Still warm

A few weeks ago, my friend Tracy gave me three dozen eggs and a tart pan. Today I repaid her the best way I know how: with a Breton Buckwheat Cake baked with six of her eggs in my brand new pan.

The cake is a stunner. I made my first one a few days ago in an effort to work my way through some of the buckwheat flour in our freezer from last year's grain CSA, and it certainly did the trick. We worked through our cake FAST. The fact that it was only vaguely sweet and very eggy and moist and made with whole grain flour meant that we justified a little sliver after breakfast and two more in the wake of dinner and lunch. 

The recipe comes from David Lebovitz, via 101cookbooks. I believe it is French. If it's not, it's everything French cakes tend to be—not overly sugary, simple to make, and deeply satisfying without being too rich. There's also no frosting—it feels very much like an every day peasant cake.

The excitement is in the sea salt that you sprinkle into the batter and then on the top just before you bake. It brings out all the nuances of the flavors that go into the cake—the undertones of dark rum, a hint of vanilla, the toothsome, earthy taste of buckwheat. I used light brown sugar in place of granulated, which I think gave it even more depth. 

After we devoured ours I made it again and delivered it to Tracy, still warm in a greasy paper sack. Thank you Tracy, again.

BRETON BUCKWHEAT CAKE WITH FLEUR DE SEL


adapted from David Lebovitz, The Sweet Life in Paris

We got buckwheat last year with our grain CSA, and I milled it all into flour. For reasons I don't fully understand it is much lighter than most buckwheat flours—in color at least—but otherwise, it seems the same. Either way, it's delicious in this cake, which is moist, eggy, and only a little bit sweet. Think of it as a snacking cake.

for the cake:
1 scant cup buckwheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon plus 1/3 teaspoon fleur de sel
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 cup light brown sugar
4 large egg yolks
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons dark rum 


for the glaze:
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon milk

Grease a 9- or 10-inch tart pan. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

In a small bowl, whisk together the buckwheat flour, the all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon of the salt, and the cinnamon.

Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat until smooth. Beat in the egg yolks one by one and then add the whole egg. Add the vanilla and rum in a slow dribble, beating the whole time. Beat on high speed until the mixture is very airy.

Finally, mix in the dry ingredients until the batter just comes together. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top as flat as possible (it is a thick dough so this takes a few swipes).

Make the glaze by whisking together the egg yolk and milk in a small cup. Brush it generously across the top, then take a fork and rake it across the batter to create three parallel lines in one direction and three in another to make a criss-cross pattern. Sprinkle the remaining 1/3 teaspoon of salt over the cake. Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and the inside of the cake is still moist. 


Note: be careful not to overcook, as the cake seems like the type to dry out.

Easy to dream

It's hard to say before it happens what kind of mother you'd like to be. Or maybe it's the other way around—easy to dream, hard to be. Either way, I hope one day that our baby will have this: memories of a kitchen where homemade baked goods are everyday, routine.

I know there will be a thousand things to do come one baby, maybe two eventually. There will be diapers to wash and tears to dry and books to read. But I hope there will also be mama and helpers in the kitchen: aprons tied, flour flying, oven warming up to 350. I hope there will be silly substitutions and big messes and amidst it all, discovery. That's the kind of kitchen I grew up in, and I was lucky.

In the meantime, we're already baking together—me and this baby. We have to keep ourselves well-fed while we wait and grow and giddily count the weeks til meeting. We need snacks for work and Alex does, too. Mostly, we bake portable things—scones and muffins with ingredients we trust: whole grain flours, pastured yogurt and butter, eggs from the girls in Wellfleet.

This week, we baked with buckwheat. We got the whole grains this year as part of our CSA, and I ground them down right away. After a few rounds of pancakes the flour sat in the freezer, untouched, until I saw a Figgy Buckwheat Scones recipe. I had fig butter in the fridge—made last fall with fruit from a friend's tree—and plenty of buckwheat. And so we mixed: buckwheat, all-purpose, whole wheat. We whisked in sugar, baking powder, salt, then cut in the butter—cold, salty. Finally we stirred in yogurt and cream, then rolled out the dough into a thick, sticky plank. We scooped the fig butter on top in big, seedy dollops—then spread it thin and rolled the dough into logs. When we cut them, the fig butter spiraled into the dough, wrapping.

Almost half of them disappeared straight out of the oven, instantly. The taste was just like the recipe said—a sophisticated Fig Newton: rich, ripe, winey. But a few days later, we're still snacking.

Soon enough it will be time for a new mess, another hot oven, and one more homebaked recipe.

FIG & BUCKWHEAT SCONES

I've adapted this recipe from one I found in Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce. I liked her base, but I added whole wheat flour and substituted yogurt for half of the heavy cream. These scones are delicious straight out of the oven, or cooled and spread with a dollop of butter the next day.

1 cup buckwheat flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick cold butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

1/2 cup heavy cream

3/4 cup whole milk plain yogurt

1 cup fig butter

Whisk together the flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter and work it into the dry mixture by rubbing it between your fingers until it is in pea-size pieces. Pour in the cream and yogurt and mix until just combined.

Transfer the dough to a very well-floured surface. It will be sticky, so sprinkle some flour on top too. Use a rolling pin to shape it into a rectangle about 8 inches wide by 16 inches long by 3/4 of an inch thick.

Spread the fig butter over the dough. Roll the long edge of the dough up so that it makes a log 16 inches long. Cut the log into two pieces, transfer it to an airtight container, and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Cut each log into about 10 equal pieces and arrange each piece on the baking sheets so that the swirled side is up. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the top of the scones are golden brown.

I could lie

I could lie to you. I could tell you that we've been roasting Truro pork chops and using the bones to make big batches of broth for homemade Pho and lingering over fresh pumpkin muffins, or apple spice cake. But the truth is we have a leaky pipe and a flooded basement and no water, and since Saturday we've been relying on take-out and the generosity of friends.

Not that it's been bad, really. We had a nice lunch at Wellfleet Town Pizza on Saturday and our friend Gui grilled us prime rib from Northeast Family Farms that night, and we even contributed the box of just-picked Chinese cabbage you see up there, from the Mac's Shack garden. I could hardly believe the greens were still lingering, without any covering or attention.

Then yesterday we went over to Alex's brother's to sample cheeses from a new place called Robinson's Farm in Hardwick. The Robinsons started raising grass-fed cows in 2006, and this year, they just released a line of artisinal raw milk cheeses. Alex and Mac are thinking of selling them in the restaurants as part of a local cheese plate, and by the pound at the markets.

The Swiss was good with pickles and pepperoncinis, and a there was a buttery melting cheese that was top-notch over pan-fried potatoes. I'm hoping that Alex will pick up at least the melting one, so that I can make an all-local French onion soup.

In the meantime, of course, I'll take running water. When that happens, here's what's on my to-cook list:

1. this penne with garlic and kale
2. Stacey Glassman's squash with olive oil and garlic
3. cream of beet soup from James Peterson
4. buckwheat pancakes with the flour I ground down the other day from our grain CSA
5. deb's cranberry upside-down cake
6. more simple breakfasts like this
7. and maybe, just maybe, a batch of homemade pop tarts to use up our astounding supply of raspberry jam
   

Happy cooking, everyone.