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.

The Lee Bros. at BookPeople

I stopped by BookPeople last week to hear what Matt and Ted Lee had to say about their new cookbook, "Simple Fresh Southern," then went right home and roasted a sweet potato. It was the least I could do after hearing their elaborate descriptions of grated sweet potato and okra fritters dipped in garlic and buttermilk sauce and a dessert of mint julep panna cotta.

Decorously known as the Lee Bros., these guys take buttermilk and cheese and biscuits very seriously, with heavy emphasis on the buttermilk. But they're out to promote the idea that fresh peas and greens and fruits and seafood can be just as tasty — and just as traditionally Southern — unadorned by extra fat and out of the midcentury mold of a casserole dish.

Thoughtful about what matters to them and full of brotherly banter, the pair seem much more hip than they appear on the khakis-on-the-front-porch cover of "The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook" and — best of all — they're utterly quotable...

On following instructions: "Recipes are just a starting point. We call them suggestive architecture."

On conceiving the idea to make a pimento cheese potato gratin: "Now that's the kind of fun I like."

On support for "Simple Fresh Southern": "It's the first book ever to have an endorsement from Alice Waters and Paula Deen and Amy Sedaris. If you think about it too much, you might self-immolate."

Audience Q: "Why is all the buttermilk you see in the grocery store low-fat?"

A: "Yeah, that kind of sticks in our craw, too."

On handy packaging: "The coolest buttermilk innovation I've seen is a half-pint carton. I mean, eureka. That was Twitterable."

On lard: "It's no worse for you than butter, and it might be better. You want the fresh product. If you touch it, it's like Nivea. Or something very luxurious. We're very lard-positive."

On sharing author duties: "Whoever's the least depressed starts off the writing."

On Thanksgiving: "I cooked my turkey in the toaster oven."

Oh right, about those pies...

Well, I did it. I made two Thanksgiving pies lined with real crust transformed from flour and butter entirely by me, with the Pillsbury Doughboy nowhere in sight. I had a few fraught moments of calling out, "I'm facing a fear here!" and "AHHH! What if I'm overworking the dough?!" The pies, however, exited the oven and sat cooling on the rack with poise, as if they'd never doubted their perfection.

One was made with a M.Martinez-recommended recipe for pecan pie without corn syrup, and the other recipe came right off the back of a can of pumpkin puree, a filling so healthy someone made these graphics to prove it.

Besides my uncertainty over making dough, I felt another pang of alarm when I ran out of nuts for the top of the pecan pie. Because it lacked the usual solid topping, the filling puffed up in the gaps between pecan halves when baked and ended up looking sort of like meringue. I'm pretty sure that's what lead to this unnerving moment of dialogue on Thanksgiving Day:

"What kind of pie is this one with pecans?"

"It's pecan."

That didn't do much to help my pie-related fears, which took root about five years ago, the first time I'd tried my hand at pie-making. I'd eaten a slice of pecan pie with Jack Daniel's and chocolate chips at the Gristmill in Gruene, and it was so good that I recreated it at home — unwisely from a sketchy Web site of restaurant copycat recipes — and invited a bunch of folks over. My friends were too kind to say it, but forks were of no use with that gloppy mess. Since then, I've referred to that disaster as the Swamp In A Dish.

On the other hand, my panic over creating pie dough came from lack of experience. I'd never witnessed that moment when dry ingredients plus fat plus water spring to life as pastry; I was afraid I wouldn't know when it was ready. Making this kind of dough seems to have lots of variables ("It says the butter should be pebbly. Is this pebbly? Because I'd say it's more like large gravel."), and everything has to stay cold, then there's that period of adding water by the spoonful, which takes a bit of instinct. I didn't have that instinct going in. My mom's dessert-making involved dipping mini Ritz peanut butter sandwiches or gelled orange candies into melted chocolate, and people on cooking shows always seem to use a food processor. I was starting from scratch. (Har har.)

But, as it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. It wasn't so hard, and they turned out tasting great. It's just that I was overly anxious about 16 people trying my very first all-homemade pies on a holiday that might as well be called Everyone Expects Good Pie Day. Now that I've done it, I'm thinking that should be every day.

