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MADE: Chocolate Raspberry Cake

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On Wednesday, Devin asked, “How would you feel about hosting a birthday party on Saturday?”

And I said, “A birthday party?! For whom?”

He blushed and said, “Well…me.”

Oops.

In my defense, this was the day after I locked myself in the house because I couldn’t find my keys. Where did the keys finally turn up? My purse.

Right.

Clearly, I haven’t been at my brightest lately, but once I realized his birthday was Monday (that is, two days ago), I got excited, especially after he asked if I would make a cake. Contrary to what this post might suggest, I love celebrating Devin’s birthday. Last year we had a big brunch and then went roller-skating. One year I commissioned a piñata that was six feet tall. And the very first party we threw together was a ‘60s-themed birthday party for him.

At 20, I’d never baked a cake from scratch, but I had a vision of chocolate cakes in the shape of records, complete with grooves and those round LP labels on top. Luckily, I had a very generous friend named Alison who had baked me the best cake I’d ever had. That’s the cake I wanted to make for Devin, and Alison was so generous she even gave me the recipe.

The first time I baked it, it was really hard. I thought I would mess it all up, and every single one of my roommates had to help me (to bake and to stay calm), but in the end, we had record-shaped cakes, and everybody loved them.

This past Saturday I baked that cake again. I know I would have liked it for nostalgic reasons no matter what it tasted like, but I promise you, it tasted even better than I remembered. Plus, when I made it for the first time six years ago, Devin went to the store to get drinks and came back with the September issue for me. When I made it this year, Devin went out and came back with a piano. I’m sure my imaginary lawyers would totally advise against this, but I’ll just go ahead and say it: this cake is magic.

Chocolate Raspberry Cake with Chocolate Ganache Icing
(adapted from Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz)

Chocolate Raspberry Cake with Chocolate Ganache Icing

Ingredients

* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose white flour
* 1/2 cup cocoa powder
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 2 1/4 cups soymilk (or another type of milk)
* 1/2 cup coconut oil (or another oil)
* 3/4 cup raspberry jam or preserves
* 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 1 1/4 cups sugar
* 6 tablespoons margarine (or buttery spread of your choice)
* 10 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips (1 cup and 2 tablespoons)
* Optional: fresh raspberries or sprinkles to decorate the cake

Tools

* 1 or 2 cake pans (I used two 8-inch pie pans because we hadn’t finished unpacking our kitchen, and they worked perfectly. You could also use one slightly larger cake pan and make a single-tier cake)
* 1 small bowl
* 1 large bowl
* 1 medium pot

Directions

1. First, make the ganache icing. It sounds fancy, but it’s ridiculously easy! Bring ¾ cup of soymilk to a low boil in a medium pot. Add the margarine and let it melt. Then, turn off the heat and stir in chocolate chips until smooth. Let sit for at least one hour to thicken. At that point, it should be easy to pour over your cake.

2. Next, get your cake materials ready! Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and grease your cake pan(s) with a little margarine or oil.

3. Mix your dry ingredients in a small bowl: flour, cocoa powder, baking power, baking soda, and salt.

4. Mix your wet ingredients in a large bowl: 1 ½ cups of soymilk, the coconut oil (make sure it’s liquid! If it’s solid, melt it in the microwave), ½ cup of the jam or preserves, the vanilla, and the sugar in a large bowl and mix. You can use an electric mixer or your muscles (I used just a fork and it worked perfectly). The jam should be mostly dissolved with the rest of the ingredients, but a few small clumps are okay.

5. Add the dry ingredients to the wet in batches and mix until everything is mixed together. If you’re going to use two pans, divide the batter between the prepared pans. Otherwise, pour it into one pan. Bake at 350F for 40-45 minutes, or until a toothpick or knife comes out clean. (I baked mine for exactly 41 minutes, so make sure you check it at 40!) Remove from oven and let cool in pans.

6. It’s time to put icing on the cake! When the cakes have cooled, spread one layer of cake with the rest of your raspberry jam or preserves. If you’re making a single-layer cake, just mix the raspberry jam with the chocolate ganache. The ganache should be the perfect consistency for pouring over the cake––my favorite way to spread icing on a cake because it’s easy and looks nice.

