What a good time for my birthday to come around.
Ideas. Well, the main idea is to bake something wonderful in itself and then, when it’s almost finished baking, sprinkle it with that absurdly expensive coarse French mineral sea salt. I have never owned this salt. But now I’m going to get some for my birthday.
The great charm of the macaroon was the way the salt was partly dissolved into it, making a sort of sweet-salty crunchy crust. I think to do this you can’t salt it before baking because the salt would dissolve completely, but you can’t wait until it’s completely baked because the salt would just roll off. So you pick your moment and sprinkle and hope.
So, some ideas…
- Salted truffle brownies.
- Margarita Tart. (Salted lemon bars cooked in a tart pan. Substitute Grand Marnier for some of the lemon juice.)
- Salted truffle brownies, cooked as cupcakes, with a sea salt caramel I the middle.
I went to Taylor’s Market, where you can get things like organic veal shanks and chocolate/rose gelato and jewel-like produce. It’s within walking distance, but I never go because of the prices. Of course they had the French sea salt, but it was fourteen dollars for a small jar. I couldn’t do it, not even for my birthday. And I remembered seeing some pretty nifty salt an Ono’s, the Japanese market, which is where I dragged Enzo last Saturday.
Ono’s is modern and swank and expensive. Everything is small and exquisitely packaged, and all the product information is in Japanese characters, beautifully abstract to the unreading eye. We found thirteen kinds of salt including The Salt, Practical Edition in a small hexagonal box tied with a red ribbon and stating in English “Three years stored solar salt of tidal flat.” That cost six dollars, and we bought it. There was also an impractical edition, which cost more than the French salt at Taylor’s, simply called The Salt.
(A few days later)
Forget the salt. I’ve decided on carrot almond cake and chocolate amaretto cake, both from Marcella's Italian Kitchen. Since I’m about to be in my forties, instead of just forty, I think I’m mature enough to handle two cakes. Besides, I’ve wanted to try both cakes for years, and the years are passing. And as a midlife crisis type gesture, two cakes seems pretty tame. It’s better than two girlfriends.
Tomorrow is my birthday, and my first present is that Enzo and Teresa are doing to clear out of the house this afternoon, so that I can come home early and bake and listen to music and maybe have a glass of wine. Hurrah!
(next day)
I forgot what it was like to cook ALONE, alone, beautifully alone, licking both beaters all by myself, thank you, and without Enzo running to get his snow plow truck to drive through the flour. I went over the recipe a few times, made a few changes: more chocolate, more salt. (The recipe had no salt, obviously a clerical error, and yes I used my three years stored solar salt of tidal flat.) I considered adding baking powder, because I’ve never made a cake leavened only by egg whites, but I decided to trust Marcella on that one.
Anyway, here’s the recipe. My variations are in parenthesis.
½ pound butter softened to room temperature, plus 1 tablespoon for smearing the baking pan
1 cup granulated sugar
A bowl for beating egg whites—preferably, but not indispensably, a copper bowl washed with vinegar and salt, rinsed thoroughly, and dried. (Yeah right.)
5 eggs (also at room temperature)
½ cup flour
4 ounces amaretti ground to a powder in the flood processor
2 (3 or even more) ounces semisweet baking chocolate, grated fine
(¾ teaspoon salt—less if using salted butter.)
(1 tablespoon Amaretto liqueur plus a little overflow)
I don’t have to put in all the directions, do I? You know how to make a butter cake, which is all this is: cream the butter and sugar, separate the eggs and add the egg yolks one at a time, beating each one in; combine all the dry stuff and add it to the butter-egg yolk mixture a little at a time, beat the egg whites, fold them in. Bake.
The cake was a little burned, so I trimmed off the edges, and if the test of a great cake is that even the burned edges are delicious, then this is a great cake. I frosted it with whipped chocolate ganache from The Cake Bible, which is pretty much bittersweet chocolate whipped cream.
It’s a dense, low-lying cake, and covered with messy light brown whipped cream, it looked like a cow paddy, according to Teresa. But it did not taste like a cow paddy. Almondy and chocolatey and buttery and not too sweet and just salty enough, and the frosting was chocolate on legs.
I didn’t have time to make the carrot cake. Next year. Or maybe next week.
Happy birthday to me.
