Posted January 30
Well, that's not very impressive blog-continuity, is it. This is all still a work in progress, you understand. And I will fix and expand on that Plato post and then just rejigger everything so it looks like I posted it all later, even though I think that's against the blogger's code. But we're still casting about for our voice here at Better Living Through Vanity Publishing.

They say you should blog what you know, and what do I know about? John and I were talking about it this morning, and we've decided the things I know most about are sleep deprivation and cooking. I also know a fair bit about Greek, Latin, and cool music.

My baby is acting crazy and waking up every five seconds to nurse all night long. Every time I decide to implement the new and soon-to-be-very-unpopular no nursing at night regime she gets sick with something and/or we fly away to another time zone. Last night she was having terrible nightmares! It was really very sad. Whimpering and twitching and waking up crying. I wonder what she dreams about. Baby zombies? Their gait an awful combination of toddling and shambling? Toddbling? (No, that sounds more like bling-bling for the younger set. Platinum, diamond pavé rattles.) We could ask my sister Mia, renowned nightmare expert, except she has no memories of anything that occurred before she was 14, which I find vaguely suspicious. It's almost like she doesn't want to remember.

The long and the short of it is that I have to put a clean washcloth on my shoulder while I sit at the computer so that the liquefied brains running out my ear don't get on everything. So then I thought, maybe I'll start a blog for really stupid people at Ilovepillows.com. Are you too stupid to read all those fancy blogs with wooowds on them? Come to my blog where pillows...sleepy feelings...whatsit... But that doesn't seem very exciting.

Yesterday I wrote an email to My Hero James Lileks telling him how to make homemade pizza, since he claimed to have made bad homemade pizza, which should never ever happen unless you are using the Old El Paso Taco Pizza kit, and I don't think that counts as homemade anyway. So I thought I'd expand on that into my new, perhaps somewhat cramped, niche as the helpful person who improves the cooking of real bloggers. And did I mention that I like pillows?


Pudding Mix=D'Anthes
Paging Eugene Volokh!! You recently posted a recipe for Black Russian Cake (aka Pushkin cake. A subtle reference to his "octaroon" status--or was that sedecimaroon?). Later, you updated this with input from a reader who pointed out that your cake tasted basically the same as his rum cake, from which it differed only in the alchohol and pudding mix components of the recipe. The rum version is the original, by the way, and was published in ads for Bacardi in the 70's. It appears in my copy of the unintentionally humorous cookbook "Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Jars" by Cecil Dyer, published 1979. Now, you may know a lot more about constitutional law than I do (and by "may" I mean "incontrovertibly, in fact, do"), but I appear to know more than you about baking cakes. Allow me to respectfully point out a few problems.

You say, re the liquor in question "you can use the cut-rate ones, no need to use Kahlua". This expresses the idea, "I am cooking, therefore I will use rotgut I would never consent to drink." This is a flawed cooking axiom. Firstly, as all the alcohol is going to cook away and nothing will be left but the flavor, you don't want that flavor to be vile and artificial. Secondly, if the intention is to save money, it seems a bit confused. Are you going to buy a whole extra bottle of bad liquor just to use for cooking, or just use a relatively small amount of the good liquor which you, as a man of discernment, already have around to drink? Not to say you have to put the XO in your clafouti or whatever, but have some pride, yo. No need to pack meager.

But how does this square with your correspondent's observation that "the exact identity of the alcohol seems to get lost in all the other ingredients"? Well, here's a hint. You know how he also notes that "even the flavor of the pudding makes little difference", and "the dominant flavor is sugary, alcoholic goodness"? You know how both cakes are made of cake mix and pudding mix? Which contain many dubious ingredients such as hydrolized vegetable oils, vanillin (i.e. artificial vanilla), dried milk solids, and other stuff not found outside the factory and mainly differentiated from the real ingredients by lower cost and inferior quality? Real chocolate cake, by contrast, contains things like unsalted butter, cocoa, buttermilk, and genuine vanilla extract. Whey, stabilizers, FD&C yellow #5, and all ingredients deemed "permitted" (rather than actually, say, recommended) are foreign to real chocolate cake.

Now I would like to issue a general plea to people to make homemade cakes. In making cake mix cake you have already shown your willingness to grease and flour cake tins, get out and dirty a bowl, the beaters of the electric mixer, the cup measure, and so forth. As long as you decided to make the cake at least 1/2 hour before actually doing so, you could have made a real cake, infinitely superior, at the cost of an additional 10 minutes (and here I am being generous; it is really more like 5 minutes.) You have to take the butter out to soften in advance, granted. But what else is so hard? You have to measure flour, sugar, leavening, salt, and possibly cocoa rather than just dumping in the bag. While the mixer is running, there is butter, sugar and eggs in the bowl rather than cake mix, eggs, oil and water. Does this materially increase the difficulty? I think not.

