Dubious Dishes: Cautionary Tales in Cookery
Earthquake-in-Venice Cake
It is your sweetie’s birthday. Oh, how the feeling flows in you to prepare for him a
special dinner! The dear man loves chocolate. Last week this conversation ensued:
You: “What kind of chocolate cake do you like? And don’t just say ‘regular chocolate
cake’ – you always want ‘regular’ whatever-it-is! That’s the only kind you can’t say!”
He: (wryly): “Well, are you going to tell me next what kind to say?”
You: (laughing): “No. But what special kind do you like?”
He: “Anything except German Chocolate.”
You: “That’s ‘cause of the coconut, right?” (You know him a bit by now.)
He: “Yep.”
You: “So, what kind do you specially like? Like, super chocolate or something? What
kind did your mother used to make?”
He: “Regular chocolate cake.”
*
But you are unstoppable. You comb recipe books looking for something both quirky and
rich. Finally it’s down to Bavarian Chocolate Torte (Best Recipes from the Backs of
Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Jars) or Italian Cassata (Joy of Cooking.) You settle on the
Bavarian thing, for two reasons - it seems to have more chocolate in it, and it contains
cherries, a fruit he seems to favor.
Shopping day! You plunge into the fray. List to the ready, adding things up on a piece of
paper as you go along. By the time you have exhausted the Produce, Healthfood, Ethnic,
Deli, and Dairy sections you don’t really have enough money left for everything in the
recipe. Quickly decide to make only half of it, which makes sense anyway as there is only
one man to eat it.
Grocery shopping is fraught with hurry too because he leaves you off at the market with a
wad of cash and an agreed-on time for pickup. He learned the hard way that
accompanying you to the market drove him nuts – you read every label on every box,
bottle, can, and jar.
You’ll have to leave out a few things. The recipe is from Squeeze Parkay Margarine, a
directive which sounds strange anyway, and you’ve got a tub of whipped marge at home
which looks aesthetic, swirled like yellow facecream.
Slab of semi-sweet chocolate? You’ve got a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips at home.
It’s been sitting in the pantry, probably melting, for a few weeks. It’s very likely the same
stuff as the slab anyway.
*
On the day, you grease and flour a round cake pan, wishing it was the kind with the little
thingie which runs around in a circle like a mule on an ancient threshing machine. This
detaches the cake from the pan when you want to decant it. You’re suspicious of all other
kinds. And you didn’t have money or time enough left to get parchment paper.
The recipe calls for 3 oz. semisweet chocolate, melted. You create a makeshift double
boiler and get the chocolate chips out of the pantry. You hold them aloft over the counter
and snip the corner with scissors.
But what’s this? Chocolate chips are falling onto the counter from the hinterlands of the
pouch. And – little black cylindrical pellets are mixed in them!
UGH – MOUSE-DROPPINGS!!!!
Throw away bag. Clean off and disinfect counter. Inspect pantry.
Sure enough, mouse-droppings. Inspect all foods in pantry. Crackers? Okay. Pasta?
Okay. Pumpkin seeds? Okay.
This was a chocoholic mouse, that’s all.
Your sweetie says he hopes it was the one he got yesterday with the mouse-trap.**
Spray teatree oil and mint water around just in case. You’ve read that mice hate mint.
Back to cake. No chocolate chips – what to do? Oh – you’ve been seeing in the freezer,
ever since you moved in with this man, a bag of miniature candy bars. They’ve
apparently been there so long they are waiting for a further incarnation. (Not as a mouse
– not this man – it could be an anything incarnation; probably everything likes
chocolate.)
This solution appeals to your (often sneakily-hidden) quirky nature. Get out the bag and
start pawing through it. Snickers? Okay. Butterfingers? No – too crunchy. Chocolate
mints? (Your fave – no mouse you, either.) Sneak one in. Get a whole pile of stuff,
*
no mice seen since
including lots of Hershey’s Kisses. Lots is always better. Unpeel them and stick in the top
of the double boiler. Bash them around a bit with a wooden spoon.
Rest of batter assembles okay – beating things, adding nice fresh eggs, etc. Instead of the
called-for buttermilk, though, use some really old homemade yogurt – yogurt just
improves with age. You’ve been cooking with it and it’s just fine. (Really.)
The incorporation of not-quite-melted candy bars creates an interesting texture – yes, the
batter is looking browner; but crunchy-ish sort of bits seem to remain. Oh well. At least
they have nothing to do with mice.
