Reflections

Getting Plucky with My Tasting Buddy

I was at a party at Dramaland's* house several months ago and met Leila.  Though I had been introduced to her early in the evening, she really entered my consciousness when somehow we started smelling each other's wrists and comparing notes on the essential oils we both favored.  Lavender, geranium and vetiver?  I hate those scents (except, what is vetiver?  Can't very well google a scent).  But on Leila (LEE lah) they smelled divine. 

Body chemistry really alters smells, I find, which is why all my life I have hated women's perfume--it mostly turns to a sickly-sweet smell on me.  I need to start off with something pretty yang and it mellows into...whatever it is my body does to it. An ex of mine claims I smell like apple pie. I think that's just because he associates me with all that is girl-next-door-ish. :-)

I won't reveal my proprietary blend here, but I will say it contains five oils, one of which I use only the tiniest drop, one of which is sweet and the remaining three are woodsy or musky.  I did have fun witnessing Leila trying to guess.I had at first pegged Leila as Jewish, for her immediacy in the realm of scent and physical contact (something more common in non-WASP/mainstream culture, I've found) but it turns out she is Iranian-American.  Still--she smells like mischpocheh (family). 

So anyway, it turns out Leila lives close by.  So who better to hunt down blackberries with than my new friend?

It turns out most of the blackberry bushes had been cut away and the remaining fruits tended toward the acidic.  But I couldn't resist braving the brambles for a motherlode or two of huge black shiny prizes.  Of course once I reached the inner circle I could hardly move for fear of being pricked. Made the juice all the sweeter.

See the full set here. 

*Dramaland made a name for herself among Bay area womyn-loving-womyn...Oops! Brain fart, it's not 1979...dykes, I mean...by posting these hysterical rants on craigslist about how sad it was that her oatmeal got burnt and her drain wasn't working properly...all a deadpan twist on the drama dykes are known for.

Dessert Casanova

When I look at a beautiful dessert...something that obviously took time, effort, care and expertise to render...I feel...such strong feelings.  Maybe something like a masculine being feels gazing at a pinnacle of femininity.  I, the yang appetite, look at the ephemeral beauty of the sweet prize, knowing (hoping) I'll consume her.

Yes.  It's a mixture of awe, reverence, deep arousal, admiration (I could never look like/be/produce that), non-specific passion, the kind that could morph into anger, lust, greed or any other sin or pleasure; stunning hunger, worship, obsession to possess, and yes a bit of paralysis with it all.

I can never be all that She posseses, nor possibly even understand how all her elements come together to produce this response in me.  I could not understand Her even as I might dissect her elements and reproduce Her in a feat of reverse engineering.

But it's just not the same when you bring it about yourself.

No, I would just as soon avoid even seeing the foundation garments, the hot rollers, the prep work.  Bring me Her finished beauty, as if She stepped of Venus just like that. Let me behold Her with wide eyes, a swelling tongue and pores opening to receive Her.  She and I will dance together with Her my perfect partner, taken in pieces to a place I decide..the whether and the when, the how and how many...and together we'll find a rhythm that sends me to dreams and satisfies a place in me that now only She knows...until the next one...

Unbridled Chocophilia

Jiggy gets down home with it

Sooner or later I had to do it.  Create a down-home, over-the-top kind of dessert. Screw the esoteric saffron pot-de-creme and the too-full-of-itself marjolaine.  Tonight, I made a brownie-crusted ice cream pie with chocolate sauce on top.  Simple as that.

Well...I confess, the brownie crust was actually a redeemed outtake of an attempt at perfecting my Diesel Fuel brownies.  With the batter just a tad too stiff, they came out a little grainy.  But perfectly reinforced for my ice cream pie!

The chocolate sauce was a whim.  I dumped some leftover unsweetened chocolate discs (by Guittard, I believe, in the bins at Berkeley Bowl) into a glass bowl with some 2% milk, a hunk of butter and a handful of powdered sugar.  Nice first try, but the bittersweetness reeked of the snobbery I mentioned above.  Down-home (think Cook's Country, Ladies Home Journal...you know.) called for more powdered sugar.  Yet, I wanted the assertiveness of the bittersweet--just not so much that it would put off the kids at the upcoming...okay get ready for this...Fourth of July picnic.  Now I'm off the middle America scale, nu?  Oh.  Um...well, I did splash a tad of Frangelico in at the end, not so much for the hazelnut essence but just to give the chocolate a little sass, a kick of mystery.

