Best Practice: The Black Cake
Christmas is gone. One nine-inch black cake (round) traveled on my lap from Illinois to Ohio. After a short tenure at my parent’s Christmas Eve party, pieces were claimed and taken to Columbus, Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
A percentage of tasters swore there was chocolate inside. A subset only tasted rum, and their sibling subset were overwhelmed by the flavors of the fruit paste. My grandma told me, mysteriously, she “tasted that applesauce in there.” My mom tasted the burnt sugar essence. One friend at my own Christmas party picked up a hunk with his bare hands, chomped it in half, and proclaimed, “It’s good!” On Christmas morning, my little brother sliced the merest tip from one sliver, sliced that tip into two tips, and upon tasting the first tip, he made the worst face I have ever seen before he nibbled the second tip and made a second, different, worse face. He said, “It tastes like a shot of rum that’s been watered down with chocolate milk.” He and my sister-in-law took some pieces to her parent’s house, where all his in-laws engaged in a round-table critique session of the cake, which he got on video, texted me he had a video, and then forgot to send to me for three days.
Laurie Colwin describes giving her friends this cake, after her babysitter, Betty Chambers (whose mother’s recipe LC replicates in the essay), gifted her one over the holidays: “It was polished off on Christmas Eve by ten adults and two children under three.” She was disappointed, it being a hit, there were no leftovers for her to enjoy. Knowing my family’s tastes, my own limitations, and the drawback of it being my first black cake (my first fruitcake!) I lowered my expectations. Her essay ends on the line “One bite is all it takes.” I force myself beyond my love for her and say for others, like my little brother, one bite is all they need.
On December 7th, one week before my own Christmas party in Chicago, I was a person who had never made black cake. That morning I drove 38 minutes to Arie Crown Forest Preserve. One of the ecological stewards clocked my approach and said, so loud, “LOOK AT THIS FELLOW! HE NEEDS SOME GLOVES!”
He taught us how to identify honeysuckle scrubs, that scraping the trunk of an invasive buckthorn would reveal damp, orange flakes beneath the bark, a brief rundown on handsaws and loppers, and how to use the Dragon (a propane tank) to light the brush pile without obliterating all surrounding human life. I was overwhelmed to be so happy and so busy and so physically useful.
The fire swelled, and the hollow we were clearing melted into a muddy trough. I sawed, for four hours, through one thatch of buckthorn and one thatch of honeysuckle and looked forward to my future black cake plans that day with a kind wide-mouthed hysteria. Despite enabling the best practice explained by the steward, my shoulders and forearms and abdomen cramped and ached, even before I was pulled off to practice cutting logs with an 8-pound splitter maul. Wow! I thought to myself, it will never be a problem that I scheduled another arduous task after this one, here, today! Isn’t it cool how problems have stopped existing? Then I lifted the maul above my head and brought it down on a knotty log, where it bounced off, log unharmed, but the impact led a long and ominous reverberation up and down my arms and back.
The ax guy, ax master really, replaced my maul with an actual ax. “You’ve heard of those places?” He said, “those popular places these days, right? With the ax throwing, where people can throw their own ax? Hatchets! Those hatchet throwing places.”
“Hatchets!” I said, trying very, very hard to be the human embodiment of I’m Just Happy to Be Here!
“They are an affront to the art of ax cutting,” he declared. “In the past, there were eighty different types of ax heads, each intended for a different type of tree. Pine. Maple. Oak. Different shaped ax heads, for each tree. You understand. Okay, try again.”
Days before this day, using the recipe in LC’s essay as a base, I rolled around the internet from food blog to food blog. I wanted pictures, I wanted the know and recognize the desirable aspects of the cake, I wanted any trick I could find. I wanted to avoid the cratered surface of the cake on this site, without the crumby and multicolored interior featured on that site. I decided to use the staff recipe featured on iamajamaican.net. The cake looks thick, but pliable, the batter perfectly smooth, the finished cake surface moist and pristine. After a little compare/contrast, I worked out a final recipe and tried to feel proud of my preparation, my own best practice, my constant and dreadful fight to avoid frantic gestures and superfluous movement (to be calm would be cool and fun. I hope one day to experience this).
In my brush pile clothes, I queued up Bridget Jones’s Diary in a charming act of foreshadowing. I set up the mise en place I rarely do in daily life. The eggs and butter had been put out long before, to reach room temperature. I ground whole nutmegs and blasted fresh cinnamon sticks in my coffee grinder. It took about five minutes to render Rum Jar and process the sludge inside into a maroon paste, where I left it to rest tenderly in my only pasta pot. The eggs were beaten in my stand mixer, which is going on four years old and makes a new, exciting clunking noise with each use.
