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Okay, in fairness, we did not actually bring the cake back from Connecticut with us.  It was one of the great ironies of the trip that the UConn campus is a short driving distance from at least half a dozen farmstands, all promising lush, height-of-season summery produce, but because Lloyd and I did not rent a car on this trip, opting instead to travel on the cheap by bus and then stay in a nice hotel on campus, we could not actually buy any of this stuff, and thus had to wait until we were back in New York to buy fresh-off-the-farm produce.  (Confidential to McBeth:  Yeah, honey, I know it’s cracked.) I’d had big plans for wandering around the market on Saturday, as a gentle re-entry back into All Noise, All the Time after five days of quiet work in an archive, but by the time I made it to the market (having had to detour to the yarn store for a cable needle to replace the one I’d lost on the bus), the teeming masses were so teeming that I decided to stay at the south end of the market, pick up only what I could get without having to fight a crowd for it, and get the hell out of there.  Fortunately, I was at the same end of the market as the local apricot people.

Local apricots are such a tricky proposition for me.  Because they are rare, luscious, short-seasoned jewels, I always feel a little wasteful when I do anything except eat them out of hand.  Unfortunately, there are so many other things you can do with them, and for the most part, those things are improved a hundredfold if you use local apricots, as opposed to the ones from two thousand miles away.  Even though my favorite apricot jam is made with dried California apricots, I’m always a little keen to see what using the fresh ones would do.  But wait!, cries my subconscious.  What about ice cream, or that gorgeous apricot curd that Julie makes?  And didn’t you say you wanted to learn how to make your own apricot lekvar, now that Paprikas Weiss is gone and you can only find prune lekvar at Economy Candy?  Make with the lekvar, already!

Well, maybe if there are any apricots next week, I’ll make with the lekvar, but by Sunday morning, I knew what I needed to coax me back into workaday life.  I needed Honey-Poached Apricot Cornmeal Crunch Cake, a dazzler of a cake from a dazzler of a book, In the Sweet Kitchen by Regan Daley.  Like cherry pie, this cake is best made when the fruit is in season, and like cherry pie, it is worth the wait during the five-sixths of the year.  Of course I know that I’m not going to get far without at least promising to share the recipe—I know you, dear friends —but tonight is the night that LSAT study kicks into full gear, so I’ll have to wait until I can crack my knuckles and really share.  In the meantime, I can describe it thus:  you split your apricots in half, remove the pits, put them in a pot with some water, sugar, a vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick and the most flavorful honey you can find (although I’d stay away from buckwheat or chestnut), poach them all together until the fruit almost, but not quite, collapses.  From there, you strain out the fruit, return the poaching liquid to the heat and boil until it becomes a moderately thick syrup.  While those are cooling, you prepare a streusel with cornmeal, white flour, brown sugar, salt, baking powder and cinnamon, blending it all together as you might for pie crust.  You get a nice big 10” springform pan, butter it and line it with parchment, tamp down half the streusel mix into a layer, spread the apricots over the bottom layer, crumble the rest of the streusel over the top, pour a little syrup over it, and bake until your house smells like warm, sugary toast.  When you’re ready to eat it, pour a little more syrup over the top of the cake.  Take a bite, make the little “happy to be eating this” dance with your fork, and take another.

Lest you think I brought nothing back with me but halfassed travelogues and maddeningly vague instructions on how to make a cake whose season is wrapping up rapidly, I promise you, dear friends, that I brought much more—namely, 36 pages of notes on the state of the U.S. poultry industry from 1920 to 1923.  I know you’re looking forward to that.  Okay, I’ll play nicely.  For those of you who love bucolic splendor, I brought home this picture of a crabapple tree in front of a graduate dorm, a tree that taunted me every day with apples I did not have the nerve to pick:

For the knitterinae, I have a nice shot of Blankie in Progress, on which I worked every night in the hotel after being reduced to a gibbering idiot by farm reports:

I even managed to find myself some food for thought in the student union:

These UConn kids, they take their student activities seriously.  Daunting, man.

Edit: Longtime readers, who may remember the merrily lunatic commentary of my pal orionoir—heck, you might even have been fans of his late and much-missed blog—to you, and to all, I am happy to report that he is still with us, living the charmed life of a flickr celebrity, still vigorously alive nearly three years after being told by an oncologist he’d be lucky to live much longer than 12 months.  Lloyd and I were lucky enough to go to coffee on Tuesday with Mr. O and his daughters, the women formerly known as e1 and e2.  They are smart, funny, wondrous girls.