Alizarine

Pink Roses

New painting and new video!

A friend commissioned me to paint some pink roses to give as a gift later this year. Jeff and I were lucky enough to be in Portland, Oregon for his birthday last month, and the city has an amazing rose test garden.

It boasts a mind-boggling array of roses in every color and variety imaginable, and I was able to take dozens of photos--fodder for future paintings and for use the next time somebody wants me to paint them. And needless to say, this place smelled incredible.

Just row after row of roses like these!

I sent my client a selection of photos of pink roses, and she chose one for me to paint the one: a cluster of light peachy-pink English roses that I wanted to make slightly pinker. I set to work and completed about a third of the 11"x14" painting in that first day.

And it was nice to have the tough rose out of the way (or at least started). The next morning I worked on the other roses.

And in the afternoon and the next morning, I developed the background.

This left a gaping white hole in the picture that I was saving for last. This rose was just starting to open, and I thought it would be a good subject for a video. You can see me paint it here (sped up eight times, I believe):

  

I'm not appearing in the video this time around--I don't think I need to show my face in all of them--and to make life a little easier for Jeff (who edits these), I changed the way I do my narrations. For my other videos, I recorded about 25 little chunks of audio, each about two sentences long, and we painstakingly dropped them into the videos at just the right time. This process was tiresome, and I thought it would be a lot easier if I did maybe four long chunks. And it was. I hope people like this approach just as much, as it saves us from an hour or two of moving mini audio files around.

I'd like to thank my sister for collaborating with me and linking to my last video about a week ago, by the way, and her thousands of viewers who stopped by to take a look at it. That was truly amazing, and I hope they come back for this one! And thanks to my dozens of readers in this tiny corner of the Internet for your support over the years.

If you'd like to continue to support me, please consider buying a print of this or my other paintings, available here. Feel free to contact me via a comment, email, Tweet, or Facebook message if you'd like me to paint some roses or other flowers for you as well! Next time I'll put up a post about what kind of flowers are available.

Here are some of the roses I sent to my client--I have lots of other rose colors, too.

I also have a PayPal button on the right side of my blog for those of you who'd like to support the cause financially. Please know that it always makes my day whenever somebody notices that and sends me some money--I typically shriek and go bounding around the room, upsetting the cats, before I send a gushing email thanking you. And if you've got nothing better to do, go to my YouTube channel and watch some videos, give 'em a thumbs-up, and comment. Believe it or not, that helps!

Thanks again for watching. :)

Emily 2.0

Brand new on my YouTube channel: it's another speed-painting video of my sister Emily, a.k.a. Poof! Three years ago, I painted this portrait of her:

And just for fun, Jeff and I attempted to make a video of me painting her face for about an hour. Our technology was not that great: my workspace is small, and the only way we could get a camera in there and have any kind of light was to position it sideways. There were focus problems at the beginning. But, whatever, we sped up the video, popped it up on my mostly-unused YouTube channel, showed it to friends, and let it sit there for three years.

 

And that crazy thing proceeded to accummulate almost half a million views!

I liked the small amount of ad revenue that started to trickle in (don't get too excited; this makes me a dollar a day at the very most), but I felt bad that the quality of the video was barely acceptable.

Three years later, Jeff and I have rebooted the channel, named it Art Food Kitty, and improved the technology--as inexpensively as humanly possible, with lots of MacGuyver stuff going on. After warming up with some how-to videos (see my last few posts), I'm finally ready to post a new Poof video: Emily 2.0!

This is a collaboration with Emily's Beauty Broadcast channel--and I'm so glad she wanted to do this because, um, she's basically a YouTube superstar. She's been a big help in the development of my channel, too. We've been talking about it a lot since I had the idea to create Art Food Kitty earlier this year, and we thought it would be great to introduce her fans to my channel via a collaboration.

So here is my speed-painting video of a quick portrait I made of Poof last week. She came up with a speed-makeup video, and I painted her based on some selfies she took immediately after she shot her video.

 

As I mentioned in the video, this has been sped up ten times, and it is also me painting at my absolute fastest. Most portraits like this take me a day to a day and a half to complete. The reason I hurried to complete it in a couple of hours was simple: our camera can only store so much video, and I didn't want to make a 30-minute video or speed it up to the point where my hand became an absolute blur. So two hours was about my limit.

