Edible Books: An Extraordinary Journey of Bravery, Endurance, and Jell-O

 The following is a guest post from my mother, Joan. My parents have a long history of diorama-making and Jell-O sculpting, but a few weeks ago they really outdid themselves. I'll let her tell the story, and I'll only add that there are few things more fabulous than calling up your folks on a routine Saturday to hear that they are deep in rigging a ship with spaghetti and celery threads. My parents are now heroes in my office, and we all have ideas for their next act. (Did I mention I work in the Youth and Family Services Office of a large library system?)

Our first entry in our local library’s seventh annual Edible Book contest was a lot of fun. The object of the event is to represent a book or literary genre with a 100% edible creation. This event is not unique to our library. Here is the blurb from the library’s website:

“The Edible Book Event began in 1999, when co-founder Judith Holmberg, of Santa Monica, California, got the idea during a Thanksgiving dinner with book artists. Since that time it has grown and become an international event. The festival honors French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), famous for his book, The Physiology of Taste, a witty meditation on food. His birth date is April 1st. He wrote:
The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star.

Since 1999, Edible Book events have been held in places as far-flung as Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Russia. In most cities where Edible Book events are held, the sponsors are art centers, academic institutions, restaurants, and book arts spaces. Northampton was one of the first places where a LIBRARY hosted the event!”

*The original edible book event website is: books2eat.com

We decided to merge two of Stan’s favorite things – the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s amazing “Endurance” expedition in Antartica, and Jell-O. Spurred on by expedition chronicler Frank Hurley’s extraordinary photographs, we threw ourselves into our project. We had several days to test the properties of jello and meringue and learn how they coexisted. Lots of science experiments balancing heat and cold and timing.

 We were late to this game, only deciding to participate a week prior to event, so we had to source our ‘extras’ locally. Apparently, one can buy everything in gummi form online, but we were lucky to snag some gummi penguins in the downtown candy store.

Tiny people were challenging. Joan wanted to omit them altogether but Stan insisted that the story was one of human survival and they were important, thus the marzipan weirdly trollish forms.(Katya's note: I came down on my mother's side of this one--the people could have been still inside the boat. When she despairingly described her efforts as looking like 'gingerbread men sitting down,' I sympathized, but our resident Shackleton expert had the final say.)

The shipwreck was Joan’s favorite part, using celery strings to tie the spaghetti masts and rice paper sail onto the carved chocolate hull.

Most fun of all? Watching the kids eat the books at the end of the contest.
Here are some of our favorite other fabulous entries.

Blueberries for Sal! Chocolate cake with rich fudge frosting.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds. No word on what kind of pie it is.

And, for the aaarghh factor, a Catcher in the Rye.
Note the yellow bit on the side, which is a part of the striped cover
of the Little, Brown paperback edition.

(Katya's note: This whole adventure was extremely inspiring to me, and I am hoping to make many future cakes based on my favourite books. Most of my favourite books spell 'favourite' that way...is it any wonder I spell British? Taking all requests for children's book themed party favours.)

Lessons with Kristen II: Petit Fours

Petit Fours (© Jill Frutkin)

 Some of my loyal followers (is anyone still reading this blog? hello? hello?) may be under the entirely mistaken impression that I'm a baking master. After all, I make a lot of cake. And it looks pretty nice on this blog.

I'll admit it, I have some skills, including making things that taste fabulous, and other things that obey the laws of chemistry, but there's one area that I haven't come close to mastering. This area, arguably the most important in pastry, is aesthetics. I make bundt cakes. I make pies, and my three layer cakes aren't a complete disaster, but when it comes to inspired and masterful presentation, most of the baking population of the world leaves me in the dust. Marzipan flowers and shining ribbons? Fondant animals? Elegant composition? Cakes that resemble anything other than cake? This is another world altogether.

The truth is that I'm not that aesthetically gifted in any area of my life. Framed pictures would lean against the wall forever if I were left to my own devices when I move. I can dress myself, but am baffled by daily fashion. I never plate anything.

The upside to this general visual vagueness on my part, though, is that I'm quick to appreciate and admire the efforts of others, to marvel at their superpowers, and, at least in pastry, to be happy to learn from them with minimal ego, and go about squishing out buttercream roses and marzipan flowers with abandon.

