Mille Feuille Crêpes Cake

You can find the recipe for this cake here.  It's quite an impressive looking dessert and it tasted great, but I'm not sure it was quite worth the amount of time and energy it took.  

This dessert requires a ridiculous number of eggs.

At this point, I'm pretty much an expert crepe maker.

We dressed up the cake with a nice powdered sugar design.

First Repair!

The Royal drew first blood, but in the end, I was victorious.

This little rubber thingie (technical term) and its brother were the culprits.

Almond-Cherry Loaf Cake

This recipe is based on one of Nigella Lawson's.  The main difference being that it uses fresh cherries. You can find the recipe here at the Paris Pastry blog (which has a ton of really tasty-looking recipes). 

Cherries are awesome.

The recipe told me to roll the cherries in flour before adding them to the dough.  I'm not
sure why.  Maybe to make sure they kept most of their juices?

Brown Sugar Meringue

After poking around on the internet a bit, I found out that you're not even supposed to attempt making meringue on a humid day (or if you've recently boiled water or run the dishwater or laundry).  So maybe I was wrong to blame the sogginess on the ganache.  A good excuse to try this again!

Some people are intimidated by ganache, but it's nothing more than chocolate and warm cream.

To make the base of the meringue, all I did was whisk the egg whites until they formed soft mounds then
slowly added one cup of brown sugar.  This only took about three minutes in total, but some of the brown
sugar didn't entirely dissolve, so the uncooked mixture piped onto the baking sheets a bit unevenly.

Poached Rhubarb with Elderflower Sabayon

I tweaked this dessert a bit, but it's based on a recipe you can find here.  The sabayon is quite an interesting element; it seems like it would be nice paired with other fruits or even drizzled over a simple cake.  Its warm, whisked, egg yolk foundation stikes me as a pretty versatile base for any number of other flavored accompaniments.

Poaching fruit is a little tricky because it's so easy to overcook.

I have really bad luck with custards, so I was a little wary about attempting a sabayon,
but it ended up being pretty easy.  I just whisked four egg yolks, two tablespoons of sugar, and three
 tablespoons of St. Germain over a water bath until it tripled in size.  I bet this rich, foamy topping
would be really nice over fresh berries.

As far as floral liqueurs go, St. Germain is quite a stately one.

Vintage Royal Century

This case is in fantastic condition, looks really cool, and snaps right over the typewriter.

These keys appear to be plastic. Typing on them is much easier than typing on my older manuals

Chocolate Stout Birthday Cake

The only disappointing thing about this recipe is that the icing and cake are so dark and chocolaty that it's a bit difficult to photograph in a way that does it justice.  But don't just take my word for it, you can find the recipe here and try it out for yourself.

Yes, that's A LOT of butter.

Augustus Gloop has nightmares about this cake.

This is supposed to be a three-layer cake, but the recipe made so much batter  that we decided
to split it into two smaller cakes.  Believe me, between the rich batter and the ganache
 icing, two layers more than satisfies. 

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake

While typing this it occurred to me that while there are obviously alignment issues with the Underwood's typebars, I think there's also a problem with the platen.  It doesn't seem like it's gripping the paper tight enough, so the vibrations from hammering at the keys makes the lettering even more askew.  I'll have to test this...

Anyway, this really is a nice, light summer cake with a very fine crumb.  You can get Melissa Clarke's recipe here.

Not only is rhubarb super easy to grow, it also comes back every year.

The batter was nice and buttery and the lemon zest adds a really nice dimension.

Pre-flip, all the sweet rhubarby goodness stews at the botton of the pan.

(Finally) Spring in the Berkshires

Delicate fern fronds unfurl elegantly.

What are now forests were once cultivated fields and cleared pastures.
Ancient stone walls still crisscross the landscape that the trees have since reclaimed.

When fog rolls in on cold spring mornings,
the mountain takes on a Jurassic feel.

It's Electric: Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12

The obsessive compulsive in me really cringes at the typos and misplaced apostrophes in this typecast, but all these errors are organic to the process.  With these errors included, the page itself becomes like a moment trapped in amber.  In practicing my typing I've also realized how dependent I've become on spellcheck and auto correct.  When typing on a computer, I sometimes don't even bother to capitalize the first word in a sentence because I know that Word will take care of it for me.  Conversely, writing on a typewriter forces me to be more mindful of what I'm doing.

These keys call for a light touch.  The Coronet is also the first of my typewriters that has a numeral 1
and an exclamation point.  Still have to find that backspace, though...

Part of the typewriter's body can be lifted off to replace the ink cartridge,
so you can really get into the belly of the beast.

Got to love the 1970s styling!

The Focaccia Also Rises

You can find the full recipe for Jim Lahey's focaccia here.  And I cannot recommend MY BREAD more highly.  Before I heard about Lahey's incredibly simple no-knead recipes I had it in my head that baking bread was a huge ordeal best left to professionals, but that's not remotely the case.  Filling your kitchen with the incomparable aroma of fresh bread and then finally pulling a perfectly browned loaf out of your own oven is both surprisingly easy and hugely rewarding.  

Most breads are built upon a seductively simple combination of flour, yeast, salt, and water,  but,
interestingly, this focaccia also calls for the puree of a boiled potato.
This potato keeps the dough nice and light.

 Dimpling the dough and sprinkling it with olive oil before
it goes in the oven helps give this bread its unique crust.

You can top the focaccia with pretty much anything you can think of.  I garnished this one with a simple
combination of Roma tomato slices, fresh rosemary, sea salt, and a dash of black pepper.

Yum!