On Cake!

When it came to birthday cake, my brother, at least in my opinion, was at a disadvantage. He was born on St. Patrick's Day, you see, and mom, after assessing the situation overnight, changed his name from Dustin to Patrick and every year thereafter baked him an angle food cake, dyed green, with powdered sugar frosting, also green. This, of course, came after the green sugar cookies and green buns accompanying that day's celebratory lunch at school. He suffered all this with good grace, and claims to still like cake of any color, though now he can have it with green beer. But we don't talk about that around mom.

Green or not, at least he had a birthday cake. Mom, a New Year's baby, rarely had one, unless you count (and I don't) the birthday brownie at Perkins. By the time January 1 rolled around, all members of the family (and probably even the dog) were so sugar sick, having breathed it in and nibbled it in various forms nonstop since Thanksgiving, that even the thought of birthday cake was unappealing. So instead we bundled up and drove to Mitchell for a movie and dinner at Perkins or Godfathers, whichever the birthday girl preferred.

Dad, on the other hand, invariably got a German chocolate cake, sometimes straight up in a 9"x13" pan, sometimes stacked three 8"-round layers high, which, in my opinion, offered the better ratio of tender buttermilk cake to coconut-rich frosting. But since his birthday generally fell right in the thick of achievement days, the kind of cake he got depended on how much time we had, how much mom and I had tried each others' patience and if she had agreed to help with the horticulture judging.

For me, birthday cake, as with most sweets, is really about the ice cream. So other than the My Pretty Pony cake when I was four or five and the horse-shoe-shaped cake presented in the middle of the county horse show (where the first unrequited love of my life Bruce S. was also competing) as a decidedly mortifying surprise to celebrate my 14th birthday, no cakes really stand out.

Except for fudge crème de menthe cake, which, incidentally, happens to have green frosting, too. (And my birthday -- it's on my parents' anniversary. We believe in multitasking our holidays.)

Whatever the cake, though, it was homemade. That, along with the perfect card, was how mom did birthdays. And while I will allow that there are occasions when cake mix can achieve perfection -- hospital coffee cake, for example, or the first cake your husband bakes ever and its for you, on your birthday -- as a general rule, it belongs in the same category as ramen, Doritos and Coke. This is the kind of birthday cake my husband grew up on. White cake, to be exact, with rainbow chip frosting. And he loves it. Raves over it.

I can't make it for him, though. I just can't. It's too easy and without the little bit of extra effort, how can he be assured of my undying affection? Yes. Yes it's true. I am my mother's daughter. So this year I made the cake from scratch, the frosting, too, and added the confetti sprinkles as a nod to J's long-time affair with Betty Crocker.

I'm not condemning cake mix users; I understand that baking isn't everyone's thing, but I love everything about it except the dirty dishes, so you can imagine how immensely gratified I was when my co-worker asked me to make a cake for her father-in-law's birthday.

My mom's go-to cake recipe for everything from brownies to cupcakes is called Good and Moist Chocolate Cake because, obviously, it's good. And moist. I can attest to it.

Here's the recipe (courtesy of my mom):

2 cups sugar
2 ½ cups flour
5 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup hot water
2 eggs, unbeaten
1 cup salad oil (i.e. canola oil)
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Sift together sugar, flour, baking powder, cocoa and salt. Dissolve soda in hot water and add remaining ingredients. Beat two minutes. The batter will be thin. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

This cake is pretty much perfect. Light and delicate. The kind of cake you could eat at until you put down your fork in surprise to see that half the pan (or a dozen or so surprise cupcakes) was gone.

I wanted something richer, so I used Orangette's Far From Disaster Cake, which also calls for buttermilk. Only I called it the flattery-will-get-you-everywhere cake because a) I know that my co-worker has a friend who makes wedding cakes and b) it didn't dampen my excitement about the project.

1. I made it in three layers, though it's just as good in a 9"x13". I've heard contradictory things about greasing the sides of cake pans. My mom does, but I don't because I heard or read or somehow acquired the opinion that the cake won't rise as high if the sides of the pan are greased. I should probably figure this out for sure.