Pate brisee (pie dough)

Pep talk from The Awl, with real measurements from Martha Stewart

Makes one double-crust or two single-crust 9- to 10-inch pies.

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces

1/4 to 1/2 cup ice water

Combine flour, salt and sugar. Add butter and smush with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse meal or just butter blobs held together by paste. That worked for me. Add a 1/4 cup of ice water and do some more smushing. Timidly add more cold water one tablespoon at a time until the dough no longer crumbles. It should hold together without being wet or sticky. Divide dough into two equal balls. Flatten each ball into a disc and wrap in plastic. Transfer to the refrigerator and chill at least one hour. Dough may be stored, frozen, up to one month.

Sprinkle a heavy dusting of flour onto your table and the rolling pin (owned by boyfriend who doesn't cook much, but uses it to make killer tortillas when so inclined). Roll the dough into an odd unknown-continent shape until it's large enough to fit in a pie plate. Unstick it from the table and roll it like a scroll around the rolling pin to transfer it to the buttered pie plate. Yell out with glee. You did it!

Corn-syrup-free pecan pie

From someone named Elaine at allrecipes.com via BAKIN' LOVE

1 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup white sugar

1/2 cup butter, melted

2 eggs

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup chopped pecans

More pecan halves for decorating.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Butter pie plate and fill it with dough, as outlined above.

In a large bowl, beat eggs until foamy and stir in melted butter. Stir in the brown sugar, white sugar and the flour; mix well. Add the milk, vanilla and chopped pecans.

Pour into an unbaked 9-inch pie shell. Place pecan halves on top in whatever type of pattern you can manage. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees, then reduce temperature to 350 degrees and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until done.

40 degrees feels very cold

Northeasterly wind, temperatures near freezing and precipitation from someplace or other came together this morning to create perfect conditions for snow in Austin: meaning I saw about 18 flakes hit my windshield. Then they disappeared and left us all with just a plain cold day, one without the rare and exciting prospect of real snowfall.

This is Austin, though, so a few schools did close for a snow day. We here are fanatical in our fear of weather that's cold and wet at the same time.

Flurries or not, the chill was enough to make me want something hot for lunch. So I went home and made this French-style warm lentil salad from Orangette, proving that it is possible to make something other than quesadillas during an hourlong lunch break. Of course, that's provided you live a barely plural 1.1 miles from work (as I do) and are willing to take some recipe shortcuts. If you chew quickly, you might even have a second to spare for a photo. Another time saver: I never even took my coat off. Conditions are just that arctic.

Lentils for lunch

Very loosely adapted from Orangette for the sake of speed

• ½ cup French green lentils

• 1½ cups water

• 1 bay leaf (Mine was Mediterranean, not Turkish, as called for. This was OK.)

• salt

• a dab of oil

• half of a fat shallot, minced as small as you have time for

• leftover cucumber end (about a quarter of a largish one)

• what's left of a 10-ounce bag of carrot "matchstix." (But hey, the package also says "French-cut cooking carrots." Very fancy.)

• 1 clove garlic, chopped smallish

• sprinkling of dried thyme

• Drew's All Natural Rosemary Balsamic dressing, or whatever ready-made vinaigrette you have

Drive home, walk into the house and immediately put lentils, water and bay leaf into a pot and turn the heat to medium-high. Bring them to a boil. Do some slapdash but reasonably careful chopping. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, until almost tender, about 15 minutes. Sprinkle in some salt, then simmer, covered, for another 3 to 5 minutes, until tender. My lentils needed slightly longer, so make sure to taste them for doneness.

About halfway through the lentil cooking time, warm the oil in a skillet over medium-low and heat the shallot, carrots, cucumber, garlic, thyme and some salt. Stir every now and then for the next 7 to 9 minutes. Drain the lentils in a sieve and pick out the bay leaf. Dump the lentils into the skillet with the vegetables, add the vinaigrette and stir to combine everything.

You could relocate things to a new bowl, but you're in a hurry and no one else is around, so don't worry about this step too much. (I did, and all it got me was another dish to wash.) Pack up and rush back to work, thinking about how you'll come home to a disorderly kitchen, but eating something warm and homemade on a cold day was worth it.