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This was originally supposed to be Chocolate Spice Bread from Nick Maligieri’s The Modern Baker, but I was, um. Out of sour cream. And then I accidentally added twice as much cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. And had to add an extra egg. And substituted goat cheese for the sour cream.

In other words, this is not Nick’s chocolate spice bread, but it is one of the most decadent chocolate desserts I’ve made, and that includes the afternoon I spent getting drunk on chocolate bourbon cake.

Chocolate Spice Cake Loaf

1 1/2 C AP flour
1/3 C dutch process cocoa powder
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 t cinnamon
1 t nutmeg
1 t ground ginger
3 eggs
1/2 C granulated sugar
1/2 C brown sugar
5 T melted butter
4 oz goat cheese, softened
1 t almond extract

Sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, spices and salt. Set aside.

Whisk eggs with sugar. Add melted butter, goat cheese, and almond extract and beat until smooth. Add dry ingredients and beat until combined.

Spread in a greased loaf pan and bake in a 350F oven for 40-50 minutes or until a clean knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for five minutes, then remove and cool completely before serving.

I figured that yet another recipe full of substitutions and minor errors was the right way to end the year. It is, after all, the way I bake 90% of my recipes.

I’ve done a lot of shopping at Ann Taylor Loft this year – sweaters, jewelry, shoes, dresses – but I’m fairly sure that this is it for the year. Appropriately, it’s a party dress that would be great for ringing in 2010 except for the facts that a) it’s not arriving until January 12th and b) I’m spending NYE on the couch.

In fact, I am not entirely sure when the next occasion calling for formalwear will even be, but let’s disregard those little details:

This is it for 2009, people. No more shopping until 2010.

I can always wear it to the opera in April, I suppose.

It’s 5:59pm on New Year’s Eve, I’m spending the night the way I usually do – at home with the cat – and since I did this last year (I think) I’ll do it again.

2009 was a fucking weird year.

Work: In October of 2008 my boss was laid off, leaving me as the one and only librarian at my company. In January, as the economy continued to crash, the entire company moved to a four day week. In May, shortly after I bought tickets for my very first vacation, they announced that we all had to take at least a month’s sabbatical. In June, my second boss was fired. A week later, I had a slightly critical evaluation from the CEO that had me on tenterhooks for much of the summer. I left the Special Libraries Association and started looking at jobs that weren’t necessarily ‘library’ jobs.

In September, we went back to five days a week, and this month I got a glowing evaluation and a raise. So, um. Yay?

Fandom/Writing: In January, I reconnected with a really good friend and we started RPing for a few hours every week. Then in March, we saw Watchmen and started RPing for several hours every single day, and I met a lot of awesome people in a new fandom. Annie and I have probably written thousands of pages, and started a spy novel. Creatively, I don’t think I’ve ever produced this much – if I have, it hasn’t been for years and years. I have written recipes for fictional characters.

Personal: I dated a few boys and flirted with one girl (so far). I went to California and met awesome people, and started to think about the possibility of relocating. I bought a lot of jewelry and clothes, showed my sister around New York in July and saw Jude Law as Hamlet in November. I got contact lenses and new glasses. I turned 29. I baked a crapload of shit, and started a baking blog.

Things I Know Will Happen in 2010: Annie and I will get The Novel written. I will see Renee Fleming in Rossini’s Armida. I’ll go to the Galapagos Islands in July. The world will continue to revolve around my cat.

Beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess.

Procrastination is an art form, dear almost nonexistent readers. Procrastination is why I’ve put off baking this coffeecake for almost two weeks now, and procrastination is why it’s being baked right now, at 10 pm. Because the other option is working on the writing project I’ve been putting off for a month, and heavens, we wouldn’t want to that, would we?

Of course not.

This recipe is basically Kitchen Brother’s Cranberry Buckle, with one important, essential, imperative addition: orange extract. Unnecessary, you say, when there’s already zest? Please, there can never be enough orange, especially in combination with cranberry.

That’s your lesson for today.

Cranberry Buckle

Streusel
1/2 C unbleached AP flour
1/2 C packed light brown sugar
2 T granulated sugar
1/2 t ground cinnamon
Pinch table salt
4  T unsalted butter (1/2 stick), cut into 8 pieces, softened but still cool
Cake
1 1/2 C AP flour
1 1/2 t baking powder
10 T unsalted butter, softened but still cool
2/3 C granulated sugar
1/2 t table salt
1/2 t grated orange zest
1 t orange extract
1 1/2 t vanilla extract
2  large eggs , room temperature
4  C fresh cranberries

Mix dry streusel ingredients, add softened butter, chopped, and rub between your fingers until the consistency of wet sand. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350F and grease a 9″ cake pan.

