Life of Wry

Baking as meditation. Cooking, too. Because I’m so slow and precise, ordered and meticulous, my cooking & baking really are sorta meditative. I only realized that yesterday. It’d been awhile since I cooked… had been gone for a month, came back and took awhile to get my sea legs (home sea legs). Then went off for another 4-5 days. And now I’m back and it was Father’s Day and I wanted to make Jim something special.. or at least new.. so made this new cake and a nice dinner.

It was good!

But it seemed more about the process. I definitely enjoyed the process, as much as (if not more than) the outcome. We laughed last night as we finished dinner. Honest to god.. I spent a few hours in the kitchen making the cake and then making dinner (a rich, deeply flavored roasted chicken dish… one of those Chris Kimball flavor bomb dishes).. and it took literally 10 minutes to eat (if that). It was a nice (if quick!) ten-minute dinner, which followed several hours of dinner prep. Which I loved.

I’ll have to ponder that a little more.. my slow cooking. Maybe I can learn to move even more into the process, the meditation of it, as a way to be in the moment. Maybe there is something to be learned in that. In fact I know there is. I have a book on it.. it’s called Being Home and is all about the zen of home chores. More on that later.

Back to the cake.

I saw the recipe in the New York Times a few days ago and it looked amazing. It was! It is a cross between a pound cake and a coffee cake.

First, you make the filling.. which is a mix of chopped pecans, brown sugar and cinnamon. Then you make the cake batter (an ordinary bunch of ingredients: flour, soda, powder, salt, butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, rather fussily assembled). Layer them in a bundt pan and bake. Top with a glaze of powdered sugar, vanilla and milk.

Here’s the first cake layer:

Followed by the pecan layer:

You cover that with the second cake layer and bake for a little over an hour:

And after about ten minutes, you upend the pan and voila…. a nice pound cake with pecan-sugar-cinnamon middle:

Then, after it’s fully cooled, you drizzle the glaze.

That’s a bit of a mess, but holy cow it was great!