cake 1: almond cake
13 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in cake, sweets Tags: almonds, aprons, baking, butter, edible glitter
dear radical muffins, we are going to have an adventure of 100 cakes.
cake wholeheartedly made and eaten
this is the first cake.
which should have been, perhaps, something grand, and is instead a most homely yet perfect cake. presented here, as sacredly as possible, though not before we ate most of it. Maybe that makes it more sacred; here you see how we broke cake together. Eaten out of hand.
a cake in honor of cakes and Annelies’s birthday- a radical muffin from the Netherlands with a professional interest in worms and viruses and other sciencey things- and the new home that i, the preacher eater pickler, the k pidds and our roommate Squib have just come to inhabit. We partook of cake on the new porch in the night with the plants and the trees.
a plain cake like this showcases the straightforward goodness of bakers’ mainstays: butter, flour, sugar, eggs. Reminds us that it is real food as well as a treat.
this almond cake, not too sweet, starts with creaming a stick of butter and cup of light brown sugar packed. Zest an entire lemon over a measuring cup of a generous ¼ cup of milk. Beat in two eggs. Stir in 1 ¼ cup of almond flour with ¾ cup all purpose flour, 1 ½ teaspoon baking powder and a pinch of salt, alternating with the milk, and try not to over work the batter. Pour into a lined and buttered pan. Bake at 350˚ for half an hour; let rest for quarter of an hour before turning out.
baked this in a standard sized, single layer heart shaped pan, and a 8 or 9 inch round pan would do as well (watch your baking times, of course). Dusted with powdered sugar, pink sprinkles and edible shiny pink heart confetti.
life is a party but you have to hang your own decorations
more cake basics as well as fancier cakes to follow. cannot promise these 100 cakes will come in 100 consecutive days but we’ll come close!
remember you can like Radical Muffin on facebook—folks there are already clamoring for the recipes for their favorite cakes to be revealed.
ps – annelies and bridgette made us an APRON! Radical muffins are so crafty…
winter bizarre @ Third Root Community Health Center
17 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in narrative Tags: aprons, Brooklyn, ditmas park, gifts, holiday gifts
Sweets and tart aprons for your pleasure and pleasing available live and in-person this Sunday evening.
Third Root Community Health Center is hosting a Radical Muffin Winter Bizarre! A trunk show of aprons. Joined by hand-knit warm things, eye-pillows to lure you to rest, and other hand-made goodies by artists in the neighborhood. Plus tasty treats for the sampling, and, of course, Third Root gift certificates: good for yoga classes, acupuncture and other services for the weary on your gift list.
New aprons have joined those shown on the Aprons page. Prices range from $25 – $75. You can e-mail me at radicalmuffin @ gmail.com to reserve one of the pieces pictured.
Come to find just the right apron to delight your favorite kitchen witch or become smitten with one yourself.
Sunday, December 19
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Third Root Community Health Center
380 Marlborough Road, Brooklyn, NY just around the corner from the Q train stop at Cortelyou Road
So join the crowd in Brooklyn Sunday night for a treat. Support local artists and healers then hurry down the chimney…
aprons
01 Dec 2010 1 Comment
in narrative Tags: aprons, burlesque, crafts, gifts, glitter, holiday, kitchentop catering, sewing, tarts, winter
Tori & Reshma showing off 'hansel & gretel's witch' and 'biased queerly'
just in time for the winter season – the freezing we warm by feasting and gifting – the radical muffin kitchen has turned workshop to compose aprons. Two new lines of aprons are now available, worthy of your most inspired feats of cooking and your most beloved kitchen witch.
’cause even the witch with everything can use another apron!
what's not to love?
click through the “APRONS” tab on this website’s main toolbar for more babbling on aprons as well as detailed descriptions and photos of all those currently available.
half a dozen of these semi-frocks are on hand. Another round of production in these two lines (Bootsy and Audrey) is scheduled for completion by Monday, December 13, 2010.
to request prices, join the e-mail list for in-person showings, or order an apron, please write me at radicalmuffin @ gmail.com
gratzi mille to Tom Martinez for the photos!
aprons pair well with wine & lady friends (my years old apron, l'arte d'arrangiarsi, the art of making something out of nothing)
windows birds roots
26 Dec 2007 Leave a Comment
in narrative Tags: aprons, bird, Brooklyn, hawk, italian, miracle, radical muffins love good food, rain
Chores and errands were a relief, really. I was happy to spend last weekend entirely preparing for my mom to come for Xmas. Without leaving my crossroads, I gathered a few more gifties, topped up the pantry, and picked up the laundry. The sidewalks puddley and slushy not just wet, and the winter weather seeped through my black flats; it is warm for December in Brooklyn.
