A note: It feels frivolous to write — about baking, and anything — while martial law is raining down on Los Angeles; while wars rage and continue to steal people from their lives; while my family deals with our many recent losses. But writing is an obligation of observation, and these baking things are still happening inside me. So I send them to you.
Hello, Dear Readers!
This morning, I woke up thinking of cake. Bolo cakes walked into my waking thoughts because Ellie and I were dreaming of Brazilian cakes together yesterday.
Do you ever have this itchiness, where you need more sleep but the urge to bake pulls you downstairs?
Since sleep is tricky for me, I generally curb the impulse to start bread in the afternoon or evening. If I do, I might sabotage the critical extra hour or two of morning rest with flour possibilities.
What’s going on with the dough? peels me from my pillow. After today, clearly, I can’t even imagine cake without setting my mind whirring. But how can I not imagine cake, or Brazil?
I’m just home from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I traveled with Ellie and some friends. Well, physically, my body was returned to Troy a week ago, but it is taking time for me to catch up with where I was and where I am.
Two weeks ago, we — Ellie, her kid, her friends Jessy and Laurie and me — were walking up the shady path to Forte Duque de Caxias, a natural area at the end of Copacabana. We met Ellie’s friend, photographer Robert Karp, and wound our way up through a landscape full of plants I don’t know, and marmosets too, to a spectacular view.
I’m not much of a traveler. I like the comforts of my known world and panicked about going away. I mean, I get antsy taking the train to New York City! But my family and friends cheer-leadered me beyond my feelings and got me on this magnificent voyage.
Ellie is from Brazil. She came to Oklahoma for college, and we met while her husband was teaching at RPI. I met her love for food and people and life, and began sampling the Brazilian foods she carries in her home kitchen. I’m ready to make pão de queijo, cheese breads that Ellie introduced me to here in Troy.
Now that I’ve tasted this staple in its natural habitat, I have even more affection for it! Chewy, salty, warm — here’s how Ellie describes this beloved Brazilian food.
“It is really more than just a bread. It’s a meal, a snack, a hug at the breakfast table. It’s also not an easy recipe for kids to make because traditional versions require heating milk and oil and scalding the tapioca starch. But one year, when my mom visited, she was excited to share a new, simpler method for making Pão de Queijo. She promised that this version would be quick, with just three ingredients, “three cups,” she said.”
I’ll be making some for Bike Fest this weekend, Troy’s fantastic salute to bicycles and bike people. They will make a nice addition to the burrito bar — not to go in the burritos, but as a little hug from Ellie.
Part of this fundraiser is a ridiculous cake auction, where people pool their money to pay mounds — sixty to four hundred dollars — for cakes. The bidding is a great fake competition amongst the people who love Troy Bike Rescue. My son Felix will be the auctioneer.
My cake is going to echo my trip, where I saw bolos featuring carrot, coconut and pineapple. At the bakeries you could buy a slice of an unceremonious looking rectangle, or a whole bolo made in the same kind of pan used for flan. I’m impressed by how these cakes seem everyday, in that they are not super sweet and have minimal decorative flair.
In my mind, cakes are on a pedestal, for celebration. But I love them so much that I want them to be ordinary. This is part of why I’ve made a million pancakes in my life — not to slather them with maple syrup, but to have a baked round thing on my plate as often as possible.
My breakfast cakes have wholegrain flour, and I eat them with berries and plain yogurt. Dinner cakes often have corn kernels, onions, rye and cornmeal — but any and everything can go in a batter, whir in a blender, and make it to your plate.
Looking at Brazilian cakes, which are sometimes made in the blender, feels like an extension of my griddle love. Ellie has been baking these for years, and I’m going to follow her lead, archived on Instagram with the hashtag #storycookingblendercake, and debated through chats in WhatsApp, for my cake for the auction.
I hope you have something to celebrate soon. What will you bake?
Yours, Amy
"the itchiness where you need more sleep but the urge to bake pulls you downstairs" YES!!! Every few months, maybe three times a year, I awake in the middle of the night at an hour earlier than I did when I was still full-time at the bakery feeling full of energy and singularly fixated on making baguettes. I cannot get them out of my mind. I wander the house simply letting my brain play over the sense memories knowing it makes no sense to start baguettes at that hour but hoping if I think enough about it - the smell of the dough, how it feels to pre-shape, stretching, the shifting sound when loading it into the oven - my brain can rest again. I feel so alert thinking about it that I consider going on a run. It usually takes an hour or two until I can sleep again and I know the next day that it is time to drop all plans I had so i may baguette again.
I'm still here baking breads! Loved your description of dough peeling (or raising!) you off your pillow. Dough or making dough totally gets me out of bed :)