And here is Emily's speed makeup video!

 

By the way, that thing I'm doing with my mouth at the beginning of my video? I don't know what that is, I find it impossible to control, and I'm working on it. I assume this is just the way I talk either all the time (I hope not!) or when I am nervous (please?). If you don't know what I'm talking about, please disregard this and don't go back up there looking for it.

I've never felt comfortable on camera, ever, and that was one reason why I've shied away from YouTube all these years. People massacre my sister in comments and on message boards on a regular basis, and she's so much more capable than I am. Poof does her best to learn from constructive criticism and ignore abuse, but she's been making videos for almost eight years, and every once in a while someone will say something that will get to her. She's a human being! It's simply an occupational hazard at this point, and I'll have to get used to it, too. So far people have been very nice to me on YouTube, and that's terrific, but it's not going to last.

So yeah, you guys, I get it: my mouth does that sideways thing, I am very pale, I am old, my clothes are not interesting, my hair is black and I don't do anything cool with it, my makeup is always the same, I have several moles on my arms, my voice is weird and I talk like some kind of stoner robot, my palette is a mess, I am a crazy cat lady, I'm not a size 0, my paintbrushes suck, I don't have children and what's that all about?, I like to bake things that are not good for me, my fingernail polish is wrong in some way, my paintings are too realistic, my paintings are not realistic enough, I'm taking all the joy out of watercolor, I'm obviously just trying to make a buck, I'm a lousy teacher, I have no business being on YouTube, and I'm not uploading mockable new content quickly enough.

WAY AHEAD OF YOU!

Sorry. I'm nervous. I just checked my mouth and it's doing that sideways thing. So yeah. Please try to enjoy these videos by my sister and me. Please subscribe to my channel. I'll be in my safe room.

Oh yes: prints! They are here.

Jeff's Birthday Cake

Jeff's birthday is one week away, and we're all pretty excited about it.

Well, at least I am. And I felt like making the ultimate birthday cake. I've also been wanting to try out Christina Tosi's homemade Funfetti cake for about nine months. The concept behind it--let's spend hours baking something that normally takes about five minutes to throw together--is, if you think about it, so me. I'm the kind of person who will spend a month painting a watercolor while my contemporaries blithely turn out splashy creations at the rate of one per day. What is my problem?

That's a question for another time. But this recipe results in something that accurately duplicates yet is better than your standard Funfetti-with-canned-frosting cake because it has the secret ingredients of love and toil and dude I spent my entire Friday afternoon making this for you. It also has some crunchy things happening that you won't get anywhere else. Christina Tosi is a wonderful maniac for putting this recipe together. Her Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook is by far my favorite cookbook this year and is definitely in my all-time top five. Look: it contains a recipe for something called "liquid cheesecake" and it's everything you imagine it to be. Buy this book. Learn from it. Worship it.

Here's the giant recipe. My notes are in italics, and I apologize for the wonky format. It's a Typepad problem.

Birthday Cake
makes 1 quarter sheet pan

• 4 tablespoons (½ stick, 55g) butter, at room temperatue
• ⅓ cup (60g) vegetable shortening
• 1¼ cups (250g) granulated sugar
• 3 tablespoons (50g) light brown sugar, tightly packed
• 3 eggs
• ½ cup (110g) buttermilk
• ⅓ cup (65g) grapeseed oil  <-- vegetable oil also works
  
• 2 teaspoons (8g) clear vanilla extract  <-- regular vanilla also works
  
• 2 cups (245g) cake flour
• 1½ teaspoons (6g) baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon (3g) kosher salt
• ¼ cup (50g) rainbow sprinkles
• Pam or other nonstick cooking spray (optional)
• 2 tablespoons (25g) rainbow sprinkles

Preheat the oven to 350.

Combine the butter, shortening, and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream together on medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the eggs, and mix on medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl once more.

On low speed, stream in the buttermilk, oil, and vanilla. Increase the mixer speed to medium-high and paddle for 4 to 6 minutes, until the mixture is practically white, twice the size of your original fluffy butter-and-sugar mixture, and completely homogenous. Don’t rush the process. You’re basically forcing too much liquid into an already fatty mixture that doesn’t want to make room for the liquid. There should be no streaks of fat of liquid. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl.

