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(Originally published on Scrineblog.  Reprinted by kind permission of Keith, the architect of the PTMYB template and all-around swell guy.)

In the great “Bay Area v. Boston” geographic smackdown, I do not intend to fight fair.—‘mouse

So noted, sir…

1.  Tuition, room/board, expenses.

Bay Area and Beantown charge approximately the same tuition and on-campus room/board.  Living expenses are also approximately the same.  Draw.

2.  Financial aid.

Beantown has awarded me a scholarship that will cover approximately 22% of my tuition costs over three years.  Bay Area has sent me paperwork to apply for a scholarship that will cover about 15% of my tuition costs over three years—assuming that I am one of the lucky scholarship recipients in the first place. Advantage:  Beantown.

3.  Job opportunities.

Bay Area does not allow first-year students to work.  [Edit: ‘mouse, who is a Bay Area alum, has questioned this.  I am reinvestigating.  It’s possible that first-year students are merely discouraged from working, in accordance with the American Bar Association recommendations.] However, Bay Area’s campus is close to the office of an attorney who has suggested that there might be work available for me in the area.  Beantown has a co-op program embedded in its curriculum:  students attend classes for 11 weeks, then work for the co-op for 11 weeks.  Depending on where the co-op places the student, pay ranges from fairly low (for public service work such as with the public defender’s or district attorney’s offices) to almost livable (for big corporate Satan-on-a-retainer firms).  Draw.

4.  Accessibility to off-campus amenities.

Bay Area has a public transit system, but so far it is an unknown quantity; the school literature says only that it’s *possible* to attend school for three years without requiring a car.  Beantown has the T.  Draw, with possible advantage to Beantown.

5.  Weather.

Okay, on this there’s no contest.  Advantage:  Bay Area.

6.  Food.

Both Bay Area and Beantown have abundance of swell places to eat.  Grocery situation uncertain without further study.  Rumors abound of swell roadside produce stands in Bay Area.  Draw, with possible advantage to Bay Area.

7.  Exercise.

Bay Area and Beantown both have huge, sexalicious fitness centers and swimming pools, all free for enrolled students.  Draw.

8.  Curricula, clinics, special programs.

This is where the choice can really make a body’s head hurt.  Bay Area has a community law center, an institute for redress and recovery for the victims of torture and other human rights abuses, the Northern California Innocence Project and several clinics and programs on sustainability.  Beantown has clinical courses on criminal advocacy, domestic violence and public health; a program on civil rights and restorative justice, and a project that sends students into Beantown-area public schools to teach constitutional literacy to high school students.  I am only scratching the surface of what both schools offer.  Draw, dammit, a complete and utter draw.

9.  Going home.

Going to Beantown will allow me to come home and see Lloyd at least once or twice a month.  Coming home from Bay Area will be considerably more expensive and difficult.  On the other hand, one could argue that being 3,300 miles away from home will force me to focus on my coursework, with no distraction.  Advantage:  Beantown, but since I have no idea whether I’ll be too embedded in first-year boot camp to enjoy any time at home, this might be a draw, too.

10.  Future practice, a/k/a Where do you want to be when you grow up?

I have been advised that the place where you pursue your education generally determines where you build your career (or did I get that backwards?) If I go to Beantown, the odds are good that I will work in Beantown or points nearby—or possibly as far south as Washington.  If I go to Bay Area, it would not be a stretch to consider one day living and working in San Francisco.  Draw, draw, draw.

But wait, there’s a wild card! I have yet to hear from two schools in New York City, one in Pittsburgh and one in Boulder.  If any one of those schools offers me a superior financial aid package, all of the previous considerations are hereby rendered null and void.

Edit: Yes, there are open-house days for admitted students at both schools.  Yes, I plan on attending both, which should either cement a decision or just make the whole damn decision that much more difficult to make.

It was about this time last year that I was a woman of few words.  Once again I am a woman of few words, albeit for much different, much better reasons.

I had thought that the adventure started once I finished my applications and sent off my fees.  That only goes to show what I know.  Now the adventure starts, namely, how in the world am I going to pay for this?  (There are options, of course, but I dare not disclose them for fear of hexing them.  There are also four other schools from which to hear; out of the same fear of hexing, I am being cagey about them.)

