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I miss the 60’s. I’m not talking about the flower-child late 60’s. I would have been a terrible hippie—not enough structure and not enough bathing. No, I miss the early 60’s and it is Doris Day’s fault. When I was a kid Channel 9 used to show all those (I thought at the time) saucy movies with her trying to keep Rock Hudson at bay (no comment), their wink-wink banter and poor Tony Randall sneezing alongside them. She was a sassy career gal (who seemed to always have a full-time and even sassier housekeeper) with her own apartment, great pastel jackets with ¾ length sleeves and that perky helmet of white-yellow hair. 'Someday,' I’d think, 'I’m going to live just like that.'
Yeah, no. It didn’t exactly turn out that way. But, it should come as no surprise that I am a devoted Mad Men fan. Same era, same clothes, same dark handsome leading man. Although the show’s career gal has the frumpiest clothes, the creepiest looking bangs, a roommate and an apartment that looks like it could use a housekeeper, sassy or not.
Two recent events made my longing for those days even stronger. First, I finished reading “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s can’t-put-it-down-till-I-finish-it novel set in Jackson, Mississippi circa 1963.
And then season three of “Mad Men” came to a close. Such a great finale but how depressing to know it will be at least nine months before we see Don Draper again.
In an attempt to put living in the past in the past (until at least season four or the next time Doris and Rock are on TV) I decided to honor 1963 with a dessert. My father was a "mad man" himself, starting in the mailroom at McCann Erickson and spending his 40 odd year career on Madison Avenue (really the Pan Am building and West 23rd Street, but you get the point). Luckily for me I have a built-in Betty Draper—my mother. For the record she’s not a disappointed, passive aggressive sour-puss like Betty and, as far as I know, my father is not an identity stealing philanderer like Don. If anyone knows what the wives of mad men were making back in the day, it is Mom.
After some ‘hmmm’ing and ‘let me think’ing my mother called with an “I found it! Ann Seranne’s Mocha Torte. I thought I was such hot stuff and so sophisticated!” she said, laughing at the memory of herself at 23 when she became a “Mrs.” and had yet to set foot in a kitchen.
The thought of my mother attempting to make this cake in their tiny East 50’s walk-up gave me the energy to embark on my experiment. In the spirit of veracity I followed most of the original recipe’s instructions which made my project more time consuming (big shock that recipes would assume a woman had nothing better or else to do all day) and a little annoying. I did love the look of the chocolate disks on the side—groovy in a mod kind of way. Some of the techniques in the adapted version below are slightly updated but the photos chronicle my own experience.
And yes, after this time warp adventure I am committed to living in the present. Looking at these pictures I’m sure you’ll understand why.
Ann Seranne's Mocha Torte
Updated from The New York Times, 1963 or 1964
Printer Friendly Version
Ingredients-Torte
8 eggs
1 cup sugar
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1/2 cup very, very strong coffee (make one cup of either a triple strength coffee or espresso)
Directions-Torte
Preheat oven to 350
Butter two 9" cake pans, line them with a disk of parchment paper, butter paper.
In microwave safe bowl melt chocolate in microwave at 30 second intervals, stirring after each time, until fully melted.
(Note: This photo is per the instructions from the original recipe)Pour coffee into melted chocolate and whisk until combined.
Combine eggs and sugar in electric mixer and beat with whisk attachment till very think and pale.
With spatula, fold in flour until fully combined. (Keep your eyes open for hidden pockets of flour)
Fold chocolate/coffee mixture into egg/sugar/flour mixture till uniform in color.
Pour batter into prepared pans and bake 35 minutes till cake tester/toothpick comes out clean.
Cool in pans for 5 minutes. Invert onto wire racks, peel off parchment paper and let cool completely.
Ingredients-Mocha Butter Cream
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup water
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
4 egg yolks
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1/4 cup very, very strong coffee (see above)
3 sticks of butter, softened
Directions-Buttercream
In bowl of electric mixer, fitted with whisk attachment, beat egg yolks till light and fluffy. Leave in mixer.
In microwaveable bowl, melt chocolate in 30 second intervals as above.
(Again-photo is for original recipe's instructions)
Whisk coffee into chocolate till completely combined. Set aside.
Combine sugar, water and cream of tartar in small saucepan.
Bring to a boil until sugar dissolves.