This is the first time in 32 years I was not in the Midwest for Christmas. Now that everyone’s estranged and I’m perhaps the strangest of them all, my mother traveled to my apartment across from the Russian bodega where I bought her shiny, wintery wrapped candies with brown bears on blue, squirrels on pistachio green, and white daisies on shiny cherry red and again on shiny tannenbaum green. Even the slender boxes of berry juice there look festive, the Cyrillic writing swirling with Moscow snows. I pulled one of these from the cooler and one of the handmade caramel layered wafer cookie things from the sweets corner of the crowded glass counter. At the other end, sausage rings sit one on the other over one ring in the center holding the whole meaty stack upright, the centerpiece to the sausage and coldcuts display.
Leaning on a clear foot of glass, the blondest of the shop ladies holds her face tilted up to watch the Russian soap on the tv in the corner just above and behind the half-stocked dairy case. I felt crowded between them; the women on the show all wear very tight pants. Her face ripened with a smile.
You’re buying such beautiful candies!
my mom’s coming…for Christmas.
O, she is! That is wonderful! Where is she from?
Chicago.
How long has it been since you’ve seen her?
Let’s see – I think, a year, I think. It has been a long time.
O, that is so great—now she comes! It is my son’s birthday today, and I will go home after this shop, and make the table. Make the cake too. And my mother, she called, she said—I am coming. I will meet you after the shop. So she is coming, and we will make the table, and he will have such a good birthday. And your mom is coming. That is wonderful! Now she comes, and she is your best friend!
I smiled and bought a bag of bright clementines too. Jangled the bells going out.
In the crosswalk, three feet from where I stood and twenty to where I live, an Italian man in a Russian hat, holding out his arms at half flap, his boots resisting all the wet, his face lit in the suppressed excitement of a man who flares most often, almost exclusively, in anger.
A hawk—I saw him; I saw it— if you looked, you saw it— fan like, his tail, the man’s thick fingers, exposed like mine so cold and wet, spreading like feathers.
It was a red tail hawk.
He proclaimed it in and out of the traffic zizzing through the flattened puddles. He broad stepped between the crosswalk, curb, and parked cars, looking up every four words, trying to see the bird again. His black & grey eyebrows telegraphed the miracle to each of us— the bright-coated couple leaving the diner, the small flock of Hassid boys, and me. I followed that human lightening bolt back to his eyes, brown. We smiled together, circled up with the great bird I never did see.
I wanted to give them both soup; here are soup recipes for you instead.
Two recipes, the Miso Awesome Soup is a take on a “recipe” from Morgan, my beloved kitchen witch, and the Winter Root Soup originates in a favorite recipe and what the farmers’ market had in good supply. This recipe has made certain friends of mine come off looking like kitchen studs at dinner parties. You might want to pick the thyme while in good company or watching a movie. Persnickety business, thyme picking.
My mom came; she picked the thyme. We had the soup for Xmas dinner.
I wish my digital camera was working to show you this and the other components the feast my mother and I made together for ourselves. We also had ginger/chickpea/garlicky salad on fresh spinach and watercress and a flat of Turkish bread on a wooden cutting board with small bowls of toppings: fresh butter, goat cheese with lemon zest and thyme, and apple bits & clementine sections in lemon and honey. She scooped the fruit on the chickpeas, which was brilliant. A bottle of Riesling chilled in the windowsill, leaning against the glass over the dark garbage courtyard. We wore aprons I made and took smoke breaks out there.
The grand finale—Amaretto Dream Cupcakes. Almond extract instead of almond slivers, makeshift buttermilk, and the midnight close of the meal was too late to break out the noisy hand mixer to beat the frosting so I whipped cream with more amaretto. We plopped it onto our tasting array of mini-cupcakes ( we experimented- stuffing with blueberry-raspberry jam, chocolate chips, and apricot jam) and sprinkled chopped pistachios and grated nutmeg on top. We had these with mugs of Sleepy time tea.
I hope to post a few more recipes before this breather in work is over…stay tuned.
absence and books and shoes
01 Dec 2007 Leave a Comment
in narrative Tags: aids, airport food, aprons, betsey johnson, femme, karma, london, michelle tea, outfits, sorority girls
it has recently come to my attention that you read this blog—with some regularity and anticipation.
In light of this news, I apologize for my temporary absence. To earn pay for rent and loans and such, I have been working to plan this event that was, throughout its span, a 7-day a week endeavor. In the last month, even my sparse late night bloggings had to go. They were not the only bit of my life to be neglected into oblivion, including my sacred kitchen goddess bit.
I was eating a lot of pizza. Pizza! Also, drinking seltzer water directly from liter bottles. I can get myself talked into a passable if delusional Slow Food-y, local business supportive justification for the pizza, which I buy not from that anti-choice pizza chain or any chain but from whichever older-than-me, tiny Brooklyn place I happen to be near. This weak front fails to address the grossness of all that cheese to my body and takes a fingers-in-my-ears approach to where that cheese comes from. This also happens to be the distinct eating pattern of my ex-lover who rounded out her diet with pepperoni, cereal, and cheese’n’crackers.