Of course, I have the rest of the spring and summer to figure out how I’m going to pay for this.  Today I can read and reread these letters, and be thankful that the word “regret” does not occur in either of them.  I can’t think of a better way to spend the day than that.

On Friday it was a loaf of bread—or, rather, eight loaves of bread—and an opportunity to spend the day doing something I loved.  Today it is a moral dilemma, and possibly an exercise in decadence.  Of course, it was a moral dilemma, and possibly an exercise in decadence, long before this weekend.  It was only this weekend that my conscience finally caught up to reality.  I realize fully that my conscience is a little slow on the uptake.

The plan had been simple:  Make a batch of pain brié as I’d been taught to make it in culinary school.  Tell an amusing story about how, back in school, I had beaten that damn dough for half an hour and it had never, ever smoothed out.  Discover that the first batch I’d made in ten years was spoiled by an overproofed sponge and a surfeit of flour (I had forgotten that my instructors who had written our bread curriculum had built 10% additional flour into the base recipes, and I had forgotten to leave it out).  Make another batch, then decide to make a control batch with a lower-protein flour, to see if I could achieve a smoother dough.  Spend a day in the kitchen, rediscovering how malty and clean is the scent of flour and water being mixed together; how satisfying is the whole shaping process, turning par-shaped loaves into bâtards, feeling air bubbles pop under gentle pressure, how thrilling it is to draw a razor blade against the top of an oven-bound loaf and get it right on the first whoosh.  Bake the breads.  Pull them out of the oven.  Love the way the hot crust crackles in the cool air.  Note ruefully that the bottoms are burned thanks to one of the oven racks being placed too closely to the bottom of the oven.  Let it cool.  Let it rest.  Taste it.  Discover, sadly, that the loaves made with bread flour taste like nothing, while the loaves made with all-purpose flour taste only marginally better than nothing.  They’re definitely not reflective of the work I put into them.  Still, there’s nothing shabby about having a freezer full of sandwich-suitable bread, and a story to tell about it.  Vow to try again with an overnight-risen dough.  Tell the story, all of it.

Now, I realize I’m talking about all of this as if it has occurred in a vacuum.  It has not.  Long before I decided to embark on this little baking adventure, the price of flour was increasing, and I knew this.  I confess now—and I’m embarrassed to confess this—that I didn’t pay too much attention to root causes.  Ever since oil prices began to climb, I took it for granted that eventually these increases would result in higher prices for food.  When the price of milk began to climb, I knew that it was due to a combination of increased fuel costs and increased feed costs:  as more corn is being used to produce ethanol, less of it is available for animal feed.  I started seeing a news story here, an email from my flour company of choice there, an occasional news report in between:  the price of flour is going up.  I didn’t pay too much attention.  I would be still be buying all the flour I needed; I’d just be paying more for it.  It’s all about the fuel.  Nothing to see here.

It’s not all about the fuel.  Thanks to this article in Sunday’s New York Times, I know just how wrong I was.  Fuel pricing is a factor, of course.  So is the diversion of land from wheat crops to corn crops to feed the growing market for biofuels.  So is the weak dollar.  So is the drought in Australia, which has proven devastating for Australian wheat crops, and which has sent the buyers of Australian wheat to look to the U.S. for exports.  So is the growing global demand for wheat-based foods like bread and noodles, even—especially—in countries where they have not historically been staples.  All of these factors have made wheat a dear commodity, growing dearer by the day, and have plunged the U.S. grain reserve to its lowest level since 1947.

I went to bed on Sunday, contemplating all of this.  On Monday morning, I walked past the bakery around the corner on my way to the laundromat and found this article, laminated, hanging in the front window.  It was then that I realized just how dire the situation has become.  We now have 30-year-old and 50-year-old bakeries in the city, pleading with their customers to remain patient, and to understand that nobody is getting rich off that extra 40 cents being charged for bread.  We have decades-old businesses, well established in the community, facing closure because they can’t continue to absorb these increases indefinitely, and there does not seem to be any end in sight.

Dear friends, I am confounded.  I do not know whether I am part of the problem or part of the solution.  Is it better to keep buying flour, to continue patronizing a company whose product I really like, to help keep them afloat through the rough waters of a grain shortage?  Or should I realize that I am part of that insistent global demand for wheat and wheat products, and modify my flour purchases accordingly?  Do home bakers use enough flour to even register as a blip on the radar of world commodity markets?  Is this all, in fact, an exercise in decadence?

