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!

Misadventures in Typing: The Ribbon War

I found out the hard way that you really shouldn't need any
of these things to change a typewriter ribbon.

Changing a typewriter ribbon is a pretty simple task.  But unfortunately, this is only true if you have the faintest idea of what you're doing.  This is sort of embarrassing to recount...

I began, as one does, by trying to remove the dried out ribbon that was already in my Corona 4.  I wasn't able to get to the spools, so I assumed that the small screws around the base of the spool housing had to be removed.  This was totally wrong, but it still took me about an hour to figure this out for myself.  The screws on the left side of the typewriter came off without a problem and I was able to remove the cover that protected that spool.  The screws on the right side were more stubborn.  I sprayed them with WD-40, hoping it would help loosen them, then I used a hairdryer, hoping that the heat would make it easier to dislodge them.  Finally, I was able to unscrew one of them, but the other two were really stubborn.  Removing the one screw had afforded me a bit of give, so I tried to wiggle the base back and forth to break up whatever it was that was causing the screws to stick.  At first I wiggled it gently, then a bit harder.  Then a lot harder.  Then the spool cover popped off--without budging the screws.  Apparently, I could have just squeezed the spool cover to get it off.  Good to know.

Having removed both spool covers, I was able to disengage the old ribbon.  Turns out that the old ribbon had spools made of metal, which looked pretty cool, so I decided to keep them.  Now it was finally time to add the new ribbon.  One problem: the new ribbon's spools didn't fit.  Did they send me the right ribbon?  They did.  Did I ask for the right ribbon?  I did.   Weird.

Oh, well.  The new ribbon had spools made of plastic so it was pretty easy to trim them enough to get them to fit.  The covers fit over the scaled-down spool with no problem.  Time to type!

It was so satisfying to watch the letters come out a nice, solid black, but something still wasn't right.  As I typed, the vibrations caused the ribbon to unspool.  Had I trimmed the spools too much?  Then I realized that I also couldn't respool the ribbon without removing the spool case again.  Something was definitely wrong here.

A little internet research revealed that typewriters this old (1925) were incompatible with the more modern plastic spools.  Instead, the ribbon has to be removed from the plastic spools and rewound onto the typewriter's original metal spools (as near as I can tell, not throwing out these metal spools was the only thing I did correctly).  Twenty minutes and two charcoal black hands later and I was finally in business.

As annoying an episode as this was, I still feel like every mistake I make helps me to learn a little more about these amazing machines (though, there's also probably something to be said for researching a task before undertaking it...).  

The Great Swamp

When people think of a swamp, they think of a place thick with vegetation, solitude, stagnant water, and slithery animals.  Happily, the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge has an abundance of all these things.

Placed as it is in the middle of suburban New Jersey, this is an unlikely kind of wilderness.  Though you're not more than a few miles from several major highways, as you explore it, it's easy to imagine that you're the last person in all the world.  Bald eagles, golden eagles, and black vultures carve gyres through the sky.  The trees and wetlands ring with birdsong and the calls of frogs.  Snakes thread their way through branches and turtles blithely paddle among water lilies.

And to think that they almost built Newark Airport here.

I hadn't been to the swamp since the middle of April, and it was remarkable how the forest's canopy had filled in in these few weeks.  Direct sunlight was a rarity in most places.  This made it more difficult to spot snakes, who so love to bask in the sun by the water.

There are more birds now than there were a few weeks ago, but they're easy to hear and hard to see in the thick of the swamp.  This time, I could only spot a sandpiper, mallard, and a few Canada Geese.  A month ago I saw a Great Blue Heron in the distance; skirting above the tops of reeds with its huge wings. I don't have much of a zoom on my camera, but I'd love to see one of them up close.  I found a duck's nest back then, too, with four yellow eggs.  The eggs are gone now, and I hope that means that the ducklings are all happily swimming somewhere among the budding lily pads.

Green Frog (seriously, this is its official name)

Northern Water Snake

Asparagus Spears Wrapped in Prosciutto

I usually have a hand in most of the desserts we make over here, but Mother's Day is an exception.  This is the one day a year that my Dad rolls out his truly excellent cheesecake (if we had this more than once a year, someone would have to roll us out).  But I wanted to contribute to the meal, so I decided to attempt an appetizer we'd never had before.  I wanted to make something different, visually appealing, and, mostly importantly, really simple.  After some Googling, I settled on asparagus wrapped in prosciutto.

Asparagus is one of Mom's favorite vegetables, and who doesn't love prosciutto?  This dish is easy to make, fun to eat, relatively healthy, and it looks great on any table.  There are about a hundred variation of this recipe on the web, so I took them several of them into account and came up with this hybrid.  While the prosciutto gets nice and crispy in the oven, it also tends to get a bit salty.  For a less salty alternative, try wrapping the prosciutto around the asparagus after they've been roasted.