Bake as directed. While it’s in the oven, Sweetie comes in and, astonishingly, says,
“Would you like to come into town? I’ll give you some money and turn you loose in
Target and the healthfood store. You can get cotton sheets, like you wanted; whatever
you want. I have to get something.”
“But it’s not my birthday!,” you squeak, “and, Yes! But I have to wait twenty minutes ‘til
the thing in the oven is out!”
“Okay.”
The recipe says bake 30-35 minutes, let rest 10 minutes, take out of pan, cool.
You go to town. The cake (one layer only as you made half and intend to bisect and stack
it) sits sedately on a rack on the counter. It is an ordinary brown cake. You put a cloth
over it so he can’t view it before it is a real confection. It does not get removed from the
pan after ten minutes.
As you go out of the house the man says, “Cake smells good!”
“Cake? What cake? Did anybody say anything about a cake?”
“Well, I can smell it,” he laughs.
“You think you know everything,” you say airily.
Turns out you didn’t know much.
The shopping spree takes longer than expected, as shopping sprees do. (On the way home
in the car you discover that the ‘thing he had to get’ was—a whole new operating system
for your troubled computer! That’s what he’s doing on his birthday!)
You get home about a quarter to six. Lots to do!
Bison from the healthfood store, marinated since yesterday in organic red wine, garlic,
herbs, olive oil – into oven. Looks.. potent. Quickly wash, slice potatoes, roll in organic
olive oil and chopped fresh rosemary. Stretch them out on a cookie sheet. Salt and freshly
ground pepper are added. Put in oven.
Okay, cake time. The recipe says to whip cream until stiff peaks form. You had a dubious
feeling about this from the beginning. Joy of Cooking advises to do the whipping over
ice.
Well, heck! You have never had much luck beating cream or eggwhites – not that you’ve
tried much. Apparently it can be done without an electric mixer… manfully hop to it. The
hand-beater goes whirr, whirrrrr! Whap whap! Rattle of metal bowl on ice!
Kitchen chaos. Focus! Go for it! Whip that cream! You don’t want to ask him to whip his
own birthday cake cream.
Oh well. It’s kind of stiff. Add the confectioner’s sugar and keep going.
You’ve made the tart-cherry glaze – lots of frozen cherries in a cornstarch-sugar glazething. It was supposed to have brandy in it, and you bought some of the unfamiliar,
slightly suspect stuff, but in the tizzy you forget all about it and the glaze stays virgin.
The whipped-cream stuff you divide in two – half gets cocoa beaten into it. Looks kind of
pale though. Not the chocolatey decadence you’d envisioned. Come to think of it, when
you were in Germany (as in ‘Bavarian” ) you had noticed the inordinate interest they
have in cream – cream in salad dressing! Cream in potato salad! Cream in coffee! Cream
desserts! All this in one meal. And you happen to know from restaurant desserts that
your man is more interested in the chocolate than the cream. Oh well – what to do but
muddle on?
Now, to get that cake out of the pan! Knife around edge, turn over, thump all over on
bottom with knife-handle! Over plate!
This does not work whatsoever. At all.
The cake stays glued firmly to the pan.
The dinner seems to be multiplying on all sides – dirty pots, things sliding about. The
iced tea prep! The Broccoli Carciofi you’re in the middle of! The salad! The French
bread you have to put in the oven, now! It’s the kind you buy but bake at home.
You can smell the stuff in the oven. It’s getting more and more done! Fast!
Oh well – you were going to cut this cake in half anyway. Cut it now! Try to pry it up,
half by half!
It doesn’t pry.
Pry more! Then, in a fit of panic, gouge! Rip it up in handfuls! The top comes up but the
bottom, stuck to pan, has to be scooped up with fingers!
Put some of this on cake-plate. It’s sort of got a shape, though its top is all bumpy and
uneven, like a 3rd-world roadbed. Heap cherry-stuff on this! It falls to all sides! Push it
back!
Add more handfuls of cakey stuff! Press! Add chocolate filling now! The cake is
supposed to have four layers; you are supposed to cut it horizontally (a thread works but
this cake never got that far- you would first have to have an actual whole layer on a plate
to cut) and fill it first with cherries, then the next layer with chocolate goop. This goop is
hardly stiff; it sloughs.
There is a sense of urgent, benign, embarrassed disaster. Can this really be happening?