Boil rapidly until syrup registers 236 on a candy thermometer.
Gradually beat the syrup into the egg yolks using whisk attachment of mixer, continue beating until the mixture thickens.
Switch from whisk attachment to paddle attachment and beat in the butter a little at a time until light and fluffy.
Chill until buttercream is spreading consistency. For a little lightness after chilling you could beat the buttercream again to fluff it up. (I did below.) Or not, it's up to you.
Ingredients-Chocolate Disks
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate
Directions-Chocolate Disks
Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
In microwaveable bowl, melt chocolate as above.
Quickly pour chocolate onto parchment lined cookie sheet.
Using an offset spatula, spread chocolate into thin layer.
Chill for 5 minutes
Using 2 1/2" cookie cutter, firmly press cutter into chocolate and place sheet back in fridge.
10 minutes later, or whenever you are ready, pull sheet out of fridge and separate disks from sheet of chocolate.
Assembly
To keep things neat, center strips of wax paper on turntable or serving platter so that they fan out in a sunburst pattern.
Place first layer of cake on top of strips.
Frost cake with butter cream as you would any layer cake. An offset spatula will help to keep the frosting even.
Top with second layer and continue frosting.
Gently pull out wax paper strips.Press chocolate disks around the side of the cake, evenly spacing them all the way around. You will have room for 11-12 disks.
I was looking for a pair of tickets (“which will be sent to you in an unmarked envelope” the Telecharge guy had said) when I became overwhelmed by clutter. I went from stack to stack—magazines, bills, folders of writing projects, recipe clippings, books I’m meaning to read and on and on. And it hit me. Why do I have so much junk in here? Do I really need to keep the 2006 editions of New York Magazine’s “Cheap Eats” and “Best Doctors in New York?”
Are they even considered the best and the cheapest anymore? And what about all of the catalogues from which I will be ordering nothing? Oh, and the five books I’ve made it half way through before moving onto the next? Something had to give. And then I remembered something I heard a wise woman once say, “Never leave a room empty handed.”
Marilu Henner. I know. I can’t believe I just quoted her either. Elaine from ‘Taxi’ has been a healthy living guru for years and spreads the word on everything from the thrill of a dairy-free life to organizing your home.
But she’s right. If you remove something that is out of place every time you leave a room and put it in its rightful place (or get rid of it altogether) you will have a clean, clutter-free life in no time at all! So, I decided to take a fresh look at my apartment, as if I was walking in for the first time.
Bad idea. Where do you stop? After trying to tackle all the obvious surfaces and sorting things into put away, throw away, give away (I came up with that on my own!) I thought about all the unnecessary stuff lurking behind doors of cabinets and closets, drawers and shelves and I started to feel my chest tighten with anxiety. Would I ever really fulfill Marilu’s directive? Live an organized and calm life? And did I really care enough to dive under my bed to sort through the bags of tights I once wore everyday in my old office life and now never consider in my current jeans life? It’s like the way Martha Stewart has a recipe for ketchup. I mean come on, Heinz isn’t good enough? When does madness stop and acceptance begin?
One thing that did really surprise me was how accustomed to disarray I had become. I’m a very clean person and a pretty neat one too. But with a fresh eye I realized I’d gotten used to this tableau of semi-litter. Like that crumpled dryer sheet. I’d done my laundry three days ago and had been stepping over it ever since.
Wake up lady and pick up your stuff! I also found a sock I’d tossed on my closet floor when I’d discovered a hole in the toe and was running late so I pulled out another pair from my sock drawer and left holey just lying there. And let’s not even start on the leaning tower of New Yorkers that sat mocking me from their perch on the coffee table. Oh dear.
Aside from all the scraps of paper, stacks of periodicals and piles of I’ll-get-to-that-later-stuff I started noticing some lovely things I had stopped seeing and appreciating—works of art by my niece, a bowl I’d bought in Mexico and, on the red wall of my kitchen the framed pages of a Royal Baking Powder cookbook I picked up at flea market five years ago. They have been hanging there ever since and I have yet to bake a single one of the recipes. Until now.
I had never made popovers before and I couldn’t believe how easy they were. I only had a muffin tin but after this experience I may break the bank and cough up the $ for an official popover pan. These would be great cracked open and spread with a little jam, or as a vessel for scrambled eggs or chili or just plain—so easy, so good and right in front of me the whole time. And yes, I found my tickets.