Whisk together flour and baking powder, set aside.

Cream butter, sugar, salt, and orange zest. Add eggs and vanilla and orange extracts. Mix until smooth, and then add dry ingredients, mixing until the flour is thoroughly combined.

Fold in cranberries. I highly recommend you do this with a wooden spoon rather than a spatula, lest your spatula snap in two. As mine did approximately half an hour ago.

Transfer dough to pan, pressing it into corners until it is even. Gather streusel in your hand and form a large clump before sprinkling it over the cake.  Repeat until the cake is coated and the streusel is gone. Bake for 55 minutes.

I can’t vouch for its taste, but it smells fabulous.

Hanna Rosin’s got an interesting article in Slate’s XX about the rise of the kitchen bitch, and frankly, after reading it I’m not sure that I’d want to marry a man who likes cooking as much as I do. And it’s entirely because of what Rosin describes: I have a feeling I’d end up with a guy picking (gently or no) at my techniques, ingredients, and recipes, and it would drive me up a fucking wall.

It seems like when guys march into the kitchen, a lot of them make it a competitive arena. The ingredients have to be fresher, the techniques have to be fancier, and the tools have to be the most badass tools available for the job (I blame Alton Brown for the last. Have you seen his immersion blender?) And for myself, I tend to cook the way my mom does. I don’t have problems with canned vegetables. I do tend to bake from scratch, because I like to bake, but my tuna noodle casserole is most certainly not made with sushi grade ahi and cremini mushrooms. It’s made with Chicken of the Sea and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom. I cannot evenly chop an onion to save my life. I use pre-chopped garlic from a jar. I own a Rachael Ray cookbook.

But I still love to cook, and it’d piss the hell out of me if someone was standing over my shoulder critiquing my technique; if I wanted that, I could go to culinary school.

I’m not saying all, or even most guys are like that, and maybe I’m getting all New York Times Styles here and building a trend from a couple of random data points. I don’t really think so, though. Food Network has gotten increasingly testosteronized over the past few years – the only pure cooking show left in primetime is Good Eats, and while I dearly love me some Alton, we’ve already mentioned his propensity for superpowered kitchen equipment. Other than that, it’s approximately 10 million competition shows and a few reality shows. The faces of baking is Ace of Cakes‘ Duff, mentioned by Rosin, and the dude from Cake Boss. I don’t watch Cake Boss, but he’s a burly Italian guy from Hoboken.

The fact is that increasingly, there are less and less female voices in the culinary press and pop culture, and as a woman who likes to cook, I worry about that. Do I want to be tethered to the stove? Not really. Do I want cooking to be yet another arena where I get mansplained to? No. I’ve got plenty of those as is.

This is based vaguely on a Paula Deen recipe, except I doubled the spices, changed molasses for maple syrup, and switched the vegetable shortening for butter (Yes, I too was shocked at the existence of a Deen recipe without a pound of butter.) They turned out well, heated the apartment on this extremely cold December day, and made my kitchen smell like Christmas, so I consider it a success.

Ginger Spice Cookies

3/4 C butter, softened

1 C brown sugar

1/4 C maple syrup

1 egg

2 C AP flour

2 t baking soda

2 t cinnamon

2 t ground ginger

1 t cloves

1/2 t salt

Granulated white sugar, for rolling

Preheat oven and either grease cookie sheets or line with parchment or a Silpat. Set aside. Cream butter and sugar. Add maple syrup and egg and mix until smooth. Sift together flour, baking soda, spices and salt. Add to wet ingredients and mix.

Form dough into 1″ balls and roll in white sugar. Flatten gently with the heel of your hand and bake for 12 minutes, rotating once.

They’re quite spicy and the maple flavor I was expecting was nonexistent. If you want a milder, sweeter cookie, halve the spices – it probably would have a more maple-spice flavor then.

Dear New Yorkers and New Jerseians traversing the streets of Manhattan,

It’s pouring down rain today. As it is late fall/early winter in New York City, this isn’t exactly a rare occasion. It rains in New York for three-quarters of the year, and the months of November and December tend to be more water-logged than most. One would think that would mean we’d all be experts at traversing the streets in downpours by now. One would be wrong, clearly, so here are some tips and tricks for not pissing the soaked girl in the purple wool coat off to the homicidal point.

