Assembled, then quickly eaten

Vows were said, toasts were made and cake was eaten! And the three tiers even turned out looking the way I'd envisioned. I'd had this picture in my head for months, and I'll tell you what, it was pretty satisfying to pull it together and see it served and polished off.

It's a big cake for a big day, so although no one put real pressure on me, I did want to get everything just right. One small panic (of several) came the day after I baked the top layers when I realized too late that I should have strained the seeds from the puree — subbed with blackberry in this recipe. But I couldn't worry about it too much because the purple layers were already baked and the pans were due to be returned. By the way, the woman I rented them from at a shop called The Frosting took an opportunity to give me a life lesson. While recommending doubling the cake boards for the largest — and heaviest — cake, she said "You need a good foundation, just like in the home." That's right. In the home.

I have to say, the green tier brought mixed reactions. I heard one older guy say, "Hey, this is pretty good — despite its color." At least he didn't hear Miguel, my too-good-at-lying-with-a-straight-face boyfriend, convince a friend that it was lettuce cake. One particularly cute detail is that Caitlin got married in pale green shoes she picked out to match it!

It was the orange tier that proved to be trickiest. Being the widest, it had the most potential to crack in the middle and fall apart. After lots of flipping from one large, flat surface to another — we used all the good foundations we could find in our home — Miguel and I finally got them in place and covered with enough cream cheese frosting to fill a kiddie pool.

A note on that frosting: I'd tested two more traditional ones beforehand — a Swiss buttercream and a mousseline buttercream from The Cake Bible — and immediately knew they weren't right. With each of those, when I dipped in a fingertip for a taste, it was like eating sweetened butter — way too greasy. It wasn't far off from some frosting I've had at weddings, but it wouldn't do for what I wanted this to be. A fancy, thin-spreading slick of icing just isn't the right complement to a homestyle, naturally flavored cake. Fluffy cream cheese frosting totally is.

As fun as it was to take on the challenge of making a wedding cake, of course it was only one contribution to a magical night of celebrating friends. We filled fruit jars with champagne and talked and danced with friends who'd come back to town from Houston, Brooklyn, Seattle and the Rio Grande Valley. Two women — relatives, I think — who sliced the cake at Caitlin's parents' wedding 30 years ago took charge of slicing and serving, then we raised our jars for toasts and got to contra dancing. With so much love in the air, my heart couldn't help but swell a little.

A cake for Naitlin, part 2

After separating approximately 70 eggs this week, I'm getting pretty good at it. No errant shells or broken yolks here! The wedding cake recipes require only egg whites, so in an effort not to let all those yolks go to waste, I've decided that green tea ice cream will be a byproduct of these cakes.

All the baking was finished late Tuesday night: I've made four 16-inch orange layers, two 10-inch matcha layers (not counting the one I was about to put in the oven when I realized I'd forgotten baking powder) and two very purple 6-inch blackberry layers. And I disassembled the inside of my freezer only partially to shoehorn all these things in there. Here's a warning that I read many times before starting this project but didn't heed: measure your oven and freezer!! It's only because of luck that mine can barely fit in things that are 16 inches across — I'd guess the oven must be 16.2 inches front to back. What would I have done otherwise? Panicked, that's what.

But that hasn't happened (yet), and in fact a lot of this project was done with great ease thanks to Melissa's borrowed KitchenAid, a library copy of The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum and this spreadsheet made by my friend Joanna.

The spreadsheet was a lifesaver. You see, unlike rice or meatballs or pretty much everything else edible, making a bigger cake isn't as simple as making more batter. Instead of just doubling the recipe, it must be scaled to the size of pan with — most direly — the right amount of baking powder. Beranbaum has spent years of her life perfecting charts for all kinds of baking situations, and her work on what she calls Special Occasion White Butter Cake really saved me from a lot of guessing. I should point out that she is a woman who, according to the book's introduction, wrote a masters dissertation on sifting flour for yellow cake, got an A+ for it, then dumped her boyfriend after he read it and told her the subject was trivial.

She's kind of like a teacher who says "look it up in the dictionary" when a kid asks about a big word. Beranbaum invites you into the madness that surely went into creating her charts by requiring you to do your own dang math for your particular size of pan. She has you refer to the chart to determine your pan size's "Rose factor," by which you multiply the ingredient amounts of the base recipe. However, I know Joanna. And Joanna knows Excel. And she embedded some formulas into some columns so that I had an ingredient list for each tier multiplied by the correct Rose factor. Then, she went the extra mile and figured out how much of each ingredient I'd need to buy, i.e. 84 tablespoons means I should pick up 11 sticks of butter. She's great.

So, to bring you fully up to date: the wedding is this afternoon! Right now, I have 96 ounces of cream cheese coming to room temperature so I can whip up the frosting, frost and box the layers, then take them over to the house where the wedding's being held. I'm hoping that's as easy as it sounds condensed into one sentence!

Around town: Call for kale

This much is true: Austin is full of people who would really rather not do things the regular way. And I happen to be interested in more than what comes out of my own kitchen — even while in the middle of a gigantic baking project. So, in an effort to return to the idea that this blog began with, I'm getting out of the kitchen and talking to folks with big ideas about the way they eat, share and grow food.

