Here is a shortlist of what we didn't do this weekend: We did not make grapefruit marmalade or apricot hazelnut conserve -- at least not yet. We did not bake the famous cardamom-lime cake. Although we discussed it at length, in the end we decided not to make Fanny's Special Chocolate Kuchen, the groaningly-rich, dizzingly-perfumed yeasted cake from Lora Brody's Growing Up on the Chocolate Diet.
Now that I've got what we didn't do out of the way, I can sing the song of what we did: In my kitchen sits half a cake, a little over half a batch of cookies and half a focaccia, the other half of each sitting in Julie's kitchen, almost directly across the East River from mine. Julie, for those of who have not been introduced, is the fine, fine mind behind A Finger in Every Pie, a website brimming with entertaining tales and superb recipes, all told by a woman who exudes full-bodied pleasure from every single word. Julie and I have taken farmer's market crawls together; we have gone on wings-and-beer runs and giant-blue-drink runs with the lovely bunni, and I have even been to dinner at her house, where I was well-fed, watered and entertained by Julie and her fellow, a kind who we shall call G (because that's what Julie calls him). But Julie had never been to our neck of beautiful uptown Astoria, nor had we ever made good on our numerous, blue-drink-fueled plans to bake together. Obviously, this situation could not stand.
I knew it would be a good weekend for baking on Friday, when, as I sat boring away from within at LuthorCorp, a nice big box arrived from Amazon.com. Inside the box was this wonderful book, a present from my sweet friend limine, who sent this to me just because she saw it and thought that it would make a perfect gift. She has no idea how right she was on this score: not only is the story sweet and funny, not only are the illustrations a world unto themselves, not only is there a little crash course on European baking embedded in less than five pages, but holding this book in my hand brought back memories of my younger, pre-bakerina self, when I worked as the children's book buyer at the now-defunct Tower Books in Philadelphia. The pay was terrible, but in exchange for that terrible pay, I was allowed to work with children's books, everything from the sublime to the worthy to the ill-conceived to the just plain bad. I chose the books for the store, and every once in a while, a nice salesperson would comp me a book. As a result, I have a large bookshelf's worth of picture books and chapter books. There was much to hate about that job, but there was much to love, too, and remembering it all is a bittersweet exercise -- in the very best way, of course. Thank you, limine. I would try the Ghost-Pleasing Cake recipe in the back of the book if I weren't so scared of smearing butter and flour all over the page.
My instincts were right: It was a good day for baking. It was an even better day to preface the baking with a walk around the neighborhood. We have already hatched a plan for a food crawl, a non-baking day, so that we will have time to do the neighborhood right, to stop at the French patisserie and Indian groceries on Ditmars Blvd., at the half-dozen Greek supermarkets between 23rd Avenue and Broadway, at the Italian bakery/gelateria around the corner, at the bagel shop that was our very reason for moving to Astoria in the first place, and at the best little coffee bar a girl could ever hope to have on her block. As it was, though, we did not do too badly. We had time to walk around the block, and in that short time, in that short distance, we did very, very well. We bought shells and gnocchi from the fresh pasta store, where the smell of durum wheat and water settles on your clothes and embeds itself directly into your bloodstream; we bought fresh mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes and a baguette for lunch, as well as feta and dried figs for a presentation Julie is giving to her class, at my favorite Italian deli, one of my two shopping linchpins in the neighborhood; we bought halvah and baklava and tahini bread and Russian salad and creme fraiche from the other linchpin, a deli run by a Turkish couple who will be retiring as soon as they can find a buyer (I have a rant about how unappreciated this wonderful store is in this neighborhood, but I will save it for another time); at the Greek store we bought an enormous loaf of tsoureki, a sweet bread enriched with eggs and butter and almonds, and perfumed with mastic (a sweet resin) and mahlepi (a spice made of dried, ground sour cherry pits) and split it in half; at the liquor store we stopped to buy a bottle of wine. I am only a little ashamed to admit that my excessive impulses got the best of me, and I ended up putting down the rough equivalent of seven days' worth of lunch money for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. It was an impulsive and excessive gesture, yes, but my feeling is that except for "functional" baking, like sandwich bread for your toast and lunches, or cornbread to go with your beans, baking is in itself an excessive gesture, and if you're going to follow that impulse, you should *really* follow that impulse. 
Fortified by our excellent sandwiches and gilded by our champagne, the baking portion of the day was just a dream on wheels. The loaf of bread was the ubiquitous olive oil and white wine focaccia, the same one I made during Blogathon last August. I will confess to a moment of agita about this focaccia, because the dough didn't really rise much during fermentation. I had visions of an unrisen slab, not thick enough to be bread, not thin enough to be crackers, just a chewy, clay-like nightmare, but no, it was not a dead dough, just a sluggish one. Once I got it into the sheet pan, it behaved as it usually does, and when I put in the oven, the yeast did its frenetic-burst-of-activity-before-dying dance. I am still thanking the fates that we got it in and out of the oven, and cooled down, quickly enough for Julie to be able to take half of it home. The cake portion of the day was Julie's; apparently the Ginger-Glazed Chocolate Cake has a lingering siren call, and the one she made was glorious. Had I not panicked at the thought of her having to leave before the cake was finished, and had I not glazed the cake while it was still hot, it would have been French-patisserie-worthy. As it was, the finished cake looked like a kind of sublime mud pie, which, to my eye at least, was even more beautiful. It was hard to restrain myself from picking at our half of the cake all night long.
Both the focaccia and the chocolate cake are old friends, but the new friend we made yesterday was such a revelation that I really can't stop myself. Until recently, I had never considered olives as an integral part of dessert,and if you had tried to tell me that they could be successfully incorporated into a sweet dough, I would have made some smart comment about taking two good things and making them worse. I also would have revealed myself as a blinkered philistine. It was the brilliant and singular Melissa at Traveler's Lunchbox who introduced me to scourtins, a sweet, shortbread-style cookie enriched with olive oil and punctuated by a generous amount of cured black olives. I had read her recipe, thought to myself that I had to try them as soon as humanly possible, and then forgot about them in the maelstrom of Christmas baking. Then the also-brilliant-and-equally-singular Lindy mentioned them recently, and sent them roaring back to the forefront of memory. She mentioned that they might be a bit odd at first bite, but once you get used to the interplay of sweet buttery dough and salty fruity olive, it is hard to stop eating them. Myself, I was hooked from the first taste of the unbaked batter. The instant that they were out of the oven, cut into squares and decanted onto a cooling rack, I was already planning the next batch. As soon as I stop typing, I will probably mix that next batch up. The only thing that keeps these cookies from being perfect is that I ran my hands under water to help press the sticky dough into the pan, and I think that the water from my hands may have inhibited the browning of these cookies. I'm betting that if I rub a little olive oil on my hands, that problem will solve itself nicely.
By the end of the day, it was only left to us to pack up all of the food, collapse in front of the telly with Lloyd and with our glasses of champagne, and wait for G's phone call announcing that he had found our neighborhood without going insane (a formidable feat if you've ever driven in Queens). Julie and I lugged the bags to the car, she gave me a lovely parting gift of a bottle of Jersey-cow heavy cream from Vermont and two Cara Cara navel oranges from Fairway, she and G drove back to Manhattan, and I trooped home, stopping only to pick up some Thai food, contemplating a nice hot bubble bath and one of those oranges. I could not have had a more perfect day if I had planned it. Julie, I have not told you lately that you rock, but you do, you really do.
Of course, I could not leave well enough alone. I started the kuchen dough this morning. If you're going to follow that impulse, you should *really* follow that impulse.