1. A fallen umbrella is not a car accident. It does not require slowing down, it does not require rubber-necking, and it definitely doesn’t require both of those things at 8:40 am when two trains have just emptied out at the World Trade Center site. Move. Walk. Please.
2. Golf umbrellas are great for when you’re sheltering several people in an open air space like, say, a golf course. Golf umbrellas are horrible for when you’re using it solo in an extremely densely populated area. Get a smaller umbrella for the commute, all of you. The head you keep ramming into thanks you.
3. The usage of an umbrella of any size increases your space requirements. Keep this in mind, and other pedestrians’ hair won’t get caught on your umbrella, thus making you both late for work.

This public service announcement is brought to you by the fact that I’ve been at work for two and a half hours, and my feet are still wet.

This, my friends, is the best blondie you’ll ever make, period. It starts with my mother’s basic caramel brownies recipe – which, like many of my mother’s best recipes, comes from the 1955 edition of the Minonk United Methodist Church Cookbook – but instead of the prescribed nuts, add a cup of heath bar crunch bits. The kind with chocolate, although the brickle bits would probably be awesome in their own way.

I used the Heath bits the first time I made these, and though I’ve made them since with chocolate chips and with walnuts, and with pecans, nothing really comes close to the rich sweetness that toffee brings to the party.  This is the epitome of blondies, and I probably would have finished my latest batch already except for the fact that I’d sent them to California for someone’s birthday.

Heath Bar Crunch Blondies

1 1/2 C AP flour, sifted

1 t salt

2 C brown sugar, firmly packed

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2 t baking powder

2 t vanilla extract

1/2 C butter, melted

1 C HEATH Bar Crunch Bits

Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Add melted butter, sugar, vanilla and eggs and stir to combine. Fold in HEATH Bar Crunch pieces.

Spread in a well-greased 8×8 pan and bake at 350F for 30 minutes.

Excellent warm or cool, but somehow the most decadent when still soft from the oven.

Lindsay at Jezebel posted a video yesterday of one of the Gap’s holiday ads in a post entitled: New Gap Commercial With Little Girls Is, Yeah, A Little Gross. I’m…not seeing it, honestly.  Neither are most of the commenters.

The sticking point is apparently at :08, where one of the girls does a hip-pop. Now, I can’t dance. I really can’t dance. I can’t dance so much that I took weight training in college instead of a class in modern dance (which was considerably closer to my dorm, I might add), and even I know that hip popping is pretty much a standard in jazz and modern dance, not to mention modern cheerleading. The move itself isn’t sexual. It’s certainly not inherently sexual when performed by little girls in sweaters, tights, and boots.

But about 500 commenters agree with me there, and it’s not the thing that’s bugging me now. What’s bugging me are the comments like this one:

“it’s sick, quite frankly, that little girls would care so much about their clothing– how materialistic.”

This isn’t the only comment of this kind on the post – there are several in the vein of “they’re too young to care about their shoes!” – but this was definitely the most to the point.

Part of my reaction to it is increduality – I was pretty tomboyish after I got over my initial frilly dress phase around age seven, and I spent elementary school dying for a pair of Guess jeans. I got to go to the Gap for my back-to-school clothes for the first time when I was 12 and was so thrilled. I wanted my tennis shoes and sturdy sandals that I ran around to be cute.

And this is from someone who didn’t pay attention to fashion and what really looked nice until sometime in college, or possibly grad school.

There’s nothing wrong with being interested in clothes at the age of 8. There’s also nothing wrong with not being interested in them at that age (or any other). Kids are just as individual as adults, people. Really.

Before I get too deeply into Rachael Ray and my issues with, plus ridiculously easy tomato soup, I feel like I should point out one thing: I have a baking blog now. It’s called Live Every Week Like It’s Cake Week. That is all, carry on.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m really not all that fond of Rachael Ray – I can’t watch her on tv, she just grates, endlessly – but to give her her due, I did rely heavily upon her approximately five years ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school, 1500 miles away from my mother’s cooking, broke as hell (heh, some things don’t change), and in need of dinner seven days a week.

I made a lot of Rachael Ray recipes those first two to three years, and while she’s slowly been phased out in favor of Jamie Oliver, Tyler Florence, Dave Lieberman, and Ina Garten, plus lots of food blogs and the ever popular Recipes Sent By My Mother…there are still one or two 30 Minute Meals I make.

And yes, they’re all soups. You know me so well.

There are two great things about this soup. First, it’s adaptable. Out of shallots? Yes, an onion works fine. No vegetable broth? I’ve made it with chicken and just plain water with no adverse effects. Craving bacon? Fry up a few slices and saute the onions/shallots and garlic in the fat. Can’t stand spinach? No one says you have to put it in.

The second great thing about this soup is that it takes fifteen minutes to make, and the most complicated part is chopping the shallots. Seriously, that’s it. It’s a great option when you’re exhausted and broke (otherwise known as: me.)

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