On very low speed, add the cake flour, baking powder, salt, and the 50g (¼ cup) rainbow sprinkles. Mix for 45 to 60 seconds, just until your batter comes together. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Please note: the batter is delicious. Jeff popped into the kitchen and ate, I don't know, two tablespoons of it.

Pam-spray a quarter sheet pan and line it with parchment, or just line the pan with a Silpat. Using a spatula, spread the cake batter in an even layer in the pan. Sprinkle the remaining 25g (2 tablespoons) rainbow sprinkles evenly on top of the batter.

Bake the cake for 30 to 35 minutes. The cake will rise and puff, doubling in size, but will remain slightly buttery and dense. At 30 minutes, gently poke the edge of the cake with your finger: the cake should bounce back slightly and the center should no longer be jiggly. Leave the cake in the oven for an extra 3 to 5 minutes if it doesn’t pass these tests. My cake took 30 minutes to bake completely.

Take the cake out of the oven and cool on a wire rack or, in a pinch, in the fridge or freezer (don’t worry, it’s not cheating). The cooled cake can be stored in the fridge, wrapped in plastic wrap, for up to 5 days.

Birthday Cake Soak
makes about 60g (¼ cup)

• ¼ cup (55g) milk
• 1 teaspoon (4g) clear vanilla extract

Whisk together the milk and vanilla in a small bowl.

Birthday Cake Frosting
makes about 430g (2 cups)

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick, 115g) butter, at room temperature
• ¼ cup (50g) vegetable shortening
• 2 ounces (55g) cream cheese
• 1 tablespoon (25g) glucose  <-- I got mine on Amazon
  
• 1 tablespoon (18g) corn syrup
• 1 tablespoon (12g) clear vanilla extract  <-- regular vanilla works too
  
• 1¼ cups (200g) confectioners’ sugar
• ½ teaspoon (2g) kosher salt
• pinch (0.25g) baking powder  <-- what an idea!
  
• pinch (0.25g) citric acid  <-- I got mine on Amazon
  

Combine the butter, shortening, and cream cheese in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream together on medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes, until the mixture is smooth and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

With the mixer on its lowest speed, stream in the glucose, corn syrup, and vanilla. Crank the mixer up to medium-high and beat for 2 to 3 minutes, until the mixture is silky smooth and a glossy white. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add the confectioners’ sugar, salt, baking powder, and citric acid and mix on low speed just to incorporate them into the batter. Crank the speed back up to medium-high and beat for 2 to 3 minutes, until you have a brilliant stark white, beautifully smooth frosting. It should look just like it came out of a plastic tub at the grocery store! Use the frosting immediately, or store it in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Birthday Cake Crumb
makes for 275g (2¼ cups)

• ½ cup (100g) granulated sugar
• 1½ tablespoons (25g) light brown sugar, tightly packed
• ¾ cup (90g) cake flour
• ½ teaspoon (2g) baking powder
• ½ teaspoon (2g) kosher salt
• 2 tablespoons (20g) rainbow sprinkles
• ¼ cup (40g) grapeseed oil  <-- vegetable oil also works
  
• 1 tablespoon (12g) clear vanilla extract  <-- again, regular works
  

Heat the oven to 300°F.

Combine the sugars, flour, baking powder, salt, and sprinkles in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and mix on low speed until well combined.

Add the oil and vanilla and paddle again to distribute. The wet ingredients will act as glue to help the dry ingredients form small clusters; continue paddling until that happens.

Spread the cluster on a parchment- or Silpat-lined sheet pan. Bake for 20 minutes, breaking them up occasionally. The crumbs should still be slightly moist to the touch; they will dry and harden as they cool.

Let the crumbs cool completely before using in a recipe or scarfing by the handful. Oh you will want to do that. You can get away with eating maybe 1/4 cup of them. This recipe makes a lot. Stored in an airtight container, the crumbs will keep fresh for 1 week at room temperature or 1 month in the fridge or freezer.

Assembly

You will need a 6" cake ring and two 20"x3" pieces of acetate. Come on. I know you don't have them. Add them to your Amazon wish list along with the glucose and the citric acid, hopefully get them for Christmas or your birthday, and wait for an excuse to use them.

