Food Friday: Sweets to the Sweet

It’s Friday the 13th, gentle readers. Be careful. Tread lightly. Watch out for ladders, black cats, cracks in the sidewalk and broken mirrors. And please remember that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

I walked around the big fancy grocery store yesterday, dodging the folks setting up a multiple table display of massive $72 bouquets of red roses. I was already grumpy that Trader Joe’s didn’t have any more sweet $3 bouquets of daffodils, so imagine how indignant I was about this gaudy array of vividly colored excess. I was not feeling very loving. Hostile and overwhelmed might explain the little black rain cloud that followed me. Luckily, there was a special on romaine lettuce hearts, so I was mollified once my attention had been diverted.

Give me that humble, fragrant daffodil posy, which will bloom for a week in a jelly jar on the kitchen window sill. I don’t have a vase big enough, or important enough, for a $72 bushel of cut roses. I think I would have to buy a gleaming baby grand to properly welcome such excess into our home. How could anyone think that an enormous, oversized, cellophane-wrapped armful of long-stemmed roses represented love? The handful of daffodils, which looked plucked from one’s own garden, seemed so much more genuine to me: at least Wordsworth’s atmospheric poetry that comes to mind, and not Hallmark schmaltz.

But, back to business. Food. To share a food love token with your sweetheart, you must consider what kind of Valentine celebrant you are. Chocolate or Conversation Hearts? Chocolate covered cherries or Ferrero Rocher? Do you even like dessert? Is it homemade, store-bought, ordered from the dessert cart, frozen Sara Lee poundcake topped with ice-cream, Betty Crocker chocolate cake, a chocolate eclair from the bakery, a York Peppermint Patty from the Wawa, a Whitman’s Sampler (for irony) snatched up at grocery store? Do you order food online? DoorDash or Goldbelly? Have you already ordered something extravagant for breakfast from Russ & Daughters? Or are you trotting over to Dunkin for some fresh glazed doughnuts first thing?

I do love some fancy excesses. Whenever we get out of town I like to wander through food halls, and linger over the bakery displays. I find the most amazing creations. This week’s illustration is a cake display at an Eataly in Boston. Imagine having the imagination to whip up a batch of purple butter cream! And then to pipe it onto a layer cake, and then embellish it further with judiciously placed blueberries! Just thinking about that sort of creativity is exhausting, so I remember anew that I am lucky that my family thinks a shiny ganache covered Boston cream pie is the height of sophistication, and decadence, and is always suitable: birthdays, Valentine’s Day, college graduations, christenings. Find your significant other, and then test all the chocolates you can find.

Here are some of my chocolate suggestions:
We finally found the family birthday cake when, after years of experimentation and many failures, we discovered that I can doctor a yellow cake mix, and doll it up with custard and the glaze from the flourless chocolate cake recipe, and it resembles a Boston Cream Pie. I quiver just thinking of all the calories.

I line a round pan with a circle of parchment paper, and pour about 2/3 of cake batter into the pan, which I then place on top of a cookie sheet, and bake according to directions. After the cake has baked, and cooled, I slice it into two rounds, using a long bread knife so I don’t hack the cake to bits.

Or you can default to Jell-O Instant Vanilla Pudding. But, instead of using the milk as is called for in the instructions, use heavy whipping cream. It whips up in about half the time, and is rich and thick as mashed potatoes. Artfully trowel on a good thick layer of the Créme Pat (or the vanilla pudding) on the bottom half of the pie and then carefully place the top half onto the filling.

You cannot change one speck of this magic chocolate glaze! I have been using this glaze since 1989. The cookbook always falls open to this page. It is covered with crumbs and splatters.

3 ounces bittersweet chocolate
3 ounces butter, softened
1 tablespoon brandy or bourbon
Melt the chocolate and butter together over a low heat, stirring until smooth. Stir in the brandy. Pour over the top of the cooled cake, smoothing with a spatula, and let it drip down the sides.

Another family favorite, also suitable for Valentine’s Day, is a flourless chocolate cake. It is easy, practically fool-proof, beauteous to look at, and never fails to impress. Especially when strewn with a handful of plump raspberries and great lashings of whipped cream.

Flourless Chocolate Cake Recipe

5 ounces bittersweet chocolate
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1 stick of butter, softened
5 large eggs, separated
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a springform pan with parchment paper – it is never pretty. Like hospital corners on the bed, I can never do this tidily.

• Melt the chocolate and butter together in a pan, over a low heat, stirring to blend. Be careful not to rush this process! Set aside to cool.
• Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until thick and pale yellow in color. This can take up to 5 or 6 minutes. Add the vanilla.

Clean the beaters, and now whip the egg white with the salt until they are stiff.
Fold the chocolate mixture into the yolks, then fold in about one third of the egg white, mix gently. Then fold in the rest of the whites, mixing until there are no more white streaks.

• Pour the mixture into the springform pan and bake for about 35 to 45 minutes, test with a toothpick to be sure cake is done. The cake will rise gloriously while baking, and suddenly crash and collapse when you take it out of the oven. Do not worry about this! It will be deliciously and deliriously luscious.
• Cool the cake for about 10 or 15 minutes. Flip the cake onto a cooling rack. Remove the bottom of the pan and the parchment. Let it cool completely before adding the glaze.

Glaze (you know this one by now)

3 ounces bittersweet chocolate
3 tablespoons butter, softened
1 tablespoon brandy or bourbon or whatever you have in your desk drawer for emergencies

• Melt the 3 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and butter together in a saucepan, stirring until smooth. Add the generous splash of bourbon and stir some more. Now pour the glaze over the cake, assuming that you have placed it on a serving dish, and have prepared said dish with some waxed paper. The glaze will drip down the sides. But we like that shimmering pool of molten chocolate.

We sometimes top the slices of cake with whipped cream, and maybe some raspberries. I had this once with a maceration of raspberries and have never tasted anything so delightful since!

Be careful today on the thirteenth, wallow in love tomorrow, and think lofty, patriotic thoughts on Monday, Presidents Day. Skip the roses.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
—William Wordsworth

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Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.