Chocolate Beet Cake

I prefer numbers that, like vegetable-laden cakes, have many factors. I dislike the significant, holy numbers like 3 and 7, and particularly loathe large prime numbers, which remind me of tax-evading misanthropes. So thank heavens that as of yesterday my age is no longer a middling-large prime number. I'm annoyed that 3 is still a factor, but there's nothing for it but to wait out the whole 8 years before I haven't any odd factors at all -- and make myself a birthday cake.

It's to be a fudgy beet chocolate cake, with a mixing method that's more brownie-inspired than not, and therefore quite simple. Confession: I'm winging it. Like dirty Mrs. Pigeon on the ledge across the alley.

Beet Chocolate Cake

Prepare 2 cups beet puree: boil three medium beets halfway covered in salted water till quite tender. Drain and let cool. Slide off their skins, chop them roughly, and toss them in your favorite pureeing device. I like the Foley food mill because it means I don't have to add water as I would in a wimpy blender.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9" round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment. Flour the sides.

Melt over medium heat:
1/2 lb butter
8 oz. unsweetened chocolate

Pour the chocolate mixture into a large bowl and beat well with:
4 eggs
2 cups sugar

In another bowl, whisk together:
1.5 cups ordinary flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

Gradually fold the flour into the chocolate, alternating with the beet puree.

Pour into the baking pans, smooth the tops, and bake until risen in the center and a toothpick comes out clean, somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes depending on the material of your pans and whether or not you have a kitchen timepiece. Cool briefly before removing the cakes from the pan and letting them cool completely on a rack.

Frost with a (mint?) buttercream or cream cheese frosting. It occurred to me afterwards that some lovely dramatic results could be achieved by putting beet puree in the frosting, too. Gold beet puree! I can't wait to make it again. And you know what? Because of all the eggs, the top has a lovely sheen, which the beets turn maroon. You might even serve the cake plain with whipped cream, or do a minimal see-through drizzled glaze job on it. I didn't allow myself enough time to be inventive more than twice. I curdled the first batch of buttercream by trying to simultaneously add Greek yogurt and answer the door -- at which point I started brandishing my whisk with a mad glint in my eye and everybody scampered till the cake got itself under control.

Grilled Peach Salad

My sitcomly diverse housemates and I have instituted a house meal plan. Monday it's meat and potatoes, noodles dressed in soft eggs and bacon -- from the Croatian. Tuesday the Jewish pre-med hands us a platter of pasta and ketchup and tells us it was a delicacy back in Russia. Actually, he's fond of some fish and greens and things, too. Thursdays the Indian dishes up dal and curry and rice. Wednesdays the Mennonite girl spends all morning at work handling peaches, and winds up with a let's-put-yummy-things-together-and-call-it salad. Last week it was let's-put-yummy-things-together-and-call-it avgolemono.

(Oh, yes, I'm regularly employed now at a health-insurance-providing charming little market down in the Mission. I make cornucopiac cascading displays of peaches. And I get discounts at the creamery across the street).

In designing a menu for my housemates, I have to consider their capacities. The Russian says, "Back in Russia starvation was a delicacy," and chows down on plateful of food like he just did an Ironman in Siberia. Not so far from the truth. His favorite hobbies are going to the gym, running, and wishing he went more places icicle-free women also went. The Indian bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge to and from work every day. Add an extra 1200 calories to both of their portions. The Croatian is slender, rather like a daisy growing on a cloud. It's encouragement to limit my plate accordingly. My meal-planning tactic so far has been to make a regular supper and supplement it with vast quantities of good bread.

Rosemary-Thyme Aioli

Place two egg yolks in a bowl. With a fork, beat in one drop of olive oil. Beat in another. And another. Now a teaspoon. Beat. Now a splash. Beat. When it is stiff and glossy, add a sprinkle of salt, a tablespoon of minced rosemary, a tablespoon minced thyme, and the juice of half a lemon. It should be almost swizzle-able -- if not, thin with lemon juice or thicken with oil.

Grilled Peaches

Dip whole peaches in boiling water for a minute so you can easily slip off their skins. Or peel them. Cut them in half, remove the pit, and place them on a fairly hot grill or one of those skillets with raised lines. When nicely seared, rotate them 60 degrees to make pretty cross-hatching marks. When those marks are well-formed, flip them and repeat. Cover for a bit, then lift them carefully and leave somewhere they can cool.