Here's the recipe (and my first attempt at typecasting, so please bear with me):

So typing that up was harder than I thought it would be.  Do you see how the type looks as if it's been cobbled together by a drunken five year old?  Really need to get that fixed.  I think my Corona 4 is in better shape, and I should be receiving a new ribbon for it in the next couple days.  Hopefully my next attempt will look better!

Asparagus is versatile, simple to prepare, and an excellent

accompaniment to many spring and summer meals.

All wrapped up and nowhere to go....except the oven.

Corona 4 (1925)

Ah, buying this one was a completely different experience from what I went through with the Underwood.  But first some details on this important model.

The Corona 4 was incredibly popular when it was first introduced in 1924, and it's easy to see why.  At a glance, its appealing lines are obvious, but this typewriter's technical virtues are even more impressive.  The Corona 4 replaced the (you guessed it) Corona 3.  I have my eyes out for a Corona 3, because it's also a really interesting specimen: while the 3 was able to produce 84 characters, it only had 24 keys.  This meant that most keys had 3 characters on them.  These could be reached by pressing either a shift or double-shift key.  This is fascinating, but you can see why it'd also be pretty annoying.  The Corona 4, with its 42 keys across 4 banks is an obvious improvement and made typing much more efficient.  It's also quite light for a portable of this era, coming in at about 9.5 pounds, which is about 4 pounds lighter than my Underwood (but please don't tell her I said that).  This model was so appealing that Corona claims that its introduction led the market for typewriters to grow to fifty times its original size.

Alas, this particular Corona 4 was not quite so awe-inspiring when I first saw it.  Unlike my Underwood, which arrived via FedEx and in pristine condition, I picked this one up in person from the seller.  When I first opened its battered case I won't say that I gasped in horror, but let's just say that the photos of it had led me to believe it would be in better shape.  The paint was marred with dirt, the type levers wore coats of hardened dust and hair, the platen was streaked with white stains, and the typebars were discolored with the beginnings of rust.

This turned out to be a great thing.

I'd been treating my Underwood like a museum piece--it was so beautiful that I was afraid of damaging it.  I didn't even like touching it anywhere except for its keys for fear of leaving fingerprints.  But, confronted with this dirty Corona, I realized that this was ridiculous.  As beautiful as these machines are, they were meant to be used and they had been built to last.  These typewriter were as old as my grandparents and they could still dutifully carry out the tasks that they were designed for.  I wasn't likely to do anything to them that they couldn't handle.

I began cleaning the Corona as soon as I got home.  First, I used a vacuum to pull out the big chunks of dust, then I went to work on the type levers with a toothbrush.  There was a ton of filth caked in there, but it wasn't too hard to get out.  I used q-tips on the hard-to-reach places, wiped down the metal body with a damp cloth, scrubbed each typebar one-by-one, and used an alcohol dipped cloth on the platen.  It took me about two hours, and while I'd still like to use some aluminium polish on the typebars, I think it turned out really well.

The best part is that the type doesn't have any of the alignment issues that I'm experiencing with my Underwood.  While typing on this machine isn't quiet as smooth as the Underwood, the results on paper are currently far better.  I ordered a new ribbon yesterday, and hope to be typecasting with it soon.

Hmm, the glare here makes it look like the keys are different colors, but in person they're all uniform.

This typewriter's buttery keys go beautifully with its glossy black body

Underwood Portable 4-Bank (1926)

It all started with an Underwood portable.  I can't even remember why I was browsing eBay in the first place; I'd bought a first edition through them years ago, but I rarely went to the site.  And I didn't harbor any particular interest in antiques, so I certainly don't know how I ended up in the vintage typewriter section.  Yet I somehow found myself going through pages of seller postings: spindly Blickensderfers, sleek Coronas, stately Royals.  Then I saw her. Smooth silvered-rimmed glass keys.  The red of a two-tone ribbon stark against her glossy black paint.  What can I say?  It was love at first sight.

I couldn't bear to bid on her (it just felt so tawdry),so I paid the full asking price by clicking on the "buy it now" tab and sealed the deal right then and there.

Impulse control has never been my strong suit, and this isn't exactly the best time in my life to be indulging such things, so buyer's remorse set in pretty quickly.  But that only lasted so long as it took for FedEx to deliver her.  She was even more beautiful in person.  Somehow both sturdy and elegant at the same time.  The faint scent of machine oil follows her wherever she goes.  She's eighty-five years old, but doesn't look a day over twenty-five.  I was incredibly lucky that she was in good condition because I didn't do any of the due diligence that I should have before buying her.  Her typebars need to be slightly adjusted (the lettering is a bit uneven), and she needs a new ribbon, but she's an absolutely gorgeous machine.  I can't wait to get her fixed up and put her to work.

 

Beautiful, shiny, glass keys

Typebars