Case Study 128: "The Roasted Strawberry Basil Cupcake"

OK. So we might have fast-forwarded to summer this week. 

Like any good culinarian, this got me jonesing for warmer weather things. Like sunset runs and day-drinking and taking my shoes off in absolutely any presence of grass.

It also got me excited for summer fruits. And flavors. And the sweet sweet magic that occurs when you combine sugar and berries and put them in the oven. 

These cakes are a product of that. 

Roasted strawberry cupcakes with sweet basil-vanilla bean buttercream and balsamic-basil candy on top. 

They're like any other strawberry cupcakes...except better. And more exotic. First, I tossed good ripe strawberries with a little sugar, olive oil and coarse sea salt and roasted them in the oven for about 25-30 minutes. I mixed these into the batter of a normal strawberry cupcake recipe that's never failed me in the past. For the buttercream, I steeped basil with sea salt, sugar and milk for 10 minutes, strained it through cheesecloth, and used it in my standard vanilla bean buttercream recipe. And balsamic basil candy? Just reduce a little maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, sea salt and dried basil in a pan until it bubbles, and turn it out onto parchment to cool, before breaking up and sprinkling on top.
 

We might be a little premature in saying that summer has in fact arrived prior to June 21. After all, the days still have to get even longer and the sunsets need to turn a little more gold until I can proclaim it the fairest of the seasons. But my god, if these days are any indication of what we have to come. I. Can't. Wait. 

Case Study 125: "The Summer Citrus Cupcake"

Guys... I'm officially over winter. 

I knew it would happen soon enough - the charm of a errant snowstorm would reel me in enough to announce a love affair with the cold. But there's been no skiing yet this January, and quite frankly, I need a tan. Now, I summer hard and well, and what I've learned in my time is that every good summer girl needs an accomplice. I like to call these my "summer sisters" and for the past few years, I've been dealt a very strong hand.

She and I had rekindled our friendship at a Beach Boys concert, and as far as I'm concerned that in itself is the basis of everything. We kept in touch throughout the winter, but once June rolled around, the spark was lit. 

We went to polo matches. We lied in the grass and drank Dark n' Stormies until the horses went home. We went to Block Island. We drank mudslides and had serious dance parties at Yellow Kittens. We ate hot dogs at all hours of the days, went on a magical late night swim amongst bioluminescents and went skinny dipping at 2AM skinny in Sachem Pond. We celebrated New Years Eve with homemade pinatas and took over an island with 200 of our closest friends we just hadn't met yet.

I remember one fourth of July weekend, when we convened under the arbor behind a grey stone house. We threw back a few, and cut through the hedges lined with blue hydrangea as the sun melted over the Long Island Sound and the night turned blue. Twenty of us, in our best summer Nantucket reds, eyelet whites and gingham blues, trekked past ponds and manors, drinks in hand, down the winding Connecticut roads toward the shores of Tokeneke Club. 

There were candlelit cabanas, Seabreezes and fireworks at every angle across the water to New York. There was a seven piece soul band, and now barefoot, we twisted and shouted until no brow was dry against the American flags along the front of the dancefloor. 

The next night we hit the water and strung our boats together like a barrel of monkeys for hours in the misty night, until we sped back to the house to make pizzas with whatever we could get our hands on. We danced to 90s rap hits on marble countertops and drove vintage motorbikes across the lawn at three o'clock in the morning.  

Summer is like a spark to the ridiculously spontaneous - those people who light up like fireflies when the hot sun goes down. And those long summer night talks that happen - the happy ones, the sad ones and the hundreds of talks about men - are memorialized in a way that seems almost eternal. That's the thing about summer sisters. They cement a time and a place in your memory that carries us through the remaining cold damp months of the year. 

Tonight we'll set out on the town to celebrate. And though it's the middle of winter, there will be margaritas, plenty of summer spirit and these creamsicle cupcakes with blood orange-vanilla buttercream and candied blood oranges on top. 

Happy happy birthday, to my summer sister Z. I am so lucky that our paths brought us together again, and I'm fortunate to call such a loyal woman, filled with incredible drive and values, my friend. To continued success and balance, my dear. To more life conversations and real talk, to romantic Greenwich dinners and to many many more nights of mayhem in every month of every year.

Notes from the Field: Until fall...

No big words here today. Just a few pictures from this summer's travels, some chocolate Nutella raspberry cupcakes from the beach last weekend and quick note to say that in my annual end-of-August fashion, I'm signing off to live the rest of summer to the fullest. 

Hope you enjoy these long days of sun as much as I will.  See you in the fall, as we close out the fourth (!) year on this little blog of mine. 

Case Study 118: "The Peach Crumble"

"This is the plum season, the nights

blue and distended, the moon
hazed, this is the season of peaches
with their lush lobed bulbs
that glow in the dusk, apples
that drop and rot 
sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands
No more the shrill voices
that cried Need Need
from the cold pond, bladed
and urgent as new grass
Now it is the crickets
that say Ripe Ripe
slurred in the darkness, while the plums
dripping on the lawn outside
our window, burst
with a sound like thick syrup
muffled and slow
The air is still
warm, flesh moves over
flesh, there is no
hurry"

- Late August 

by Margaret Atwood

It's hot outside. The August days march on and the air is heavy, as if every passing thunderstorm is a sign of the summer's passionate heat clashing in the sky. I crave clams. I only want rum and saltwater, and I'm pretty sure that my feet don't fit into normal shoes anymore. We are in barefoot season. Clothes are a nuisance, work is a chore and the sight of sunlight after three o'clock constantly brings to mind that Henry James poem: "Summer afternoon, summer afternoon...."