Grilled Peach Salad

Arrange chunks of cooled grilled chicken legs, sliced grilled peaches, and soaked sunflower seeds or tomatoes or avocado or cheese, all on a pile of rinsed and dried lettuce. Serve with rosemary-thyme aioli.

Cherry Cream Tart

Once I was picking sour cherries with an erstwhile boyfriend. The arrangement -- 2 quarts for the farmer, 1 quart for me -- meant that I had to pick pretty quickly, and I was greedily picking away (plink-plink-plonk), juice running to my elbows (plonk-plank-plink), gnats sticking in the juice (plunk plunk plink), when the boy announced (plink) that he didn't, in fact, like picking cherries (plonk). Unfortunately, I said something that may have included unfavorable references to his D&D character's Constitution, and things fizzled out shortly thereafter.

Another summer, another boy and I noticed my Aunt S. Jean's magnificent cherry tree just as we were about to leave. We wound up extending our visit to pick and pit every cherry within reach, and then capped the day with some Dylan in the ballpark. Dylan was a mess, but we got to study his wizened blue eyes for twitches of sardonic grace. Another boy and I discovered that in Hungary, tart and sweet cherries are two different fruits (meggy and cseresnye). I turned brandied meggyek into pie for Pi Day. He was fiercely loyal to his Rainier cherries, and later we ate them by the fistful in sight of their towering namesake. But I am not really a sweet cherry girl....

This summer, Mama calls me up to tell me how many sour cherry quarts -- nay, bushels -- she's put up, while I hunt and peck to find them in San Francisco at $5 a pound. Sure, I can tolerate the widely-available sweet Bing and Rainier cherries, nibbled juicily fresh off the stem, but they turn to a mealy bland mush when baked. Pie cherries, though, positively ripen under heat, getting glossy, translucent, and breathtakingly intense. Withstanding the oven's crucible -- now that's a winning trait. And cherry pie is my favorite flavor of heaven.

But what's to be done when a pie's worth of sour cherries cost more than $10? Stretch them out over pastry cream and a rich shortbread crust.

Cherry Cream Tart

Prepare and bake a 9" sweet shortbread tart crust
Prepare a 2-cup batch of pastry cream

When the crust and pastry cream are cool, spoon the pastry cream in the tart shell. Rinse and pit 2 cups sour cherries. Pitting is most easily done with a paperclip. In a small saucepan, whisk together 4 T. sugar and 1 T. cornstarch. Drizzle in 4 T. red wine, blend well, and add the cherries. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly until everything thickens, turns clear, and boils. Remove from heat and stir in a splash of bourbon. Immediately spoon on top of pastry cream. Chill till set. Avoid transporting on public transit during rush hour.

Serve with soft dollops of lightly-sweetened whipped cream.

Pastry Cream

Put 2 cups milk over medium heat and bring to a frothy (not boiling) scald. Meanwhile, heat a skillet full of water. Beat 2 egg yolks in a small bowl. In an enamel or steel bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup sugar and 2 T. cornstarch (or 3 T. flour). Pour the scalded milk into the flour mixture in a thin stream, whisking constantly. Place the bowl in the simmering water and stir till thickened, 5 minutes or so. Pour a cupful of the hot milk mixture into the egg yolks, whisking well, and pour back into the hot milk. Keep it in the simmering water, stirring constantly, until even more thickened, 5 minutes or so. Remove from heat and stir in 2 T. butter and 2 tsp. vanilla. Chill with tinfoil or a plastic bag pressed directly against its surface.

Sun Bread

I'm taking advantage of the rare summer sun in San Francisco to claim my share of solar energy today. With a nice large batch of sprout bread ready for the oven, I'm setting aside a few flat cakes to bake on the roof of my apartment building. Photo updates throughout the day.

Look! Started at 8 o'clock, by 10 o'clock they've already risen significantly. I confess, it never ceases to surprise me that bread without yeast or baking powder will rise unaided.

By noon, the breads have risen a little more and deepened in color. I'm hesitant to flip them yet, as their warm, soft undersides make better contact with the hot steel tray than their crusty, rounded tops.