But really, who am I kidding about the bittersweet putting off kids?  Cainan eats the unsweetened chocolate discs plain.  And asks for more.  This is the most hardcore three-year-old I have encountered.  In a couple more years he'll be my best critic, I predict.

I did feel good when, the other day, he wolfed down the very same gently sweetened homemade popsicles at which my friend's kids turned up their noses.  She explained that they were used to super-sweet commercially-rendered confections.  For the sake of his pancreas and other internal organs and systems, I'm glad Cainan's palate allows him to be satisfied with less sugar.  And to appreciate the nuances of those tastes with which sugar blends so well.

But back to the pie at hand.  I took two leftover tubs of vanilla ice cream, one Haagen Dazs, the other Kirkland from Costco, which was surprisingly good.  I also like Costco's nova salmon, BTW.  I integrated them into one off-white melting ice creamberg and stuccoed it into my brownie crust with the blade of a rubber spatula like so much spackling.  As quickly as I could, I poured my bittersweet concoction on top and swirled it around some.  I then transferred the muddy, utterly nonpretentious brownie-encrusted goop into our downstairs tenant's refrigerator.  By "Jo Jo"'s good graces, I've had overflow storage space for the last year and a half.  And he's had portions of yummy concoctions.  (Jojo, pronounced "ho ho," was an early name Cainan gave to Ricardo, who rents our basement apartment.)

BTW, the picture above was taken by a friend at a dyke bar in SF called the Lexington.  I went because they did.  Going there annoys me, a) because it's a tiny, dive-y space that's SF's only dyke bar whereas the boys get acres of space to do every kind of boy thing you can imagine.  b), everyone there is sixteen.  Well, not really, but I'm definitely this side of baby boomer to their gen-X and Y.  I asked Bayla, one of my 40-+ best buddies one night if she wanted to go there with me, in part because it's such a challenge to get her to be open to meeting women even though I know she wants to, and she said, Well, sure...as a joke. 

Bayla has a way of framing things--and people--that draws out the heart of the matter. Now how will I ever go there with any seriousness?  She's killed my inner Dorothy.

But not quite.  T has said one of the things she loves about me is how I chew bubble gum in earnest, that is, expressly to blow bubbles, without irony, somehow belying my advanced age, I suppose. 

Now if I can chew bubble gum without irony, and joyfully revisit a baby dyke dive dissed by my aging mentor, perhaps I can learn to quiet my inner food snob while I tote a down-home oh-so-sweet ice cream paaaahhhhh on into bar-be-que land. Regardless, I suspect mah sweet stuff'll come in mighty handy following those ribs and burgers.  Mmmmm.

Brownies for Butches

Especially for You, with deep reverence and love for what it takes to move through the world as a butch.  We love the paradoxes you embody, the beauty you shine and the irresistible sexy energy that draws us to you.  Please accept these butch brownies, made by our own femme hands, as a small but passionate token of appreciation for your existence.  You are rare gems, and you rock our worlds!  Love, Jill and Melanie

All or most batches organic: unbleached all-purpose wheat flour, unrefined or refined sugar, unsweetened chocolate, butter, eggs, semisweet chocolate, cocoa, natural flavorings.

As ever, click on any image to enlarge it.  (Too bad this doesn't work for other parts of life.)

Saturday June 24th was a happy day in my life.  Before the Dyke March, when hordes of women gather in Dolores Park, I got to combine two of my favorite passions: brownies and butches.  With a little exhibitionism thrown in, its a wonder I didn't get sent straight to hell.

For a week, I made brownies.  Before the march, I went over to my friends Brett and Melanie (butch boi and femme respectively) and combined my brownies with Mel's.  We wrapped the brownies in a butch appreciation message (reproduced above) printed on colored paper with glittery designs on the back: red with gold, white with blue, pink with silver and so on.  As we walked out the door, the brownies nestled in a red satin box with a gold flap, on which we mounted the ingredients along with the butch appreciation message in a pink heart.  I can't remember the last time I was so excited.

