Of jazz—a riff

My mother is a profound believer in the power of zucchini. A zucchini patch, she says, is a meal. It can feed a family for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner on the grill. You name the zucchini recipe, she's made it. She has four recipes for zucchini bread alone.

That one you see up there—the one with the thick, moist center and the thin green flecks—is her standby, the one she makes the most. She's had it for so long she can't remember where the recipe came from anymore—only that it's a keeper, and that it's equally good as muffins or loaves.

She makes the others every now and again—Chocolate Zucchini Bread from our friend Maddie, this Special Zucchini Bread from Heidi Swanson, Lynn's Spicy Zucchini Bread from the Victory Garden Cookbook.

But it's the loaf up there that tastes like zucchini season to me—the one that feels like sitting on the forest green stools at the kitchen counter with a knife and a stick of butter, carefully slathering one slice, then another, until the bread is gone. My mother's made a few twists over the years—swapped whole wheat pastry flour for all-purpose, thrown in a handful of poppyseeds, left in or out the nuts depending on who was home—but essentially, it's the same tried and true loaf.

The other day, I tried a version of my own. I found a baseball bat growing out from a vine wrapped around the raspberries in the garden and grated it down. I dug out a bag of rye flour from what we got in our grain CSA and added cinnamon, salt, nutmeg. I dug around in the cupboard until I found the apple cider molasses I bought this spring in a tiny store in New York, and a few minutes later, packed the oven with two loaves.

It wasn't too different from my mother's—but I was thrilled with the way the squash played off the rye. The shift reminded me of jazz—the way the same chord, played over and over, changes each time. It was a zucchini bread riff—an improv of whole wheat, molasses, spice—the same chord that somehow sounded different, new, just right.

ZUCCHINI-POPPYSEED BREAD

Though I usually make it into loaves, this recipe also makes wonderful muffins. Simply scoop the batter into prepared tins, and shorten the cooking time to about 20 minutes. Also, my mother says it's a good idea to wring out your zucchini after you grate it—otherwise the bread can get too wet.

3 large eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 tablespoon molasses or apple cider molasses
3 and 1/2 cups grated zucchini
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups rye flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup poppyseeds
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two bread tins. Whisk together the eggs, oil, vanilla, and molasses in a large bowl. Add the zucchini and stir well.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flours, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and poppyseeds. Pour these dry ingredients into the zucchini mixture and stir until just combined. Add the nuts if using, then divide the batter evenly between the two loaf pans.

Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the bread is still moist in the center but just cooked through.

Chocolate zucchini muffins

Perhaps it's the rain, but recent days have found me holding in a baking pattern. While the air cools down outside, earth damp and leaves dewy, I settle into my kitchen for another afternoon with the oven.

Yesterday, it was the baseball bat I found lurking under the leaves of my zucchini plant that inspired me. Carrying it back to the kitchen alongside cherry tomatoes and green beans, I wondered what use I could possible make of it. It was no day for a stir fry, lasagna loomed too complicated, and the freezer shelves sat already packed with dated bags: zucchini, our garden 7/12...

Suddenly, I pulled out the grater and reduced the bat to a heap of shredded squash. I donned an apron and grabbed a mixing bowl and spoon, pulled out cocoa and flour, salt and butter, cinnamon and vanilla, and prepared for a summertime ritual.

Chocolate zucchini bread has been a favorite in my family since the day we first fooled my father. While he didn't like the idea of greenery in his birthday cake, he could boast no complaints about the taste. And so we started making it for more mundane occasions: to mark the passing of another week with too many zucchini, to celebrate the arrival of a baseball bat, or to freeze for a winter breakfast with warmth and a hint of August.

Since leaving home, I hadn't had a piece; this is my first year with a garden, and it seems my neighbors are too polite to try to fool me with a sample. I, for one, won't let that stop me. With a recipe this good, it's only courteous to share.

CHOCOLATE ZUCCHINI BREAD

Makes 16 small muffins or 1 10-inch loaf

In a mixing bowl, combine 2 and 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour, 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, 2 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Stir, set aside, and preheat the oven to 350.

In a large mixing bowl, beat 3/4 cup softened butter with 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup maple syrup, and 1/4 cup honey. Add 3 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, and 2 teaspoons vanilla and continue mixing. Setting the beater aside, mix in 2 cups shredded, un-peeled zucchini. Stir in flour mixture and pour into muffin tins or one 10-inch tube pan. Do not overcook; bread should be slightly gooey at the center.

