Food, Photography and Bons Mots
I guess I have always lived in a scone desert. I never tasted one until I was an adult. Always seemed meh to me. Then, this scone came along. Wow. My late-in-life discovery of scones made me wonder about the origins of scones. It turns…
Do you still experience childhood food nightmares? Me, too. For me, the nightmare always begins with me prying open my battered metal lunch box. (Cue in the music from Jaws: Jaws.) On the worst days, there would be a processed cheese sandwich with gloppy…
Stare into this swirling spiral vortex. That and a good hot cup of chamomile tea will make you very sleepy.
I love this bundt cake pan. It is a Nordic Ware pan from their Heritage Collection. I bought mine on Amazon here. (Full disclosure: Jeff Bezos and I are not close and Amazon doesn’t send me checks. Damn!)
When I was a little girl, I used to love the classic (and pretty benign) horror movies on TV. When I use this pan, it always reminds me of one of those films where the evil genius (maybe Karloff) urges the naive sweet young thing to stare deeply into the swirling vortex. It was the first time I had heard of hypnosis. I remember trying to stare into one of those little sticks with a swirling top (pinwheels) to see if I could be hypnotized. (I couldn’t but, believe me, I gave it a good try. Color me wild.)
Enough about the pan. This Cider and Five-Spice cake is very good and very unusual. It is a pungent spice cake. It is decidedly low on the sweetness meter. It has a good punch of ginger flavor and it incorporates a couple teaspoons of Chinese five-spice powder and one cup of cider. My French neighbor recommended a cider made with apples that is popular in Brittany and I used that for the cider in this recipe. Incidentally, I used a cider I bought at Trader Joe’s called Dan Armor. Served really cold, the cider also makes a refreshing and low-alcohol (5%) summer drink.
Here is the recipe.
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This recipe was adapted from a Nigella Lawson recipe. You can find the original recipe here.
Summer! Here is a bit of mood music to set the tone: Joe Hisaishi’s One Summer’s Day. How pretty is that? This is my favorite time of the year for cooking. Summer fruits and vegetables are ripe and plentiful in the farmer’s markets. I just…
Salad Days! No. Not the Shakespearean kind of salad days full of reminiscences and regrets. You remember— Cleopatra lamenting her youthful indiscretions. “My salad days, When I was green in judgment: cold in blood, To say as I said then! ” Instead, these salad…
Happy Fourth of July to those of you reading this in the United States. What could be more quintessentially American than a banana cake with salted caramel glaze?
OK. I know that a hot dog with everything is pretty standard Fourth of July fare. But still…
Here is my adaptation of this wonderful Melissa Clark dessert. The cake is great. The salted caramel glaze is to die for.
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Here is a link to the original NYT recipe: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020073-banana-snacking-cake-with-salted-caramel-glaze.
Happy summer! Too hot to spend much time at the stove? These Thai Corn Fritters may be just what you need. A short cook on the griddle and you have a tasty appetizer, entree or side. (OK. I’ll fess up. I eat these for breakfast,…
This dessert soars! Truly. If you read Blue Cayenne regularly, you know that I have a love affair with plums. I can’t be sure, but I think I would choose plums if I were stranded on a dessert desert island. That and vanilla ice cream and…
“Beebop-a-Reebop Rhubarb Pie”
Recognize that lyric? It’s classic Prairie Home Companion.
Anyone else miss lazy Sunday afternoons spent in front of the radio listening to that show? Truth be told, I hated the twangy music but loved the gentle humor.
If you are unfamiliar with the show (or a wistful fan), here is a wonderful clip from a 2013 show: “Rhubarb Pie” from Prairie Home Companion.
The recipe for today is, of course, rhubarb pie.
(The pastry recipe for this pie can be found here: Plum Tart. The plum tart recipe, if you haven’t tried it, is amazing.)
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Oh, how I wish I had a vegetable garden! I would try my hand at growing everything. Gene, my good friend and neighbor, has a flourishing vegetable garden this year. On occasion, he lets me come down and dig around to get my fix.…
