Marissa Flaxbart

Buttercream as Metaphor

Last week, one of my two roommates had a birthday. In any other year, Kat would have arranged for a picnic outing in Malibu or a chicken parm dinner at Little Dom’s, maybe. But this is 2020, and we live in Los Angeles. The guest list and the venue were predetermined by the rules of quarantine.

Something extravagant seemed necessary to make a Safer-at-Home birthday feel like a celebration, so I volunteered to make a cake. A BIG cake. I pulled out a cookbook called Sky High, which — no kidding — exclusively features recipes for triple-layer cakes. My baking bible has long been Shirley Corriher’s Bake Wise, my cookbook shelf is crowded with workhorse volumes: Julia Child, Joy of Cooking, The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook. But in my 20s, when I went through my primary cake phase, Sky High was my go-to for fun party cakes. I only stopped making them because it never seemed like anyone else was as excited to eat a slice of cake as I was to offer it. The cakes were beautiful but huge, and they rarely got finished off. Is there anything sadder than putting cake in the trash?

I asked Kat to flip through Sky High and choose any cake in the book. She went with a “Mile High Devil’s Food Cake,” which the authors paired with a lovely “brown sugar buttercream” frosting. Classic, straightforward. Or so I thought.

I made the three cakes with relish. It was distracting, even meditative. All my old, learned tricks came back to me — dropping the filled pans onto the counter from a few inches to knock out air bubbles; folding 3 pieces of parchment in half to create identical pan liners; rotating the pans just once during baking so that the cakes were even but the oven stayed hot. The cakes came out springy and fragrant, filling our third-floor walkup with the aroma of chocolate and vanilla.

Then it was time to make the frosting. Buttercream. What could be simpler? All I had to do was follow the recipe.

On closer inspection, this recipe was something unfamiliar, totally unlike any frosting, buttercream or otherwise, I’d made before. It called for (1) beaten egg whites; (2) a brown sugar/water solution cooked to soft-ball stage, then added to the egg whites; (3) a full pound of room temperature butter. That was it. Four ingredients, four steps.

Any baker (successful or failed, in fact) can tell you that specificity and exactitude are more important in baked goods than in any other type of cooking. The only saves for a vague (or bad) baking recipe are wisdom or luck; ideally you bring both into the kitchen. I was operating with only a little of the former and (as always) an unknown amount of the latter. As I got going, I became aware of a great many ways my buttercream could fail. Was this one of those egg white recipes where the bowl must be scrupulously clean? The recipe didn’t say. Must my whites be fluffy before I add the sugar solution? The recipe mentioned nothing about this. Is this butter really supposed to be room temperature? Or had that been a mistake in the ingredient list?

This recipe had the audacity to specify that the brown sugar solution needed to hit precisely 238°F on my candy thermometer, but then suggest that I blend it with the eggs whites until that mixture reached “body temperature.” Body temperature! 98.6º? The temperature of my cold baker’s hands? Who knew. I put my hands on the mixing bowl and tried to remember what it felt like to touch a human body. Then I added the butter.

Here’s what the recipe told me about what would happen next:

“When all the butter has been added, raise the speed to medium and beat until the frosting almost appears to separate. Continue beating, and it will suddenly come together, looking like smooth whipped butter.”

What is missing from those two, simple sentences? After a minute or so of mixing melting butter into my feverish batter on medium, the deficit became obvious: no amount of time was specified. How long was this supposed to take?

HOW LONG WAS THIS SUPPOSED TO TAKE?

Sometimes we come across a situation so metaphorically apt that, for a few moments, it is as if we can see the matrix. The world snaps into focus with a certain poetry that is invisible to us most of the time. As I let my supposed buttercream spin away for minute four…five…six…I saw that churning mess in my KitchenAid for what it really was. The buttercream was the quarantine. It was this whole situation.

Right now, all we want to know is how long? But we just don’t know. We have vague instructions to wait for things to come together, with no timeline, our only assurance a warning that they will get worse before they get better. We know how we got here, we know what we want things to look like in the end, but in the meantime, we watch the beater spin and hope that we haven’t already ruined everything. There’s no real reason to think that it’s ruined; only our fears that, without better guidance, hope itself is foolish. How long is this supposed to take? Why haven’t things changed in a way that I can see? When will it look like it is supposed to? Will it ever?

