snowboarder birthday cake

The bar had been set pretty high. Okay, really high. For my birthday this past September, my boyfriend surprised me with an entire swimming pool [cake] (I have been an avid swimmer my entire life. In fact, swimming is really what brought my boyfriend and I together . . . you know, out-of-breath flirtations in between swim sets . . . romantic). This cake was detailed with lane lines, little stick figure swimmers, flags pronouncing things like "Go Jen!" and "#1," and, last but not least, diving blocks made of rice krispy treats. Yes. The bar had been set very high, but I was determined to match it. Snowboarding was the obvious choice and a friend and I had been eying a marshmallow fondant (think edible play-doh) recipe for quite some time. Now, I thought fondant was a bit scary. The pros on TV use the stuff to make some pretty incredible things and I was afraid that little 'ole me in my quaint suburban house might be a little too low-key for such elaborate, edible structures. But then I said, nahhh.

What did I have to lose . . . besides a couple pounds of marshmallows and several pounds of powdered sugar? (I doubled the recipe but still might be exaggerating some here.) I did a whole lot of searching for images of snowboarding cakes and took inspiration from a very impressive professional cake. I don't even want to show you that one because it is so good that you'll be disappointed with my final one. However! In the name of developing ideas and inspiration and maintaining some amount of blog street cred, I thought it important to show how the idea snowballed (hah!). So, I decided I wanted a cake "mountain," I wanted pine trees, I wanted a fresh powder snowboard track, and, if possible, I wanted a nice blue icy look to the base fondant. Easy . . . ?

Greek coffee

Coffee isn't a love. It's a necessity. I much prefer the taste of tea, but sometimes the caffeine just doesn't cut it. When you need a real jolt, there's only one place to turn. Let me first say, I'm no coffee aficionado. On weekends, I might brew a pot of Dunkin' Donuts in my grandparents' old electric coffeemaker with the mismatched pot, obviously from some other set, since it never sits quite right in the machine. I might also venture to Starbucks, but mostly because it's the best atmosphere near work (but not at work) to sit with your laptop. I often get the café misto, because it reads the most like Spanish coffee (dark and strong with steamed milk), but never ends up tasting like it. Maybe partially because you're not sitting with your feet in the sand at a table on the coast of southern Spain. True that.

I'll tell you one thing I have learned: Coffee is just as much of an art, if not more so, than tea. There. I said it. But it didn't dawn on me until a couple of Greek friends, Angeliki and Jorge, painstakingly instilled in me their brewing process.

"After Visiting Hours" by Leon Weinmann

All unnecessary weight is eliminated. . . . Even the brain cells needed for song are lost and replaced seasonally in some birds.
—All the Birds of North America, p. 63

At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this thoughtless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.

farro risotto with rancho gordo beans

For my birthday, my incredible friend ordered five pounds of Rancho Gordo beans for me, along with the Rancho Gordo Heirloom Beans cookbook. While I put the beans in their awesomely packaged bags on display in my kitchen, I couldn't decide what recipe merited the addition of these spectacular specimens. Four months later, it hit me, thanks to Smitten Kitchen (one of my all-time favorite blogs) and my love of risotto. 

I took Deb's recipe for barley risotto with beans and greens and used that as a base with a couple twists of my own. First, same incredible friend who gifted me the beans also bought each of us a bag of farro. We had been looking high and low for that elusive grain and once I had it in my hands, I knew I needed to do something with it as soon as possible. So instead of barley, like the recipe originally called for, I used farro.