Mum's Birthday, or, In Which I Make Four Cakes and Throw Away Three

The good thing about having my particular mother as a mother is that when you pose the question "What do you want me to cook for your birthday?" you get a request that is a) ridiculously simple to make and b) exactly the same as the year before, and the year before that. A creature of habit, is my mother; a creature of habit with the tastes of a nun in northern Finland.

Oh, Beetle, you say. You're just being hyperbolic. As usual. But, dear reader, I kid you not that every single year the answer to the above question is "Pancakes, Potatoes, and Salmon."

So . . .

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!

SWEDISH PANCAKES

BOILED POTATOES WITH DILL BUTTER

BROILED SOCKEYE SALMON

GREEN BEANS IN MUSTARD DILL SAUCE

BUTTERMILK LAYER CAKE WITH RASPBERRY BUTTERCREAM

The good thing about only having to make the requested dishes is that because all are quite easy and simple to prepare, it freed up the SEVENTEEN MILLION HOURS I spent making a birthday cake, throwing it away, making another birthday cake, throwing it away, making ANOTHER birthday cake, throwing it away, and making a final cake that, had it not worked out . . . well . . . I'd probably still be on the stairmaster.

This is also a solemn promise from me that this is the LAST TIME I stray from the Nigella Lawson Birthday Cake Path of Light and Deliciousness and make anything other than her Buttermilk Cake. I WILL NEVER DO IT AGAIN, NIGELLA, I SWEAR. I'VE LEARNED MY LESSON.

My lessons, incidentally, are buried in the bottom of the trash cans in the barn in individual ziploc bags. (The good thing about watching so many Scandinavian crime thrillers is that I've seen from the best of the best psychotic Swedish serial killers how to get rid of dead bodies, and that's kind of how I treated the cake failures: wrap it up, take it out with the trash, disinfect all surfaces, make like it didn't happen, deny EVERYTHING.)

The cake thing began last month when I was flipping through Country Living UK and came across a recipe for Cappuccino Brûlée. Upon showing the page to Mum, she said "THAT'S what I want for my birthday cake." So, June 23rd swings around, I get out the eggs, the heavy cream, the coffee, and set to work. 

I went in, it has to be said, with a distinct optimism. Crème Brûlée is actually relatively simple, and I've cracked the custard ceiling in the last few months quite a few times with a decent success rate, so I was feeling good. 

Somewhere around the 30th minute of a cook time that said 5 - 10, my confidence was waning. Instead of looking set at the top with a lovely dark brown sugary coffee crust, the top was bubbling in this weird creepy way that didn't so much suggest "dessert" as "primordial swamp." 

I threw it out. 

But it was MUM'S BIRTHDAY and she HAD requested it, so I felt obligated to give it another go. I doubled the recipe this time, and switched the baking dish to a shallower broader one, thinking that might work. After an HOUR in the oven, the primordial ooze was bubbling away and it honestly did look like that one episode of Bones where the corrupt construction guy kills the health and safety inspector who's going to rat him out and dissolves his body in a bathtub filled with acid.

I threw it out. Mum had raspberries and cream for dessert that night.

*I'm going to blame the recipe, which is convenient and exonerates me completely, but when you make something twice, and both times it comes out horrifically, chances are you're working with a dud. What can I say. I tried.

Monday, THE BIRTHDAY dawned, and I pulled on my apron, and pulled out the emergency box.

The emergency box, dear reader, is an Organic, Ethically Sourced, Free Trade Produced, Lovingly Hand Prepared, Holistic, Spiritually Blessed, Nirvana Achieving box of Vanilla Cake Mix that cost $15.99 at the tiny health food store in the town over. It promises to open your chakras, clear your mind, and let you see the light and error of your previously dietarily sinful ways. I keep the emergency box for situations such as the above, when I need to make a cake but, in the last 12 hours, have used up a full dozen eggs, two pints of heavy cream, three cups of sugar, and almost all of my patience.

I made the cake.

The only Nirvana I reached upon pulling it from the oven was "Wow. Cake mixes are awful." It was sticky and flat and gooey and smelled like cotton candy at a state fair.

I threw it out.

BUT IT WAS MUM'S BIRTHDAY. THE WOMAN NEEDED A CAKE.