Seven minutes passed. Eight. I really needed this frosting to come together, and not just for Kat. I needed it to work out because of the metaphor. We were going to be okay, right? We were going to get the world back, right? I had great idea: I consulted my bible (BakeWise; see above). Alas, the only comparable recipe was so different from this one that there was no usable advice. Classic bible. So I consulted a couple of other valuable sources while the beaters spun on. I found a few buttercream recipes with similar ingredients, but the details were different, as were the methods. I put my cookbooks away. They had been little help, beyond the affirming my feeling that this whole situation was totally bizarre.

Nine minutes. Ten minutes. I leaned on the counter’s edge. It was already after 10pm. The smell of warm chocolate on the air had long since faded. I watched the blade spin and tried to determine if anything at all had changed. Was the color finally uniform? Had all the butter pieces finally dissipated? Was anything working here?

And then, it started.

“…Until the frosting almost appears to separate” is a scary directive. In whipping anything, be it mayonnaise, cream, or frosting, separation is a crisis. It means that all your hard work, your ingredients, your elbow grease, have gotten you nowhere. And yet, as my frosting appeared to separate before my eyes, I felt a rush of relief. It looked awful, but that was what was supposed to happen. It was supposed to come apart so that it could come together. My hope restored, I watched a few moments longer until, finally: brown sugar buttercream. Looking like smooth whipped butter.

The cake was delicious, and gigantic. The three people that live in my apartment polished it off in 5 days. And even though it was Kat’s birthday cake, my roommates saved the last piece for me.

 

 

Permission to Take What's Granted (Thoughts on Dad's LA Visit)

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Yesterday my dad flew home to Chicago after a long weekend trip to visit me and read books in the sunshine. While we Angelenos proclaimed the 60-70 degree temps "so fall" and "officially sweater weather," Dad smirked at all the stylish brooders in black knit beanies, slept with the window open, and donned short sleeves. On Monday night, after I left the office, we had a teriffic, one-for-the-memory-books dinner at The Ponte, Stephanie Bombet and Scott Conant's newish, Modern Italian restaurant in the part of town Dad suggested we refer to as "NQBH" -- Not Quite Beverly Hills.

 

And, of course, we dined al fresco. Sure, it was 60 degrees outside, but there were heat lamps and goddammit, we're Chicagoans. If you give us the option to sit outside, we take it.

 

I'd worried about how expensive the meal might be, scheming ways to keep the bill low. Two entrees, no cocktails, no desserts, and suddenly this would be a pretty average tab. My reasoning was simple: I knew my dad would be paying the bill, and I didn't want to drag him to a pricey place willy-nilly. If I could afford it, I'd have tried to pick up the bill myself, but as anyone who's eaten dinner with him can attest, this is easier said than done. I didn't want him to think I was taking advantage of his constant generosity just because it was his last night in town.

 

Dad had his own agenda for dinner though: get what we want. Have a cocktail, because look at this beautiful menu. Have a second cocktail. Have dessert. The plates were small after all. This was a celebration, life is for the living and, thank God, after decades of very hard work he can afford to take his daughter out for nice dinners during their short time together in LA.

 

Dad didn't SAY any of these things out loud. What he said, as I held the cocktail menu close to my face, weighing my many options like so much precious metal, was "you look like you're preparing for your bat mitzvah." And he laughed, and I laughed, because it was really funny and we were having the time of our lives.

 

I've been thinking today about the complex feelings I have around parental support, be it emotional (we talk on the phone nearly every day), moral (he firmly believes in my talent as a writer, reads my work and discusses it with me, and is the single loudest voice rooting for my success), or financial (I would be unable to pursue success in my chosen field without the privelege of a parental safety net). The simple fact is, my father's support and friendship is probably the greatest treasure in my life. Not all my friends can count on stability and sanity from their parents; few if any can count on the level of motivation, wisdom, and friendship I'm lucky enough to receive (and which I try very hard to return). I don’t take it for granted and I thank him for it all the time.

 

But “not taking it for granted” ignores the very beautiful way in which all those things ARE granted. That love and support? It’s not going anywhere. And yet, I let my gratitude morph into a kind of guilt that no one asked for and which is doing no one any good. Guilt that sometimes takes the shape of my deepest insecurity: that if I am not doing it “on my own” I am failing.

 

Where does this come from? Who taught me that I needed to do it all on my own? Is it an American society that teaches us that making it on your own is a necessary part of adulthood? Is it the fact that I'm an only child, and have a lot of learned self-reliance? Is it an inherited self-reliance from my pretty self-reliant parents? Or maybe (because all psychological self-evaluative roads lead back here for me), it has something to do with my mom's death. Some story I made up for myself about not wanting to be a burden.

