it for an extended period of time.
It's been a lousy few weeks for Bunny. The story is so convoluted and boring--I'll try not to ramble.
Bun takes a miracle drug twice a day to keep her regular. The University of Illinois' small animal clinic gets it from India, but the supply recently ran out (for good? conflicting stories!), and all animals on the drug needed to come in so their doctors could talk about alternatives. So Jeff and I brought Bun in.
During the exam, the doctor suspected that she had a urinary infection. She gets these about once a year, and after further tests, we learned that yes, that was the case. The antibiotics she had to take: 56 Clavamox pills over the next four weeks, which seems incredible. Bun hates pills, so this would be a twice-daily power struggle. I drew 56 erasable Bun faces on our kitchen chalkboard for motivational purposes. Fine.
Yesterday morning when we opened our bedroom door, Bun was not there to greet us and boss us around. This was highly irregular, so we started calling for her. She emerged from the living room and limped up to us. She didn't want to put much pressure on her back left foot, and as a result she was moving slightly sideways.The foot in question:
Jeff once had a little dog that had a stroke who moved the same way, so he immediately thought, stroke. Maybe it was a side-effect from the pills? He scooped her up in a towel and we both started crying and holding Bun like a baby. Our poor girl!
She seemed alert in every other way, though, and was not yowling in pain, but we knew we needed to get her to her local vet as soon as possible. Jeff held it together long enough to make the necessary call, we threw on some clothes, and we rushed her up to the vet just as it was opening.
Bun's kind of a big deal up there. Her file is one of the thickest they have, so everyone knows her little face. She is incredibly docile and sweet to all humans, and she also has this way of giving her doctors and other vet people homemade cookies "just 'cause." I took one look at the always-sympathetic C., working the desk as we blew in, and got hideously weepy as Jeff explained our situation. We were hustled into an exam room.
The first available doctor looked in Bun's eyes and did the usual exam, saying she wasn't showing any stroke symptoms. She suspected that Bun had injured her leg in some way and wanted to take some X-rays.
[fast forward through stressful waiting period where they kept Bun for a couple of hours]
The X-rays showed no signs of breakage. We were able to see that she was a bit constipated. ALL of Bun's doctors had looked at her and all concluded that she had not had a stroke. Consensus was that she had a soft tissue/tendon injury. They gave us something to treat her pain and we went home. I came up later with some cookies from Bun.
What could have caused the injury?
Theory A: Bun's kinda-pal Quixote likes to engage in grab-ass (see video below, and now I feel like such a jerk for chuckling)...
...and occasionally those two get into some knock-down, drag-outs during the wee hours.
Theory B: As Bun has aged, her ability to jump has declined. Last week I watched in horror as she attempted to jump from our dining room table to a window sill and missed, falling to the floor. Maybe something like that happened overnight.
But Bun has been frightened of Quixote since yesterday morning and actively hides from him now. So I'm leaning toward Theory A.
Attempts to give Bun her pain medication were met with a frothy, spitty, puking girl who was having none of it. She refused food for the rest of the day and hid in Jeff's office. Her eyes were dilated and I know she must have been in pain. We ended up sleeping on the floor beside her last night.
In the morning (5 a.m.) we all woke up. Happily, I was able to coax Bun into eating some of her dry food and drinking some water. She used her litter box a little--she had to have been almost totally dried out. Standing in the box seemed uncomfortable for her and I feel that's a top reason why she's avoiding it. Jeff managed to get her various meds in her. She's spent most of today in Jeff's office, eating and drinking a bit but not much. Jeff has become worried that she's not passing the stool we saw in her X-ray yesterday and, with the advice of her U of I doctor, he has upped her laxative dosage. We don't want this to turn into a repeat of two summers ago.
SO we are hoping that between now and 2 p.m. tomorrow, Bun will have had a successful litter box trip to Town #2. If not, she has another date with her U of I doctor. I really hope it doesn't come to that.
If you would like to donate some money toward Bun's hefty medical bills, I have a PayPal button on the right. Or please consider buying a print here, stuff here, or originals here. Thanks!
EDIT! It's late Friday morning, and I am pleased to announce that Bun gave birth (basically) to a bouncing baby boom-boom, as we call them. Actually, it was more like octuplet boom-booms. Crisis averted! Even though she's still got that sideways walk that will hopefully heal over time, Bun's feeling a lot perkier today. AND she gets to nap the afternoon away in her sunny basket, narrowly avoiding a scary, expensive trip to see her U of I doctors. GO BUN.
I mean, seriously, there was cheering going on in this house. People were dragged away from desks to gape at things in litter boxes.
And I would like to sincerely thank everyone who wished our cat well and donated some money to her cause. You almost completely paid her surprise expenses this week. Thank you very much for helping us. Bun loves you and wants to give you cookies, just 'cause. I was genuinely surprised that anyone had even bothered to read to the bottom of yesterday's post. I propose a toast to you, my dear readers. You made a little cat happy.
(I made it clear that Bun pooped today, right? She did not have a litter of kittens. I was trying to make a little joke and am saying this preemptively in case people didn't get it.)
Bun, seen here all bein' a Rockette, wants you to go to my art website, kellyeddington.com, and check out its new, cleaner, prettier, easier-to-navigate design. I wanted to do a screen shot and add it to this blog, but Bun was like, Then they'd never go to the site.
The new design comes courtesy of Jeff, who noodled around with it on WordPress for about a month. And by "noodled" I mean "squinted at code, bashed his head against his desk, did fast and complicated cut-and-pastes, looked up answers on WP help sites, resized and inserted dozens of images, found widgets, and did many other things that I will never completely understand."
Thank you very much, Jeff!
And thanks also to Bun, who nailed the above photo in one shot today. She is easily the most photogenic cat ever. Observe.