Good morning.  Happy Friday.

Lest you think I have finally lost all sense of time now that I don’t sit in a cubicle anymore, I promise that I know it’s Friday morning, and not Sunday afternoon.  I’d like to say there’s some bright and clever story behind the Sunday afternoon cake love series, but the truth is pretty prosaic.  I’d had the idea last Sunday to write a big ol’post about cake, and include three recipes, one for the Roland Mesnier applesauce cake, one for the pistachio-nougat torte I made for Julie’s birthday party the previous week, and one for the famous Elizabeth David flourless chocolate cake that inspired so much conversation around here.  Alas, I’d had this brilliant idea at about the same time I’d had the idea to start experimenting with the pain brié that I hadn’t made since culinary school.  Two hours later, I had only got as far as the applesauce cake; the pain brié starter was overfermented, the resulting dough was overfloured and sharp-smelling, and I was filled with the vague sense of guilty self-loathing that always comes with not planning well.  (Confidential to e:  Yes, I seem to remember promising something about no more self-loathing.  Hey, these things take time.  You can’t just jump into ‘em.) That was the moment where I decided that Sunday afternoon cake love would make a super three-part series.

I know I’m breaking at least one heart by not posting the pistachio nougat torte recipe this morning, but in my infinite genius, I forgot to take a picture of the one I’d made for Julie’s party.  (In my defense, I had also made a pair of Trianons for the same party; by the time I finished the finishing on the torte, I was a little addled, to say nothing of sticky and cream-covered.  This was not nearly as attractive as it sounds.  Give it up, already, you perverts.) Fortunately, it’s easy to put together and will keep in the freezer (although the original recipe doesn’t specifically recommend this).  The only thing keeping me from making it right now is an insufficient supply of pistachios, but a quick trip to the Greek supermarket around the corner will fix that sharpish.  In the meantime, I do have the fixings for the Elizabeth David cake.  I made the one in the photograph on Tuesday afternoon.  Lloyd and I finally killed it last night.  It took everything in me not to make one for breakfast, but even I have my limits. 

Elizabeth David’s Gâteau au chocolat et aux amandes (from French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David; also found in More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin)
makes one 8” cake

Note: As is the standard operating procedure around here, the recipe is Mrs. David’s, but her instructions are rewritten in my own words.  I have also changed the methodology a bit, most ly by adding some of the sugar to the egg whites during the beating process.

4 ounces (115g) bittersweet chocolate (I used Green & Black Dark, which contains 85% cocoa solids; this gives a slightly bitter, very intense chocolate flavor.  If you’re not wild about bitterness in a chocolate cake, you can use a less-dark chocolate, although I think semisweet makes this cake a little too sweet.  Unsweetened chocolate is, to my taste, much too bitter for this cake.)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon espresso or other strong coffee (I used 1/4 teaspoon of espresso powder from King Arthur Flour dissolved in a tablespoon of water—this is strong stuff.  If you have access to a decent instant espresso, like Medaglia D’Oro or Cafe Bustelo, you can up the ratio of coffee to water a bit.)

1 tablespoon brandy

3 ounces (85g or 6 tablespoons) unsalted butter

3.75 ounces (106g or 1/2 cup) granulated sugar (After you have weighed/measured the sugar, measure out one tablespoon.  This will be added to the egg whites; the rest will be added to the chocolate mixture.)

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt (not in the original recipe, but I think it boosts the flavor nicely)

2 5/8 ounces (75g or 1/2 cup) ground almonds

3 large eggs, separated

Set a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 300F/135C/Gas Mark 2.  Butter an 8-inch springform or loose-bottomed cake pan (which is what I used).

Melt the chocolate, vanilla, coffee and brandy together in a double boiler.  If you have a heavy saucepan, you can heat it right in the pan as long as you keep the heat low.  Stir everything together gently.  The liquids may cause the chocolate to seize up a bit.  This is nothing to worry about; it will all smooth out once you blend everything together.  Add the butter, sugar, salt and ground almonds.  Stir together until the butter is melted.  Remove the pan from the heat.

In a medium bowl, beat the egg yolks until they are lightened in color ("lemon-colored," in Laurie Colwin’s words).  It’s fine to do this by hand with a small whisk.  Add the beaten yolks to the chocolate mixture.