I had exactly three eggs left (I seriously need to get a chicken. Or take out stock in egg production). I had Buttermilk. WHY HADN'T I JUST MADE NIGELLA'S BUTTERMILK CAKE IN THE FIRST PLACE? I sent Mum out to the garden in her brand-spanking-new overalls and colour-coordinated gardening gloves, put the World Cup on, and suited up. In ten minutes it was in the oven, smelling delicious. In half an hour it was out and golden brown and fluffy. BIRTHDAY WAS SAVED.

Raspberry Buttercream SOUNDS difficult but really it's not. I chose to strain the mashed berries because I wanted a clean-looking frosting, but I've seen more rustic versions that kept the seeds in and it didn't look half bad. But being on cake FOUR, I figured I might as well go big or go home.

The only thing about Raspberry Buttercream is that it really does look like Pepto Bismol.

But once you get over that everything is groovy.

Herewith are more photos of potatoes and salmon because they are so pretty and honestly one of my favourite things to do is look at photos of potatoes. I feel like you will understand.

AND just because I love my LL's the leftover Buttercream frosting (what I could wrest from Mum amidst plaintive cries of "BUT THAT'S MY FROSTING" has been dotted onto butter cookies and transformed into mini birthday cookies that are possibly the girliest things ever to come out of Beetle HQ. I hope you like them.

So, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!

And strap in for next year.

Because it's Buttermilk All The Way.

Blackberries + Cream = CAKE

THINGS I LEARNED FROM OUR WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C. 

1. Washington D.C. is HUMID. 

2. Library book sales and used book stores that have no organisational system are incredibly stressful because you can't look for specific titles or genres and therefore you are terrified that unless you spend FOUR HOURS looking at every single book you will miss something life changing. This can annoy the people you are with when you refuse to leave. 

3. The Washington Post is not as good as The New York Times. 

4. A packet of dried apricots, a tiny bar of dark chocolate, a single serve container of soy milk, and a container of yoghurt costs $24 at the hotel store. 

5. Speaking of soy milk . . . New York, NY, and Bar Harbour, ME, are apparently the only two locations in the world where it is common to put soy milk in your coffee. In Washington, D.C., you have to ASK for it to be brought out, which makes you super self conscious because of course the barista then hates you and thinks you are a princess, and then she WATCHES YOU pour it in and you feel even more self conscious like you're using too much, and everyone else waiting for their half decaf sugar free vanilla frappuccinos with light whip looks at you like you are a crazy person and you want to be all UM HELLO HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT YOU JUST ORDERED?

6. Apparently, a German portraitist named John Valentine Haidt painted a portrait of me (or my doppelganger at the very least) in 1755. (see image) I was unaware of this until I wandered into a small room in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. General consensus has been that it is, actually, definitely, completely, me. 

7. Upon reaching a . . . how shall I put this . . . "relatively advanced age" you are considered too old and feeble to be a terror threat. I guess they figure you can't handle detonating a bomb or carrying a concealed weapon or anything because you'll get too tired, or you'll forget you're supposed to blow something up, or you'll get your C-4 explosives confused with your Ensure or something like that. I learned this because at the Manchester airport, MUM WAS FAST TRACKED BY THE TSA AND I HAD TO WAIT IN LINE WITH THE REST OF THE NON-OLDS. She attempted to lord this over me for a few minutes but I reminded her I had the parking validation and the car keys, and I would, without hesitation, leave her aged self to be eaten by wolves and Republicans in New Hampshire. 

ALSO. I love the World Cup. This doesn't count as something I learned, per se, because I totally already knew it, but the World Cup is awesome. It's so exciting, it's so fun to see all these countries coming together and all the fans cheering and how crazy they get about football, and it really makes me wish that America took more of an interest. I for one would much rather watch a football match than, say, an ice hockey game. Or, SNORE, golf.
ALSO. Football players are so incredibly handsome. That's fun too.

However. We are back at Beetle HQ and summer baking continues.

IT'S TIME FOR BERRIES, YOU GUYS. BERRIES. SPECIFICALLY. BLACKBERRIES.

SPECIFICALLY. BLACKBERRIES AND CREAM. 

BLACKBERRY CREAM CAKE

Having obtained Blackberries, the question that remained was what to make. The first thing that comes to my mind at least when faced with a mountain of berries is CREAM. Berries and cream. They just work. Whipped cream, custard cream, whatever. Just. Cream.