 

(Don't trust the stories you tell yourself at 15. 15-year-old-you doesn't know shit.)

 

And maybe not. Maybe all this is bullshit psuedopsychology. The good news is, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that I more fully open my heart to the grace of Other People, which I know to be both abudant and only available if you allow yourself to seek it. What matters is that I earnestly try to put the myth of "you have to do it on your own or you're failing" into a box marked "Damaging: Please Incinerate." And with time, gratitude, love, and that open heart, I will set that damn box ablaze.

 

After dinner Monday night, I drove home, the radio tuned to KUSC, the classical station. I told my dad, honestly, that the amount of time we'd spent listening to this station while he was here (a lot) was not representative of how much I usually listened to it (only ocassionally). And then Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano concerto began, and I proclaimed, just as honestly, that it was one of my favorite pieces of music. The DJ's lead-in had prepared us for a unique and eye-opening rendition of the piece, and that's exactly what it was, so singularly soulful and dramatic that there were passages I barely recognized. I pulled into my parking garage, but the second movement had only just started. Without discussing it, I switched only the engine off, and we sat in the car, trying hard not to hum too loud over the rolling piano highs and lows of a piece that both of us, independently, had chosen as a favorite. And for just a moment, I stepped away from myself, took a look down at the scene from above, and felt exceedingly blessed to have been given so very many things in this world to love.

Limited Endeavor: Video Edition

Several months ago, I started a VERY silly Instagram project called Limited Endeavor. About once a week, I set up an artistically grandiose photograph of a weird limited edition snack (most often candy). My motivation was threefold:

(1) I'd heard the happiness advice that having a "quest" is a good for you
(2) I hold a lifelong interest in limited editions (or just new versions) of brand-name standbys, especially candy bars
(3) I possess an artistic sensibility steeped in irony

I've had one particular candy bar on my desk for a few weeks now, and it is so odd that the idea of just posting a photograph of it seemed a shame. I was VERY curious what was under the hood, so to speak, and wanted to share the unwrapping/first-taste journey with the world (or, you know, whoever happens to find their way to the video). I'm about to leave for England (like, I'm heading to the airport as soon as I hit "publish") so it was now or never.

For your viewing, questing, and maybe eating pleasure (?) may I present... the Payday: Flavor of Texas BBQ.

 

 

Keep Drinking (One Taste at a Time)

Every Friday night, a little wine shop in Pasadena called Monopole puts an item on their menu called "Friday Blind." The game is simple: taste four wines – two white, two red – and if you can name three out of four varietals, your wine is free, the equivalent of about two full glasses.  It may sound like a gamble exclusively for sommeliers in training, but you’re provided with a detailed tasting guide that explains typical colors, bodies, and flavor notes for the different grapes on offer. I've gone to do the Friday Blind three times – the first was a total whim, the next two were very much on purpose – and each night, somewhere near the end, I declare it "the greatest thing ever." 

To clarify, my wine tasting companions and I are by no means experts. We have all consumed a fair amount of wine in our free time, but always at an amateur level, i.e., sans tasting guide, sans careful analysis, sans much thought period. I know from experience that I tend to love Sauvignon Blanc and make a sour face at a sip of Chardonnay. I prefer red over white unless it’s hot or I am thirsty, and then I chose white because it’s cold. I have entertained daydreams about sommelier training, because a job that’s all about taste and smell sounds like…well, the greatest thing ever. There’s a slight chance I might be one of those “super tasters” and a keen sense of smell runs in my family (we call it “the Berg nose” after my great great grandparents, not to be confused with “the Berg tongue,” which has nothing to do with taste at all, but is rather a kind of absentminded facial tick).

 

An olfactory scourge

Aside: When it comes to the canonical Five Senses, taste and smell don’t get enough credit. People ask “would you rather go deaf or blind?” as a kind of sick parlor game, but losing smell or taste would make a pretty grim impact on my daily life. It’s noon on a Saturday and already today I’ve compared the taste of 4 different stone fruits at the farmers’ market; tested a long list of perfumes at a local beauty shop; noted the subtle flavor change as I added cream to my iced coffee (and the less subtle change of adding the spicy house salsa to my chilaquiles); lamented that the gelato shop where I bought that coffee uses the cleaning solution that has become my personal odor nemesis since moving to LA (in case you’re trying to get me to avoid your home or business, it’s called it’s the “lavender” scented Fabuloso); and been greeted, upon my returned home with the delicious smell of pancakes (which I am too full of chilaquiles, stone fruit, and coffee too eat).  