Put a piece of parchment or a Silpat on the counter. Invert the cake onto it and peel off the parchment or Silpat from the bottom of the cake. Use a 6" cake ring to stamp out 2 circles from the cake. These are your top 2 cake layers. The remaining cake “scrap” will come together to make the bottom layer of the cake.

- layer 1, the bottom -

Clean the cake ring and place it in the center of a sheet pan lined with clean parchment or a Silpat. Use 1 strip of acetate to line the inside of the cake ring.

Put the cake scraps in the ring and use the back of your hand to tamp the scraps together into a flat even layer.

Dunk a pastry brush in the birthday cake soak and give the layer of cake a good, healthy bath of half of the soak.

Use the back of a spoon to spread one-fifth of the frosting in an even layer over the cake.

Sprinkle one-third of the birthday crumbs evenly over the top of the frosting. Use the back of your hand to anchor them in place.

Use the back of a spoon to spread a second fifth of the frosting as evenly as possible over the crumbs. This is quite impossible. Give it your best shot and try not to get too uptight about it. Neatness doesn't really matter.

- layer 2, the middle -

With your index finger, gently tuck the second strip of acetate between the cake ring and the top ¼ inch of the first strip of acetate, so that you have a clear ring of acetate 5 to 6 inches tall—high enough to support the height of the finished cake. Set a cake round on top of the frosting, and repeat the process for layer 1 (if 1 of your 2 cake rounds is jankier than the other, use it here in the middle and save the prettier one for the top). This acetate stuff is truly a pain in the ass, but it's worth the hassle, I tell you, if only for the satisfaction you will feel when you peel it off later.

- layer 3, the top -

Nestle the remaining cake round into the frosting. Cover the top of the cake with the last fifth of the frosting. Give it volume and swirls, or do as we do and opt for a perfectly flat top. Garnish the frosting with the remaining birthday crumbs.

Transfer the sheet pan to the freezer and freeze for a minimum of 12 hours to set the cake and filling. The cake will keep in the freezer for up to 2 weeks.

At least 3 hours before you are ready to serve the cake, pull the sheet pan out of the freezer and, using your fingers and thumbs, pop the cake out of the cake ring. I've also set the cake on top of smaller, upside-down bowl and pushed down on the ring. It's easier than using your hands. Gently peel off the acetate and transfer the cake to a platter or cake stand. Let it defrost in the fridge for a minimum of 3 hours (wrapped well in plastic, it can be refrigerated for up to 5 days).

Slice the cake into wedges and serve.

Jeff's comment:

"[This] was glorious food and even made the cream soda that washed it down taste better. I described it as the Platonic ideal of a Funfetti cake."

Winged Nativity

This is my first Christmas painting! It's a 10.5"x13.5" still-life of a handful of bird tree ornaments. We have quite a few, and I like how they are kind of seasonless. I wanted to create a holiday painting that would be tolerable year-round, and I ended up with something that can be interpreted as a secular or religious image. More on that in a bit. Here's how it came together.

These birds have a variety of textures, from the feathery peacocks and hummingbird, which at the time Jeff insisted looked furious, to the cardinal that's made of some kind of straw-like fiber, to the puffy white bird that's covered with sleet and glitter, to the T-1000-looking crystal bird in the center. It's the only bird above that was truly finished. I had extra stuff to add to the rest of them, but I was suprised by how quickly the picture was progressing after a few days' work. During this time, Jeff and I made a video for my BRAND NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL!

Yes. I've decided to follow in my sister's massive, canyon-like footsteps and am giving YouTube a shot! The channel is called "Art Food Kitty" and will cover things like arts, foods, and kitties. It's a video version of this blog, and I'll show art demonstrations and sped-up paintings, favorite recipes (once we get the lighting in the kitchen figured out and stop hating the way we look and sound on camera), and plenty of gratuitous shots of our darling cats. Jeff and I are excited about this and it's currently occupying a lot of brain space. I've already had YouTube dreams/nightmares every night this week. Wheeee!

Our first video is embedded at the bottom of this post. But please read the next couple of paragraphs. I'll make it brief!