If desired, leave out cocoa for plain zucchini bread or muffins. Both versions can be drizzled when cool with a glaze of 2 cups powdered sugar, 3 tablespoons milk, and 1 teaspoon vanilla beaten together for a light dessert.

Zucchini & brown rice soup

I'm fasting today. According to the radio announcers, the season has passed, already—the new moon sighted and another hungry Ramadan done. But once a year, for fall cleaning, I like partake, late or not.

It was easy at first. The fridge sat, tight-lipped and quiet. I'd had my fill of its contents last night: apple crisp and cold vanilla cream. But as the day wore on, and lunchtime rolled around, the peppermint tea began to roll around like an echo in my belly.

What it wanted, most of all, was to capture the zucchini from the kitchen counter. Strange, I know, after all these months of excess squash, but there it sat, heavy, beckoning, 3 perfect pounds of green. I imagined what I'd do with it: zucchini bread, zucchini pancakes, fried zucchini, zucchini soup.

It was early evening by the time I finally began to cook. I called my mother for her recipe for zucchini soup. She pointed me to the Victory Garden, a favorite cookbook she'd passed on from a library sale, annotated and all.

Beyond the zucchini, I found the rest in the garden. A pot of broth and rice simmered away on the stove, and I began to craft a batch of zucchini and brown rice soup. It'll be just the thing to break the fast.

ZUCCHINI AND BROWN RICE SOUP
adapted from the Victory Garden Cookbook

Makes 2 quarts

Wash, trim, and grate 1 lb. zucchini. Do not salt; the juices add flavor to the soup. Wash 1/2 lb kale leaves, dry, and cut into thin strips. Bring 6 cups chicken broth to a boil, stir in 1/2 cup long-grain brown rice, lower heat, cover, and cook slowly until the rice is just tender, about 40 minutes.

In a large sauté pan, cook 1 and 1/2 cups sliced onions in 3 tablespoons butter until wilted and golden. Stir in zucchini and cook, stirring, for 4-5 minutes. There will be moisture left in the pan. Mix in the kale, and cook, stirring, until barely wilted. Set aside. When the rice is cooked, stir in the zucchini mixture, heat through, and season with salt and pepper. The soup will have a beautiful green color and will be fairly thick. Thin with additional broth if you wish.

All ours

I was standing in the kitchen the other night, pressing garlic to add to a pan of mashed potatoes, when I realized everything for dinner had come from our garden. 

There was garlic—I planted two long rows last fall, just after Sally was born. I pulled the heads a few weeks ago, when the tops started to yellow and fall over, after we cut the scapes, and dusted them off and brought them in. I cured them in the basement next to the dehumidifier, and this week, I trimmed them and peeled off the purple- and dirt-bruised skins.

There were potatoes—new potatoes from the patch we planted in mid March. They were leftovers, boiled and put in the fridge, and now mashed and pan-fried with butter and garlic.

There was also zucchini—from last year's garden, pulled from the freezer upstairs to make room for this year's batches. It was shredded for zucchini bread, but we had company and I was worried we wouldn't have enough potatoes, so I mixed it in to stretch them.

There was a salad of arugula, carrots, and radishes.

And it was all ours! It made me grin.

PAN-FRIED POTATOES WITH ZUCCHINI AND GARLIC

There is nothing fancy about this dish; it's comfort food, through and through. I made it with leftover boiled new potatoes and very fresh garlic. If your garlic is older, you may need to use more—I find the flavor is stronger when it's fresh.

3-4 tablespoons butter

2 pounds potatoes, diced, cooked til fork-tender, and drained

1/2 cup shredded zucchini

2 large cloves garlic, minced

sea salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a large, cast iron skillet over medium heat. Add the potatoes and squish them a bit. (I used a pastry cutter, but you probably have a better tool.) Mix in the zucchini and the garlic and turn the heat down to low. Cook, stirring every once in a while, for 15-20 minutes. The potatoes should get a little bit crispy in spots, but mostly stay soft—like underdone homefries. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve hot.