Giving away the brownies wound up much less straightforward (so to speak) than I would have guessed.  For one thing, eight out of ten people assumed we were proffering "special" brownies.  Luckily, we ran into a woman doing just that, and she followed us around so we referred those clientele to her.  Strategic business alliances rock.

Secondly, femmes and men and (apparently) straight folks were mighty interested in brownies.  I explained that they were for self-identified butch women only. Brett chimed in with flowers for femmes some of the time, which placated a few, but a number of men went away empty-handed.  One inebriated young feminine woman went on and on about how she had a butch cousin.  I told her the brownies were made especially for self-identified butch women. 

"Oh, like YOU'RE butch!?  She said, looking me up and down.

Oh.  Like you have a brain cell left?

M weak attempt at explanation proved futile.  She repeated herself, gesture and all.  Finally she picked up a brownie.

"That's not okay with me," I said.

"Oh, well, we're all family," she said, and ate the brownie as she walked away.

Hello?

Meanwhile, the butches seemed delighted.  About half of them would reach for their wallets, and I explained that they were not for sale, that they were our gift of love to butch women.  They lit up with gratitude.  When they read the message we included, a few came back to personally thank me for my words.

Some clearly (to me) butch women arrived unsure if they qualified.  "Well, I'm sort of a soft butch," a few offered.  We told them their identity was up to them.  I saw a couple of out-and-out lies, chocolate-induced, for sure.  I finally interrupted the implausible yarn about identity being spun by one cleavage, makeup and miniskirt-sporting woman by asking her to please respect our intention.  She backed off, I like to think a bit relieved of having to sustain her awkward lie.

The thing that (at first) surprised me the most was how miffed some people got when they found out they could not buy a brownie for themselves.  In particular, one woman's face tightened up.

"That's discrimination," she said.

"I made these with my own hands and am giving them to whom I wish," I said.

"That's really racist," the woman retorted.

Huh?

Finally, I got it.  Those slighted (all white) felt entitled to have whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.  The butch women of the world have to deal every day with judgment and exclusion, crude and subtle.  For once, here was something sweet offered ONLY to butch women, a direct reversal of the usual order of things.  It reminded me of similar reactions when years ago I charge white women and people of color less to come to some of my flirtation workshops.  Some white men got miffed, as if we were actually on a level playing field to begin with, and I was somehow introducing rather than repairing an inequality.  And here I was just wanted to give butches something yummy.

Brett and Melanie had the foresight to anticipate these awkward moments.  I did not.  I thought we'd just show up and the appropriate targets would identify themselves.  Instead I got a chance to become a sort of lingerie-wearing, brownie-toting anthropologist.

My m.o. in general, and for this gig in particular, was to share my love through food, not piss people off by denying it to them.  At the same time, I felt strongly that I wanted to stick to my intention.  I think it was really powerful for the butches who got to witness me telling men, femmes and straight folks effectively, No, actually, this is for her, not you.  How often does that happen to a butch woman?  I enjoyed that part of the dynamic, which helped make up for how the food withholding violated my Jewish Mama gene.

Oh, did someone ask about the lingerie?  The dress was a $1,000.00 Perla number that I borrowed from a friend.  I had tried it on weeks before just for fun, and was amazed at how it looked on me.  I don't think most lingerie looks that good on me, but I just loved how this dress, with its matching bra and panties worn underneath, flattered.  I wound up using my own undergarments, preferring a black lace thong and leopard push-up bra to their Perla counterparts.

Halfway through our time there, I swapped out my platforms for bedroom slippers, and toward the end, donned a long silk bathrobe my mom had given me for my wedding.  Little does she know.  I did take off the bathrobe and hoist myself back up on the platforms for a final brownie giveaway round, braving the San Francisco cold.