2. Before baking.

3. After baking.

4. After layering with ganache.

5. And now, for frosting. My friend requested a light frosting. Cream cheese frosting was too rich; I was afraid to try a meringue frosting for the first time on some dear stranger's birthday lest I give someone food poisoning. I could have done a whipped cream frosting, but instead I asked my cake expert friend Sarah for advice. She recommended a chocolate buttercream with a secret ingredient:

6. Marshmallow creme. She's brilliant, that Sarah.

7. And here, friends, is the charmingly lopsided, imperfectly frosted result. It got a favorable review. And then, when we were planning an engagement part for my kolache-loving coworker, the cake was requested again.

8. Only I decided to dress it up. In fondant. This required more advice from Sarah:

Once your cake is completely cool and each layer is assembled, do a crumb coat (a thin coat of buttercream icing to seal in the crumbs on the cake). This will also allow the fondant to adhere to the cake.

Then, once the crumb coat is set up, I like to do another layer of buttercream that is as smooth as possible as the fondant shows all bumps. Make sure your rolling surface is totally clean and clear, the fondant will pick up
any little grains, etc.

Prepare your surface with shortening and a dusting of corn starch. Roll the fondant to the appropriate thickness (about 1/4 inch). To get the desired circumference, take a ribbon or string and cut it to the height of your cake (go up one side down the other) when you stretch the ribbon out your fondant should be slightly larger than the length of the string. You'll only use one side of the fondant (you won't turn it over like you would with pie crust or pizza dough), but it is a good idea to pick it up throughout the rolling process using your spatula to make sure it is not sticking -- use corn starch as needed.

Once you've got your fondant circle and prepared cake, hold your rolling pin in the center of the fondant circle and drape half over the pin toward yourself. Once you've done this, reverse the process on top of the cake. Gently lay the fondant in the center draping it over the sides. Use your hands or a fondant smoother to smooth the fondant over the top and sides of the cake, massaging down and around. Cut off the excess.

I used this recipe for the fondant. It was a lot easier to make and work with than I expected. Seriously. (Still, the cake took all weekend to assemble. The price of pride, I guess.)

9. I also decided to use a cake leveler. Because let's face it: Lopsided isn't always charming.

10. There it is. Safely out of reach of the roving thief that stalks all things edible in the house. (Can you tell what it is?)

11. The roving thief.

12. It's a cow cake. A cow cake. How about that?

ps -- Here's proof that some things never change, and that my brother and I are definitely from the same gene pool.

1. Circa 1986. Betcha can't tell which one I am.

2. Circa 2002:3. Circa 2005:

I have a confession:

I don't really like meat. Never have. In other families such disinclination might be unremarkable, or even encouraged, but my people are salt of the earth meat-and-potato sorts who butcher their own beasts, make their own sausage and celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and other occasions of note with chislic (see Blackie, pictured above) feeds and prime rib. I could go on, but suffice it to say that my family really likes a good steak or pork loin or duck or even a crawdad feed. So I've worked hard to hide the fact that I don't -- disguising a paltry portion of Thanksgiving turkey behind heaps of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, or, God willing, a nice big serving of pretzel salad and nibbling around the well-done edge of my piece of prime rib.

Even so, I'm sure I never fooled anyone, and my mother is the only one who still harangues me about this particular failing, though it's more focused on whether I cook enough meat for J. (My grandma is just concerned that I cook enough for him, period). He's thin, you see, and there's nothing that triggers their save-the-world-one-good-meal-at-a-time instincts like a skinny man. I'd like to point out, though, that I'm not the only one in the family with meat "issues:" One of my cousins won't eat seafood because the ocean creeps her out. And there's the uncle who refuses to eat chicken or anything else that was once feathered.

For the record, I do eat meat, albeit irregularly, and sometimes I really do crave a steak, but mostly it's pork chops or white meat chicken, though I was in high school before I'd even attempt that much.

I had an intimate familiarity with the lifecycle of that fair bird, you see, and once the mystery is gone, well, it's just gone, though you have to understand that I was a particularly sensitive and squeamish child. Squeamish children don't do well with blood and guts no matter how much they want to be like Laura Ingalls and her enterprising ma making head cheese over an open fire. (Check out these brave little Laura scholars).

The whole thing got started in spring when grandma ordered her chicks.

They arrived in the mail a few weeks later, all whisper soft and warm and peeping to settle in under the heat lamps in the brooder house, where they passed an awkward half-chick half-chicken adolescence with feathers gradually taking the place of down until they were mature and clucking and ready to butcher, about six to nine weeks later.