We are in the heart of summer's sweetest fruit harvest. Blackberries stain sweet honey on fingertips, watermelons provide the best hydration and the peaches are so swollen and ripe they can be sliced with a butter knife. 

Where there's seasonal fruit, there must be cupcakes, and better yet, Peach Crumble Cupcakes. 

The sweet local stone fruits of August were peeled, roughly chopped and thrown into moist vanilla and brown sugar cupcakes. I topped them with a vanilla buttercream, mixed with a scoop of whipped cream cheese for good measure. A peach's best sweetness is brought out by toasted bits, and so a crumble topping was necessary, making these cupcakes almost like mini- peach cobblers reconstructed.  This crumble consists of flour, brown sugar, crumbled walnuts and melted butter, spread on a baking tray and cooked crisp in the oven before topping. The crowning glory: I slid in a fresh peach slice for good measure.

Late August approaches, and to be honest, I'm in denial that anything close to fall could be on its way.  But luckily, somehow, time moves slowly. Three more August weekends left for these traveling summer hands and feet. Whatever they lead us to, they won't be wished away. 

Notes from the field: On summer.

 "Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
 

 

Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
 

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am." 

- Stanley Kunitz

 

Desire, desire, desire. So lucky for me, my summer has finally arrived, and just in time. The sun is hot and the grass is green. The ocean is a baptism for tired winter bodies and the weekends provide endless opportunity for adventure and awe. 

Summer also gets sweet with these ripe strawberry cupcakes with balsamic spiked vanilla buttercream and local strawberries on top.

So relish in it. Drink it up, enjoy the magic, and remember that manifesto of a summer child is to let the season perpetually astonish you. 

Case Study 112: "The Key Lime Crunch"

Hold up now. Whoever said that March comes in like "lion" and goes out like a "lamb" was surely mistaken.  The golden sunsets I've been watching from high atop my Wall Street office tower every evening have quickly become a memory, as the temperatures plummeted to thirty, and the daffodils are shivering in their stems on this dark and damp day. 

If I haven't made this clear already, I am extremely excited for warm weather. Excited in a way that I've started hiding all of my wool socks and tights and building up my summer skin. Excited in a way that my mind is clouded with daydreams ten o'clock-in-the-morning piña coladas on vacation and my radio is filled with the the likes of UB40 and Inner Circle on irrationally repetitive levels. This dreary weather feels like someone threw has thrown a wrench in the axle of my one-way party bus towards the fairest of solstice, and I do not like one bit at all.

In an effort to remedy this, I decided to take action. And so this evening, tucked in a warm Philadelphia apartment, we'll watch the raddest of 80s and 90s beach movies, and indulge in a Jamaican jerk feast, rum punch and these vanilla cupcakes in a macadamia - graham cracker crust topped with Key Lime buttercream and sugared lime shavings. 
  
Because I am a firm believer that if summer cannot come to me now, I then, must create summer for myself, even if it means dancing to reggae-versions of "Baby, I Love Your Way" in wool socks. 


Summer, I am coming for you!

Notes from the Field: God Bless America

"After you flew across the country we
 got in bed, laid our bodies
 delicately together, like maps laid
 face to face, East to West.

My San Francisco against your New York, your
 Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
 New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
 bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
 burning against your Kansas your Kansas
 burning against my Kansas, 

your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my
 Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
 beating against your Central Time, your
 sun rising swiftly from the right my
 sun rising swiftly from the left  

your moon rising slowly from the left my
 moon rising slowly from the right until
 all four bodies of the sky
 burn above us, sealing us together,
 all our cities twin cities,
 all our states united, one
 nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

-Sharon Olds 

  America, romance.  Let's celebrate this 4th of July with the best plans that could be: surrounded by the people we love and with double vanilla cupcakes topped with vanilla bean buttercream and fresh summer berries.  Happy Independence Day.

Case Study 87: "The Great Hollow Beach Cupcake"

"The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side.

 

At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of, — if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport, — I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here.

But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. Lynn and Nantasket! this bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly.  

 

What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a light-house or a fisherman's hut the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him."

- Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod 

 

  

 Out to sea with banana walnut cupcakes topped with vanilla buttercream, sandy crumble and homemade candy seashells.  

 Happy Summer.

Case Study 86: "Les Fraises"

It's officially summer in New York.  The heat has set in, everything's lush, and all anyone can really talk about is how the creeping humidity breathes heavy sighs down their neck. 

  
I, however, find myself in transit. I am roaming up and down the northeast coast in a matter of week's time.  A constant state of motion that would seemingly have me dripping from the pores, but actually finds me in a perpetually air conditioned room.

It seems I'm not alone.  Very scientific cultural studies find that the nicer the office, cafe or store that you find yourself in might be, the lower the thermostat is dropped.  As if to chill the class right into you.

But I say, I'll freeze when I'm dead.

  Theses days, there's nothing more luxurious than an escape from that arctic blast.  I strategically plan my exit against ticking of the clock, when the minute hand strikes the hour in which I'll catch the last squeeze of the setting sun.  Leave the jacket at the door, drop the heels along the way.  Let the hands fall free and create a breeze in hot evening air.  A summer stroll taken for the damn sake of strolling.  

 "Les Fraises" are summer strawberry cupcakes topped with a whipped pillow of vanilla bean and lemon cream cheese buttercream.  Have you ever seen the way water beads up on the side of freshly washed fruit?  Fresh, cold, dripping.  That is a true summer sweat.   

Let's make a mess of ourselves this season in the bounty of summer's fruits.  May we all find something a little closer to natural air and learn to appreciate it for what it really is.  After all, we crossed our fingers, our toes and everything else that winter would finally go.  

Your wish has been granted. Enjoy it.