 

Anyway, back to the wine tasting. The Greatest Thing Ever.

On our first outing, none of us guessed any of the wines correctly. The second time, one of us got ONE correct. Last night, I was the big winner: I got two out of four correct (both the whites), and was roundly congratulated by the owners. I felt very proud of myself. 

But guessing right isn’t what makes it fun. What makes this process fun is the way half a glass of wine, once merely a classy way to loosen up/refresh, becomes a world unto itself, a conversation, a quest, an article of examination. Last night, we all agreed that one of the wines had a definite “tar” note to it, and I confidently stated that the final wine had a bouquet of burnt blackberry pie. And you know what? I meant it.

Because we were having so much fun, and it was getting late, we got to try the last bits of a couple other bottles when we were done. We were give sips of a white wine that was a clear as water and tasted like jasmine perfume — I’d never had anything like it. When we asked the people serving us how they learned so much about wine, the woman behind the counter told us, “You have to keep drinking. If you don’t drink, you don’t learn.”

Now there’s some advice I can run with. 

So I just stumble upon an Italian grocery and find this candy I've been dreaming about for nearly a decade. Boston, you're cool. Not even mad that you're raining on me.

 

Farmers market has blackberries? I has pie.

 

Chipotle = ...Chicago?

So here's something weird: now that I live in California, I almost never go to Chipotle. There's even one right by my place but, though I've long loved the chain, I almost always skip it in favor of something that feels more uniquely Californian. I mean, if I'm in the mood for sorta- kinda-Mexican food, I have tons of choices, regardless of what part of the town, county, or region I'm in.

It's not about avoiding chains, either. I think it's more that, even after nearly six months (!), I'm still in tourist mode. When I'm in a foreign country, I might be tempted to visit a McDonald's, but only to see how it's different from the US version; for most of my meals, I want to try something I can't get back home. Just so, in So. Cal things as commonplace as Rubio's, Wahoo's, even El Pollo Loco, have the benefit of feeling novel, because we don't have them back home.

Today, I discovered a strange, added bonus to my somewhat illogical avoidance of Californian Chipotles: as I walked through the front door, that familiar Chipotle aroma hit me, and it instantly reminded me of home. I wasn't at the Chipotle of Orange, CA, I was on State and Grand, or on Ontario in Streeterville where we used to take our lunch breaks, or down on Jackson by the library. Through avoidance, I managed to make a national chain feel like home.

The catch, now, is that I'll only be able to experience this feeling maybe once every month or two. I figure if I walk through those doors too often, the smell of the restaurant will lose its transportational powers.

But I can live with that. After all, it's just Chipotle.

Memorable Jingles for Forgettable Products

One minute, I'm suggesting "pizza party" as a birthday idea for a friend. The next minute, I'm singing. I had to look up this commercial for the '80s board game, "Pizza Party," to jog said friend's memory and tickle my nostalgia bone. But the truly amazing part? I'd been singing it in the right key.

 

Good Stock Market News? Celebrate with an AAPLtini

I thought about calling this post "Marissa's Tips for Living the Dream: Celebrate Any Damn Thing," but that just didn't seem informational enought.

Today, as some of you are sure to be aware, Apple stock (aka AAPL) passed 600 and Apple announced they'd begin paying out quarterly dividends. This is kind of bittersweet news for me (I had a tiny bit of the stock once, but had to sell it to survive my year of joblessness), but my dad was pretty psyched. In fact, he decided he had to celebrate by creating a cocktail. 

And it's good.

Here's the recipe

AAPLtini

2 oz vodka

1 oz Goldschlager

3-4 oz Martinelli's, chilled

Combine vodka and Goldschlager in a shaker (ice optional). Strain into a martini glass and top with Martinelli's. Sit back and think about how you bought Apple stock in the 1980s when people thought the company was going down the tubes. Alternately, stare blankly into the glass, enjoying the pretty gold color and the bubbles.

Said the drink's brilliant inventor, "We'll enjoy it for today. The stock's been going up so fast, something's gotta...[trails off]."

Genius, master chef, goofball, pessimist. That's my dad. 

Thanks for the tip, Fast-Food Cookie.

The irony of this fortune — from a Panda Express fortune cookie, opened AFTER the meal — is not lost on me. Apparently the cookie doesn't even care that I got mixed vegetables as my side.