Can a person keep himself in homemade cake at all times? I've spent my adult life wishing I could. I want a life where there's a cloche on the counter, and a homemade cake always in it. But cake every day means baking multiple times a week. And cake is fussy. And I'mexhausted. Where would I find the time?
A couple of new cookbooks suggest I'm being a baby. One, Odette Williams'sSimple Cake, has a subtitle that speaks to my sugar-addicted heart: "All You Need to Keep Your Friends and Family In Cake." I'm not so interested in keeping my friends in cake, and I don't live with family. But I do love myself as if I were my own child, so on a recent Monday evening I decided to put Williams's concept to the test.
It was 8 p.m. I'm elderly, and get ready for bed at 10 p.m. "Is there time to make cake?" I asked out loud. My boyfriend,Hillel the Elder, replied: If not now, when? (He knew I had plans the rest of the week.)
So I pre-heated the oven and turned toSimple Cake'sChocolatey Chocolate Cake. It was immediately clear I would have plenty of time to bake it, for three reasons: 1. It's an oil cake—no butter to beat—so the batter only requires a quick measure and stir. 2. Williams includes weight measures for most ingredients, so I was able to use a scale—much faster than measuring cups. 3. True to the concept of the book, which offers 10 base cake recipes and 30 ways to top and/or adapt them, the recipe features several options for baking pans. Instead of the 10x3-inch round pan, which requires 50 minutes of baking time, I chose the 9x13-inch rectangular pan, which requires only 30 minutes.
My cake was in the oven by 8:30pm, which is when my mind wandered to frosting. Williams provides 15 topping ideas, including simply dusting a cake with powdered sugar, which seems like a laughably basic idea for a cookbook to articulate until it's 8:30pm on a Monday and you just put a cake in the oven and you're thinking about hiring a TaskRabbit to take the cake out of the oven because you did a really hard workout that morning and just want to watch HBO.
但糖瘾是强大的,我的wouldn't let me be content with a dusting of powdered sugar. Instead, I chose a Silky Marshmallow Icing. There's little to it besides sugar and a couple of egg whites: you heat them, whisk them, then beat them in a stand mixer until it's all whipped up into a fluffy meringue. It's marshmallow-like and gorgeous, like the coifed silver hairs of a Upper East Side baroness.
晚上9点,我的蛋糕从烤箱里取出来。在15米inutes in front of an open window, it was cool enough to frost, and 30 seconds after frosting I had stuffed a piece into my mouth. The cake was what you want out of a last-minute chocolate cake: a mouthful of cocoa flavor, very familiar, very moist. But the frosting was a toothache of a sugar-bomb. So I took the cake to work in the morning, promising myself that, next time, I would top this very good chocolate cake with something only half as sweet as the Marshmallow meringue. Maybe caramel?