All photos, BTW, by Sweet Boi Brett, except those of Brett hymself.  I took these--view hir and drool:

Speaking of drooling over sweet bois, someone asked about the brownies themselves: There were, essentially, two batches, Sweet Bois and Diesel Fuel.  The sweet bois were a classic recipe, the kind most folks would be familiar with. Melanie used a Martha Stewart recipe and I went to Cooks Illustrated.  The Diesel Fuel were my adaptation of the CI classics, adding cocoa, semi-sweet chocolate, strong coffee and brandy.  I wanted something with the classic texture but severely amped-up chocolate content.  CI offers a triple-fudge brownie, but the texture of that recipe is more like a thick chewy fudge than a brownie, and you can't really eat more than one square inch of them.  My Diesel Fuel recipe is still in progress, but I've reproduced the current version below.  Please do tell me how they turn out, if you use it.

Jill's Diesel Fuel Brownies

Note: These brownies were developed specifically for Dyke March 2006 where the lovely Miss Melanie and I served them under a sign that read "Brownies for Butches"

Be sure to test for doneness before removing the brownies from the oven. If underbaked (the toothpick has batter clinging to it), the texture of the brownies will be dense and gummy; if overbaked (the toothpick comes out completely clean), the brownies will be dry and cakey.

When serving to butches, supply lots of napkins, and don?t take it personally if appreciation gets expressed primarily in monosyllables.

Makes about forty brownies when cut small

1 cup plain cake flour (or all-purpose; the texture will be just slightly different)

1/2 tsp table salt

3/4 tsp. baking powder

3 T Green & Black's organic cocoa (this is the most potent--add 1 T at least if you use another brand)

6-8 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped fine

2 oz semisweet chocolate

12 T unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks, cut into six 1-inch pieces)

2 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1/4 cup powdered sugar

4 large eggs

1T vanilla powder or crushed vanilla beans if possible, extract if not

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 325 degrees. Line a 9 X 13-inch baking pan with tin foil so that it hangs over the sides (you'll use it to lift the brownies out later) and grease it up with butter or your oil of choice.

2. Sift  flour, salt, cocoa, powdered sugar and baking powder together, then whisk to combine in medium bowl; set aside.

4. Melt both unsweetened and semisweet chocolate along with butter in a  large heatproof bowl set over saucepan of almost-simmering water, stirring occasionally, until smooth. (Alternatively, in microwave, heat butter and chocolate in large microwave-safe bowl on high for 45 seconds, then stir and heat for 30 seconds more. Stir again, and, if necessary, repeat in 15-second increments; do not let chocolate burn.) When chocolate mixture is completely smooth, remove bowl from saucepan and gradually whisk in sugar. Add eggs one at time, whisking after each addition until thoroughly combined. Whisk in vanilla. Add flour/cocoa mixture in three additions, folding with rubber spatula until batter is completely smooth and homosexual.  Um, I mean homogeneous.

5. Transfer batter to prepared pan; using spatula, spread batter into corners of pan and smooth surface. Bake until toothpick or wooden skewer inserted into center of brownies comes out with few moist crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool on wire rack to room temperature, about 2 hours, then remove brownies from pan by lifting foil overhang. Cut brownies into 1.5-inch squares and serve. Store leftovers in airtight container at room temperature or in refrigerator up to 3 days.  Or freeze--these taste wonderful and chew quite tenderly just out of the freezer and are delightful in hot weather.

A Few of My Favorite Things

What's going on for Pride this weekend? 

Here in my world I'm prepping to serve up a bit of performance art, laced with some exhibitionism and dessert.   Or perhaps it's dessert laced with exhibitionism and performance art.  I guess it depends on your lens.

Anyway, the lovely Miss Melanie and I will be out of out in Dolores Park prior to the Dyke March, and you'll be able to catch us in the act of exposing our...predilections.

Come hungry.

Oh goodness, okay, I'll give you a hint, or several.  It involves chocolate. 

And fancy lingerie.

And perhaps something poetic.  Butches, for a change this time, are the object.

Guesses welcome.  If you know, don't tell.  But do ask if you just can't stand it.

See you there.

Bald Truth

"One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating."

-Luciano Pavarotti

Another Sweet Creation

This is what I made tonight, in Lorton, Virginia, about a half hour out of DC,  for Alex’s cousin Jennifer, her husband Andrew, Jennifer’s little (yet large and hunky) brother Chris and his fiancée Melissa, whose engagement party we’re attending Sunday: Sweet cherry coulis on half the plate, spiked with a bit of dry sherry (no, not just because it rhymes), crème anglaise spiked with rum on the other half, a square of bittersweet flourless chocolate cake in the middle, decorated with a slice of kiwi, a sliced and fanned strawberry, and bittersweet chocolate curls.  Moans ensued.  However, a divorce almost commenced when, moments before I served the dessert I’d been working on all day, Alex went downstairs to find some ice cream (!).