Moving right along: a couple of days ago I added a sparkly star near the center and a glittery pine cone under the hummingbird. Along the bottom: some greenery I pulled off one of our trees and arranged on top of a red Christmas stocking. Also in there: a blue light. At his point the stocking still needed work--I had to add shadows on the flat areas near the right side.

This watercolor is already in a frame! I'm calling it Winged Nativity because as I mentioned earlier, this painting can be interpreted as secular or religious. On the surface, this is a grouping of cute birds on some greenery, a red stocking, and some aluminum foil. But if you want to dig deeper, it's a non-traditional nativity scene. The white bird and cardinal are Mary and Joseph (note their gold cord halos). The otherworldly crystal bird is the baby Jesus. He is tucked under a star, wears a glittery crown, and beneath him is a light. The hummingbird offers him a golden pine cone, and the two other kings are peacocks. (Perhaps they have misplaced their frankincense and myrrh and are looking for it.)

Would you like a print? You can absolutely get it as a print! Click this thing!

Buy your holiday cards now! It's Christmas in July! They're blank inside!

BIG cards are here.    Little cards are here!

And now, I'd like to begin the very soft, very slow roll-out of Art Food Kitty. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE and watch this channel evolve! Will it ever get better? Will I figure out how to paint without my frizzy hair getting in the way of the camera (sorry about that)? Will our marriage implode over the inevitable artistic differences? Will the dreaded comments section destroy our very souls? Will our cats become superstars and leave Jeff and me in the dust? You know you want to get in on the ground floor of this thing!

 

Thanks in advance for watching. :)

Rose of Sharon

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!

Click here for Wilting Parrot Tulip.

Click here for Passion Flower.

I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO BUY ALL THREE! :)

Like me on Facebook, yo!

Mufnuts and Frunch Toast

I can explain.

The night Jeff and I returned home from Orlando, all stocked up on groceries, cuddling with the cats, and awaiting the snowstorm, I hate to say it, but my husband became a little whiney.

He wanted donuts, you see, and we had neglected to pick up any of those when we were shopping, but he didn't feel like getting back in the car and returning to the store. And anyway, the donuts they'd have to offer wouldn't be the apple-cinnamon donuts upon which we gorge once a year at a local orchard.

I make a perfectly good muffin, but Jeff just isn't into muffins. I half-heartedly offered to make some muffins instead and got a dismissive shrug. You guys, my muffins are fantastic and I could eat about five of them now.

I'd been sitting on a Pioneer Woman recipe that seemed like it would be similar to those local orchard donuts, only shaped like muffins, plus no deep-frying. I'd been sitting on it for over a year! The reason I hadn't made it yet: too much butter. Too effing fattening. I'd glance at the photos of her "French breakfast puffs," study the one where she's rolling muffins around in two sticks of melted butter, and scoff. Obscene. It's like they've never even heard of cholesterol out there in Oklahoma or wherever.

But after a few failed crock pot experiments (thank you so much, Pinterest), I wanted to make something that I was confident wouldn't suck in every way, and I wanted to prove to Jeff that muffins are worthy of his love. I made that sat-upon recipe the next morning and fed them to a mind-destroyed Jeff.

They are evil perfection. They are the bastard children of muffins and donuts. We're calling them mufnuts.

The only way we can justify making them is to eat one mufnut per week. We have frozen the rest (they reheat beautifully in the microwave) and--I say this with pride--we still have a small stash in the freezer.

The recipe is here. Proceed with caution.

And then there's this thing:

The next weekend Jeff felt the need to dazzle me with breakfast.

 

His recipe's original title: the unweildy Crunchy French Toast with Cap'n Crunch Coating, which we shortened to Cap'n Crunch French Toast. This further devolved into Frunch Toast.

 

Not Franch! Frunch.

The recipe, which you can find here, reminded us of a slightly classier version of this:

 

Jeff substituted a loaf of white bakery bread for the recipe's challah (it's expensive around here). The recipe produced enough custard to soak a dozen slices, i.e. the entire loaf minus the heels. We elected to bake eight--oh yeah, you bake this!--and freeze four.

It took about 30-45 minutes for Jeff (with light assistance from me) to produce the Frunch toast. It's now our go-to French toast. No question about it. And look: you get 8 pieces all at once! Plus you are left with a mostly-full box of Cap'n Crunch, which you love but never buy!