I was halfway through creaming the butter with the dark brown sugar, my forearms positively in love with me, before I remembered I hadn’t cocked up the parchment paper shells for my springform pans, which were set out next to the water pan intended to keep the cakes damp and uncracked while they baked. I ended up on the floor with a pair of scissors, in a fit of dread from abandoning the creamed butter/sugar. In moments I’d made a mess an honorable kindergartner would be ashamed of, and on my laptop, Renée Zellweger dyed her Vichyssoise blue.
Is it already to the part with her birthday dinner party? I thought, and successfully entered the first stage of panic. I threw out all the wasted parchment paper and resolved to butter the hell out of the springform. I’d forgotten how long it takes, in my personal baking process, to set the tools out and turn in slow circles while I accuse myself of inefficiency.
I finished creaming the butter and sugar. The dozen beaten eggs were standing by, already mixed with the browning, vanilla, powders and salt, the spices. I poured the eggs over the creamed mix, and folded dutifully with my wooden spoon, as per the directions on IAAJ.net.
So, the butter curdled.
I think I just kind of braced my arms on the table, my face hovering above my pseudo-batter, and let it regard its heinous mother while kicking me in the fucking dick, fuck.
Fruitcake forums advised “it’ll sort itself out in the oven or when you add the flour, whatever,” and I reacted by dumping all my fruit paste over the mess, overfolding it, and then overworking the flour, overcome by the desire to convince the greasy butter polyps to rejoin instrumentality.
After another splash of rum and a tablespoon of browning (I’d already exhausted all my fruit preserves), which was absorbed with no visible change in the batter’s texture, I failed iamajamaican.net’s spoon test. A spoon is dropped into one’s black cake batter, and hopefully, it falls to a 45-degree angle before slowing down. The recipe says, in bold, “TOO MUCH FLOUR WILL YIELD A TOUGH CAKE.” When I dropped my spoon, it fell to the bottom of the bowl and commenced to stand straight up, proud and indecent, held up by the dirty slut who, in her perversity, overmixed the flour.
The pictures on iamajamaican.net reveal a silky, liquid batter that pours easy from a spoon. My batter was nearly chunky, and sort of glopped from the ladle. But there was nowhere else to go from there, and I filled my buttered springforms, chucked them into the oven over my water pan, and pretended to wash my hands of the situation when actually, I just had the entire kitchen to wash.
A household is full of invited beasts, sort of like goals, sort of like Moomins, and for as much dread these little plans and plots and lists haul up inside a person, usually the second that person believes they’re about to be devoured is the moment the person turns around, opens their mouth, and shocks themselves by realizing they were the one eating all along. Cannibals roam and vampires stay put, and one particular vampire stomps on the floor and goes, “Why did I fuss around so much and tell everybody about it, when I could have been private? Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! It’s just a stupid cake!”
It was two nine-inch cakes. An unveven surface, but less splitting and cracking than I expected, though I noticed a bit of buckling along the sides, once I unpeeled them from the springforms (they came unstuck very cleanly, like good children). Very dark and dipping a bit in the middle. Within minutes of cooling, I could balance one cake on one palm, and flip it back and forth to rest it properly onto a plate and swath it correctly in square rounds of wax paper. I hobbled off to bed when the job was done, my bonfire clothes laid out and at least one transformation completed and sitting on the kitchen table. How successfully, I wouldn’t know for at least a week.
Christmas is gone. In the privacy of my home, black cake and I can get to know each other. It’s true that black cakes improve with age. The alcohol mellows out, the fruit flavors blend, and even the flaws take on some charm. Though moist, it’s a bit stiff in crumb, but that means I can carry it around with me and eat it out of one hand while I putter around with the other). The inside, when pulled apart, is dark and rich like a good hole found underneath a rock. It’s hard to get through a whole slice. A little does the trick. And I haven’t learned my lesson, since I’m going over my notes and making new little plots while I’m in the shower — “Next time I’ll do this differently, start the fruit earlier, and use this particular rum, and reserve the excess rum from the rum jar if I fail the spoon test!”
I still wonder if Laurie Colwin ever made her own cake, and if she did, what she felt about it, if that knowledge is out there in the world, and if it is, if it can even be felt in the spot she used to be.
That afternoon on December 7th, the ecological volunteers were picking up and counting the handsaws when a bird cackled and hooted overhead. One of the stewards looked up into the maple branches and said, “You hear? That’s a woodpecker! That’s one of them — those woodpeckers, the pil-pil-pileated woodpecker! When the ground cover spread and kept them from seeing the forest floor, they had to leave. But now they’re coming back!”
If something is done for long enough, deliberately, sincerely, there’s usually going to be a result. You’re lucky if you can hold them. You’re lucky if you can’t.
Links:
Again, with many thanks: How To Make The Delicious Jamaican Black Fruit Cake In 10 Easy Steps
