All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [18]
I was on my way to dinner one Monday night in Chinatown and had my empty cake carry with me. When the hostess at the restaurant saw it, she squealed, “It’s YOU!” My dinner companion looked at me and confirmed it was, indeed, me. “No! I see you walking every week with that thing and I always wonder, who gets the cake? And what kind of cake? Misha, look!” She pulled over one of the waitresses, “It’s the cake lady!”
There are a lot of characters in Washington’s Chinatown. The spinning man, who turns circles in his jogging tights as he moves through the crosswalks; the mumbling Indian menu man, who shoves menus in your face as you wait for the Metro; the Friday afternoon street keyboard man, who plays badly; and now the cake lady. I’m honored.
Procrastinatin’ Drunken Monkey Banana Bread
NEW TECHNIQUE ALERT!
PLUMPING DRIED FRUIT WITH RUM
* * *
YOU’LL NEED
A 10-inch tube pan
A small saucepan
A kitchen lighter or match
2 cups dried cherries
¾ cup dark rum
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
4 large eggs
5 or 6 ripe or very ripe bananas
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup chopped walnuts
1. Position a rack so the cake will sit in the middle of the oven, and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line the bottom of your tube pan with parchment paper, and spray the sides and bottom with baking spray.
2. In a saucepan on medium-high heat, plump the dried cherries in the rum and flame them.
3. Cream the butter with a mixer on medium speed. Combine the sugars in a separate bowl and gradually add the sugars, beating well after each addition.
4. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating just enough to incorporate after each addition.
5. In a separate bowl, mash the bananas. Then drain off the slightly thickened water and rum mixture from saucepan into the mashed bananas and stir. Add the bananas to the creamed mixture and beat on medium speed until well blended. FYI: The mixture will not look smooth and creamy. It will look like melted Chunky Monkey ice cream.
6. In still another bowl, dry whisk the flours, salt, and baking soda together. Add to the batter with the mixer on low speed. Add the vanilla extract and mix well on medium speed.
7. Using a spatula or a wooden spoon, stir in plumped cherries and walnuts.
8. Pour batter into the pan and smooth the top with a spatula.
9. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick or thin knife inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.
10. Cool the cake in the pan for 10 minutes. Remove the cake from the pan using our plate-over-pan method and flip it onto a cake rack (see page 28). Continue cooling the cake on the wire rack.
NEW TECHNIQUE
PLUMPING DRIED FRUIT WITH RUM (IT WORKS WITH BRANDY, TOO!)
Put 2 cups of dried fruit (cherries in this case) in a small saucepan and pour in just enough water to submerge half the fruit, about ¾ cup. Bring to a boil and continue boiling until most of the water has boiled away. Add ¾ cup of rum and leave on the heat for 30 seconds, just enough to warm the rum. Turn off the heat completely. Then, using a kitchen lighter (a lighter with a long nozzle that kind of looks like a gun) or a long match, LIGHT the rum. POOF! You’ll have pretty blue flames dancing around the tops of your plumped fruit. Let the flames die (about 2 minutes), then set aside.
Ahhhhh, bananas. Remember when they were new? That unblemished, firm yellow skin, pulp perfectly ripe and waiting to be sliced for your morning cereal? Yeah. That was just five days ago, wasn’t it? And now you don’t want to eat brown bananas, you’ve really got no time to make banana bread, but times are tight and you don’t want to waste them. What’s a poor soul to do?
Toss ’em in the freezer. You heard me. Oh, they