At this point, friends, grandma called together the girls, usually my mom and assorted aunts and cousins, for a butchering. I always tried to find something to play that would keep me out of sight and mind, but my mom was not so easily foiled and she was big on having me help ( I think she wanted to work that squeamishness right out of me). Part of the crew set up a propane burner in the quonset to start some water boiling. Grandma, meanwhile, slit throats out behind the brooder house and then released the chickens to flap, headless, through the weeds. One of my jobs, as I recall, was to watch where they finally flopped still and then dart through the now blood-smeared weeds to collect the carcasses.

From there they were taken to the quonset for processing. First step, plucking: We gathered around the propane burner on upturned 5-gallon buckets, newspapers spread out on the floor to catch the feathers, but first the carcass had to be swirled through the boiling water to soften the feathers. I was supposed to help pluck, but I didn't like touching the wet, warm feathers -- or the smell -- and so I did a pretty poor job of it. While I still suffer some residual guilt from that, truth be told -- I wouldn't change a thing. After the chickens were laid bare, grandma inspected them, lighter in hand, for stray barbs or any other undesirables that might need to be scorched off. That smelled awesome, too.

Then they were gutted. Again, I was supposed to help with this, but I could not stand even the thought of sticking my hands into the mysterious slippery innards of a chicken carcass, so mostly I watched. If there had been gloves, I might have done it, but requests for said gloves were dismissed as ridiculous. Besides, my cousin Heidi had no problem with the task, and that's why she's now a traveling nurse who's seen the world and I'm just a lowly humanities major turned journalist stuck at a desk all day. True, true. But the thing I remember most about this step was that grandma slit open the gizzard to empty out the chicken's last meal. It was fascinating, but sad, really; they didn't even have time to digest. She didn't save them, though; grandpa wasn't big on gizzards.

The carcasses got rinsed out, I think, and then frozen, with a few left out for eating fresh.

Blech.

To be clear, I'm not claiming this was some sort of traumatizing or even disillusioning experience. I had -- and have -- no moral or ethical objects to meat in theory. I grew up on a farm, and I knew what happened to Midnight the prize-winning sow when she didn't come home from achievement days.

In fact, I rode along with dad to take her to the locker in Freeman. And I knew why she had to go -- you didn't bring home pigs that could have been exposed to Lord knows what at the county fair, even in the name of 4-H State Fair. I'm just saying that I didn't like meat and being intimately familiar with how it went from coop to plate gave me yet another reason to be persnickety about the whole business.

But then I took philosophy in pursuit of a liberal arts education and the professor made us watch some video about factory farming.

It's the only thing I remember about the class, other than that I was always late, sat toward the front and usually fell asleep.

Still, it made me start thinking about what it means to be called to stewardship in all things, including the kitchen.

Sustainability is definitely en vogue these days, and the discussion becomes treacherous at this point, with talk of food miles, carbon footprints, organic food, local food, local as opposed to organic food, Whole Foods versus Wal-Mart versus Jane's Health Market versus the farmers' market, and, of course, Michael Pollan.

I try not to get too tangled up in all of this. I want my eggs to come from chickens with beaks, and if f I'm going to eat chicken, I'd rather she be a clucking, scratching, pecking chicken, than an oversized breast on legs that would fall over, given the space to move. I'd like my beef to be grass fed; if they have to spend time in a feedlot, it shouldn't make up the majority of their existence. Pigs need space, too, to root and roll (and perchance even fly), but if they're sick, they should be treated with all the proper antibiotics. And when it comes time for a dairy cow to be culled, it should be with the respect one living thing owes to another. (See Linda Hasselstrom's lovely work for more perspective on this topic.)

I understand that working in a packing plant could make one numb to the chores of slaughtering after a while; that's why there are supposed to be rules and regulations for the industry and inspectors to enforce them. I also understand that, ultimately, it comes down to money: The more cattle processesed, the more meat sold. And, for the consumer, too: Not everyone can afford graded beef, let alone free-range organic beef.

But for the people who can: Jamie Oliver recently butchered a chicken in front of a studio audience, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken, according to this article in the New York Times. "A chicken is a living thing," he told the paper, "an animal with a life cycle, and we shouldn’t expect it will cost less than a pint of beer in a pub.”