Strawberry Ice Cream

I’m not entirely sure why I wanted to make strawberry ice cream.  I never eat any commercial varieties of it.

I think it had to do with the strawberries.  At Berkeley Bowl, my most common grocery haunt, I eyed the cartons of organic red prizes.  Lifted them up and looked underneath, very carefully:good, no mold.  Nabbed three pints.  I’ve got to do something with them, I thought.  Yes, sometimes my culinary endeavors are ingredient-driven.  Hard to say which comes first, the idea for the dish, or a yen for the ingredient.

Plus, the smell.  Perfectly ripe strawberry redness.

I have a memory.  I’m three-something, living in New York. My dad’s on sabbatical from teaching art in Miami, where we live the rest of the time, and where I grew up (insofar as I have actually grown up).  My mom stays home with me and my baby sister.* I open one of those plastic cups and taste a strawberry yogurt.  It’s smooth-firm, the kind tightened up with gelatin, not the natural, more runny kind.  It’s heaven in my three- or maybe four-year-old mouth.  I just want more and more.  These days, every now and then a strawberry taste will take me back there.

So I bring the strawberries home.  Ideally, I like to use strawberries before having to refrigerate them.  I find the cold gets them slightly rubbery in texture.  Room temperature brings out their berry-ness. But they can’t stay out too long, for the mold. 

In true form, I print out the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for strawberry ice cream.  In the article preceding the recipe (which for me is often the best part), they start with the distinction between the French vanilla school of thought (which involves lots of egg yolks) and the more pared down versions.  Breyer’s ice cream’s a good example of the latter—they use no eggs.  And their ice cream’s accordingly boring.  Not bad, just not the kind of thing to make you close your eyes and fall into the nearest wall, person, or receptive surface.

CI, after their copious testing, calls for not three, not four, not five, but six egg yolks.  They mess with the cream, milk and sugar ratio, too, for that perfect blend of sweet but not too, creamy but not greasy-buttery.  All good, so far.  But then we get to the strawberries.

Let me take a gripe break here and complain loudly about recipes that require, but don’t say up front that they require, 30, 60 or more minutes of waiting while something rises, cools, chills, or in this case “macerates” (I still haven’t looked up that word).  How annoying.  Thankfully, I figured out a way around part of this, for this recipe: I started the strawberries “macerating” in the sugar and vanilla earlier than I was told (yes, I have been known to disobey) so that by the time I needed them, they’d be fully macerated.  Oh, to be fully macerated!

Once I’d made the custard, a decadent thick soup of semi-cooked egg yolks, sugar, milk and cream, the recipe said to “lightly mash” the strawberries into said custard with…a potato masher.  Once I did, though, even putting some muscle into the mash, the berries remained in unappetizingly large chunks.  Worse, they floated in a pale yellow sea.  Not the strawberry ice cream of my dreams!

So, the survivor and the epicure in me teamed up for emergency measures.  I scooped out about ¼ cup of the strawberries, along with some custard, and ground them with my vertical hand blender, the one I pray I never confuse with my Hitachi.  I got a deep pink pulp.  Without thinking too hard or looking too closely (perhaps one of my tragic flaws, both in failure and excess) I dumped the mixture back into the larger bowl and stirred. 

Ugh.

The seeds made the whole thing too gritty.

Round two: I strained the whole mess into a larger bowl, and picked out the large strawberry chunks, returning them to their rightful home, leaving the gritty strawberry pulp in the strainer.   Success!  I now had a smooth, distinctly strawberry-flavored custard, which was what I wanted, that was a beautiful pink.  I had been a bit afraid it would wind up orange, because of the egg yolks.  Not so. The extra strawberry flavor also added a tang that I’d found missing at first.  I’ll have to write Christopher Kimball and tell him how I improved upon his recipe.