Tell us here

Last week we got together after the farmers' market—all the vendors and I and a few musicians—and we talked about what we want the market to be. We talked while we ate—Tracy had made a sesame pasta and a few farmers had thrown in greens for a salad and Anna was making something she called vegetarian oysters out of purple basil and hummus and peas—and we sat for over an hour. There was some healthy disagreement, but by the end of it, we came out with a pretty clear vision of what we'd like the market to be.

First and foremost, we want it to be a producers market. This means we want the food and flowers and jewelry and plants sold to be grown or produced by the person selling them, and we want to keep it local—Barnstable County. Within that framework we're looking for hyper local—Wellfleet, Truro, the Outer Cape, Orleans.

We also want it to stay relatively small—to stay downtown, and for the time being, not to outgrow its place. We want it to be reliable and consistent, and we want you all to count on us for good food and a good vibe every week.

There was even talk of a winter market—maybe this year, maybe next. It would take time, but there are vendors interested, and inside the Hall, maybe even a home, a space.

Now that we've got our heads on straight, though, we want to know what you think. What do you look for in a market? Are there things you're missing? Things we need? Tell us here, or stop by and say hello Wednesday morning. We'll be there, 8 to noon, with the following:

—Coffee ! and lemonade. Let's start with the important things.

—Baked goods, including pies (blueberry & strawberry rhubarb!), breakfast goodies, and this week's specials: lemon/lime tarts, rhubarb crumb cake muffins, veggie quiche with garlic scapes, roasted zucchini & gruyere, zucchini bread & strawberry rhubarb pie jars!

—Eggs, from Ron & Victoria's hens,

—Honey & Bee Body Balm (from Wellfleet beeswax!),

—Summer squash, blueberries, haricot vert, purple beans, shelling peas, snow peas, vegetarian fugu (you'll have to ask Ron), green & red onions, mixed beets, Swiss chard, kale, basil, mints of every sort, hyssop, lovage, purslane, Massachusetts raised peaches, & more—

—Bouquets, lavender, sunflowers, gladiola, 

and prepared humus (plural), Greek goodies, garlic scape pesto, and chocolate mint jelly.

Come early, beat the heat—we'll see you there.

ON DUTY // anna

When you arrive at your sister's house for a week-long stay only to find that she is close to bedridden with a sinus infection, you have a duty to fill.  You help get Sally off to day care and, when she comes home, you bake zucchini bread with her and help her tuck her baby doll into bed.  You take Fisher out and make sure he doesn't run away or eat the compost.  You queue up the Glee episodes on Netflix (shhh…don't tell Alex) and you empty the dishwasher when it's done.  When dinner rolls around and you haven't given it a second thought all day, you make quiche.

Quiche is the perfect meal for those days when there's nothing planned for dinner.  If all else fails, you probably have eggs, milk, flour and butter.  You may also have leftovers or sorry-looking veggies that you aren't sure what to do with.  Quiche is kind of like the dinner version of those compost cookies bakeries make to use up extra ingredients - whatever you have on hand will work.  

On this particular day in Wellfleet, I didn't find much in the fridge: a bunch of kale, some sharp cheddar, and some leftover butternut squash from these enchiladas we had made earlier in the week (pssst: MAKE THEM! They are delicious, especially with shrimp added).  I made a quick pie crust, sautéed the veggies together, topped it all off with eggs, dotted it with cheese, and within an hour we had a meal.

KALE, BUTTERNUT SQUASH AND CHEDDAR QUICHE

This is really more of a loose guideline than a recipe, and it can be tweaked depending on your filling and the size of your pie pan.  I used three cups of filling for a 9-inch pie pan.

1 pie crust
1 1/2 cups butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

1 onion, diced
1 small bunch kale, cut into 1/4-inch ribbons

5-6 large eggs

1 cup milk (optional - I've also made this without milk, just expect the final product to be eggier)

Sharp cheddar cheese for topping

Make the pie crust and press it into a pie pan.  

Place the butternut squash in a medium pot and cover with water.  Bring water to a boil and cook squash until soft.  While the squash is cooking, begin to sauté the onion in olive oil over medium heat.  Add the kale to the onion mixture and stir until it begins to soften.  When the squash is soft, drain the water from it and add it to the kale and onion mixture.  Stir well, so the squash begins to get mashed into the rest of the veggies.  