IT WAS SO FANTASTICALLY CRUNCHY.

You'd think that the Cap'n Crunch flavor would dominate, too, but no. It reminded me of the time I made Nigella's Nutella cake, which required an entire jar of the stuff along with other rich ingredients (shocker, I know). When I tasted the end product, the Nutella flavor had all but disappeared. Unnerving. That is sort of going on here with the Cap'n Crunch. You get a bit of the flavor but a ton of the texture.

We each ate a couple of pieces and froze the rest of the baked Frunch toast along with the aforementioned four pieces of raw Frunch. When microwaved later, the baked Frunch was not crunchy anymore, but it still tasted good. We haven't baked the raw Frunch yet, but I'll let you know how it goes.

I think this recipe would be great if you're serving a crowd at breakfast. Serve it with a side of mufnuts!

Nah. Do one or the other. You don't want your guests to think you're a murderer.

Apple Pie Cake

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, and 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. If the mixture hasn’t reached this stage by 6 minutes, continue to beat it.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Cool the cakes on a wire rack and store for up to 5 days, well wrapped in plastic wrap, in the fridge.
7. 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

1. Preheat the oven to 300F/150C.
2. 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.
3. Mix together the cornstarch and salt, then gradually whisk in milk, then egg, until the well combined.
4. Whisk the cream cheese on medium-low and slowly add the egg/milk mixture, until the batter is smooth. 
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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

1. Preheat the oven to 350F/175C.
2. 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. 
3. 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.
4. 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

1. 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!
2. 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. 
3. The frosting can be stored for up to a week in the fridge.
4. 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

1. Half fill a medium bowl with cold water, then add the lemon juice.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Store this filling for up to a week in an airtight container in the fridge, but do not freeze it.
5. 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

1. 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.

Misc. Winter Things

The photo above is a shot of our side-yard one afternoon last week, back when we had a dusting and a half of snow. The light seems to be changing just a bit now that December is over, and spring is obviously just around the corner.

Not really.

I'm going to spend the next ten weeks enveloped in various fleeces and plan to amuse myself with new recipes, including two you'll see below. But first, I wanted to show you a couple of photos of Poof from Christmas at our parents' house.

She was sitting there looking so blissfully content that I had to ask her to freeze while I took a photo.

I like how her senior photo seems to be peeking at her happy future self. What a beauty. I love her so much.

And now, the recipes!

This is a Pinterest recipe I found and made almost immediately. It's from something called "jujugoodnews" and is a black bean salad with corn, red peppers, and avocado-lime vinaigrette, minus the avocado for now. It's shockingly tasty and healthy to boot! I've tweaked it a bit (see italics).

INGREDIENTS

• 2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed and drained
• 3 ears fresh cooked corn, kernels cut off the cob <-- I used a bag of thawed frozen white and yellow corn, something like 12-16 ounces, so yeah, I went *heavy on the corn.* I've adjusted the lime juice, onion, salt and olive oil amounts below to accommodate the extra corn.
• 2 red bell peppers, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• generous 2 teaspoons salt
• generous 2 tablespoons minced red onion
• generous 2 tablespoons sugar
• 10 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon lime zest (be sure to zest limes before juicing them) <-- I zested 2 small limes
• 7 or 8 tablespoons fresh lime juice
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro, plus more for garnish <-- I used Italian parsley because I have a problem with cilantro
• 2 Hass avocados, chopped

DIRECTIONS

Combine the corn, beans, and peppers in a large bowl and mix well.

Mince the garlic and mash it into the salt until it becomes a paste. Put it in a small bowl along with the lime juice, lime zest, olive oil, and onion. Whisk and pour over the corn mixture. Mix well.

Cover and chill for a few hours or overnight. Right before serving, add avocados and mix gently, being careful not to mash avocados.

Serve at room temperature.

Jeff and I decided to turn this salad into some tacos. He has a quick guacamole recipe that he likes to throw together (avocado, traces of lime juice--he had a bad experience with too much last month--a grated clove of garlic, a tablespoon of jarred salsa, and salt to taste). So: it's a smear of guac and a little pepper jack cheese on a blistered corn tortilla topped with the above salad.

