Dear friends,
Rest assured, this is not a case of blogbandonment. I will be offline for at least a week, hopefully not too much more. It’s nothing scary, nothing dire, but nothing that can be encapsulated without boring you all into a coma. Suffice it to say that I will be back, hopefully with good news, and just itching to talk foodstuffs with yinz guys.
Dear friends,
I know what you’re thinking: is our Bakerina a flash in the pan? Two days’ worth of recycled prose, two days’ sabbatical, now just a bunch of crappy interstitials? I would not blame you for thinking such things, but stop thinking such things. It seems that the past week’s arctic cold front (three degrees in NYC this weekend! Three degrees!) brought some mysterious and malevolent bug with it, because said bakerina has been feeling ill. Symptoms include fever, fatigue, malaise, ennui, gloom, a fruit-fly-like attention span, headache, dropsy, impetigo, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, acid-reflux disease, fear for the future, lack of interest in the future, sore throat, insatiable appetite for navel oranges, anthrax, housewife’s knee and nymphomania.
As you might suspect, all this has hindered my ability to string two or three thousand words together, but rather than just take a little sabbatical, maybe say “hi, friends, I’m taking a little sabbatical” first...nooooo, I have to share it all with you. 
Until I am on the mend, then, I will probably just throw a few nuggets of love your way. (If you think I’m throwing nuggets of something else, well, then, thank *you* for sharing.)
A moment of silence, for seneca has shut down All is Vanity. I was so looking forward to his return from his own winter sabbatical, and I’m sorry to see that he’s making it permanent. I’m still too shy to beg him to return, but seneca, if you’re reading this, won’t you reconsider?
The Universe Has a Sense of Whimsy, Part MM: On December 4, the very day that I posted my love letter to Petits Propos Culinaires and The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy, the Guardian ran Alan Davidson’s obituary. I had no idea he had died until I picked up my new copy of Saveur, where he is listed in this year’s Saveur 100. Davidson was the founder of PPC and its publishing arm, Prospect Books, as well as The Oxford Companion to Food, not only a peerless resource book but the best food writing you will read anywhere. Please, please do read the obit, which was written by his successor at Prospect and long-time friend Tom Jaine. Alan Davidson was a singular guy, and I will spend the rest of my life singing his praises to anyone who will listen.
Previously, on Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina…
Wednesday, May 7. Carla picks me up and before saying good morning, says, “Go inside and ask them how to get to I-89. If we take I-89 to I-91, we can miss all of the traffic through Hanover.” This is like saying that the shortest distance between two points is an angle, but I tell her I’d be glad to try it tomorrow morning, i.e. not today, when we have five minutes to get to class. En route, she tells me that her boss is not taking her news well, and wants her to work for them for one more week. She doesn’t want to say no because she doesn’t want to burn any bridges, but she can’t, just can’t work with those people for even one second more, so what she has decided to do is tell them that she will be back next week, then the day before they’re expecting her, she’ll call and tell them that she has car trouble and is stranded in Vermont, with no way to get home. What do I think? You can probably guess.
Woo-hoo! Puff pastry day! We take our fully turned, sheeted dough and start baking it for napoleons. We cut more puff into circles for apple galettes and Italian kerchief turnovers. We also - and this is big fun - learn how to make marshmallows, which will top our s’mores tarts tomorrow. (S’mores tart consists of a graham-cracker tart shell, a chocolate diplomat cream and a marshmallow garnish, which we will toast with the blowtorch.) We take our rugelach dough, which is similar to puff even though it is not puff, and make big, gorgeous rugelach with them. I am a fan of tiny rugelach, about the size of cockle shells, but I will make an exception for this rugelach here. We also make a 5” flourless chocolate cake that we will decorate on Friday. This is a lethal cake - nothing but chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and Chambord, which you need to keep the cake from curdling.
The day proceeds like ballet, where I work so fast and so hard but with such concentration that now I know the true meaning of flow. There is a moment of nerves when the time comes to assemble, decorate and cut my napoleons, but in the end I manage to conjure up half a dozen saleable, if not perfect, little napoleons. The desk crew at the Rezz will fall on these, too, and on the apple galette, and the kerchiefs, and the cream horns. We taste them, and I marvel at how light butter can be. Not that I’m saying that it’s a diet food, not by any stretch, but that when you handle butter properly, at the proper temperature, how light and non-greasy it bakes up. I bite into a cream horn and it shatters against my canines. I want to go home and make a new batch of puff and use it for pithiviers, the French cake made with puff and almond cream, a cake that is nasty if you get it wrong, but amazing if you get it right. I reward myself by going to the KA store and spending $70 on a French textbook on decorative bread techniques.