Once the veggies are cooked, pour them into the pie crust.  Lightly beat the eggs together with the milk, and pour this mixture over the veggies.  Dot the whole thing with chunks of cheddar cheese.  

Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes or until the center of the quiche no longer jiggles when moved.  If you're daring, turn on the broiler for 30 to 60 seconds to get the cheese all gooey.  (Note: Do not take your eyes off it while the broiler is on!  It will burn.  I know this from experience.)

This would also be delicious with mushrooms, leeks, crab, potatoes, sweet potatoes, any greens you have on hand.  Really, the possibilities are endless.  Enjoy! 

SOUR PICKLES & ZUCCHINI PARMESAN // elspeth

Hello from here, where we are making pickles and eating homemade fudgesicles and hosting meetings with our dolls at tiny tables. (The smalls, that is. Topics covered so far: Getting Rid of Pollution and How to Draw a Perfect Pig with Flowers on a Farm). 

So far we can report: lacto-fermented garlic dill pickles are not as easy as we want them to be. We made a big crock, it started out well, bubbling and fermenting away. We moved it to a cool place downstairs, but then it grew a white film of mold. Also, despite the fact that we added oak leaves to add tannins and hopefully keep said pickles crisp, they're not. We read about all this and have two takeaways: we think we should have used smaller, whole pickles instead of spears, and we think next time we'll do them in smaller batches in glass jars, because according to someone's Jewish grandma if you ferment them in the light near a window the UV rays (check to see if modern windows are blocking UV rays?) will kill said mold. In the meantime we're eating refrigerator pickles, because they're foolproof and fast, but DANG! our winter lacto-pickle consumption is off the charts high and getting expensive, so we're hoping to do better soon. 

The refrigerator pickles we are making come from my neighbor Sarah, who in turn found them on Smitten Kitchen. They are called Easiest Fridge Dill Pickles, and this is 100% true. There is not much to them: you slice up a few cucumbers, throw them in a jar, and shake them up with some white vinegar, salt, dill, and garlic. You wait a few hours. You devour them with egg salad and hummus and bread on the beach, and you pat yourself on the back for planning such a delightful lunch. You drink a beer and go swimming. That's as hard as it is. 

While we're on the topic of easy summer recipes that use up things there are too many of in the garden, you should also make this.  It's a Zucchini Parmesan from Martha Rose Schulman over at the Fake News NYT, and it uses only five real ingredients and tastes delicious. Basically you roast zucchini with olive oil and salt until it's a bit tender but also crispy, and then you layer it in a casserole dish with tomato sauce and Parmesan, bake it again, and eat it up. I thought my mom was leaving some sneaky hard parts out when she told me those directions, but actually it's as easy as that. My kids tried to hate it but ended up loving it, so thank you mom and Martha Rose Schulman. 

Before I leave you: filed under Somehow Both Surprising and Not, conservationists in the Antarctic discovered a fruitcake that is from the Scott expedition, and they think it's basically totally edible. Yup.

See you soon.

The Local Food Report: a winter market in Rhode Island

If you have never been to a winter farmers' market, I think you should get in your car right now and begin steering toward Pawtucket, Rhode Island, looking for signs like these:

(poster image courtesy of Semap)

Actually, you should probably wait until Saturday morning, since that's the day the Pawtucket market is held, but you know what I mean. I am all business when it comes to this.

Why on earth should you listen?

Well, for starters, if you like cheese, you ought to sit up and pay attention. They have the best ricotta cheese in the world at this market, made by Naragansett Creamery. And if you like nice greens, and liver for making paté, and dried beans, and homemade, homegrown salsa, and artisanal chocolates, and fresh baked bread, you should be there. And if you even begin inching towards your car at the mere mention of trotters (pigs feet! soft! tender! succulent! exotic!) then you should definitely go. Because they have all this stuff, and more.

You should also check out the cooking demonstrations while you're there. Every week, a group of students and a chef from the Johnson & Wales culinary program show up, shop the market, and start cooking something up. They use what they find that day to create an absolutely enticing dish, and then they start handing out the recipe. The day I visited, a guy named Chef David was making a winter veggie hash. It looked very, very good, and so I tucked the recipe flyer into my pocket and made sure to pick up all the ingredients before I made my way home.

In my own kitchen, it was just as good as it had smelled at the market. It's not that the pan-browned potatoes were all that—they weren't groundbreaking or unique, just a typical breakfast hash—but they were a good reminder of what to do with a heap of winter market fixings and a few fresh eggs.