A new project I recently heard about fits this big-idea bill so perfectly that I had to pull out my reporter's notebook. Daily Juice is looking to make some of its fresh juices using organic kale grown in pretty much the most hyper-local origin possible: Austinites' back yards. Is that innovative or what?

The way it's planned, even those like me who aren't too confident in their growing ability can join in. Resolution Gardens is in the business of installing raised bed gardens to get folks started in growing all kinds of vegetables, and they can be hands-on (or -off) in maintaining the garden once it's going. They're pitching in by leading kale-planting seminars specifically for this effort.

Resolution Gardens plans to buy the harvest from growers all over town, then sell it to Daily Juice, where it could end up in a salad or be transformed into a Green Party smoothie, for example, by blending with organic celery, cucumber, romaine, spinach, parsley, cabbage and cilantro.

You can imagine how healthy a juice blend containing kale must be, and growing its main ingredient in a way that puts urban yard space to use and contributes to the local food infrastructure sounds pretty karmically healthy, too. The cool thing is that this is just the pilot phase of a larger idea: Resolution Gardens' founder, Randy Jewart (also of Austin Green Art), told me he's collecting info on cost and time and yield for kale crops during this planting season so that the whole plan can expand by this fall.

"If we're supplying kale for a juicing operation, we could supply other things they use," he said. "What we'd like to happen is we could have thousands of people growing things for lots of restaurants and small grocery stores. This is just the beginning."

Interested in playing farmer? Johnny Barnett, a green-thumbed guy I talked with at the farmers market last weekend, wants to hear from you: johnny@resolutiongardens.com.

A cake for Naitlin

Nearly every day I get e-mails from the IT department at work labeled with an exasperated subject line asking something like, "Don't you even CARE about receiving

e-mail?" It's because I don't delete much. I'm afraid to check how far over the limit my inbox is because I hang on to old e-mails like this one, written to a buddy at work in July 2008:

p.s. this has me fascinated, and i'm not sure why. i don't think i'll ever make such an attempt, but it's seriously enthralling: http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/06/project-wedding-cake-an-introduction/

Well, guess what, folks? A year and a half later, I'm making the attempt. I'm baking a wedding cake this weekend! Two dear friends, Caitlin and Nathan, are getting married after six years together, during which time they've mastered the art of tandem bike riding and built a home that feels like a cozy cabin in the heart of the city. Cruise past their house and you'll always see a warm glow through the window, a welcome sight that means I'll find friends inside offering spiced-up sweet potato fries or a cold beer.

Nearly everything about the wedding plans can be described as potluck: friends will pitch in food, craft a colorful felted-wool bouquet, make flower garlands and bottle-cap noise makers for a post-nuptial promenade through the neighborhood and even pipe up during the vows for a communal Quaker-style ceremony. I'm honored to be contributing the cake. For 250 guests!

Because this isn't any old wedding for any old couple, the cake won't be the traditional, untouchable, frosted white tower. This cake will have color! And, most importantly, flavor. Here's the plan: cream cheese frosting will sit between and on top of the layers, but not on the sides. The idea of this minimal decoration is that the cake's attractive qualities come from it actually being a cake — one with flavor and color galore. A 6-inch top tier will be purple thanks to mixed berries, the 10-inch middle tier will be tinted green with matcha powder and the 16-inch lower tier will have orange zest and a sprinkling of orange-liqueur syrup. And, if needed, a few drops of orange food coloring. (Not as much as you see here in the experimental baking phase.)

Plus, the whole thing will be decked out with lots of fresh fruit. I liked how lovely it looks with these cakes that inspired this whole plan.

To test out the cake recipes I'll be using, I made these cupcake samples. We decided the orange was a bit bright and the blue hopefully should come out looking purple instead — I used too many blueberries and not enough strawberries in the puree. But other than that, it's a go! More details to come on the two frostings I've tested, this amazing resource and, of course, my baking progress.

P.S. The reality and magnitude of this project really hit me on Wednesday when I picked up the cake pans I'm renting. It shouldn't have been so surprising to me that a 16-inch pan makes an ENORMOUS cake!

Best onions I ever sliced

...thanks to this helpful book that was a birthday gift from a friend who must have been listening when I mentioned that most of the time I have no idea what I'm doing with knives. (Thank you!)

The onions went into this Moroccan dish, which possesses a combination that makes it a great dinner: it costs about $4 in all and tastes marvelous.

Another good descriptor I like for this meal — or anything I make, really — is bethtacular. (Tickets to see this woman's band were another birthday gift, and I can confirm that she is a real person whose accordion-playing skills deserve respect, but that won't stop me from taking her name and using it as my own personalized adjective.)

Discoveries

1. Sometimes early-stage cake batter starts out with a texture more like thick, beater-slowing cookie dough. I've become used to cake recipes that start out "cream the butter and sugar…" but as I learn more about cake-making, I'm seeing this isn't always standard. Such was the case with the strawberry cupcakes I made a couple of weeks ago for a buddy's potluck birthday party, seen here in various stages of unbake, if you will.

