chocolate beet cake
When I discovered beets in my CSA basket this week I figured I had two choices: toss them directly onto the compost heap or bake them into a cake.
I don’t like cake and I don’t like beets, so I’m not sure what made me think I would like a cake made out of beets. Possibly it was the assurance that “even confirmed beet-bashers will love this cake” in the introduction to the recipe or the fact that my foodie friend Katie mentioned that she’d tried it and liked it, but I suspect it was the chocolate. Of all the ingredients on this earth, chocolate seems the most likely candidate for transforming beets from a mouthful of musty dirt into something that people might actually want to eat.
lemon lavender cookies
Spring, that elusive little leafy green sprite, is taking her sweet time this year. Oh sure, I suppose you’re already floating through your days in a pollen-induced euphoria, adrift in a sea of daffodils and cherry blossoms and baby bunnies going hop hop hop, but here in northern Michigan it’s still colder (as my Geometry teacher liked to say) than a witch’s tit in a brass bra. I always imagined that must be pretty damn cold — cold enough, at least, to warrant such an expression — and it seems an appropriate way to describe the sort of stubborn, lingering cold that delivers snow in April. When the baby bunnies are supposed to be hop-hop-hopping.
I haven’t noticed any bunnies, but each time I’ve gone to the window to cuss at the snow I’ve been silenced both by its unwillingness to stick and by the cheerful sight of robins flitting from branch to branch and pecking optimistically at the newly thawed ground. On a walk yesterday I discovered tender little shoots of green poking their way up insistently through that same ground, and communion with the trees revealed limbs teeming with softly swelling buds. Spring is quietly transforming brown to green, sneaking up on us like a delightful surprise.
chocolate bourbon pecan torte
I have a tendency to cling to summer, soaking up late afternoon sun on the beach, scowling at reddening leaves, and refusing to wear shoes despite my cold toes. Eventually though, I give in, and one sure sign of this acceptance of fall has traditionally been the replacement of my evening gin & tonic with a bourbon & ginger. While I’m nowhere near ready to make the annual gin to bourbon transition, the other night I did have a dream about bourbon.
More specifically, I dreamt of a dessert my friend Jess and I once shared — a chocolaty, bourbony dessert that, as I recall, was ridiculously good. So good that we talked about it for weeks afterward and actually considered holding happy hour at a restaurant with no happy hour specials simply so that we might order dessert to go. So good that one slice shared two years ago now sends visions of chocolate and bourbon dancing in my head. So good that since awakening from said visions, I’ve been able to think of little else. And so good that despite there being a nearly-full bottle of gin in the freezer and a solid month of gin-drinking weather to go, I broke down and bought a bottle of bourbon.
Just for the chocolate though. Well, and the pecans. But not for me. It is, after all, still summer. Just so we’re clear.
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When Harry Met Salad 