Thursday, May 8. When Carla picks me up - after I tell her that there’s no way to travel on 89 and 91 in less than 20 minutes - we have no way of knowing that today will be an adventure day. We are preparing genoise for the cakes we will fill and decorate on Friday. Each of us has been given our own butane-fired burner, over which we will whip our whole eggs and sugar to 120 degrees and then immediately put it on the mixer and beat at high speed until we have a stable foam. Because all of the cakes have to go into the oven at the same time - sponge cakes will not stand - we all synchronize our burners and start beating together. As I am beating, I notice a piece of hazelnut sponge batter that I apparently forgot to clean out of my bowl. Tim, the Verizon guy, announces that he has hit 120 degrees, then cries out, “Wait! The eggs have scorched!” I look closely - that wasn’t hazelnut batter in my bowl - that was scorched egg. All six of us have scorched our eggs at precisely the same moment. We throw out our rapidly-curdling eggs, get new bowls, and try again, this time over a bain marie. Genoise progresses without incident, at least until they come out of the oven, where we discover that all of our cakes, including Chef’s, have fallen. He vows to try it again tonight, to see what went wrong.
After our baptism by fire, we are relieved to see that that will be the worst of it. Our tart shells are baked and ready to go. We also spend a few hours with the head pastry chef of the KA Bakery, who teaches us a neat trick for putting a fast woven lattice on our torti di ricotta and our linzertortes. We bake the t.d r., the linzertortes and a lemon meringue pie that has the tartest, lemoniest filling I have ever tasted. We also make a fresh fruit tart filled with diplomat cream, an apricot/frangipane tart, the vaunted s’mores tart and something called an “extreme chocolate” tart, which is filled with an extra-bittersweet ganache that is like a truffle, but more so. It is a wondrous day, marred only by my need to physically turn away from Carla because I can’t bear to watch her hold a pastry bag. At some time in her life she taught herself to use a pastry bag, but she did not know how to place her hands to get maximum leverage from the bag, so as a result her hand is always in an upside-down position, so she has no leverage or control over what she is piping. Both Chef and I, at her request, have showed her how to hold the bag, even physically taking her hand and placing it where it needs to be, but she can’t retain the memory of it. As I feared, her dustup with her boss has broken her concentration for the week, and she cannot hold information for more than five minutes. I know that she has dreams of running her own shop, and I want her to succeed, but what I have seen of her this week indicates that she has a long learning curve ahead of her, and I am worried for her. On the other hand, she did raise four children while working full-time, so I think I just haven’t seen her in her element.
Friday, May 9. Today is my brother’s 25th birthday and, slacker that I am, I have forgotten his birthday present. (Later I call my mom and she said he told her that he had forgotten until two days ago that his birthday was coming up, a far cry from his childhood when he used to plan for his birthday weeks in advance.) Today is our day to wrap it all up, fill and decorate our cakes, say our goodbyes, marvel at the speed with which the week progressed, and go home. Except for me, because at 5 p.m. I am going to the Norwich Inn to attend a reception for Peter Reinhart, who will be teaching a demo class at the school the next day. Peter Reinhart is the head of the bread program at Johnson & Wales, the former owner of Brother Juniper’s Cafe in California, and the author of six bread books, including the truly wondrous Bread Baker’s Apprentice. He also has a loyal following of breadheads who have taken his classes repeatedly and will travel hundreds of miles to see him, much like Deadheads. Deadheads...breadheads...heh.
I get a tremendous sense of deja vu on Friday morning, as it shapes up much like Monday. Carla can’t pick me up because she is waiting for a call from her husband (long story, one that I will not share, for once!), the taxi service is booked, the hotel shuttle is unavailable...so at 6:50 I head out, arriving in Hanover an hour later. Because I have some time to kill, I stop at the Dirt Cowboy Cafe, order an iced chai and a biscuit, and think quiet, pleasant thoughts. The Dirt Cowboy is a really neat little place, one that no college town should be without.