I should add that I sprinkled in a pinch of cumin to mix it up a little and also swapped some of the potatoes for turnips and added in some frozen summer squash, zucchini, and eggplant. Oh! and I sprinkled the piping hot final product with a bit of grated cheddar, which I heartily endorse as a fine touch.


All in all, I'd say hash browns are the perfect way to start a Sunday morning—which, incidentally—dawns right after Saturday's market. Imagine that.

CHEF DAVID'S WINTER HASH

2 cups potatoes, diced
1 cup turnips, diced
1 teaspoon curry powder
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 onion, diced
1 cup chopped zucchini, summer squash, and/or eggplant
1 cup cheddar cheese, grated

In a medium-size bowl, toss potatoes and turnips with 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon curry powder, and salt and pepper to taste. Heat up a large cast iron skillet, and throw in potatoes and turnips. Cook until they begin to soften, stirring occasionally. (This can take 20 to 30 minutes.)

In the same bowl, toss vegetables (mine were frozen, then thawed, then drained to help remove some of the liquid, and chopped finely) with the remaining olive oil, curry powder, salt and pepper to taste, and all of the onion. When the potatoes and turnips are almost done, throw this veggie mixture in and cook for several minutes longer.

Serve hot, with grated cheese sprinkled over top (it should melt and blend in). An egg over easy makes a nice accompaniment, along with a bit of hot sauce.

On the roster

My sister is here. This means a lot of things. For Sally it means her favorite playmate and an audience. (She's here! Watching me! ba-ba-ba-babble, comin' up!) 

For me it means naps, projects, and hopefully lots of work. For her daddy it means more time at the office, and for everyone it means cooking. Lots of it. Anna and I spent most of our free time together in the kitchen growing up and on visits, it's the same. We just made a batch of this lemony olive oil banana bread, a vat of homemade vanilla ice cream from The Art of Simple Food, and an anchovy-Narragansett feta-spinach frittata to use up all the leftover egg whites. 

We are not done yet. Not even with the planning, but here's what we've got on the roster so far:

• this crunchy kale and coconut bowl with oat groats from our grain CSA and pan-seared Maine shrimp
• this buttermilk roast chicken courtesy of Smitten Kitchen and the never-ending parade of freezer meat
• Melissa Clark's zucchini latkes with grated "Our Garden 2011" zucchini from the freezer

Last but not least a kidney special! Thank you for all of the suggestions. I think we have settled on an attempt at Darina Allen's rendition of scalloped potatoes with steak and kidney. It addresses the potato supply along with the kidneys so we are leaning that way for the time being. What do you think? We will report back as soon as we cook and eat.

3.27.12 Update! The crunchy kale and coconut bowl was superb. We didn't have dino kale so we subbed regular old kale. We also ran out of olive oil midway so used a bit of walnut oil instead, which gaves the leaves a wonderful buttery taste. And we couldn't get big coconut flakes, so we used small ones instead. Anna said they weren't quite the same, but I thought they were pretty great. We will be eating this again and again, for as long as the oat groats hold out.

JULY 31 & SOUR MILK // elspeth

   

We had a sick chicken recently. Before her illness the girls called her "other potato-head." She's the same variety, Americana, as the chicken they like best. But she's different enough from Herself to be distinguishable: she's higher up in the pecking order, for one, so her feathers aren't always ruffled and falling out. And she's always the last to come in from being in the yard, and her head is a bit pointier. She's also a bit of a grump. But she got sick for two days in early July, and now she has a new name: "Sicky Chick."

I'm not sure exactly what was wrong with her. She started sitting around and didn't seem to be eating or drinking or laying much, but on the advice of my friend Victoria I put oregano oil in the chickens water and offered her a bit of sour milk, and two days later she was out again hunting for earwigs. 

The sour milk is a new thing around here. The girls (human girls) don't always finish their milk at the table, and I hate throwing it out. It's important to offer it, I think, but it's raw and unhomogenized and doesn't save well, and so I end up pouring half of it in the compost more often than not. I was reading about something else in Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking the other day, and she offered a solution. She said her household always has a crock of sour milk going: you simply leave raw milk out at room temperature and it thickens up into a cultured dairy substance with a slightly yeasty but not unpleasant smell. The Irish use it to make soda bread, and I suppose I will now too, when I get around to it, as it really is as simple as leaving a jar of milk covered with cheesecloth on the counter. In the meantime Darina instructs that if it gets too sour, a person can feed it to her hens. She's right. They dip into it with their beaks and slurp it up with what appears to be pleasure, although pleasure on a chicken is a difficult emotion to read. 