She worked mad hours when we were together. Back then I gave her a hard time while loving to cook for her. Now, oh—I have pulled-up to her drive through and sat at the window in complete understanding. This working working working craziness: it becomes next to impossible to eat well. One needs either time or money to eat well or…exuberant and precise planning, which is not my forte. Coffee/cigarette breaks became my forte.
A sad state had come to pass- I was not horribly put off by the airplane food on the flight to London on the eve of the big to-do.
The day after this big who-ha ended, I pulled up in a cab at the Islington home of a couple, friends of a friend who was also visiting them. (At some live reading, I will tell about the lesbian cab driver giving us her lover-by-lover tour of London.)
Crossing their threshold, I struggled, wobbling over, taking off my shoes and turned into the living room, with the cat scuttering across the wood floor, looking back over his tail, my adorable coworkers seducing him with purrs and pets and cooing; my friend and her friend rollicking in their cute loud American girl reunion. The fogged autumn sun coming in through the huge front windows despite itself.
Hot coffee, platters of warm croissants, nutella, jam.
And I wept. Inside, I wept with the unraveling of releasing of relief. Which suddenly feels like joy.
I stayed with them for several days of Turkish and Indian restaurants, lingering afternoons at pubs, home cooked pasta dinners from the organic market and leftovers of everything picked-at over days.
Wandering the gayborhood of London, I found an all-you-can-eat vegan Buddhist buffet, clattering with plates and piled with flowers, for EIGHT DOLLARS. I ate so many bean paste sesame balls the kimono ladies were tittering.
And the novelist/investment banker half of the couple gave me the perfect short story for the time: Cathedral. Go on, find it. It is in a collection by the same title.
This short story kicked off a post-life-sucking-job reading frenzy, and I have gone through some delicious pages in the past few weeks. Among them, the 100 pages I read of That’s so you! before gifting it to one of the young women I worked with on this project.
It is a collection edited by Michele Tea; the tagline is Women write on self-expression through fashion and style. I am a Michelle Tea devotee—more power to you sister for earning your way in the world by your writing. Her write-up on that new turn in her life is as sweet as her nerdy queer femme intro. Her childhood lavender-on-lavender glam ensemble far out-shines my own ballerina inspired obsession at 7. I wore the grimy pink leotard endlessly, sleeping in it or hiding it at night so my mother couldn’t wash it lest—god forbid— it be in the washer or dryer and not ON ME.
Another So you! highlight: Kate Bornstein’s journey from being sent home from school for copying the wrong side of the tracks cool to her current soul satisfying outfits by Betsey.
Oh, Betsey Johnson! of the cartwheels on runways and pink pinkity pink on black designs on netting and tattoo inspired prints on velvet mini-dresses, and now – shoes. Sweetart candy for princess trash tootsies…coveted by moi. My only clothes purchased with large sums of money I never really have are a few pieces by Betsey. The first dress of hers that became mine, I swore wouldn’t fit, but the red maned shop girl stood with her heat against my back, zipped me into it sharply, yanked me back a hair’s width closer to her, and whispered, “You just needed a little help, Scarlett.”
The netting and sequins slung in the bottom of that big pink bag, I walked swinging and whooping hand-in-hand with my best friend through DC’s Georgetown. She and my mom co-gifted me the dress for my birthday. She was wearing her dimples and mighty ass, and I was wearing short, pale hot pink hair that I cut myself. We were yelling indirectly at the sorority girls, whose cab we later stole (instigating a full year of bad cab karma, but it was exhilarating at the time). Yelling about how she thinks she can wear Betsey Johnson but she cannot wear Betsey Johnson; I am the girl who wears Betsey Johnson! And we made out on the corner in our tattoos and piercings.
So go check out this book – I am going to get myself a copy and finish it.
I am so glad to know you read this blog, and for that, I want to share a little thanksgiving:
Beets with balsamic and honey
01 Dec 2007 Leave a Comment
in beets, recipes, vegetarian Tags: aprons, non-stick pan, reduction, simmer
slice the leaves off a bunch of beets, maybe four or five tennis ball sized beets. Scrub each bleedy red beet enough that the hoary skins are mostly scrubbed away. Trim off the tail, and you may need to take a paring knife to the knobbily flat end. Slice each beet in half then each beet half into three or four wedges depending on the size of your beets.
bring about two inches of water to boil in deep fry pan (i used a deep non-stick sauté pan with straight sides). Lower the heat to the water is at a simmer; add the beet wedges and simmer covered for about ten minutes. Uncover and pour off most of the water, keeping about a half inch in the pan. Return to the flame.
pour about a quarter cup each of balsamic vinegar and honey over the simmering beets. Cook uncovered over daringly high but not fully turned-on heat until the vinegar and honey reduce to a thick syrup (a reduction). This takes about 15-20 minutes. Every 5 minutes or so, turn the beets and swirl the thickening sauce in the pan.
Serve over shredded beet greens or fresh arugala (rocket!).