Now, people who know me for the Martha Stewart on crystal meth type that I am are laughing now saying, "sure, easy for Belle to say. She once spent 3 days making Russian black bread from scratch, even though the recipe said not to try it without a stand mixer, using wild yeast sourdough, and then dried it and used it to ferment her own kvas, just to see what it was like, and it wasn't even that good." But I'm being serious here. It's just not that hard to make cake. If you're willing to beat egg whites you could make genoise, even, which is also quite simple. But plain old butter cream type cake is not much harder than cake mix, period. I even know a homemade recipe that is easier than cake mix, and I will reveal it tomorrow. And I'm not sneering at you for using cake mix! Cake mix cake is pretty good! Homemade cake is just a lot better. But here is a way to make something closer to the Platonic form of the Pushkin cake. The recipe is adapted from Wayne Harley Brachman's excellent "Retro Desserts". You can thank me later.
Ingredients:

Butter or nonstick vegetable spray for coating pan

1 1/4 c cake flour
1/2 c unsweetened Dutch process cocoa powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
10 T unsalted butter (1 1/4 sticks) at room temperature
1 1/2 c sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 c buttermilk (or substitute 1/2 c whole milk mixed with 1 t white vinegar and allowed to stand 5 minutes)
2 t vanilla extract
1/2 c Kaluha (or 1/4 c Kaluha, 1/4 cup hot espresso; this is superior but requires you to make espresso)

For Glaze:
1/4 c Kaluha
1/4 c highest quality vodka
1/4 c hot espresso or hot strong coffee (aw, shit, you have to make coffee anyway.)
2 T unsalted butter, melted
1 1/2 c confectioner's sugar
1/2 c cocoa.

1. Set rack in middle of oven; preheat oven to 350. Butter bundt pan.

2. Sift flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt into large bowl (OK, I forgot to mention sifting before.)

3. Beat butter and sugar together at high speed till combined (15-30 seconds). Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Then let mixer run till you get bored, up to 6 minutes but 3 will be fine.

4. Using wooden spoon, beat in 1/3 flour mixture. Beat in buttermilk and vanilla, then 1/3 more flour mixture, then coffee liqueur (and espresso) and finally last 1/3 flour mixture. Do not overmix.

5. Pour into prepared pan. Bake 50-55 minutes, or until middle springs back when lightly pressed and cake tester comes out clean. Cool on rack 10-15 minutes. Whisk glaze ingredients together. Poke some holes in cake (a chopstick is good) and glaze. Keep spooning it over as it drips off and collects in the hole. Dust with additional confectioner's sugar as desired. Now that's what I'm talking about.

I bet you think I've needlessly complicated the glaze thing. But the truth is, adding vodka at this stage is the only way to impart vodka flavor to the cake. Vodka has so little flavor apart from "hello, it's Mr. Alcohol here" that it is overwhelmed in the cake itself by more powerful flavors once the alcohol cooks away. The coffee is quasi-optional; you could add more Kaluha (but damn, that cake do get boozy!). And butter makes everything better.

Finally, a shout-out to all my 12-steppers in the hizza. Substitute more espresso for the Kaluha in the cake and glaze with ganache made as follows: bring 3/4 c heavy cream just to simmer over medium heat in small saucepan. Pour over 5 oz coarsely chopped bittersweet chocolate (the expensive kind). Working from center out, gently stir with fork till smooth.

Posted January 22
And, in conclusion, I would like to adapt a timeless sentiment from Urge Overkill for the occasion:
It's Benny's Birthday
He's 29 today
It's Benny's Birthday
He's 29 today
:So we better get up
Gonna wrap him up a Big Surprise
Today is Benny's Birthday...so Happy Birthday toooo you!


Posted January 22
Mark A.R. Kleiman has an interesting post on resistance to irony, commenting on an old Jonah Goldberg post (via Atrios--arrgh blogospheric density collapsing...white dwarf forming) which I noted and goggled incredulously at when it appeared. Goldberg is so tone-deaf to irony that he imagines Mark Twain advocated censorship to protect the tender minds of the young from the sort of damage he suffered reading the Bible as a child. It must be read to be believed; go and do so. This is all well and good, but Kleiman follows it up with a post about Plato which is more problematic. He claims that Plato's famous calls for censorship in the Republic are similarly and obviously ironic. In his view, Glaucon and Adiemantus, being proto-Goldbergian conservatives of a vacuous sort, are unable to see the irony and blithely agree with Socrates that the ideal state would censor not just Homer and Hesiod (!), but all dramatic poetry(!!). Kleiman's case for this being intended ironically rests on several points, some more structurally sound than others.
1) Glaucon and Adiemantus are, to some extent, twits. Well, fair enough. No one can deny that their twittery is a field from which Plato makes quite a bit of ironic hay. And I would be the last person to dispute that the endless rounds of "Yes indeed, Socrates" sometimes raise rather than allay suspicions. But similarly, no one can deny that Socrates seems to care about these young twits, wants the best for them, and so forth. His (and Plato's) tolerance and affection for good-looking, well-bred, well-intentioned twits of this type is likely much higher than mine or Kleiman's...
The rest of the reasons, and my responses, will follow tomorrow. That root canal has left my brains all scrambled (partly just from sticker shock at paying the bill)


Posted January 22
Happy Birthday Ben Waring!!!! You are the man!!!