In the meantime there's summer: the same long days at the restaurant but bigger girls with more of their own agendas. Sally's learned to jump off the dock into water over her head and swim back, and Nora has for the first time demanded a play date "with her own friends." The mulberries are ripe and we're headed blueberry picking tomorrow and planning on jam. The latest Bon Appetít is filled with amazing sounding things like pounded flank steak with zucchini salsa and green gazpacho, and with any luck I'll be eating them all and reporting back soon.

Happy almost August, friends.

Itching to get back

I have a confession to make. Before I cooked for you this weekend, I hadn’t made a single thing, not one thing, for a week. Actually, I rounded down. Secretly, it was more like eleven days.

It was my official Spring Cooking Strike.

I don't know what came over me, but I felt awfully rebellious. The sun came out, the greenhouse warmed up, and I started itching to be outside. I went over to Cahoon Hollow to check out the waves, dreamt big dreams of orderly brick garden paths and neat picket fences and a brand-new raspberry patch, and frittered away a few lovely afternoons planting tomato seedlings and zucchini seeds and summer squash.

We made our way along with a big puddle of lamb shanks and sauce the fishmonger slaved over last Sunday (thank goodness someone was cooking), and some leftover sourdough bread and frozen carrot soup, and a few dinners at friends' houses. But by Friday, the jig was up. And to tell you the truth, I was itching to get back. I had a recipe for blackberry jam cake to try.

I found it in Carole Walter's book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins, & More, as part of my eternal search for the Wedding Cake. It was swirled with nutmeg and cinnamon, just a pinch of cloves, and almost an entire cup of thick, sweet jam. It sounded absolutely perfect for a jumping in endeavor.

It was. It helped with the pantry cleaning that's been going on around here recently—using up some jam, and a good deal of butter and flour and sugar and all that. Plus, it eeked the last drops from a jar of lemon extract, which went into an absolutely scrumptious glaze. It seemed somehow very spring: spicy, sweet, just barely hinting of sprouting grass and bare feet.

Plus, it's just mild enough to pass for a meal at breakfast or a snack come lunch or an after dinner dessert—an awfully important trait these days, when meals have been far and few between.

Happily, I think we may be past that. Or at least we will be, once I finish off this last slice of cake.

BLACKBERRY JAM SPICE CAKE

I think you could swap a cup or so of the all-purpose flour called for in this recipe for whole-wheat with excellent results, but I didn’t try it on the first go-round. Also, the original recipe called for seedless blackberry preserve, which is fine if that’s what you have, but I think chunky whole berries and seeds add far more character to the finished cake.

for the cake:

2 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup buttermilk or sour milk
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 sticks butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
3 large eggs
3/4 cup blackberry jam, preferably homemade
1 teaspoon vanilla

for the glaze:

1 tablespoon butter
2-3 tablespoons milk or cream
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon lemon extract

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease and flour a 9-inch bundt pan; set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, spices, and salt. Combine buttermilk and baking soda, and let side for about 5 minutes.

In a medium-size mixing bowl, cream butter with both types of sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then add blackberry jam and vanilla. Add the flour mixture and the buttermilk alternately, mixing until just combined after each addition.

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan, using a spatula to clean the bowl and then smooth flat the surface of the batter in the pan. (It’s important to take the time to do this, otherwise when you flip your cake and place it on the stand, the bottom will be rounded and it will teeter around instead of sitting flat. Trust me; I found this out the hard way.)

Bake for about an hour, or until the cake starts to pull away from the edges of the pan and the top turns golden brown and begins to crack apart. Let it cool in the pan; in the meantime, melt the butter in a small, heavy-bottomed pot and mix in the other ingredients until smooth. If the icing doesn’t seem runny enough, add a bit more cream. Flip the cake onto a plate or cake stand, and drizzle the icing over it into a thin, ribbon-like pattern. Once the icing has hardened, enjoy with a cup of tea.