2. This one's major: My camera has white-balance settings! That are easy to use! And were there all along! They take a lot of the yellow, grainy quality out of photos — even those shot at night in my yellow-walled kitchen. I've gone more than two years without knowing about this, so I'm making up for lost time now. Expect a surplus of pictures of the bleach commercial variety as I marvel at how my whites are so much whiter.

3. Paul Reubens, when dressed as Pee-Wee Herman, looks exactly the same now as he did in character in 1986. I took a break from the strawberry cupcakes to watch him in the next-to-last episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, feel several twinges of entertainment nostalgia and then go back to pureeing strawberries. Yes, this was a while back, but these two guys in their very different suits have been making me laugh for a long time now. But then, so does this guy:

(And just look how white he is!)

Merry January

Sharing a recipe for an edible Christmas gift in January is sort of like continuing to plug in the twinkle lights on your house long after the holidays are over. But I'm doing it anyway. I realized last night while making my way through my neighborhood, where plenty of houses are still colorfully lit, that I'm all for keeping the lights glowing. After all the cider and hot chocolate is sipped, the presents are opened and the anticipation (for me, the best part) is deflated, we're left in January with a surplus of cold night air. We should at least make it sparkle.

And what does a sweet bite do but add sparkle? Besides, caramel corn with salted peanuts isn't necessarily December-specific. It's not peppermint-flavored or chestnut-studded or clove-scented, so a handful tastes right any time of year. Go make some now!

Before I decided on the caramel popcorn, I'd planned a collection of cookies for Christmas gifts:

• Butter cookies with pretty swirly icing

• Chocolate dulce de leche bars with sea salt caramel

• Triple peanut oatmeal cookies

• Trios cookies with three kinds of jam

• Spumoni chunk cookies with chocolate, pistachio and dried cherries

• Chocolate marshmallow cookies

I'd make multiple batches of each to give out for Christmas, assorted sets in little tins. I did the same thing last year with five other recipes, this one being my favorite. This involved a staggering grocery list of combined ingredients. 15 sticks of butter, 12 cups of sugar. But then I realized that's crazy. I didn't have time this year for that much baking, as much as I'd love to. Even without all those cookie recipes, my kitchen table already looked like this pre-holiday:

In a way — beyond the simplicity — the popcorn was a relief to make. Or, I should say, to make successfully. My only other experience in candying was my attempt to make cashew brittle for my dad's birthday last year, and that turned out tasting plainly chemical — with the main flavor being the baking soda added at the end. I learned the hard way how crucial a candy thermometer can be.

And, I have to say, I'm pretty proud of clearing the hurdle of microwavelessness to make this. It's the first question people ask when they hear about this deficiency: "But what about popcorn?" Well, usually, I just don't eat it. But now I know how fantastically easy it is to pop on top of the stove. A few nights before Christmas, Sara and I put our ears near my biggest lidded pot, wondering if the first burst would go off like gunfire. We fretted over the high pressure that might be building inside, then moved our faces away just to be safe. We imagined how alarming the world's very first (surely unplanned, don't you think?) popping of corn must have been.

Then a kernel popped with a muffled noise no louder than a whisper. Kind of a letdown, but at least we'd had the anticipation. And the fun of caramelizing, coating and sampling afterward more than made up for it.

Caramel Corn with Salted Peanuts

Via Orangette, where it was adapted from DamGoodSweet, by David Guas and Raquel Pelzel

The first two ingredients will make 10 cups of popcorn, and it's best to do it in two batches.

6 Tbsp. oil

2/3 cup popcorn

1 cup lightly salted peanuts, roughly chopped

1 cup packed light brown sugar

¼ cup light corn syrup

6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

¼ tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 250°F and prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper. Heat 3 tablespoons of oil in a large lidded pot over medium-high heat, then pour in 1/3 cup of kernels, cover and shake around to coat. Listen for the thrill of that first little explosion. You'll know it's ready when the fusillade seems to have died down – and before anything burns. Spray nonstick cooking spray into your largest mixing bowl and pour in the popped popcorn, picking out and discarding any unpopped kernels. Repeat the popping step for the second batch, add that and the peanuts to the bowl, then lightly salt everything.

In a saucepan, whisk the brown sugar, corn syrup, butter, salt and 2 tablespoons of water and bring the mixture to a simmer over medium-high heat. Keep whisking and simmering until it hits 250°F on a candy thermometer. Take the pan off the heat and whisk in the baking soda and vanilla. Now is the time to be quick: tip the caramel over the popcorn and stir with a rubber spatula. It's a little tough to be as thorough as you'd like, but try to get some color on each piece. Spread this mixture to the baking sheet and bake for 1 hour, pausing every 20 minutes to stir the popcorn with a spatula — this is another chance to get things evenly coated.

When the time is up, leave it on a cooling rack for 20 minutes. Eat right away or divide into jars for gifts. I made this twice and filled about 10 Mason jars.