I spooned the mixture into frozen canister of what was, now nearly twenty years ago, a complete Donvier ice cream maker.  The original machine, a hand crank, had an outer case, a lid, a blade and a handle to crank with.  The ice canister’s all that remains, but I improvise the rest.

You’re only supposed to turn the crank once every twenty minutes, but I can’t help myself: Every five or ten minutes, I scrape the stiffening mixture from the cold sides with a large wooden spoon.  I love how the liquid mixture drips over the quickening custard, how the raw material comes together into its firm future, stroke by stroke, minute by minute.

I don’t want to miss any part of this transformation.

So, at small intervals I churn and scrape and yes, taste, the hintercream, that part that’s just cold enough to hold its shape, the perfect texture to push forth the berry-ful taste. Sweet melting perfection!

What was once a strawberry growing in a patch, cream from a cow on a hill by the Pacific ocean, a brown egg and a bag of blonde granulated sugar cane now dances on my tongue in a warming cool meltown of creamy pink bliss. 

This is the value of labor.  And of vision.

I have to leave, and so return the big silver-gray cup, and its contents, to the freezer. 

Later that night, after seven hours straight with my baby, a party of various adults and babies, a dinner with my partner’s family, and a delicious round of hip-hopping, stretching and writhing on a big dance floor, I return home.  It’s late, but my partner and I want to watch Sex and The City, and…eat strawberry ice cream.  I wonder how this will go, we’ve been mired in domesticity, not romance. 

I go into the kitchen and fish out the silicone scoop gadget I bought for moments such as this.  I squeeze together the two halves, which meet like an s-shaped puzzle piece.  Now the scoop looks like other scoops.  It’s a little challenging to keep it squeezed while I scoop, though.  But I do: I scoop and scoop until I’ve got a perfectly round, pink, strawberry-studded ball, which I press into a very small ramekin, releasing the handle. A smooth pink dome rising up out of a white porcelain base.

“C’mon, baby, it’s ready,” I holler to Alex, who’s in his office on the computer.

“Okay,” he says without moving.

On a lark, I begin to lick my ball as if it’s in a cone.  One.  Then another. Just the right amount of ice cream, at the perfect texture and temperature.

It dawns on me that this is why so many, especially kids, prefer to lick, rather than spoon.

Ice cream.  Tongue.  Tongue.  Ice cream. 

I finally understand why they come together as often as they do.

Only cones don’t always taste that great.

You heard it here first: I know what humanity needs next. Porcelain, or perhaps spring-collapsible “CONZ,” i.e., reusable “cones” which enable ice cream lickage, but aren’t themselves edible.  I get it. 

But for now, my tongue, my strawberry ice cream.

I’ve licked the ball flat.  It’s time for the spoon.

Alex has come into the room, finally.  He’s starting his evening routine.  I sink into a creamy strawberry trance.  I notice my breathing, and focus only on the smell, the taste, the creamy sweetness of my cup. It’s quite a small serving, so I want to savor it. I scrape the spoon lightly to create the perfect texture in each bite.  This is my strawberry New York youth, to the power of ten.  The beautiful vibrant pink brings it all the more alive to my senses.  I’m in bliss.

Alex has joined me now, and is making small noises, unusual for him.  I look over and his eyes are closed, his full lips moving slowly around the substance I’ve given him.  Delighted, I return to my cup.  I scoop together the perfect spoonful and offer it to him.  His mouth closes around it and as he swallows I press against him, taking care not to spill my remaining stash.  Our lips come together in a softly moaning, cool-sweet strawberry kiss.

Maybe I do know why I made strawberry ice cream after all.

Buttercream

Buttercream.  Like mouthfeel, it’s a word that sort of overlaps itself, like two words made for each other, that never want to uncoil from their embrace. The sweet and the creamy slip in and out of each other, over and over and around the tongue like some crazy food ubergasm. Buttercream.  No sooner does the “r” in butter turn into a stern, hard “c”, than your lips want to kiss back into an “r” again, before smiling into that final “mm.”

Say it. 

Come on. 

You know you want to.