Oh no! Your tidy, organized man, who is always so cautious about the possibility of
things coming to grief – what will he think??
What to do??
Put more cake on it. More cherries. There are so many! More chocolate stuff. The last
slab of cake, which is almost flat. You’ve tried to cut it horizontally with a sharp knife
while it was still in the pan; so the bottom of the slab is… all wonky.
The whole structure sort of leans… it’s kind of like an amphitheatre or something, with
its roughly semicircular shape.
Plaster the white cream goop on it. It’s not a thick icing, capable of hiding sins; it’s a
slidey mass of sweetened cream in a deteriorating mode.
The whole thing looks kind of like… a building half-down in an earthquake.
Put nice fresh Morello cherries on top! Their stems stick up jauntily! Clump some in
front of the mess! Kind of bat and smooth at it all, hoping this might sort of somehow
have some tidying effect! It’s too late! The thing is… a disaster area! Irredeemable!
Go to the freezer. If you stick it in there, mightn’t it sort of… firm up?
But the freezer is full! Oh no! And the dinner is pressing steadily on, pressing into your
back!
Try to make room. Scramble! Shove! But frozen things are heavy and slippery. They
seem to have minds of their own. They keep falling on you. You keep sticking bags of
blueberries, zucchini, Tupperware dishes of leftover pasta carbonara, icecream cartons,
back in, and they keep falling out again. On the floor! On your head! Your front!
This goes on and on. Finally you create a teetery pedestal of Tupperware dishes and
slippery bags, and there balance the plate with naked cake on it.
Close door gingerly.
Work on the rest of dinner!
*
You’ve eaten. It was delicious. It worked. The potatoes were crispy and golden and tasty.
The broccoli dish was inspired – try it; it’s broccoli sliced in an artichoke-hearts sauce.
You’d tried to treat the bison as the French might if they’d had bison in recent centuries –
or before. You think it succeeded. Filet d’ Bison au vin sauvage et l’ail et les herbes,
straight out of the artistic caves. Why not?
Well-fed sighs.
Now – for the cake! You’re carting dirty dishes to the kitchen, washing briefly, tossing
them into the dishwasher. Quick.
Open the freezer and seize the cake. It does not fall down on you! Put it on the counter
and stick the garishly colored, glitter-striped birthday candles on it. How bad might these
be for a person? He won’t care. Light them. They sputter and start immediately to melt,
adding to the cake’s general effect of imminent collapse.
Bring the cake into the diningroom, singing, rather worsely than you might have
expected, “Happy Birthday to you.”
Your Roman amphitheatre under the ravages of time! Your Mardi Gras meltdown!
Earthquake in Venice! Landslide at the Oscars!
Anything ruinous and gaudy.
It is a harlequin cake – a clown-face – made of tumbled finery, made of pillars rotted by
dumb geology. Its front is fissured and heaped as mine-tailings. Its rear is like a fat lady
in crinolines with cherries oozing out of the ruffles. Its front grins like tiers of urchins.
The cherries wave their stems bravely, competing with the
unstable candles. The cream oozes like a snake-oil seller.
Cherries roll about its feet like drunks.
How bright the flames! Twenty-four candles, one for each two
years.
He blows them all out at once when your back is turned. He says he made a wish.
He is a nice man. He probably didn’t wish for a woman who could make a regular cake.
He probably wished for a new tractor, or a motorbike.
He got illustrated books of your poems you’ve written to him. He says it is the nicest
present anyone ever gave him.
He says the cake tasted good. He says it was perfect.
“Perfectionism is a disease. Only dead things are perfect.” -Osho
You know he meant something else by perfect – he meant… is-ness.
Did I say how loving the whole day has been? How sweet between you?
This cake came with love. Love blobbed off of it like snowdrifts falling. Love came
trotting out with it from the kitchen. Love beamed in its candles. Love bulged in its
irregular ridges. Love sweetened it; love called it home. Love was on that plate you set in
front of him, with your harried tinge of rue. Love survived all these.
“Love is my message – my only message.” -Osho
He does not eat a great deal of it. But there it is – a sloppy, wedgy corner lopped off
now –
You reflect, still within a certain sense of pandemonium, that aren’t there are worse
things in life than stove-in, topsy-turvy cakes with their grins askew like drunken
Irishmen?
You two take your hearts upstairs with you to the meditation room.
Dancing Leaves, aug. 3, ‘05