2 o'clock. Foiled by the ocean, which has spun itself up into foggy bits swirling above our heads. No more sunshine. To the oven!

4 o'clock. It's a tricksy ocean. Should have had faith in the sunshine.

Peach Apricot Cobbler

Or, The-Late-Bird-Gets-the-Bargain Cobbler. Or, It's-a-Party-in-the-Biscuit-Tent-and-Drupes-Are-Invited.

As I was taking the de-escalator to the train today, a stranger just leaving the farmer's market asked me for the time, and then launched into a peach paean. He was a photographer, he explained. "You can slice them, and watch the droplets of juice bead on the cut." I was already feeling a bit sorry for myself, being in such a remarkable hurry to walk somebody's dog that I couldn't stop to browse the overflowing market stalls for myself. I should've, though. The train tunnel was clogged for the better part of an hour, a polished intercom lady-voice repeating over and over that the N was arriving in 2 minutes.

The poor dog was crossing its legs and doing the dance by the time I arrived. On the way back, I was terribly afraid the market would be packed away entirely. All those peaches and their beads of juice. Maybe there were pie cherries, too? Fruit on the brain, I skidded to a halt right at the toes of a 7-foot cop asking for the ticket I hadn't purchased. I didn't hide my infinitely-flusterable calico-two-shoes propitiating nature, and after a gentle reprimand, the guard let me on my way, with assurances that I really needn't worry this time.

I ran up the escalator with my adrenaline rush to find that the market was closing up. Vendors hawked their last-minute bargains, and I swooped in to snag large dollar-bags of peaches, apricots, and cherries. After eating half a dozen of my juicy drupes over the kitchen sink, I cast about for a good fruit-dump recipe for all the ripe stuff I couldn't reasonably consume in one sitting. I struck on Fannie Merritt Farmer's peach cobbler recipe in the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, notable for its use of an egg for thickening.

Peach Cobbler

1 egg, well beaten
2/3 cup sugar
3 cups sliced peaches (or apricots)
1/4 cup butter
Baking Powder Biscuit (one standard biscuit recipe)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine egg, sugar, and peaches. Pour into buttered 9" baking dish. Dot with butter. Cover with biscuits (I like making rhombi and arranging them radially). FMF and her BCSCB don't give a timing, but bake till the biscuits are golden and the peaches are bubbly. She recommends serving it with Butterscotch Sauce, Hard Sauce, cream, Hot Orange Sauce, Lemon Sauce, Soft Custard, or whipped cream flavored with cinnamon and sugar. I shall have to have mine plain like the holes-in-my-stockings ticketless pauper I am.

Update: Reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup or less if you have cusp-o'-ripeness ambrosial fruit (which is, of course, the ONLY kind you should have). I baked my cobbler a little past golden, as the biscuits just weren't getting done. I do like a nice boggy-bottomed biscuit on my cobbler, but it ought to be soggily saturated with fruit juices, not underdoneness. Especially because I used some rather sketchy whey and sour milk for the biscuits, which is only acceptable if they bake through entirely.

Drunk Raisin Muffins

When I put raisins in my favorite oatmeal muffins last time, I found them rather dry. Dry like a town with no cheer. The solution? Get your raisins drunk and send them stumbling into the batter. Rather like making mulled wine -- with the spotlight on the raisins, not the half-drunk cabernet that spent several days on the counter -- I put 1.5 cups of red wine in a little saucepan with 1 cup raisins, 2 sticks of cinnamon, and 3 cloves. I brought it to a simmer and let it sit while I made the batter.

For the batter, combine 2 cups flour, 3 cups rolled oats, 2 tsp. baking soda, and 1.5 tsp. salt. In another bowl, mix 3/4 cup brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tsp. vanilla, and 2.5 cups whey (or other sour dairy product, like yogurt or buttermilk). Pour the wets into the dries, mix well, and let sit until the oats soak up the moisture. Just before baking, drain the raisins from the wine (pick out the cloves and cinnamon), and fold them into the batter. If your wine is like mine, its raisin-bathing labors will have only improved it. Spoon the batter into greased muffin cups and bake in a 350 degree oven for 25 minutes or till golden on top. Makes 12.