By the end of class, we have produced a hazelnut torte filled and iced with praline buttercream, one of the best substances in the world. We have made a raspberry mousse cake, genoise filled with raspberry mousse and iced with whipped cream. Chef makes an alternate mousse cake which he ices with white chocolate ribbons. Chef is a genius. He breaks my heart. (He has also cracked the code on the genoise; the pans were too small for the amount of batter produced, so we all overfilled our pans, causing the sides to set up too quickly and the middles to collapse.) He also saves more than one of our lives; as we have our cakes on turntables, piping the rosettes on which we will place our hazelnut decorations, he walks by, watching us, complimenting us, giving us pointers. He stops in front of our bench and says, kindly (much more kindly than I would have), “Carla, this is something you’ll want to work on when you get home. You’ve been holding the bag wrong all week, which means that it’s become a habit, but I know that it’s a habit you can undo.” What a man. We make a torta meringata, an orange/olive oil cake filled with that amazing puckery lemon filling left over from the pies, iced with Swiss meringue, toasted with the blowtorch and showered with edible glitter. Mine gets a wee bit too toasty, but it is still beautiful. We taste, we evaluate, we are done by 3 p.m. Since I am not going back to the hotel, I give one of my cakes to the retail staff at the KA store and the rest to Chef, who regularly donates cakes to a charity that provides rooms for the families of hospitalized children receiving care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. I have two hours to kill, no plans to go to the hotel, no real inclination to walk into Hanover or Norwich...so I sit down on my rock next to the pond, take out my notebook, and proceed to write this letter.
Hello, good people,
Please permit me to indulge in a bit of cheesy cut-and-paste. I was having lunch with a friend, rabbitting on and on about a registration form I had received for the 15th Food Writers’ Symposium at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, and how it was really more money than I should be spending, particularly since I am not a food writer, I just write about food every once in a while. “What about that e-mail you sent me after pastry camp last spring?”, she said. Well, it doesn’t count, because again, it’s writing about food, not food writing. But her mention of that e, essentially a diary I kept while attending a week-long pastry intensive at the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center, cheered me up because it was the last time I felt like a real baker, and I decided to shamelessly recycle it for PTMYB. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. After tomorrow.
Sunday, May 4. Am up surprisingly early for someone who walked up and down Central Park the previous day. Lloyd sees me off to the train. First half of train trip is glorious, comprised of eating cheese sandwiches, listening to music, reading my new Thai cookbook (Thai Food by David Thompson, brilliant book) and watching Connecticut and Massachusetts unfold around me. Unfortunately, the sunlight streaming through the trees creates a strobelight effect, and I develop a wicked migraine. Arrive in White River Junction, VT, seven hours after leaving NYC. The taxi driver misses my attempts to flag him down and I have to wait for an hour before another cab shows up. Get to hotel in Lebanon, NH, throw up on front lawn, recover well enough to check in without incident, enter room, order takeout from the local Dartmouth burger shack and pass out in front of The Simpsons. Awaken at midnight, pain-free and starving, so I reheat and devour my takeout. It can only get better from here, I think to myself as I watch Cartoon Network, and it turns out I’m right.
Monday, May 5. Awaken at 5:30. Decide that since I’m up, I’ll call for my 8 a.m. taxi. Taxi service informs me that they are booked solid between 6:30 and 9, ½ hour after my class starts. Uh oh. Call front desk, ask if hotel shuttle is available. It isn’t. I contemplate trying to call my friend Carla, but I don’t know if she’s awake, not to mention that I don’t want our first conversation to be “uh, hi, can you pick me up?” In the end, I lace up my black Skecher boots and walk the 4+ miles from the hotel to King Arthur. It takes me 1 ½ hours (this will be useful information later in the week) and by the time I get there, I am pink and sweaty and loaded with endorphins.