I decided that I would use one of my favourite Beatrice recipes, that of her Cardamom Cream Cake, and replace the cardamom with a ton of blackberries. Hence, Blackberry Cream Cake.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• BLACKBERRIES. I don't remember how many, I think it was a pint? I just threw them all in there. 

In a large bowl combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add the eggs one at a time, then the cream. Beat it at high speed for about five minutes until the batter is very light and fluffy and whippy.

Roughly chop your blackberries, it's ok too if you leave a couple whole, and gently fold them into the batter.

Pour the batter into a loaf pan or a cake pan (I used my 10 inch springform) and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour until the top is golden and the edges are starting to pull away.

Allow to cool completely before turning out and slicing up. 

BEETLE NOTES

There's no butter in this cake. The density and moistness really just does come from the heavy cream. But it manages to be dense and moist without being "pound-cake-heavy" if that makes sense. It's substantial but not "thump in your stomach" substantial. Just "summer afternoon on the porch take a nap after eating" substantial.

I decided not to add the Cardamom this time, since it was my first attempt at an adaptation, and I wasn't sure how Cardamom and Blackberries would combine. I did consider ground ginger, in fact I actually went as far as taking the ground ginger down from the shelf and unscrewing the lid, but then I thought that maybe it would detract from the berries, and that something as simple as a cream cake only needed ONE flavour (blackberry) and that adding ginger might confuse things. I'm open to experimentation later on, but for the first time out, figured I'd play it safe.

I am personally quite pleased at making a transportable, non melty, non keep-in-fridge version of Blackberries and Cream. Not that there's anything wrong with a ton of berries covered in a ton of whipped cream. But that is something best enjoyed on a porch, straight out of the fridge, surrounded by pretty people and flowers. If it's supposed to last all afternoon in the library break room it's just going to disintegrate and we can't have that, can we?

The fun thing about baking with berries is that they go all melty and squidgy when they cook so when you slice the cake you end up with these awesome dark berry stains all over the pale cake insides, and it looks so pretty and delicious.

If this does work, then the base cream cake recipe is going to be a big staple this summer. Mum approved it last night, and again this morning (breakfast cake is always a good sign) and it just remains to be seen whether the LL's deem it worthy of an afternoon treat.

And heads up, dear reader, because Mum's BIRTHDAY is on Monday, so there will be pancakes, and potatoes, and pancakes, and salmon, and pancakes, and a big cake, and, um, pancakes.

Have I mentioned she likes pancakes?

Happy Birthday, Uncle Thor!

There are two ways to do this. 

The First:

The Second:

Of course, by putting that gif at the top of this post and simultaneously making a truly insane amount of cookies, I have effectively done both. So. All right then.

Pictured above, top to bottom, are Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip and White Chocolate and Sunflower Seed cookies. A nice mix for a birthday. At least I thought so. I hope I was right. I originally just made PB Choc Chip, but then I was gazing at the baking cupboard, and thought "hmm, well, why the hell not?" and thus White Choc Sunflower was born. So now Uncle Thor gets TWO kids of cookies, which does seem rather festive, does it not?

They're currently in a box covered in silver duct tape being USPS'd to Mount Desert (I think that far north in Maine they are ACTUALLY delivered by seagull?), so I'll find out in a day or so if Beetle Done Good. And in the short term, the LL's got the overflow, since if I sent Uncle Thor ALL of the cookies I've made since Tuesday, they might alert Homeland Security and I'd get my own baking-related satellite or something.

Mind you, given the number of irate phone calls and petitions I've sent over the years on behalf of wolves, seals, national parks, puppies, horses, kittens, the environment, animal testing, vegetarianism, GMOs, horse drawn carriages, museums, drinking water, the ozone layer, and family owned farms, I very probably do already have my own satellite, or at least my very own NSA agent. (to whom I bid at this moment a warm and ironic HELLO.) 

But to the cookies. 

