The only thing better than discovering in your fridge the ingredients for a fantastic winter salad is discovering in your freezer the ingredients for a fantastic summer tart in the middle of March. I was looking for the wheat bran I use to make my weekly bread, when I jackpot and happened upon a bag of frozen blueberries in the very back of my freezer. I thought I’d run out of summer berries long ago, but no! I still had some blueberries left (along with a litle bit of sweet corn and a couple precious strawberries — stay tuned.)
When frozen blueberries present themselves, you make something crusty and flaky and oozy with fruit juices: a tart or a pie, either will do. In this case, I’d been eyeing the blueberry tart in cornmeal crust from a new addition to my cookbook shelf: Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox’s The Craft of Baking, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to try it.
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As you probably already know, I’ve had a pretty big food week. For one thing, I managed to roast a whole fish in a big pile of salt. I also made 2 loaves of bread, and 4 pizzas — pizzas that actually tasted as good as something I could buy, which has never happened before. If that’s not enough, I decided to take advantage of my already gutsy week and try a Thomas Keller recipe. People, the sky is falling.
Thomas Keller is the renowned chef of The French Laundry, Bouchon Bakery, and a handful of other spots. He’s certainly one of the most famous chef in America. He’s known for his particularity, his precision, and his meticulousness. Every recipe of his — even the simplest, most elemental — consist of countless steps, involve several pans, and have you running around the kitchen in a mental state that’s pretty much the opposite of the low-key way I like to cook. See why I was nervous?
If you read Carol Blymire, you probably think TK recipes are no biggie. After all, she made a whole book of them. And now she’s working her way through the only cookbook I can think of that seems more intimidating than Keller’s: Alinea at Home, Grant Achatz’s documenting of the molecular-gastronomy-heavy dishes at his Chicago restaurant Alinea. Not all of us are as adept at guestimating weights in grams, using products like methocel F50, and generally rocking out. But we’ve gotta start somewhere, now don’t we.
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There’s a certain amount of risk involved in cooking. Many times, I spend all day prepping for a recipe that’s a total clunker. I’ve shelled out lots of cash on “novelty” ingredients that end up being nothing special. And I’ve definitely made my share of rookie mistakes that, if I were the type of normal cook that makes something more than once, probably wouldn’t happen nearly as often. Yes, D thinks I’m crazy. She’ll never understand why I’d pass up chocolate chip cookies to try my hand at chocolate-dipped hazelnut shortbread. Or why, instead of making my tried and true recipe for lemon curd, I insist on blowing 2 whole meyer lemons on a whole-lemon tart that was so saccharine, so unpleasantly textured, I nearly threw it out. But such is the life of a blogger: constantly in search of the next internet-worthy recipe, making plenty of duds along the way.
So imagine my delight when my hard work actually paid off. This wasn’t just any old success. On the contrary: it was a complete and total knockout.
I’ve been wanting to roast a whole fish for quite some time now. I’d been told it wasn’t particularly difficult, but pfff — it’s a whole fish! With a tail! And eyeballs! And it’s a whole fish. You get the point. But after a rough week at work, I decided hell! If other people can do it, why can’t I? And thus began the most fearless, the most exciting, and by far the most successful adventure I’ve ever had in my kitchen.
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I rarely make the same thing twice. If something truly blows me out of the water — as this did — I’ll make something like it again. Something like it, mind you; never identical. I like recipes, but I don’t really like following them. I’d rather just take an old idea and riff on it. That’s what I do best. So when I take out my pen, when I actually skip over to the fridge every ten seconds to scribble how much maple syrup I’m pouring into the bowl, you better believe whatever it is I’m making will absolutely knock your socks off.
Such is the case with this cake.
Chalk it up to the weather, but I’ve been on a serious maple kick recently. I guess it all started two Sundays ago, when I was whacked square across the face with the world’s biggest craving for maple syrup. This was no small itch: I’m serious, people. I just wanted to shmear maple syrup all over my face. I could’ve tipped the jug and drunk it straight. It was that kind of craving.
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