7. Decorate it to your liking! Raspberries on top look really pretty, but so would sprinkles or nothing at all––a chocolate cake is a thing of beauty on its own.

MADE: Chocolate Raspberry Cake

MADE: SUMMER WRAPS

kristy, , 2 Comments

I’ve been feeling pretty weird about sharing this recipe because I used collard greens, which have traditionally been used in African-American cuisine and have recently been aggressively marketed by Whole Foods in hopes of making them trendy and driving up the price. (Writer/feminist/activist Mikki Kendall aptly calls this “food gentrification.”)

So, before I tell you the recipe, I want to clarify that I am very much opposed to driving up prices and making fruits and vegetables even more inaccessible for low-income people and people of color around the world. The good news: you can use any kind of sturdy green for this recipe. I used collard greens because that’s what was sent in our local-food package that week, but I think lettuce or chard would be even more delicious!

The key thing for me is to eat as much fresh food as I can (it tastes better than canned or frozen stuff) and learn how to cook with what I have. Instead of buying into food trends, I think we should consider what’s best for our planet and our communities––if that seems hard to figure out, just buy what’s cheapest!

Summer Wraps

ready to roll

To make these wraps, you’ll need

• greens with big leaves (like chard, collard greens, or lettuce)
• meaty filling (like tempeh, tofu, or meat)
• assorted vegetables for topping (like caramelized onions, baby greens, and carrots)
• readymade barbecue sauce (OR ketchup, vinegar, maple syrup, and chipotle powder)

1.If you’re using lettuce, skip this step! If you’re using a green like chard or collard greens, start by blanching them. That way they won’t be so tough to eat, and they’ll have time to cool before you’re ready to eat them. Blanching basically means dunking vegetables into boiling water for a few seconds, but this recipe has good instructions if you need a reference.

2. Devin makes fantastic caramelized onions, but they take a while to cook, so you’ll want to start these early in the process, too. Here’s a recipe for reference.

3. We usually make our own barbecue sauce because it’s so much cheaper, especially since we have an endless supply of maple syrup from Devin’s family farm, but store-bought is just as good. If you’ve never made it before, take note: barbecue sauce is ridiculously easy to make, but you do need a little time for it to cook down. (The more you make, the longer it takes.)

Combine

1 cup ketchup
¼ cup vinegar (I usually use apple cider vinegar)
3 tablespoons maple syrup (you could also use honey or another sweetener)
½ teaspoon chipotle powder, a.k.a. my secret ingredient (I use it in everything!)

…and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until it’s nice and thick (around 15-20 minutes).

4. Cook your “meat” of choice. Devin and I cut tempeh into thin slices and cooked it in a skillet with a little bit of oil, flipping the pieces once to make sure they got crispy on both sides. It took less than 10 minutes.

5. Chop your other veggies pretty small so that you can fit them into the wrap easily. We had baby greens (they were microgreens, I think) and carrots, so all I did was wash the baby greens and shred the carrots using a vegetable peeler.

6. Put out all your ingredients on the table, and let everyone make their own wrap. Make sure not to fill it too much, and roll it like a burrito.

It’s all easy, and you could make everything ahead of time to take for a picnic.

Happy summer!

MADE: SUMMER WRAPS

MADE

kristy, , 2 Comments

Confession: aside from writing and thinking up ways to disrupt the social order, cooking is my biggest hobby. I was pretty annoyed with myself when I realized that because it’s not exactly exciting. At all. I wish I were a painter or a drummer or even an electric racecar driver, but I’m not. I’m not even a chef, just a home cook who gets excited when her Crockpot soup tastes good. Is that worth sharing? I kept thinking about it and came up with two things:

Q: First of all, how lame is it that my hobby is something women were forced to do for generations?
A: SO LAME. My grandmother would not be impressed.

Q: On the other hand, how cool is it that my hobby involves preparing something that is necessary for human survival, saves me money, and helps me keep my friends alive, too?
A: That sounds better. I have to cook, so I might as well enjoy it, and actually, Devin almost always cooks with (and without) me, so in our house cooking isn’t “womyn’s work,” it’s a shared chore and one of our favorite things to do together. (I know my grandmother would be happy about this because she once told me that she thought American men were a little more feminist than Mexican men because they weren’t afraid of the kitchen.)