I get a hug hello from the chef, who was our chef-instructor in the October bread class, and who will be teaching this week’s class as well. I will admit that I have a crush on Chef, but it is not a love crush; rather, it is a teacher crush. Into everyone’s life comes a teacher who is so enthusiastic and sharp and just plain good that you want that teacher to like you, be impressed with you, find you worth the time and effort to teach, and he is mine. Carla arrives in class, and for all my pre-class agita, I have to admit that it is good to see her, and it is good to not have to face a class full of strangers. I meet the four other people taking class with us: a chef-instructor at Manchester (CT) Community College, a cook/baker at an upscale retirement community in New Hampshire, a doctor married to another doctor who took the bread class and left his medical practice to open a bread bakery, and a guy who works for Verizon but has taken pro-level continuing education classes, including the c.e. bread classes at CIA and San Francisco Baking Institute. From there, we launch into our mise en place for the week: starting our puff pastry; making pate brisee and pate sucree and pasta frolla; making cookie dough for zaletti (Italian cornmeal cookies) and almond horns and amaretti and a staggeringly stiff hazelnut dough, which we discover later was scaled down incorrectly from the master recipe, which explains why I was all but unable to pipe it. We make meringues, which will dry in the oven overnight and will be sandwiched with whipped cream the next day. We make some really amazing almond tuiles and set up a mini-production line to get them off the sheets while they are still malleable. I am exhausted but thrilled by the end of the day. I go home, kick off my shoes, and instantly get a call from Carla, who is livid because her husband just paid a bill for some lawn work that was not done to her liking, and over which she was fighting with the lawn guy. I agree to go out with her. We go to the Mexican restaurant in Hanover (home of Dartmouth), where everyone around us is drunk and happy for Cinco de Mayo. She rants. I nod sympathetically over my fish tacos.
Tuesday, May 6. The good news is that Carla picks me up, saving me another 1 ½-hour walk. The bad news is that in the less-than-10-minute trip, she nearly misses 3 turns; each time I say, “uh, Carla, this is our turn,” she is forced to cut across traffic, cutting other people off in her wake. While we travel, she tells me that she called her boss and left her a message giving her notice, saying that she will not, in fact, be returning from her leave of absence. She is fretting.
Today is cookie day, where we will be baking off our cookies, sandwiching our meringues with whipped cream, sandwiching our hazelnut cookies with ganache, dipping our almond horns in ganache, and, at the end of the day, tasting them to compare and contrast, as one says in academic circles. We also have more mise en place to do, including making pastry cream for our napoleons and cream horns and any other dessert that may require it. During a lull in class time, Carla goes outside to try to get her boss one more time. The conversation is not a good one, and she comes back in an even more fretful mood. Her concentration is broken, and she spends the rest of the class asking me how much of certain ingredients we are supposed to measure, and what exactly Chef meant when he gave us a certain direction. I hope that this is not a theme for the week. Then I remind myself that the past few months have been tough on Carla, and I should just cool my jets. I am a picture of zenlike calm as we taste and critique all of our cookies. Even though I only take small bites of everything, the amount of concentrated almond paste I ingest sends me into swoony paroxysms. I wrap up all of my cookies to take home for Lloyd, save for the meringues, which I take back to the desk crew at the Residence Inn, who fall all over them.
Wednesday, May 7. Carla picks me up and before saying good morning, says, “Go inside and ask them how to get to I-89. If we take I-89 to I-91, we can miss all of the traffic through Hanover.” This is like saying that the shortest distance between two points is an angle, but I tell her I’d be glad to try it tomorrow morning, i.e. not today, when we have five minutes to get to class. En route, she tells me that her boss is not taking her news well, and wants her to work for them for one more week. She doesn’t want to say no because she doesn’t want to burn any bridges, but she can’t, just can’t work with those people for even one second more, so what she has decided to do is tell them that she will be back next week, then the day before they’re expecting her, she’ll call and tell them that she has car trouble and is stranded in Vermont, with no way to get home. What do I think? You can probably guess.
Continuing in this space tomorrow...
Dear friends,
Tonight will be Photography Night at PTMYB, partly because I came home late due to an after-work doctor’s appointment, partly because my laptop seems to be feeling logy tonight. Must be all the steak and eggs I’ve been feeding it. 
Last night I mentioned in passing the Heather Garden at Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan. (If you didn’t click on the link, I urge you to do so—really, it’s pretty.) In keeping with the theme of Beautiful Spaces in Urban Places, Lloyd has graciously offered to let me share this picture of Point Defiance in Tacoma, Washington, toward the Puget Sound end of Tacoma. Lloyd grew up in Tacoma. He went back for two weeks in October to visit his parents and sister, and returned with some nifty pictures, including some beautiful pics of the sound. Maybe he’ll let me share some more of them.
He also, after almost 12 years of waxing rhapsodic, finally got to taste a maple bar once again. For as long as I’ve known him, he has lamented that he cannot find maple bars anywhere on the East Coast. I’ve been grilling him about the dough and the maple coating, trying to figure out of this is something I can make at home. I think I can, I think I can. (Any maple bar fans out there who have any input on what makes the ur-maple bar, please feel free to share.)