His technique follows the general idea of grandma's. And that brings me around, finally, to the point I wanted to make all along -- I had stewardship modeled for me long before I started wondering about it in philosophy class: Grandma loved those chicks destined for the chopping block; Midnight had a good life with lots of brushing and even a few baths. My brother and I had our share of bottle calves and lambs to tend, and if their names didn't end up on the package in the freezer, I have friends whose animals were honored that way. There's a rightness to that, a quiet common sense that makes its point, and all without the fanfare and theatrics involved with killing a chicken on TV.

And while I still wouldn't volunteer to pluck or gut a chicken, I do have a ring of smoked sausage from my dad waiting in the freezer for a lazy Saturday morning breakfast, should J. ever get hungry for it.

Because to be honest, I probably won't.

P.S. If you want to fix yourself some head cheese, here's a recipe. But first, watch this for pointers; she's wonderful.

For Remembering

My grandpa drove a little diesel pickup for the better part of the 1980s. It was banana yellow, well before that color was in vogue, but even so, the most distinguishing characteristic was its brand -- Toyota.

I'm certain that in and of itself, a diesel-engine Toyota pickup, even a yellow one, wasn't all that unusual at the time, but pickup drivers in the heartland typically have two socially acceptable choices: Ford or Chevy, though Dodges are allowed in certain circles.

But gas prices were high in the 1970s and grandpa, God bless him, was even cheaper then than he is now (so I'm told), and that little pickup became his trademark as he roamed the countryside tracking the activities of his six sons.

The Toyota was tiny, especially compared to its Cummins-turbo-diesel, extended-cab, long-box counterparts, so you can understand why it might have held particular appeal to a kid, like my cousin Paul, fascinated by the idea of driving.

Growing up, Paul and I spent a lot of time together; we were the only cousins (of 18) the same age living north of town -- and later, we were the only ones horse mad. But in the early days, we spent a lot of time at grandpa and grandma's place and I remember sitting in the passenger seat of that Toyota while Paul manned the steering wheel and shifter. I can't say, however, if this particular memory is mine, or if I remember it because Paul told me about it later; he was a good storyteller, that Paul, so it's hard to say. In any case, it goes like this: We must have been about five and four, respectively, still too little to reach the pedals and this ultimately proved problematic when Paul knocked the pickup out of gear. It rolled down the slight hill in front of the house where grandpa still likes to park and was eventually stopped by the baler.

I remember the stomach-churning anxiety of those few moments of motion and I remember grandma swooping out of the house to rescue and reprimand. I remember sitting at the kitchen table eating molasses cookies after everything calmed down, but I don't remember grandpa's reaction.

We must have been banned from the Toyota because, really, what other outcome could there have been? This forced us to turn our attention to nosing around in the attic, breaking into the summer kitchen and camping out in the broke down milk truck.

Years later, properly horsed, we'd stop by the house to say hello when we were out riding. Grandma would bring out cinnamon rolls or molasses cookies, depending on what she had on hand. And if grandpa was around, he'd bring us out a pop, usually orange or grape Shasta. And then we'd be off again to carouse and scheme (i.e. daydreaming about the Jesse James gang and making up country songs, which Paul swore me to secrecy about. I'm not sure why because he wasn't shy about his other masterpieces, such as the chili dog song, which goes like this: Chili dog. Chili dog. Dog dog chili. First came the dog. Then came the chili. Chili willy willy willy willy. Repeat ad nauseam.)

After Paul got his license, grandpa gave him the Toyota. It was an unusual gift for a grandpa to give to only one of his grandchildren, but I don't remember it causing a fuss (though it could be that Paul was the only one who wanted it!). Grandpa and Paul shared a birthday, a name, and a calling -- both were born farmers -- so it makes sense that Paul would inherit his trademark pickup. Only Paul dubbed it the Yota, covered it with CB whips and crowned it, for a short time, with an intercom system. Yes. It's true and as I recall, he liked to drive by the Emery swimming pool issuing pool break edicts.

We lost Paul in October so suddenly to a disease so rare that it still doesn't seem quite real. Part of that, I know, is my vantage point: I wasn't around when he settled down with his wife a mile down the road from grandpa and grandma's farm. I never stopped in at his shop in Emery for a tour or to see how business was going. I didn't see him in his role as daddy those six brief months.

