Welcome Spring

I find it both pleasant and poignant that spring arrives in the city before making its way to Westchester.  New York City is about 30 miles south of Ossining (where we live) and generally is about two to three weeks ahead of our “blooming” schedule.  I’m always happy to see the flowers in the city, but would rather them be showing off in our backyard.  There is something exciting about the wait paired with knowing what's to come.  It's as if the city landscape is showing me a teaser trailer for the blockbuster of flowers heading my way.  But I’m ready for it to be here now!!!  (A similar feeling I imagine Siena has when she is ready for more milk).

A happy part of spring’s return are the gardens I’m greeted with on my morning commute to work.  Along Houston St., on grounds owned by NYU, is a lovely space planted with a grove of forsythia bushes.  Aside from a few crocuses popping up here and there nearby, these bright yellow, glorious beings herald the breath of fresh air heading our way.  When the morning sun strikes the opaque, golden petals the light reflects back into the rest of the environment making it feel warmer and more lush, less brown and barren.  The city transforms from a cement and brick “working world” into a thriving and exciting place when the trees and bushes start to bloom.  There are many parks and gardens dotting Manhattan and one generally only need to travel a block or two to find some green space.  New York City planners weren’t fools.

Outside, daffodils have started playing their part along with hellebores and green leafed structures soon to be lilies, and I continue to threaten to go out and clean up our garden from last year's remaining leaves.  We’ve only had once nice weekend so far and I was able to make it out, but since then it’s returned to the bitter Ides of March, making me want to stay in doors and snuggle on the couch with a baby.  In spite of my efforts, plants are doing their own thing just the same.  Matted leaves are poking up in tented areas revealing tulips hiding out underneath and the first of my very own daffodils smiled their shining faces out to the world a couple of days ago.  Spring is like clockwork, whether I’m there or not, things are going to bloom.  I of course want to be able to assist and encourage the growth, but Mother Nature has style all her own and won’t let me down whether I get out there tomorrow or two weeks from now. 

I find that part of the excitement of garden clean up falls under the umbrella of therapy.  Much like the feeling many of us get from cleaning the house, cleaning up the garden, seeing an area go from “dirty” to clean is healing.  The cobwebs of your mind are swept away as you pick and poke through the dried grasses and vines, looking for shoots and emerging bulbs, carefully rooting around, so incredibly focused to the point of everything else falling away, ceasing to exist, leaving only you and your garden together in a deep bonding moment.  This may sound a little too philosophical for non-gardeners, but if you are someone who raises plants in any kind of focused way then you know what I’m talking about.

In looking for baking inspiration this week I definitely took cues from the world outside my window and along the walk to work, but I also looked to my beloved friend caffeine.  Anyone who has ever had a baby must understand the mental state to which I have arrived.  Siena is now ten weeks old (pushing 11) and is doing beautifully.  She is really starting to smile, have the occasional laugh and is definitely on the road to talking with her strange cooing sounds mingled with what sounds like a consonant and/or vowel from time to time.  It’s this first round of communication that has left me more in love with her than ever before and is making the lack of sleep more bearable.

As time wears on and I continue to have broken sleep, I find I’m both more creative and less patient with the rest of the world.  Though Siena is sleeping quite a bit and luckily has been a good sleeper so far, it’s that continual break in sleep I imagine to be the culprit of my demise.  I’m sure there are parents out there who get/got a lot less sleep than I do and can’t really sympathize with what I’m expressing, but really all I mean to say is that I’ve upped my coffee consummation considerably since Siena came on the scene.

The single morning cup no longer sustains me.  I need at least two to get things headed in the right direction and I most definitely need another large one late in the afternoon to finish out my day.  I’m sure many holistic folks out there would not agree with my methods and might suggest trying to forgo caffeine all together, letting my body get back to a natural wakeful cycle, but the problem with that is, “I like coffee”.  I like everything about it:  the taste, the smell, and the bonding act of going to a coffee shop with friends.  It’s both my mom’s and my favorite flavor of ice cream, it’s the special thing in chocolate desserts that make them come alive and by golly I downright want it in my life.  Is it another unhealthy addiction in a long line of unhealthy addictions?  Sure, but if I can’t drink coffee and eat butter then I’m not sure life is worth living. 

Having said that, I went on a coffee binge of a different sort.  Instead of finding the local coffee shop nearest my current location, I turned to the Internet and began searching for coffee related desserts.  Aside from ice cream and traditional coffee cakes, I wasn’t coming up with many desserts having coffee as their main focus.  It tends to be a component ingredient; often finding it’s way into sweets via a couple teaspoons or tablespoons of instant espresso powder.  Though I do like the powder, it’s not what I had in mind.  The problem was that everything I found with coffee wasn’t quite what I was in the mood for.  There were tortes (Passover appropriate) and buttercreams, but I wasn’t really feeling anything I ran across.  Chocolate did sound good, as it always does, but I didn’t want to go the full on brownie route with coffee mixed in for good measure. 