Of my many aesthetically gifted friends, there are one or two who share my particular brand of dorkiness*, and some of the most beautiful cakes I've seen in the last few years have come from the hands of Kristen. Like me, Kristen is more or less self-taught, although she decorated cakes professionally for a few years. She's a talented and in-demand actress, but in the quieter parts of her schedule has managed to become an exceptional baker and decorator. (Really, buy her cakes.)  Kristen's work goes beyond rote skill--she's imaginative (my downfall as a baker), and visually inspired by a wide range of beautiful things.  Still, because she's a perfectionist, she isn't satisfied with what she knows, she wants to make her cakes better and better. After talking cake at parties for a few years, we decided it was time to take our combined talents into the kitchen. Modestly, she called it a skillshare (I teach texture and taste, she teaches making stuff pretty), but I think I'm getting the best of the deal. Watching Kristen bake is a revelation--her fingers and her mind move so quickly.

A lovely evening: Ladies Bake  (© Jill Frutkin)

Also she's beautiful and funny and interested in stupid chemistry and makes killer grilled cheese.
Our first meeting went straight to the basics--buttercream roses and yellow cake. For our second, Kristen suggested petit fours. For flower painting and other general prettifying, we brought in Jill, who loves to mess with things and get sticky.

The evening was a much-needed respite from a long week, with Chambord Royale, glittery dust everywhere, and much weepy watching of NBC as a friend's block became the epicenter of a citywide manhunt (no more on this for now, if there's one thing I learned from the news media this week, it's that there's no shame in waiting a goddamned minute to share how you feel and what you know (or don't) about a complex and painful event. I did not learn this by example). In the process, we made some quite lovely little cakes.

Traditional petit fours seem to be some sort of genoise, cut into small squares, sometimes filled with jam or soaked in syrup, and then covered in some kind of frosting--marzipan, fondant, poured fondant. Kristen was interested in trying poured fondant, made from sugar, corn syrup, and water. This kind of icing is easy to make but somewhat difficult to work with, as it hardens VERY fast. For the base, we used this almond cake from Dorie Greenspan's Paris Sweets.

I was rushed and a little scattered in making the cake, so it probably came out a bit more dense than it could have, with a few tunnels, but anything that is mostly almond paste will never be bad. The real work of decorating was concentrated in the marzipan flower making. Using marzipan, food coloring, and some nifty little flower-punchers, we made little flowers, and then Jill painstakingly painted each flower with gold dust and popped dragees in for the centers. I learned how to pronounce dragee. 

The layout.  (© Jill Frutkin)

The finished products were a little haphazard, as we'd all had a bit of cava by that point, but perfectly lovely, no thanks to me. But now I know more things, and I can't wait to see what our next project will be. Meanwhile, my mother was on an entirely different edible art quest--details to come. I'll just say that it involved Shackleton, celery, gummi penguins, and, of course, Jell-O.

I can't say I'll ever be a perfectionist, but I am lucky to share the world people who care passionately, and make good art.

*Can't stop baking.

Princess Miriam Miriam Graduates Yale with a Perfect Party Princess Cake

Readers of this site may know or have gathered that I have a dear friend named Miriam. There she is above with the man who made her, Joel. She lives in New Haven. She is one of my oldest friends, and from the ages of five through twenty-one, we attended school together. A few years ago, in a daring move, Miriam broke from the pack and demanded her own institution of learning. She wasn't shy in her demands, either. For her first school post-Katya, she chose none other than the Yale School of Drama. (Can you even say Yale School of Drama sans italics? Well, I did. So there, Yale School of Drama.)

As anyone could have predicted, this brilliant and driven girl has blazed through an outstanding three years at Yale, and is now, as of last weekend, a Master of Dramaturgy, with hood to prove it. Stacey, Catherine and I were lucky enough to spend the day basking in her mortarboarded glory, as I hope to do for years to come.
Following a few hours of the most pompacious pomp imaginable (did you know that Yale has a sceptre crowned with the head of a mythical beast named 'the Yale?' Or that there is a real bulldog? Or that the forestry school are the most wonderful creatures imaginable, and wore most of the the vegetation on the East Coast on their heads?), we headed out to East Rock for a picnic.
We ate many delicious things, sat around, lolled in the sun, and watched bees, and finished off with Miriam's request, a bright pink princess cake shaped like a large hatbox. (My hands are still stained from the food coloring). For the cake layers, I used a TWD assignment from later in June, Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake. Layered with raspberry preserves, pastry cream, and whipped cream, (which mysteriously and marvelously whipped in the containers on the way up on the train), it was an impressive sight. Not quite as impressive as Miriam's diploma, but we can't all be Yalies.
The Perfect Party Cake was good. I think it failed its audition as a wedding cake, but it was indeed the close to a perfect party, so it was well named. Miriam tells me that the remainder of it was consumed at a ladies party the following day, where its fluffy pinkness was so inspiring that there was painting of nails and braiding of hair, followed by intent discussion of the merits of Sweet Valley High vs. The Babysitters' Club.
I am so proud of Princess Master Doctor-to-Be Miriam, and so glad I could be there.
All photos for this post courtesy of Catherine Wallach.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Sweet-Potato Marzipan Bread Pudding