Instead, what I remember is how jealous I was of the horse he had for his cabbage patch doll. I remember convincing him to help me break out all the windows on my parents' old chicken coop. I remember bathing horses for the county show with "My Maria" playing on the radio in the barn. I remember driving around in his old green Pinto, which he had to abandon after it started on fire for the second or third time, listening to Sublime. I remember how he smeared Vicks vapor rub under his nose, even in public, to treat a stuffy nose. I remember a boy who was a little bit audacious yet so completely charming with a gift for living each moment so fully that you couldn't help but catch hold of his joy, even if only in remembering.

When I was home the day after Christmas, I stopped in to see grandpa and grandma. Paul's wife and daughter were there visiting, too, and grandpa, in deference to the baby, had the heat cranked up to 80 and grandma had pulled out the basket of toys she keeps around for the great-grandkids. Sydney was chewing on an old Real Lemon bottle -- the one in the shape of the lemon -- completely content. Megan looked soul weary and grandma looked like she'd been crying, and despite all you can say about God and his grace, sometimes your heart swells so full that words just can't suffice and you can only hope that the sheer force of your love is enough to offer some small comfort.

This is why two of the Hutterite colonies in the area fought over which one would supply the buns for the lunch after the funeral, why my uncle, who knew he couldn't bear to attend, arranged for Paul to be taken to the cemetery on the back of a pickup instead of a hearse, and why the superintendent of the school canceled classes that day.

And even though the sadness hung thick in grandma's kitchen, we sat at the table exclaiming over the baby, the calendar of family photos Megan had put together for grandma, and Donny's engagement to Sarah, the Oklahoma girl who had won grandma over with her pleasing Southern manners. And the covered cake plate on the corner of the counter had a few molasses cookies.

So because they're grandpa's favorites, according to grandma, because they color the background of so many of my childhood adventures, and because it's good to remember, I'm sharing the recipe with you.

Soft Molasses Cookies

(Grandma notes that "this recipe is at least 60 years old. These are Dad's absolute favorites and all the boys like them too.")

The rundown:
2 cups brown sugar
1 cup shortening (yes, shortening)
1 cup sour cream
1 cup sour buttermilk (grandma notes that this should be the "bought kind;" I don't know what store-bought sour buttermilk is, or if I'd want it hanging out in my fridge even if I did.)
1 cup light mild molasses
2 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves (grandma notes that one should "go easy" on the cloves; she uses a 1/2 teaspoon, but I disregarded this little tip.)
1 teaspoon ginger
3 teaspoons baking soda
8 cups flour, sifted (I didn't sift.)

The best I can tell, a full recipe will make at least 10 or 11 dozen cookies. That's a lot, my friends. Enough to feed seven kids, one husband and assorted hired hands, perhaps, but way more than will even fit in my freezer.

I made a quarter recipe, which yielded 2 1/2 dozen. I could have gotten more, but I was tired of rolling out the dough.
Since it's difficult to halve an egg, I used one. This one, from a chicken who roams the range, beak intact, and works toward the democratization of organic and natural foods by selling her wares to Wal-Mart. I like that about her.
Grandma says to mix the ingredients in the order given. But here's what I did:

1. Cream the sugar and Crisco.

2. Beat in the egg.

3. Add the buttermilk, molasses and sour cream.
4. Add in the dry ingredients.
5. Grandma doesn't say to do this, but I recommend it: Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and stash it in the freezer while you wash up the dishes. This step is vital to an authentic molasses-cookie-making experience; grandma spent years suffering dry skin and dishpan hands without a dishwasher, too. Only she was making a hundred plus cookies at a go.

6. Once the dishes are washed, counters cleaned up and dough properly chilled, roll it out between two sheets of wax paper (but "not too thin," grandma warns).

7. Don't worry if you don't have a round cookie cutter. A cocktail tumbler dipped in powdered sugar works just as well.

8. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes. (I lined the cookie sheets with parchment paper because I was out of Pam.)
9. After the cookies have cooled slightly, frost them with a powdered sugar glaze -- powdered sugar, a little lemon juice, a little milk and a little white (corn) syrup. (I know it gets a bad rap, but I don't blame it for any extra pounds I may have carried around, and while there are a lot of areas in the Great Plains where common sense suggests wheat or pasture, I know a lot of farmers who grow their No. 2 yellow corn along with the requisite refuge acres without irrigation, in a proper rotation, using no-till or minimum-till practices. And I support them and any corn syrup they produce. So does grandma.)
10. Then, once the frosting has hardened, you can stack them.
11. Or tie them with a bow.
12. And stack them again.
13. But don't forget to eat one. Or two. Or three. Or, well, you get the point. And if you have enough, you can share, but only if you want to.