As it happened, it always does, I bookmarked several things that sounded good.  I kept returning to a Brown Sugar and Chocolate Chip Pound Cake with Maple-Espresso Glaze recipe I found on epicurious.com because it sounded good and contained ingredients I already had on hand…no trips to the grocery store needed.  I was watching Siena that night while Brian was out and there was no way I was going to wake her up at 9:00pm for a quick jaunt out for specialty ingredients.  This cake has buttermilk in the recipe and I had an opened carton sitting in the refrigerator from the bread I made last week.  There is nothing I hate more than using 1/2 cup of buttermilk in some recipe and then not finding a need for it until three months later when I discover the carton in the fridge, desperately in need of tossing down the drain.  There is nothing delicious about thick, over-ripe buttermilk.  But I digress…

The reason I found this coffee cake in the first place, in spite of the word coffee being in the name, was the glaze.  There are a couple of tablespoons of the aforementioned instant espresso powder as a key component, and it came up in the recipe search engine.  Coffee cake with a maple coffee glaze and some chocolate chips thrown in for good measure (and having all the ingredients in my pantry at the moment I was ready to bake) converged in this week’s Fabulous Pastry…or coffee cake as it were.

Coffee cakes are certainly simple enough to make.  They are generally a one mixing bowl wonder.  Prep the ingredients, mix them in order and it’s relatively fool proof, but how to make it more interesting was my conundrum.  I make coffee cake rather frequently.  As I look back over the past year and a half, there are several which have made their way across my lips and down to my hips.  They generally are pretty, solely because of the Bundt pan I bake them in.  Add a little glaze to the impression left by the design of the pan and you have a beautiful brunch treat for your friends…but I’ve been down that road before and feel like I’ve thoroughly explored it, at least for the time being. 

I felt a need to reinvent coffee cake if you will, take it to a slightly more elevated and elegant place.  Thus I present to you the Spring Awakening/Solid Gold Dancers Coffee Cake.  A little glitz, a little glam and a whole lot of spring go into making this dense and shiny wonder.

I started out by making the basic cake recipe, no changes for once, but put it in my 12 cup Angel Food Cake pan instead of the Bundt.  My desire was to get more of a plateau shape, an even surface with which to decorate and pour the glaze.  The second step was the glaze itself.  In my mind it was going to be a somewhat muted, pastel yellow reminiscent of the petals of pale daffodils, but what came out in reality was something very different.  A traditional glaze for coffee cake is usually confectioner’s sugar and water.  With the addition of a little yellow food coloring, this would make the imagined yellow glaze, but the recipe called for instant espresso as well as maple syrup in the icing.  Once I mixed them into the confectioner’s sugar I began to see more of a “brown” tone happening to the color scheme.  Not one to be put off so quickly, I went ahead and added enough yellow food coloring to kill a horse.  The result was a lovely shade of gold.

Gold can go one of two ways in my humble opinion:  bright and shiny or “baby poop” ochre.  Let’s just say I wasn’t shooting for the latter direction and resorted to my magic tin of tricks.  This tin is what I refer to as my decorating tool kit.  Inside are different tips for piping bags, gel colors, regular food coloring, a sturdy paintbrush and several different colors of luster dust.  Recently I pulled out the gold dust for the Sunshine Shortbread, but in this application I sprinkled it like glitter over the gold glaze (as opposed to painting it on).  The dust adhered nicely to the drying sugar coating and imbued it with a lustrous shine.

Admittedly, the color and texture of the glaze were a happy accident, but aren’t those sometimes the best kind?  All that was left was to fill the center with fresh cut flowers from the garden.  I discovered that a small glass container, once housing a votive candle, fit nicely into the center hole left from the cake pan, but I would imagine a deep shot glass would work just as well. This I filled with water and turned into a miniature vase for forsythia, crocus and fern leaves.  The bright yellow and deep purple popped off the gold glaze with sunny brilliance and I couldn’t have been more pleased.  The cake made me want to pin a corsage to my head and shake my rump on the dance floor, but I made do with a small dance in the kitchen with my cats as a humble audience…okay, they were embarrassed for me.

With a little food coloring and a little sparkle, anyone can pull off this cake.  It truly is one of the most simple, humble baked goods I’ve created in a long time and with a few quick and easy steps turned into something I would happily serve at any festive get-together or party.  Our friends George and Rachel came up on the day it was baked and were able to share in the caffeine inspired naughtiness while visiting with Miss Siena.  George and Rachel are also expecting a baby girl and we were able to pass on some of the things Siena has outgrown.  It seems too soon that she could have gotten bigger, but the proof is in the pudding (or the diapers) and she doesn’t fit into her petite newborns anymore.  I blame all that milk she keeps requesting.  It’s just who I am.