Buttercream is on my mind.  And, I confess, in my mouth.  For Mother’s Day, ostensibly for my Mother-in-Love (but really for myself, isn’t everything we do ultimately for ourselves?) I attempted an imitation of the inimitable: La Farine’s Jezebel cake, a hopelessly tempting concoction of chocolate mousse and apricot preserve sandwiched between layers of light genoise (that’s French-fancy for sponge cake, more or less) and covered with a rich-yet-understated—you guessed it—buttercream.

Now, buttercream can be nothing more than butter and confectioner’s sugar whipped into a light fluff. Good results are as slippery-slidey-sweet as you please. But, I did what I do when I want the best opinion on a recipe:  I consulted the Cook’s Illustrated Online Database, my “porn” site, the thing that distracts me from other things, and that which I peruse idly to see what the “best” you-name-it is really made of.  Though both hands generally remain on the keyboard, I do hang a drool bucket around my neck when surfing CI.

However, when I saw their recipe for buttercream, I didn’t trust the eggs it called for.  Specifically, I wondered what sort of texture the eggs would yield.  I knew my basic butter-sugar combo (of which CI has it's own version, called "easy buttercream") would be a good fallback.  So, I halved the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, and whipped up some of my own no-brainer buttercream to mix in.  Plus, I like combining things, in general: some of this, some that; a little of him, a little of her.  You know. 

Now.  Though I love Chris Kimball (CI’s editor) and his crew, they’re…well, New England WASPs who get off on testing each recipe many dozens of times, and investigating the science behind what conditions get gelatin to set one way and not another.  I know, who am I to talk, she who gets off on reading the same.  Still, these food geeks from back east…their view of a good dark chocolate is a bar with…I almost can’t type it…Hershey’s on the label.  So, though I love Cook’s Illustrated, their word ain’t gospel.  More on my chocolate proclivities in a later installment.

But back to buttercream.

My hat, Mr. Kimball, if I were a bit more butch, would rest humbly against my chest.  Your vanilla buttercream, with its endless stovetop peregrinations, and quick-read thermometer movements, put mine to shame!  It delivered all it promised, a true GFE, (Gourmet French Experience). I cringed at adulterating it with my two-minute handjob, so cheap and gritty by comparison.  The two versions came together under my vibrating hand mixer, and I beat them into a mellow froth with no small measure of prayer that the classier of the two flavors would out.

I found that the mélange stood up well to the stolid sponge cake with its varied fillings, and all th parts of the  concoction blended well into one another after several hours of refrigeration, the grittiness melding into that characteristic buttercream mouthfeel.  Next time, however,(which will be soon since I promised my almost-two-year-old a chocolate mousse cake for his second birthday), it’s your recipe all the way—over the whole cake.  I’m already salivating.  Because your buttercream has a mouthfeel all its own.  Now what substance, entity or material being of any kind can make that claim?  Here—judge for yourself:

Vanilla Buttercream*

4 large eggs

1 cup granulated sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Pinch table salt

1 pound (4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, each stick cut into quarters

1. Combine eggs, sugar, vanilla, and salt in bowl of standing mixer; place bowl over pan of simmering water. Whisking gently but constantly, heat mixture until thin and foamy and registers 160 degrees on instant-read thermometer.

2. Beat egg mixture on medium-high speed with whisk attachment until light, airy, and cooled to room temperature, about 5 minutes. Reduce speed to medium and add butter, one piece at a time. (After adding half the butter, buttercream may look curdled; it will smooth with additional butter.) Once all butter is added, increase speed to high and beat 1 minute until light, fluffy, and thoroughly combined. (Can be covered and refrigerated up to 5 days.)

* I can’t bring myself to use the word “frosting.” For one thing, frosting’s a cold word, and this stuff makes me anything but frigid. Moreover, why define a substance (at least a foodstuff), by what others expect to go underneath it? To use a cruder example, peanut butter is peanut butter, not “spread.”  Buttercream is sufficient unto buttercream.  From another angle, buttercream can just as easily go inside something as be spread upon it.  In fact I’ve half a mind to fill my chocolates with it the next time I haul out my crazy collection of chocolate molds.  I’ll bet you can think of even more imaginative examples.**

**I wouldn’t recommend injecting buttercream into any bodily orifices.  Except of course the mouth, and even then in small doses.  You can, however, spread it where you wish with measured abandon, considering, of course, the stickiness factor