When I got my Valentine's Day care package from the church ladies at Zion Mennonite during my days at NWC, I would fish these out and hoard them for myself. I shared the rest or threw them out, depending on who made them and believe me you could tell. But these. These are everything a cookie should be.

All the college kids from church got these care packages. One year Paul's was stolen -- only it turned up later in the mail room of his apartment complex, or some such place, where it had been all along. But in the interim, there were a lot of incensed church ladies as well as talk of mail fraud and revenge.

Since I've Been Gone

1. I went to Marne.
2. And to San Francisco.
3. Where I ran and ate a lot of good food.
4. And sat on the beach
5. To watch this:
6. Back home, I watched J. clean out the gutters. A less majestic view, perhaps, but pleasing nonetheless.
7. And I pestered the puppy (who knew her ears could be a fin!?)
8. I roasted some hazelnuts for nutella (more work than it's worth).
9. And I tried out mom's old Singer
10. My friend Bryan had to come over to help me thread it.
11. I rode herd on some ponies (their butts smell like fruit roll-ups, it's true)
12. With the help of my pardner
13. And I pestered the puppy and Justin some more.
14. Even so, I got this for Christmas:
It's pretty, no?

My Struggle

My family, except for the odd cousin or two, is not known for its athletic prowess. You know how every once in a while you pass someone like this on the street who is so big, blond, rosy-cheeked and otherwise hearty and hale that you swear she just came off a dairy farm in Sweden? Well that’s us, except dark-haired and German (Russian): We look like we were built to withstand a life of hard physical labor.

Strong and sturdy, as you know, rarely translate exactly into quick and coordinated. And I admit without reservation, now that I’m beyond the age of enforced physical activity (i.e. PE), that I can’t properly throw any sort of ball, let alone dribble or hit it with a stick, and I never learned to dive. Part of it’s genetic and part of it’s a lack of opportunity to really learn.

In any case, about a year or so ago I decided I was going to start running. I can’t say what compelled me to make this decision, though part of it was the desire to combat the effects, both physical and mental, of sitting at a desk for the majority of the day. I eventually got to the point where I could run 3 miles with relative ease. I’m not fast and I'm sure I don't have the best form, but it makes me feel strong. So I decided that if running 3 miles is good, running 6 would be better. And then I decided I was going to run a half marathon. I've never run in any organized event, with the exception of the 100-yard dash at field day and even then, I don't know that what I did counts as running, yet somehow I thought this was a good idea. I made it through the Lincoln Half in May without dying or breaking down. And then I signed up for the Nike Women’s Half in October.

Check out the hills in the virtual tour. I have nightmares about them: That’s why I run, on average, six days a week. And that’s why it’s hard for me to do anything other than make supper and clean up on weeknights. Still, I get the mania, as Justin calls it, from time to time, and decide, at 10:00, to clean the entire house or start a 3-hour baking project. And that’s why I sometimes get myself into trouble.

A Cupcake Kampf in Four Parts

1. The blister and the broken bowl (8:30 p.m.)

It started out innocently enough. We picked up Taco John’s on the way home from the Keystone, so I had plenty of time (or so I thought) to make something to take over to the friends we planned to visit Friday night. They have a new baby, so I wanted to make something fun and pastel, but Justin convinced me to do a trial run on the chocolate malt cake I planned to make for his birthday. He was in the kitchen snooping around for a snack, so I put him to work.

His job was to melt the baking chocolate in the microwave. After 15 seconds, he pulled the bowl out to stir things up. Apparently the bowl heated to such a scorching degree in that time that it blistered his finger on contact. He then dropped the bowl on the floor, where it shattered. Justin has absolutely no tolerance for heat, so I was skeptical -- but his finger does appear to be slightly injured.

I’m going to be honest here. I was annoyed – not so much about the bowl, though it was a pretty cool bowl, but mostly at the dramatic (over)reaction. But he felt so bad about the whole thing that it ruined his appetite. Plus he’s pretty cute, so I couldn’t stay mad for long, especially since he helped with the dishes.

