The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [87]
He looked up again, but not directly at either of us. “I think it was good. It was a good ending,” he said.
Throughout that night, I never brought up the fact that Ben and I were splitting up and that I was looking for a new living arrangement. I didn’t think it would have been appropriate. That night was Jo-Jo’s. But the next day, on the phone, I told my mother the news of our breakup.
“I knew it,” she said.
How, I still don’t know.
“I just knew,” she repeated.
I had another cooking commitment to attend to that week. Just before leaving for Morocco, I’d gotten a heads up from the editor of one of my favorite food websites, Mark Douglas from “Culinate.” He’d asked me to participate in a food-blogging contest they were holding, focused on chocolaty recipes. The prize for this contest was a trip for two to the annual Death by Chocolate food festival at the COPIA: The American Center for Food and the Arts in Napa. To compete, any food blogger just had to come up with a recipe that appropriately fit the theme, “Death by Chocolate,” and write a post on it. I’d promised I wouldn’t disappoint.
I initially thought I’d be inspired by Morocco and have a chocolate dish ready to concoct once I got back, perhaps with unique spice combinations. As I mulled over this and other possibilities, I searched the website, rereading the entry rules. A graphic on the contest page read in bright pink, “Treat your sweetie! Win a trip for two.”
Clearly, I was in no place to treat any sweetie. Maybe I’d just sit this one out, I thought. But I did like the idea of eating spoonful after spoonful of something chocolaty until I hurled. Did it matter what?
It suddenly came to me. Pain au chocolat.
In French, this would mean “chocolate bread” or “bread with chocolate,” and pain au chocolate is a buttery, croissantlike pastry filled with chocolate. Maybe I’d make something involving bread and chocolate, I began thinking. And then call it “pain with chocolate”—and that’s the English, not the French kind of “pain.”
Of course, this dessert wouldn’t be as straightforward as a chocolate croissant. What, then, should I make? Chocolate bread pudding? Too boring, I concluded. Some kind of chocolate-topped bread crostini? Not impressive enough.
A chocolate trifle, I finally decided, with tiers of deep, dark chocolate pudding and torn white bread pieces instead of the traditional sponge-cake bits and vanilla pudding. Then, how about tossing in some more chocolate bits, in chunks throughout? And just as the classic trifle takes a drizzle of brandy or sweet liqueur, this one would have chocolate liqueur to meld it all together. A classic English trifle with a twist: pain instead of cake. And chocolate instead of fruit.
I baked a loaf of white, basic no-knead bread before getting the plan under way. Next, I whisked together a batch of dark chocolate pudding. I purchased some chocolate liqueur to drizzle in between the layers, and some rich dark chocolate to chop up and also shave as a topping for the finished dessert. Finally, I’d need a traditional glass, footed trifle bowl to serve and photograph the dessert in. I called up Sean and asked whether I could borrow his trifle bowl.
“Sure,” he replied.
I took pains to photograph the cooking process and to shoot the final, ceremonious heap in the trifle bowl. Within the recipe’s post, I described making the dish in all its painful glory, peppering the entry with deliciously morbid insights on breakups and the gloom of Valentine’s Day for the singleton.
While the judges took a day or two to read the entries, I had a good look at all of them myself. I found myself drooling over the chocolaty recipes and photos on the other blogs, some of which looked very professionally made. But something told me that my post had a little more meat on its bones than the other ones, a bit more story, even if it was decidedly unromantic.
Mark Douglas wrote to all the finalists to tell us that a winner would soon be contacted by phone. That same day, I had just submitted an application for a one-bedroom apartment