Fake Thanksgiving

For nearly no reason whatsoever, my flatmates & I threw a thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Thirty of the people we enjoy the most came to celebrate & eat with us.

Up in the Italian District, in between cafes & pizza places, hotels & high-end restaurants, hides a poultry butcher complete with a backroom full of live chickens & geese. On Thursday, I ran up the hill & asked if they had any turkeys in. The owner pointed to his friend, telling me he only had the one in (har har). But he went out to a local turkey farm & got a beautiful twenty one & a half pound turkey for me, plucked, cleaned, & very fresh.

On Saturday, the girls & I stopped by the Hope High School farmers’ market to grab veggies & apples for pies. A little farther north on the same street is a great locally owned bakery where we picked up some dense wheat bread & a few baguettes.

Oddly enough, once we put everything together, all of the food except for the turkey & three of the desserts ended up being vegan. Only one vegan showed up, but I don’t think any one else noticed or minded. The ten pounds of mashed potatoes were mixed with two tubs of tofu sour cream & about a half cup of margarine. Anna made a sweet potato gratin by baking sweet potatoes, slicing them, & pouring vegan sour cream thinned with unsweetened soymilk over it. Then she baked it again with some nutmeg. I love sweet potatoes. This came out really well.

We sautéed collards & green beans, baked squash, threw together a salad with some red cabbage & edible flowers, & made stove top stuffing. Personally, I hated the stuffing. But what did I expect from a bag that said “Ready in 5 Minutes”. Also, it’s not something I recommend making on the scale that we did. It did make pretty good Thanksgiving sandwiches the day after, though.

Sunday morning I rubbed finely chopped onions, mild miso, & some unsalted butter under the skin of the turkey, a trick I wanted to try from last November’s Gourmet. Then I salt & peppered the skin & the inside cavity, tied up the legs, & stuck it in the oven for five & a half hours. Our oven cooks oddly, so I rotated the roasting pan after three hours when I basted the turkey. I think it looked absolutely beautiful.

For dessert, Gabriela, Maggie & Sharon brought yummy peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. The apple & pumpkin pies were easy classics that I made the day before. You really can’t have a serious turkey dinner without one or the other. And when you are feeding nearly forty people, you really should have both. We also made two of my favorite desserts. The seasonal one is called a cranberry duff, but it’s also known as Cape Cod or Nantucket Cranberry Upside-down Cake, or really any other New England name dropping title. This year’s recipe came from last November’s MS Living.

My other favorite is great anytime – Vegan Chocolate Pie. This is the easiest & richest chocolate pie I’ve ever come across. It’s also chock full of soy protein. The recipe for chocolate mousse comes from Heidi at 101Cookbooks and I put it in a pie shell for easy serving. I buy a package of Silken Soft tofu because any other brand ends up having a tofu aftertaste. This kind is sometimes unrefrigerated & comes in a carton like a juice box. I melt nearly a whole package of vegan chocolate chips, about 10 ounces, then blend them with the tofu & ¾ of a cup chocolate soy milk. The blender gives the smoothest results. I’ve never been able to get the job done with a hand mixer.

All I can say is that I adore my friends & the friends that they brought with them. Thirty-some-odd smiles & a house that smelled like the holidays made me the happiest I’ve been in a while. On top of that, we pulled together $41 for Second Harvest Food Bank. You people are amazing. Additionally, Etan & Josh did basically all of the clean-up. We are forever indebted.

(A few days before, Jessica's painting that used to be in our kitchen went up at Hillel. He's so cute!!)

Jada's Wedding Cake

Finally! After 10 cups of butter, 2 dozen eggs, and maybe a pound or two to the lower half of me, my first wedding cake is finished!

My mother’s friend got married this past weekend. The wedding was catered entirely by friends and family. When my mom heard that they were planning on boxed cake, she signed me up to bake something a little different. The bride likes raspberry, the groom likes lemon, and everyone likes vanilla butter cake, so what would have been a big slab of Duncan Hines turned into the three-tiered, three-layered monster you see above.

I baked three 10 inch square bottom layers at 2/3 the batter weight mentioned in the recipe. To split I marked the appropriate height with a serrated knife on all sides. Then I fit a thread into the marks, crossed the ends, and pulled it through the cake. The sliced off portions just cleared off the odd edges and moist humps in the middle and left a perfect layer underneath. It also left just enough scrap material to munch on during construction.

The middle tier was 8” and the top was 6”. A 10” and a 7” alone would be good for fifty people, but 10, 8, and 6”ended up looking really nice together. The bride wanted three additional 6” cakes with “So happy…”, “So lucky…”, “So in love.” written on them. This added up to over 180 servings of cake. Yikes. Thankfully the three small cakes were not meant to be cut and quite a few people had seconds of the real cake.

The three layers housed raspberry conserve as the lower filling and lemon curd on top. I used lemons from my tree out front. This lemon curd is unbelievable. I’m thinking of making up a couple more jars and giving some to my grandmother. She makes the best raspberry jelly in the country. I was afraid of the bottom layer splitting under its own weight and sliding around, so filled it with about half of the intended volume of fruit. Boring, but the top two layers looked and tasted phenomenal.

Making the mousseline buttercream (whipped butter, stiff egg whites, and hard-ball sugar syrup) was scary stuff, but it worked and held up nicely. To get the corners, I iced with a crumb layer then with fresh icing. I stuck the tier in the fridge for about half an hour, and then smoothed and shaped the cold buttercream with a hot spatula.

The bout in the fridge gave really nice corners and was probably only necessary because I was icing in our warm, sunny family room (so that I could watch The Empire Strikes Back and listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Rancid at top volume). Whatever the case, it worked like a charm and the cake had ample time to hit room temperature by the evening ceremony.

To stack, I inserted straws cut to the height of each tier through the center of the cake and at approximately the corners of the tier intended to sit above it. I stacked the cakes on their boards at the wedding using two real hands (thanks Dad) and two spatula hands. To cover up the buttercream stains on the base board (I’m new at this), I arranged some leaves from the alstroemeria around the bottom and no one was the wiser. I put a few flowers on the cake and voilà.

During the wedding I hid out in the kitchen with my date - a Tupperware container of dill and parsley - and garnished plates of hors dourves until I was blue in the face. All in all, the evening turned out well. The cake was delicious, I only nearly died of shyness, and I had a nine dollar party dress from Goodwill. Success!

I used recipes from The Cake Bible for the large scale white butter cake, mousseline buttercream, raspberry conserve, and lemon curd. I trust Rose Levy Beranbaum like no other woman on the planet. For anyone who is interested in baking cakes of any sort, I highly recommend this book. The author really knows her stuff. The recipes are fail-proof and every step is thoroughly explained. She recently released The Bread Bible which shows the same assiduous investigation of ingredients and methods published in The Cake Bible. I almost can’t imagine spending that much time, attention and energy practicing for and compiling something of this magnitude. She is definitely an inspiration. Amazon has copies of both books for $22.00 each, which is an absolute steal.