All that to say, I’m going to start sharing my favorite recipes here! Devin and I almost never make the same things two weeks in a row because every week we get a package of whatever fruits and vegetables are in season from Nextdoorganics, so we often find or make up new recipes. And all the food we make is seasonal and vegetarian, which sounds fancy, but is really code for cheap! My hope is that the recipes will be helpful or inspiring to someone.

And now, without further ado, I present unto you…last week’s lunch.

Salad with Roasted Beets, Israeli Couscous, and Orange

salad x smoothliminal

First you’ll want to peel, chop, and roast the beets because that takes the longest. We peeled and chopped about 10 beets (you could use any amount) into half-inch pieces while we preheated the oven to 400° Fahrenheit. Then, we spread them out in a glass pan and tossed them with some olive oil and a little salt before putting them in the oven. We cooked them for about an hour, stirring occasionally. If you’re cooking fewer beets, they won’t take as long. The number-one tip for roasting vegetables is to cut everything roughly the same size and cook it in one layer so it all cooks evenly. You’ll know they’re done when you can easily poke them with a fork.

Next you’ll want to make the grain. Devin and I happened to have Israeli couscous in our kitchen, but you could use any grain. Israeli couscous is really easy to cook because it’s not actually couscous. It’s just little balls of pasta, so if you can cook spaghetti, you can make this.

2 3/4 cups broth or salted water
2 1/4 cups Israeli couscous

Bring water to a boil and then pour in the Israeli couscous. Turn down the heat and simmer uncovered (check it every 5 minutes until it’s the consistency that you like your pasta; it took me less than 15 minutes).

Chop or tear whatever lettuce or greens you want with your salad. We used a small head of leafy lettuce. Then, chop the orange into bite sized pieces. You could also use any fruit. I calculate one half of a fruit per person because I love having a lot of fruit in my salad.

Finally, toss it all with your dressing of choice. I adapted this pomegranate vinaigrette (leaving out the oil and mustard) because we happened to have pomegranate molasses, but balsamic vinaigrette would also be really good. I tossed the dressing with the beets when they came out of the oven and poured more on my salad right before eating it.

I packed up all the ingredients separately to prevent sogginess then took them to work the next day. Ta-dah! It’s an easy, cheap salad if you make it at home, but a New York restaurant would probably charge more than $10 for something similar.

MADE

Homes of Portland

kristy, , , , , , 5 Comments

‘Home’ is the word I most strongly associate with Portland, Oregon. It is far from the only thing I associate ‘home’ with—shopping malls, telenovelas, Christmas, American commercials from the 90s, and Mexican junk food all rank high on the list. But Portland is a special part of that list because it is the only place where I have felt at home from the moment I arrived.

I remember landing in PDX airport in August of 2007 and running to the restroom. When I turned to flush, I saw my first dual-flush handle (it allows the user to control how much water is used to flush, which saves gallons of water.)

It was love at first flush.

Everything I encountered after that was just as perfect: farmers’ markets, efficient public transit, bike lanes, flowers the size of my face, trees the size of my dreams, public parks, and delicious vegan food everywhere…

Because I moved to Portland for college, it became my first home apart from my mother’s. And what a home it was! Fittingly, Portland also has some of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever seen. While I was visiting last month, I tried to capture some of them.

The number-one reason Portland houses are beautiful is, of course, the setting. The above picture is an unedited iPhone photo of a random house I saw on my way to the bus. Look how full of life Portland is! Look how tall that tree is! Look at that tangle of flowers on the mini-porch! There’s probably a more apt term than ‘mini-porch’, but I am not an architect!

Even if you subtracted the setting–as I tried to do for this shot–Portland is full of beautiful Victorian and Craftman-style houses painted in cheery colors. This house with individually-painted shingles in some of my favorite colors used to be my dream house. When I showed Abbita, my grandmother, a picture of it, she noted that it had too few windows for her taste. You can’t tell from this picture, but I agree with Abbita. My dream house should have no fewer than one million windows.