Using either a hand mixer or a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites.  Begin by beating them slowly while simultaneously adding, slowly, the tablespoon of sugar you held back from the rest.  Once the sugar has been added, turn the motor to high and beat the egg whites until they just hold stiff peaks.  Take a spoonful of the egg whites and stir them into the chocolate mixture to lighten it a bit.  Fold in the rest of the egg whites gently.

Turn the batter into the prepared pan.  Bake the cake for 45 minutes.  When it is done, it will be slightly risen (but will sink back down upon cooling) and dry to the touch, but a cake tester will not emerge cleanly.  Cool on a rack; remove the side of the pan once the cake is thoroughly cooled.

Before anyone becomes too excited, or feels inclined to pat me on the back for baking this cake (or any of the cakes that will follow in this series) on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I feel bound to point out that I’m not actually baking this cake right now.  This is not to say that I’m not baking at all right now, because I am.  Inspired by Bunni‘s New Year’s resolution to cook or bake something new every week, I have decided to do something similar...only different. This year marks 10 years since I quit my day job to attend culinary school.  I would be fibbing if I said that life post-culinary school is what I had hoped and worked for, but I don’t regret having tried, not for one minute.  Without indulging in too much rose-colored-glassvision, I will say that I worked harder in pastry school, in restaurants and in bakeries than I have ever worked anywhere.  I made clumsy, silly mistakes, I was yelled at on a near-daily basis and I cried more than any 30-year-old woman should ever cry, for any reason, but even on top of all of that, I had a blast.  Should I ever have the opportunity to do it again, I shall jump on it in a heartbeat—right after I make arrangements to hit the pool and a weight room with a trainer to whup my ass into fighting shape.  It was always a point of pride with me that I could lift a 50-pound sack of flour without throwing out my back.  I’d like to be able to continue doing that.

Once again, to nobody’s surprise or shock, I digress.  While cataloguing some of my little-used cookbooks before packing them for storage, I found the binders that served as my textbooks in culinary school.  Paging through them brought it all back to me:  walking to school from the 86th Street IRT stop during a surrealistically hot summer; walking through the door of the pastry kitchen and feeling the temperature drop 40 degrees; hours and hours of chopping chocolate and boiling sugar and whapping pounds of butter around in Hobart mixers; studying our finished desserts and breads as we learned to evaluate them critically; tasting, tasting, tasting; packing everything up and either taking it home or sharing it with the school staff and the mechanics at the garage next door; and scrubbing down every surface in the kitchen with sanitizing solution (1 tablespoon chlorine bleach to 1 gallon water), longing to be done with the day’s work as the chlorine smell settled on our hair and skin.  I lived, ate and breathed all this stuff, spent all of my waking life consumed by poached pears and nougatine and three different formulae for ganache—and then I graduated into a soft job market, learned that the company for which Lloyd worked was on the verge of collapse, knew that there was no way I could support us both on a pastry monkey’s salary, and returned, cap in hand, to packaging.  Even as I shifted my focus away from pastry and toward bread, even as I researched and drafted and redrafted a business plan, I never opened my school textbooks again—until yesterday, that is.

In short, I’m in a mood not only to revisit, but also to share, which is why I have a sponge for pain brié working in the kitchen even as we speak.  Pain brié is a rustic French bread, made from a relatively stiff dough that is not only kneaded but beaten with a heavy rolling pin for 10 minutes to develop the gluten.  I’m sorry to say that my only memory of this bread is that the dough refused to smooth out when my team made it.  I ended up beating it so vigorously that I was nearly jumping up and down with the effort.  (A chorus or two of “Unbelievable” by EMF would have been not only appropriate, but also welcome.) I’m keen to try it again, to see not only how the recipe works but also if any of the additional baking trucs I’ve learned over the past decade can help make the bread even better.  And so I shall.