This made a fun 1:30-ish kinda-lunch! Also there's no meat here, although this made us want to add some carnitas into the mix, but not enough to actually get in the car and drive 10 miles into town to our favorite carnitas provider.

Next up: spicy brittled peanuts from that Smitten Kitchen cookbook I've been talking about lately. Oh man, these are incredible. That amount of cayenne down there is perfect, and it quietly buzzes around in the sweet-salty background. If you're not allergic to peanuts, you will find yourself saying lots of double-negative things like, "Life would not be worth living if I couldn't eat peanuts."

You're going to have to work for these way-better-than-CrackerJack peanuts, but not too much. It's mostly just a lot of stirring over a medium-hot pot, and some of that stirring is very interesting because science.

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon flaky sea salt
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 cups shelled raw or roasted unsalted peanuts, papery skins removed <-- I used blanched peanuts

DIRECTIONS

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicon mat. If you don't have either, coat your baking shee with a thinslick of vegetable oil.

In a small bowl, whisk together the baking soda, sea sat, and cayenne, and set aside.

In a large saucepan, the heaviest one you've got, heat the sugar, butter, and water over medium-high heat until it just begins to turn golden, about 7 to 10 minutes. Add the peanuts and start stirring, coating them with the sugar mixture.

After a minute or two, the sugar will sieze up a bit, making the peanuts look grainy and crusty, and it will be harder to stir them--you'll be convinced that it's gone irreversibly south, cursing me under your breath [This cookbook is so conversationally awesome and you need to go buy it--K], but fear not, keep stirring, and in about 3 minutes it will melt back into a golden caramel.

That part actually took more like 5 minutes. I'm sure this was because my idea of medium-high heat is a little low, as I am afraid of heat.

Keep stirring, breaking up any clumps with your spoon, until the nuts are evenly coated, then remove the pot from the heat. Stir in the baking-soda-spice mixture as fast and evenly as you can, then spill the caramelized nuts out onto your prepared sheet, spreading them in a single layer and breaking up any clumps that you can before they set. Cool completely.

Once they're cool, break the nut clusters into smaller pieces and put them in a serving dish. The nuts will keep in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks, but rarely do because they are habit-forming.

She's not kidding. These were gone in two and a half days.

In other food news, yesterday I tried one of David Leibovitz's recipes for a flourless chocolate cake that was great but, disappointingly, not awesome. I already make a couple of F.C.C.s that beat it handily taste-wise and are a lot prettier to boot. So we're off to a disappointing start on that cookbook, but I'm nowhere near giving up. You should see some of the photos in that thing.

Finally, Jeff and I spent last week watching Mad Men's directors' commentaries for season five, and I was amused to discover this not-at-all-Photoshopped! insert in the packaging. I love how ticked off Betty looks.

PS Jeff thinks that Jon Hamm has an enormous head, especially in the image above, and he asked me to tack on this video.

 

Chocolate Chip Brioche Pretzels

Oh boy did I get a lot of books for Christmas, especially graphic novels (Harvey Pekar's Cleveland, Drawn Together by Aline and R. Crumb, New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine, and, geek squee!, Building Stories by Chris Ware, which I haven't even opened yet because I fear its power and size--it's about as big as a Monopoly box). I also received a couple of cookbooks: Ready For Dessert by David Lebovitz and Deb Perelman's The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook.

Let's hear it for Amazon wish lists, everybody!

I tore into The Smitten Kitchen and was immediately inspired. This 300+ page wonder includes a surprising number of vegetarian recipes. Bacon gets mentioned once or twice during the breakfast chapter, but meat doesn't make a real appearance until after page 200. Which is great! I've been craving more vegetables, and Deb's broccoli slaw and black bean ragout are already big hits with me.

But yesterday I felt like trying something more indulgent, and the book's chocolate chip brioche pretzels seemed too good to be true. They are pretzels in shape only. Our favorite local bakery makes a similar item (a long, narrow brioche sandwich with melty chocolate chips inside), and it has been a favorite of Jeff's and mine for nearly as long as we've been together. He even ate two of them on the morning of our wedding. Could we create something like those ourselves?