PEANUT BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP

This is a modified version of my own Peanut Butter Shortbread recipe, made slightly gooier so as to retain the chocolate chips once mixed in. I was flipping once again through the Bon Appetit Cookbook and in comparing and contrasting the three PB cookie recipes they had decided to add a few tbs of dark corn syrup to the dough, and also cut the flour by 3/4 of a cup. This is also to offset the fact that I did, OF COURSE, use natural peanut butter, because mark my words, dear reader, Jiff or Skippy or anything similar will never darken my doorstep. 

Herewith:

INGREDIENTS

• 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 entire 16oz jar ALL NATURAL super chunky peanut butter
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 3-4 tbs dark corn syrup
• 12 oz chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate this time, but whatever you like) 

Beat peanut butter, butter, and vanilla extract until fluffy. Add the sugars and beat a bit longer. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together in a small bowl. Add half the flour, one of the eggs, the rest of the flour, then the last egg, beating well after each one. Add the corn syrup last, adding less or more depending on how wet you want your dough to be. 

Stir in the chocolate chips. 

Drop spoonfuls on baking sheets, they don't spread that much so you can get a lot on, and bake at 350 degrees for 14-15 minutes, until they're golden and crispy around the bottom. 

The above were the special "chocolate chip free" ones that I made for Mum, because, you guessed it, she just doesn't think cookies as nice as my peanut butter ones need chocolate chips but I'm sure Uncle Thor will like them I just don't see anything wrong with plain peanut butter but no it doesn't matter I suppose because it's not my birthday it's his ok fine.

These are the ones with huge hunks of Milk Chocolate in them. To each her own. 

 When I said "crispy around the bottom", I think it's the corn syrup talking, they actually get a crumbly shell of burnt sugar around the edges. It bubbles on the baking sheet, but once you let it cool it becomes this sort of delicate halo of sweetened peanut butter. I'm telling you. They look wicked. 

MOVING ON

WHITE CHOCOLATE SUNFLOWER SEED

I am a firm believer, when making any kind of "chip" cookie, of using the recipe on the back of the chip packet. I have yet to go wrong with it.

I realise now that I've typed that, that I may be doomed for life. Oops.

The chip packet in question here was a packet of Ghirardelli White Chocolate Chips (apparently a few months ago I decided to effectively buy stock in Ghirardelli chocolate chips? I have SO MANY PACKAGES OF THEM) and the recipe on the back was "White Chocolate Macadamia Nut." I decided to use Sunflower Seeds and hope for the best. a) ew, Macadamia, why b) I only had sunflower seeds, c) sunflower seeds, though complete anathema to me, are healthy. Uncle Thor is a tour guide in a national park. THE MAN LIKES A HEALTHY COOKIE.

I threw the packet away yesterday so here is a link to the recipe on food.com, if you need it. I lowered the white sugar by 1/2 a cup, because white chocolate is sweet enough to count for at least 1/2 a cup of sugar on its own, and 1 1/2 cups plus 1 cup of brown just seemed like A LOT of sugar. I am sure you could substitute agave or honey or something like that if you wanted to go more the "healthy sunflower seed cookie" route.

This is another one that, upon Mum's arrival home: oh those smell nice what kind are they oh white chocolate no don't be unfriendly I know you didn't make them for me I just don't like white chocolate I think it's too sweet no don't give them ALL to Thor I might want to try one what else is in them oh sunflower seeds I didn't know they were that small I thought sunflower seeds were bigger are you sure they're ok no I'm sure they're fine ok I'm leaving now.

Mum didn't taste these last night, so the LL's are going to be my first wall of defense. They will tell me if I need to scrap the recipe and send a drone to intercept the seagull postman on his way to Uncle Thor's house. I was a bit worried that they might be too sweet? But macadamia nuts and sunflower seeds both have the same Omega-3-heaviness, and at least sunflower has a crunchiness (and maybe even a bit of salt) that macadamia doesn't have, so in my head it worked out. 

I realise there is sometimes a huge disparity between "Beetle's Head" and "Reality." I hope this wasn't one of those times.

This is the box the LL's got this afternoon. Sharing the Birthday Love, is what I'm doing here, dear reader. Sharing the Birthday Love.

Because when you're named after the Norse God of Thunder and are simultaneously an accomplished yogi, a damn good bass in the Acadia Choir, the best mountain climbing buddy in existence, and the guy who always puts the seat warmers on for me even in July, your birthday should be celebrated as a THING.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY UNCLE THOR! 

Love,

Beetle