Since I have no bread to share just yet, I can at least share the cakes that have made their way through the PTMYB kitchens over the past few weeks, like this beauty right here:

Warm Applesauce Cake with Cranberry Syrup (from Roland Mesnier’s Basic to Beautiful Cakes by Roland Mesnier and Lauren Chattman, Simon & Schuster, 2007
makes 1 10-inch tube cake, serves 12

Those of you who know how tetchy I am about things like chemicals and box mixes and fake foods may be surprised to see me countenancing a recipe that calls for maraschino cherries, a frankly-weird food that I have not enjoyed since I was eight years old, when the bartender at the restaurant where my folks and I used to go for pizza would throw them into my Coke.  Normally when I find something like this in a recipe, I opt right away to substitute something more to my liking, like bottled sour cherries marinated in brandy, or dried cherries plumped in a little boiling water or tea.  This time, though, I decided to trust Chef Mesnier’s judgment and make the cake as he directed it, and I had to admit that not only did the maraschino cherries not ruin the cake, they added an interesting fillip to a moist, spicy, fragrant cake.  I might try it again with the aforementioned brandied cherries, just to see how they work, but I wouldn’t think twice about buying another bottle of maraschino cherries for this cake.  Only for this cake, though.

For the light syrup (to be used later in the cranberry syrup:

4 cups water
2 cups granulated sugar

Combine water and sugar in a medium saucepan, place over heat, stir to dissolve the sugar and heat to boiling.  Let cool to room temperature.  You will have more syrup than you need for this cake.  Leftover syrup can be sealed and stored at room temperature for up to two weeks; it’s great for poaching fruit or for adding to tea instead of regular granulated sugar.

For the cake:

1 cup plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour*
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
2 large eggs
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup canned crushed pineapple, drained
1 10-ounce jar whole maraschino cherries, drained, patted dry and stemmed

*Normally when I try a recipe for the first time, I measure and weigh the ingredients, and make a note of the weight for future reference.  This time, though, I let laziness get the better of me.  Very often, when recipes are converted from weight to volume measurements, you will see odd measurements (x cups plus or minus x teaspoons or tablespoons).  This happens particularly with recipes written by French chefs, who write their formulae to metric weights.  One of these days I’ll get my act together and plug the weight measurements in.

Set a rack to the center of the oven and preheat to 375F/170C/Gas Mark 5.  Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan.

Sift the first five ingredients together into a medium bowl.

Using either a hand mixer or a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth, light and fluffy.  Beat in one of the eggs and half the applesauce.  Stir in half the dry ingredient mixture.  Beat in the remaining egg and applesauce, add the rest of the dry ingredients and stir gently but thoroughly to combine.  Stir in the raisins, pecans and pineapple.

Pour the batter into the tube pan and smooth the top.  Arrange the cherries on the surface of the cake and press them in gently, but do not embed them (the cake will rise around them, and they will sink below the surface).  Bake 35 to 40 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.  Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack.  Do not remove the cake from the pan.

For the cranberry syrup:

1 12-ounce bag fresh or frozen cranberries
4 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups + 2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 cups Light Syrup

Combine the cranberries, 4 cups of the water and the sugar in a medium saucepan over high heat.  Bring to a boil, turn the heat down to medium high and cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the berries are very soft and nearly all popped.

Strain the syrup into a large bowl.  Press on the solids with a spoon, forcing as much of the strained solids into the syrup as possible.  Add the remaining 1/2 cup water to the solids in the strainer and keep pressing on them.  When as much of the pulp that can go through the strainer has done so, return the solids remaining in the bottom of the strainer to the syrup.  (As you may have noted, the objective is not to produce a clear or smooth syrup, but a deeply-flavored one.  Chef Mesnier is a big fan of not wasting flavorful pulp.) Stir in the lemon juice and the light syrup.

Preheat the oven to 150F/60C/Gas Mark 1/2.

Place the cake pan (with the cake still inside it, natch) on a rimmed baking sheet.  Pour about 1/2 cup of the hot cranberry syrup over the cake and let it sink in.  (The effect you’re going for is akin to watering a houseplant, where you let the water sink into the soil before adding more.) Add about 1/2 cup syrup at a time, in 5-7 minute increments, until the cake is saturated.  Chef Mesnier doesn’t specify how much of the cranberry syrup you will need; I found that I had a lot left over.  If any syrup leaks from the cake onto the baking sheet, pour it back into the pan and reheat gently.

Remove the cake pan from the baking sheet and return it to the warm oven.  Keep the cake in the oven until serving time, up to four hours later.  When you are ready to serve it, just invert the cake onto a platter.  It should pop right out of the pan. (I’ll admit to some trepidation when Chef Mesnier assured that it would happen, but odds my bodkins, he’s right.) Slice and serve with sweetened whipped cream, if you so desire.