Answer: yes. Just barely, but yes. The recipe put our KitchenAid stand mixer through its paces, that's for sure, to the point that we thought it might do some damage to the machine. And even though these pretzels are as good as our bakery's if not better, Jeff and I will not be making them as often as we would like to because we love our mixer and would hate to see anything bad happen to it.

The recipe, which is kind of long, is here. Please read it if you want to give these prezels a try. Otherwise, here are some photos of the pretzel-shaping process and comments.

Here's half of the dough after its 2-hour rise. Jeff cut it into eight equal portions. Dibs on that one on the left!

He rolled the dough into 18-inch ropes on a plastic cutting board, stretching the dough by spreading out his fingers as he worked. The dough was really easy to deal with and required no flour to keep it from sticking to the plastic.

Each rope was turned into this sort-of noose shape.

Total pretzelization.

Four per pan.

While Jeff formed the pretzels, I got the egg wash going. I used the coarsest sugar in my cookie decorating arsenal to beautify the tops. I wish I had the clumpier kind that mimics the salt traditionally found on pretzels, but this was a good-enough substitution.

 

The recipe said to bake them for 12 minutes "or until lightly bronzed." After 12 minutes, ours were still pale and squishy. Ditto after 14. At 16 minutes, we declared them done, although they weren't as brown as the cookbook's photo:

That, to me, is "bronzed." And I want that sugar.

Be that as it may, our pretzels were perfectly baked and bronzed on the bottom. Please note the gross-looking crust in the prezel's holes formed by the egg wash. Don't be as aggressive as I was with the egg wash, or just don't worry about it. You won't notice it when you're eating these. Also please note my stylish bracelet. I'm one of those women who wears a seemingly-permanent hair tie bracelet.

These brioche pretzels are outstandingly delicious. As I ate the first one, still warm from the oven, I informed Jeff three times that "these are SO GOOD," as if he didn't know. They were also fantastic this morning after 20 seconds in the microwave.

PS A whole stick of butter was involved in the making of these babies, along with a hefty amount of chopped dark and milk chocolate, and when you look at them they positively scream I AM MADE OF CARBS PLEASE JUST STICK ME DIRECTLY ONTO YOUR THIGHS RIGHT NOW OKAY?! Sorry everybody.

Specul-YUMs!

Here is a 10-minute recipe that will rock your holiday party to its very foundations. It's a take on the popular teacher-gift that my former students called "puppy chow," a term that always made me wince as I ate the chocolatey stuff hand over fist.

Jeff found the recipe last week, and, similarly dissatisfied with its name ("sandy buddies"), he came up with the abomination you see above, Specul-YUMs!, so named because its key ingredient is Speculoos. Also known as Biscoff spread or simply cookie butter, Speculoos changed our lives when we were killing time in Los Angeles a few months ago. You may remember this photo:

We went through a phase where this was all we wanted to eat, but since then we've scaled back on our Speculoos consumption, conceding that when all is said and done, Nutella is our nutritionally-bankrupt spread of choice.

But then along came Specul-YUMs!. We have been enduring a brutal, three-day diet that ends later this afternoon, a diet so strict that our heads have become heavier than the rest of our bodies and this is happening:

 

Not really. We lost a few pounds but were hating life.

So when we made this recipe today and sampled a few weeee bites in the name of quality control, we lost our dang minds. This stuff not just some gimmicky snack. It is a savior that has delivered us from eating a cup of cottage cheese studded with five saltines and a hard-boiled egg and calling that some kind of lunch.

The recipe is from here. This is our doubled and slightly altered version (it's for a party).

INGREDIENTS

• 4 1/2 cups rice Chex cereal
• 4 tablespoons white chocolate chips
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 3/4 cup Biscoff Spread/Speculoos
• 4 tablespoons butter
• powdered sugar for coating, something like 1 cup

DIRECTIONS

Place cereal into a large bowl. In a separate small bowl, microwave chips, Biscoff spread, cinnamon and butter for 1 minute. Stir. Heat for 30 second intervals, stirring between each, until mixture is smooth. Spoon mixture into cereal and gently mix to combine all ingredients.

Place powdered sugar into a gallon resealable bag. Spoon in half of the cereal mixture and shake to coat. Then spread this on wax paper to cool. Repeat with the rest of the cereal mixture. Place in a festive bowl to serve!