The Omnivorous Fish

Don’t touch the cake
Cake? I thought you said ravioli? I’ve got a pound of flour in front of me and squash in the oven, when the hell did you decide to make a cake?

Well, I was always going to make a cake, and since yesterday got eaten up at the greenmarket and working on my apartment (I own a place the Agent is not involved in), today became about the cake. If, yesterday, I would have cooked the squash, so it could have drained, I might have been up for ravioli tonight, but now I must find a way to spend the evening not up to my elbows in flour. Oh well.

In case I didn’t mention it, my parents are coming for my mother’s birthday. I’m going to cook dinner tomorrow, then they’re going home Saturday afternoon. My mother loooooves cake, and we have a long history of birthday cake in my family. That said, I hate most cake. That’s not a typo, I didn’t mean moist cake, I meant what I wrote. Most of the birthday cake my family eats comes from one of two bakeries, both of which have slipped in recent years, or worse, from the supermarket. My father and I like rum cake, a traditional Italian cake whose Italian-American rendition increasingly includes mix-cake, prefab pastry cream and “rum flavoring,” the sides encrusted with cake crumbs. The real deal is sponge cake (which is DRY, like a SPONGE) soaked silly with white rum, then filled with alternating layers of vanilla and chocolate pastry cream, and frosted with whipped cream. The sides should be lightly adorned with almonds.

Anyway, my point is, with as many calories as it has, cake has to be damned good for me to eat it. The second-rate bakery cake doesn’t cut it. So, giving my mother- who will eat anything- no less than what I would want for myself, I set out this morning to bake her a cake. When I got home from Fairway, I was set to make a cake out of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s (icing goddess) The Cake Bible, but then, as I checked the blogs, I saw this article at Eggbeater, so naturally I had to make that instead.

I made the recipe as written, with the following mods: I used a whole vanilla bean (seeds into the milk, pod stuffed in the sugar while everything came to room temp) instead of the phenomenal tablespoon of vanilla extract listed (that quantity gave me the courage to experiment) and I used table salt in a slightly smaller quantity¹. The photo shows the beautiful seeds dispersed in the batter. The icing used was RLB’s “Neoclassic Buttercream,” also from The Cake Bible, but I added about ½ teaspoon vanilla and a pinch of salt to it. Let’s face it, salt improves everything.

Vanilla Bean Cake Batter

Cake decorating is one of those things I have always wanted to be good at. Even when I baked professionally, and iced hundreds of cakes in a day, I was never any good at decorating them. I can fake something with a star tip, and I can make nice patterns in the icing with a spatula, but in the deco-department, I am weak. That, however, won’t prevent me from doing it, and pride won’t prevent me from showing you the 3-year-old-finger-painting-esque flower basket I put on this cake.

Happy Birthday Mom

Since I’m not making ravioli, I’m meeting the Agent for dinner.

Listening: NPR, always when I’m baking.

¹For whatever reason, I never seem to have kosher salt around anymore, and the coarse sea salt I buy has crystals that are much bigger. I really should put it on the shopping list.