This week's official Tuesdays with Dorie assignment was something that Dorie refers to as Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding, a classic bread pudding with chocolate melted into the custard before soaking the bread.

I had made it before in both chocolate and non-chocolate forms, and I have finally decided, based on that experience and on a few restaurant encounters, that chocolate bread pudding is not a great match. I think chocolate is great, bread pudding is great, and they shouldn't mix. My ideal bread pudding is still one that I encountered one late night in Cuzco, Peru, of all places.

Cuzco, being the tourist mecca that it is, has a bizarre mix of Irish Pubs, Peruvian nightclubs, and one amazing Scandanavian breakfast place all within walking distance of the town center. It should be off-putting, and I'm not sure how long I could have stood it, but for a few days, Cuzco is strange but satisfying, if overcrowded and more touristy than Disneyland. Anyhow, like Disney (so I'm told), you can pick any cuisine of the world for every meal of the day. Unlike Disney, the options are usually run by expats dedicated to recreating nostalgic flavors for homesick tourists, so the results are usually pretty good. At one such place, Jack's something or other, an English/Irish pub overlooking the main plaza, my sister's British friends demanded that we order individual bread and butter puddings. These took the better part of an hour to arrive, but when they did...perfect, crunchy, custardy, and with creme anglaise to dribble over...

Liana and I have been dreaming about those bread and butter puddings ever since, and I have recreated them (sans creme anglaise, come on people) more than once with varying success, but all in all the experience has given me a soft spot a mile wide for bread pudding, and a corresponding discernment--all bread puddings are not created equal.

So, in my eternal quest to top Jack's in Cuzco, I decided that this week's TWD would skip the chocolate (absolutely wasted to my mind, brings down both elements, but this is purely and obviously a matter of taste) and instead throw in a little marzipan that was lying around. For bread, I used half a loaf of a soft sweet potato sandwich bread that I recently made, toasted in the oven to stale it up.The resulting pudding wound up soaking a little too long while waiting for the granola to get out of the oven (sometimes my kitchen is like an irate roommate situation with everyone waiting for someone else to get out of the bathroom), and so was, in the end, a little more soggy than I like it, without much differentiation between pieces of bread, but the marzipan was excellent, mostly but not entirely melted, and the whole thing was faintly orange from the sweet potato bread, and altogether pretty pleasing. Matt loved it, and at least it's not too terrible for us, as I used skim milk and mostly egg whites.

Thanksgiving Mystery Confection, Part II

Ladies and gentlemen...the Princessetarte!Genoise brushed with a sugar syrup, layered with jam, whipped cream, and pastry cream, and topped with a thin layer of marzipan. It's apparently big in Sweden and parts of the midwest, and they sell a frozen version at IKEA. I've made this twice before (actually twice in the same weekend) and it was a big hit, but this version, via Martha Stewart Living, wasn't quite on the ball. It might have just been me, I was doing bits and pieces of it at odd hours, but the cake was tough and eggy, the pastry cream a touch lumpy, and nothing was quite as it should have been. It was still delicious, though, and so much fun to play with.
This is a terrible picture, but I wanted to give some idea of the interior. It just wasn't that popular--a little wet, a little weird, a little green, and the cake a little too tough. Quite frankly, even I, who loves every component of this cake and have loved previous versions, wasn't too impressed. People ate it, though, even as they muttered about all that cream. The next day we nibbled leftovers but mostly stole the whipped cream out for our pumpkin pie. And it wasn't like we were hurting for desserts. Below is just a small sampling, including chocolate layer cake, meringues by Dottie, and brown butter spoon cookies.The star of the show, though, and probably the only thing we needed, was my mother's glamorous fruit platter.