Portland residents also like to add fairytale touches to their already magical real-estate realities. This Craftsman has miniature toy dinosaurs on every rock in its front yard! I’ve also seen tiny toy horses tied to horse rings in sidewalks. (Horse rings are what people in the 1800s used to ‘park’ their horses. Read more about Portland’s toy horse project here.)

But what’s a home without an interior? This picture of my friend Alex’s house shows two things characteristic of Portland homes: (1) amazing old wood details and (2) color. Sadly, the photo doesn’t do justice to the deep orange of this dining room’s wall. Another thing I love about this picture is the cross. Alex was my roommate freshman year, and this cross is the first thing we bought to decorate our room. We bought it at a store selling fair-trade artisanal goods from Latin America. From what I remember, it’s either from Ecuador or Honduras, but uh, don’t quote me on that. Living with Alex is one of the best living arrangements I’ve ever had—and that’s even considering the size of our room. It was so small that the next year it was turned into a single-occupancy dorm. Alex, if you’re reading this, I love you! Thanks for letting me crash in your perfect house.

When I walked into Jo’s house (a house I’d been dying to see ever since I saw this house tour on her blog), the first thing I saw was this yellow tea kettle sitting on the most darling gas stove I ever did see. I was breathless over the color coordination among the kettle, wall décor, and dishtowel. If I had a Pinterest, I would pin this soooo hard. Let’s focus on what’s important here, though: tea kettles. Every Portland house has one! A lot of them have a stovetop one and an electric one. I didn’t even know what an electric kettle was until I moved there, and I’d only really had two kinds of tea in my life: chamomile and peppermint. Then, I started drinking tea to stay warm, and pretty soon I was drinking it just to drink it. Once, when I was feeling very romantic and Devin was writing his thesis, I bought him flowers and fancy tea. Only the tea tasted like perfume, so I ended up using the tea bags as potpurri for my drawers. All my socks and t-shirts smelled really good for a few months. After I took the above picture, I discussed kombucha with Jo and her housemate Aria. It boggles my mind that a lot of North Americans reading this probably don’t know what kombucha is. If you have never heard of it, here is all you need to know: it originated in China, it’s fizzy, some people think it cures every disease ever, everyone in Portland has an opinion about it, and once Lindsay Lohan claimed it made her drunk.

Jo, Aria, & Chris also have the neatest book & zine corner. This picture is a testament to their design genius, in case you weren’t convinced by the kitchen shot. I know not everyone knows what a zine is, so I found this webpage from Brooklyn College that explains the concept. Basically, it’s cool writing made and self-published by cool people. Most zines are made using paper, scissors, and photocopiers though that has changed a lot thanks to things like computers and Photoshop. When Devin asked me to be his girlfriend significant other—he asked me to be his girlfriend, but I prefer the term ‘s.o.’ ‘Girlfriend’ is just too antiquated/normatively gendered for me. So is ‘fiancée’, but I haven’t found any accurate equivalent for that so most of the time I say ‘partner’, which doesn’t really capture it…ack sorry, what was I saying? Oh yeah, Devin photocopied every feminist zine he could find at the Portland Independent Publishing Resource Center, put them in a binder, wrapped the binder in newspaper from the New York Times Style section, and asked me to be his ___________. The rest is history! (Can you tell I miss Devin? Me too.)

Jo’s living room is one of the prettiest I have ever seen (I got to sleep on that couch, you guys!), but it also reminds me of every Portland living room I’ve ever been in. The vintage couch by a window, the glass jars and bottles on a coffee table, the laptop… The whole scene gives me goosebumps, in a good way.

P.S. Every time I rave about Portland, I feel a strong moral conviction to acknowledge the huge problem of racial segregation in that city. Portland’s racial inequality is increasing. Seattle—the other metropolis in the Pacific Northwest—is decreasing racial inequality thanks to bold, innovative policies. This episode of Think Out Loud, a radio show from Portland, is a solid introduction to the problem.

P.P.S. If you enjoyed the pictures of Jo’s house, check out her blog. It is my favorite blog in the whole of the worldwide web. Her latest post, especially, inspired and moved me. I cried the best kind of tears.

Homes of Portland