fool's spring
the most beautiful cake, and clearing out the produce drawer
It seems we have reached the ‘false spring’ stage of Vancouver weather. We have a few nice days in a row combined with sunrises before 8am and sunsets after 5pm, and we all get very excited, and then get our feelings hurt a week later when the chilly, grey rain returns. But I won’t complain too much, because unlike my friends in, say, Ottawa, I have at least been able to see the ground once or twice in the past month.
Also this week my brain has been complete mush for creativity and human interaction— every work email takes me 25 minutes to deal with— but I’ve been craving organizational problem-solving and repetitive tasks, so the other aspects of my days are going pretty well. Maybe I’m just feeling the need to see the physical result of doing something, which explains why it feels satisfying to have spent a day building and stocking shelving, and less so to clear my inbox. With cooking, you’re always literally harvesting the fruits of your labour, so no matter what you make, you can see it and feel a little bit proud when it hits the plate. With that, here are my culinary organizational accomplishments for this week.
I cancelled my usual Sunday grocery order in order to play catch-up with my produce drawer and some of the things in the freezer, so we ate quite a few tossed-together, recipe-less dinners. Citrus beet salad with horseradish & lemon-marinated tempeh; pinto bean, kale, & chicken enchiladas with salsa verde from the freezer; curried butternut squash soup served with pickled cabbage, flatbread, and hummus made in the instant pot.
I rarely made hummus until recently, because it never turned out as tasty or as smooth as what you’d get in restaurants or even most grocery store brands, and now I know the secret is peeled chickpeas. But as a wise woman once said, ain’t nobody got time for that! You can get a pretty similar result by double-cooking the chickpeas, as detailed in Half-Baked Harvest: Super Simple. The chickpeas you get in a can are fully cooked, but generally to a point where they still hold their shape, so even after blending the hummus you sometimes still get a bit of a granular quality, or pieces of the skins that just don’t blend. By cooking the already-cooked chickpeas until they’re falling apart (10 minutes in the instant pot, 20-30 in a pot on the stove) they blend into the smooth and delicious hummus of your dreams, which is just perfect with some olive oil, smoked paprika, and salt flakes on top.
I suggested this ciambellone recipe to my mom last month for my brother’s birthday, because he doesn’t much care for chocolate and doesn’t like desserts that are too sweet, and because everyone (as far as I know) loves lemon in baked goods. She ended up making a coconut cake instead, but I couldn’t get the recipe out of my mind. So this past Sunday, after learning the sad news of the closure of Cartems’ Kitsilano and a subsequent 20-minute chat with my sisters about baked goods, I set about making it. I was also thrilled to be using the beautiful Nordicware bundt pan I got for Christmas for the first time.
Although the Italian name and the stunning beauty of this cake make it seem fancy, it’s an easy prep, a one-bowl cake with no need for a stand mixer. And if you don’t want to shell out for mascarpone, you could use regular cream cheese or sour cream for a similar result. I’m also relatively sure an experienced baker could concoct a vegan version since this is already an oil cake— though I’m personally not sure what a good sub for four eggs would be. And don’t let the measurements scare you: yes, two cups is a lot of sugar, and yes, two and a half teaspoons is a lot of salt, but this is a big cake, and you only need to taste the batter to see that it’s perfectly balanced.
The 40-minute baking time seemed low for such a large cake, and maybe it would work for a wider tube pan, or if you have an oven that runs hot. In this deep bundt, I found it took closer to 60 minutes— I kept checking every five minutes and it took a little while before it stopped being jiggly on top. And since it needs to come out of the pan for glazing while it’s still hot, best to not risk it being underdone and coming apart! Mine came out of the pan instantly, which was a nice change from my old bundt pan where I was always struggling to release it, and usually had a chunk break off no matter how much greasing I did before baking. The cake looked very dark on the outside, but it is intended to have a thick crust similar to a pound cake, and so the inside remains moist and dense. I absolutely loved this cake: creamy, citrusy interior with a salty undertone, a fine crumb, and a wonderful contrast from the crispy glazed exterior. It’s only with difficulty that I’ve avoided eating it for breakfast as well as after lunch or dinner.
We made ravioli again, and I’m happy to say the process went much more smoothly and quickly, and none of them burst open during the boiling process (there were some structural failures in our first attempt). I used the Spread‘Em vegan cheese as filling again, this time with roasted butternut squash. For a sauce, I just fried some garlic and chili flakes in butter and added a squeeze of lemon juice, and tossed everything with some fresh parsley and parmesan. The end result was a little on the sweet side, and I think either something with a slightly bitter element like pine nuts, or something with a pungent flavour like lemon zest, would have balanced it out. Still, that didn’t stop us from filling our bowls with more stuffed pasta than we could reasonably eat.
Because cabbages are the everlasting gobstopper of produce, and because nobody wanted more coleslaw or borscht, I made an experimental pasta with roasted red cabbage. I was inspired by the success of roasted shredding cabbage in the sheet pan cauliflower pancetta dish last month, and I looked to more traditional savoy cabbage and sausage combos for flavour ideas. The roasted cabbage came out appealingly caramelized, with some pieces crisp and others tender. I sautéed some onion, garlic, and Gusta vegan Italian sausage in the pan, deglazed with wine, and finished it with some fresh basil, pecorino, and pasta water. I didn’t have any short noodles, so I used spaghetti, but I think rotini or fusilli would have been even better. Overall though I’m happy it turned out so well, because now I have something else to turn to when I have too much cabbage (ie. every time I buy a cabbage).
Media:
As it’s Purim, I thought I would share this delightful post from This Needs Hot Sauce, featuring the logistics and results of a hamantaschen bake-off. The author of this substack, Abigail Koffler, brought Bon Appetit under fire (this just seems to keep happening to them!) the previous week for a published recipe by a non-Jewish author entitled “How to Make Hamantaschen Actually Good”, which was understandably met with outrage from the Jewish community on Twitter. They’ve since changed the name of the article, but there’s no undoing the mindset that brought it about: that if foods from other cultures are not to your liking as a white westerner, they are inherently in need of change. Whether you agree or not that hamantaschen are good, hopefully you can agree that
“I still want it to be treated with respect by one of the largest food brands, especially one that has such prominence in search results.”
Back to the bake-off: the baker, Adina Goldstein, tested doughs from 5 different recipe sources with 4 different fillings, and distributed them amongst the community to do a blind taste test. As a longtime vegan cookoff participant and someone who loves a good spreadsheet, this whole setup is really appealing to me, and seems like a lovely way to share holiday food during a pandemic. I’ve never made hamantaschen before, but it does look like a very fun thing to make, so I suspect I’ll be trying it out in the near future.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. Here is a better question of ethics than the original trolley problem, in my opinion.