2. Muffin tops (9:17 p.m.)

Muffin tops only look good on muffins, and even then, only when they’re nice and peaked. These are a bad flat kind of muffin top and the only thing I can think of as a cause is overfilled tins, though maybe these were just doomed from the start.


Not only did these cupcakes muffin top on me, they stuck to the top of the pan because who thinks to grease the top of the muffin tin! Seriously. And honestly, I didn’t think they were that good (which is why I'm not posting the recipe). They’re a little chewier than a cupcake should be, I think. Possibly the result of the malt powder.


3. Mess (11:00 p.m.)

In my original brilliant plan, I was going to make chocolate malt cupcakes with vanilla malt frosting and vanilla malt cupcakes with chocolate malt frosting. I don’t even want to talk about what happened here. As you can see, it wasn’t good.


They all ended up in the garbage and I went to bed, still without any cupcakes for Friday.

4. 4 ounces does not a 1/4 cup make (the next day, 6:00 p.m.)


I was brooding about the cupcakes gone wrong at work the next day when it came to me: I should make Surprise Cupcakes, the long-standing favorite of the Lucky Cloverleaves 4-H Club. Cupcakes so good one would lie and steal for them.

Or at least I would. Granted I was probably about four years old, but even so, I remember parts of it quite clearly: Mom had made a batch of these sincakes for some occasion – for a harvest lunch out in the field or for a 4-H meeting snack, I don’t know, though I do know they were off limits to me. But I ate them anyway – that’s right, “them.” I don’t know exactly how many were in that 9x13 tupperware, but it was a lot more than one. Enough that my mom didn’t suspect me at first; the immediate blame went to my brother, who was five years older and supposedly hungrier and more prone to snacking, and I was smart enough to let her think that was the case.

This is the first time I remember lying.

My brother ratted me out, and I ended up getting my due. I don’t remember what that was, which means it was probably worth it.

But even these fool-proof cupcakes posed a problem. I could blame Justin, but it’s just as much my fault for asking for his help as it is his for “helping” while trying to tell me an involved story about Bioshock.

I made the cupcakes from this recipe, which requires a 1/4 cup hot water at the end to thin the batter. I asked Justin to get the water ready while I finished mixing; by the time we realized it was too much, it was too late.

I could have tried making a cake with the extra-thinned batter, or thickening it up by adding more flour, etc., but I’ve made these cupcakes (with the berry ganache and cinnamon buttercream) before and I didn’t want to ruin their perfect texture. So I started over.

Once you have that ready, make the “surprise” part.

Filling:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
pinch of salt
1 cup chocolate chips.

Cream the first four ingredients together. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Fill the cupcake liners about 2/3 full of batter, then drop in a generous teaspoon or so of the filling.

This should make about 15 or 16 cupcakes.

Bake at 350 degrees for 18 to 20 minutes. Once they're cooled, you can drizzle a glaze over. I made mine with some melted dark chocolate, powdered sugar, a little milk, and a little vanilla.

5. And finally, success (7:00 p.m.)

Remember what we started with:



Justin liked them; our friends, who have the cutest baby ever, liked them and I think the neighbor I gave the rest of them to liked them. But to tell you the truth, by the time these suckers were done, I had pretty much lost my appetite for cupcakes. I'm thinking apple pie.


Postscript: When I was training for the Lincoln Half, I did my first 10-mile run in South Dakota when I was home for a visit. It was a gorgeous morning – about 50 degrees – and I felt strong, awed at my own strength and in love with the world in general. I planned my route to go past grandma’s house during mile 7 and as I was running past, I stopped in to give her a hug and say good morning. Later that day I came back for a proper visit. And she said, “Can’t you run any faster than that? You just sort of troddle along.”

To top that off, the way grandpa told the story of one of the best runs to date (or this is the way the story got back to me, anyway), I was out running in my bikini while my mom followed behind on the 4-wheeler. I was, of course, properly attired in t-shirt, shorts and running shoes, and mom was at home making waffles.

This reminds me of the time grandpa told my cousin, who was cleaning out a bin for him in the middle of summer, to put a shirt on before he covered him in a tarp. And of all the times grandpa tried to give me a ride home when he saw me out walking.

It's not much as far as a vote of confidence goes, but at least grandpa thought I looked strong enough to make it home on my own two feet -- and he didn't try to cover me in a tarp.