Thank you Marilu!
Sorry, I Didn't Even Notice You Popovers
Adapted Royal Baking Powder Cookbook
Printer Friendly Version
Ingredients
2 Tablespoons Canola oil, divided
1 cup all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon butter, melted
1 cup milk
Directions
Preheat oven to 450
Pour 1/2 teaspoon canola oil in each cup of 12 cup muffin pan. (If you have a six cup popover pan, more power to you. Use that instead and place one teaspoon oil in each cup.)
Place in preheated oven for 5 minutes
Sift flour and salt in a large bowl
Make a well in the flour and pour butter, milk and eggs into well
Whisk until smooth
Pour into heated muffin or popover tin, filling the cups halfway
Bake for 20 minutes
Reduce oven to 350 degrees
Bake an additional 15 minutes until dark golden, puffy and risen
Cool slightly and serve immediately
The other day I was channel surfing and stumbled upon “Australia” playing on HBO. The movie, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman and directed by Baz Luhrmann, was released last year with the accompanying holiday epic fan fare—Oprah flirting with Hugh (because she is human), and so impressed that Nic gave such a fabulous performance despite the heat of the Australian outback and
the fact that she was pregnant! What a brave trooper she was. Then the movie opened to eh reviews and went away.
I had meant to see it because Hugh Jackman is my husband—only we’ve never met and he is married to someone else. A minor technicality. Nicole Kidman, her immobile facial features to one side, is a talented actress (don’t give me a hard time on that…remember The Hours and her rubber Virginia Woolf nose? She was great.) Baz Luhrman is a really creative and innovative director (I loved Moulin
Rouge). How bad could a sweeping adventure filled (supposedly) with romance, and did I mention Hugh Jackman be?
Pretty bad. You just can’t judge a movie by its cover. Didn’t I learn this with the Godfather III years ago? One of the biggest duds of all time and for no good reason—I & II are among the best movies ever. We still had Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, Mario Puzo and sadly, Sofia Coppola. But can you really place an entire flop on one woman’s shoulders? Yes, but that’s not the point.
Now think about “Slumdog Millionaire.” To hear someone describe the movie (“an orphaned, abused, impoverished teenager becomes a contestant on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,’ no one believes he knows the answers, they beat the crap out of him and we learn how terrible his life has been!”) would you ever have thought it was going to be as wonderful as it was?
The point is that what looks good often turns out to be bad and what looks unappealing often turns out to be good.
Take hummus. Not so good looking but very tasty.
Same goes for pulled pork. A pile of pork on a plate? Not pretty. But bite into a warm, crusty roll filled with juicy, spicy, sweet, salty and smoky pig? Delicious.
The reverse would be a wedding cake. They’re beautiful.
How many times have you, (ok, I mean me) waited till the bitter end of what
was already an endless evening of ceremony, cocktail hour and a half, four course dinner, dancing and toasts for the banquet coordinator to wheel over that gorgeous cake you’ve had your eye on all night, endure the wedding singer’s ‘the bride cuts the cake’ and anticipated the unmistakable thump as the waiter drops (it’s been a long night for him too) the piece of cake in front of you at your long- ago abandoned table? Then the rush of disappointment as your hopeful fork tries to make its way through that chewy coating of sickly sweet fondant still hoping it will hit the jackpot of vanilla buttercream, passion fruit puree and the delicate crumb of a light yellow cake only to wind up stabbing a dry, dusty flavorless white cake filled with an overly sweet chocolate-y mousse filling. And yet, I still have faith that one day the cake will be worth my wait.
One sweet that has the honest, good sense to know it isn’t pretty are “Brutti Ma Buoni” aka “Ugly but Good” cookies. These are Italian and I won’t go into the fact that there are many versions of these cookies from various parts of Italia because I am not Italian and am already anticipating being corrected by those who are. Just make them and know that they live up to their name in every way. The smell of the orange and nuts of these cocoa-y, not too sweet meringues baking in the oven is transcendent. I chose Mario Batali’s recipe because he’s a great chef and actually personifies the name of these biscotti, giving them even more cred.
Brutti Ma Buoni, Ugly But Good Cookies
Adapted from Mario Batali, 2001
Printer friendly version
Ingredients
4 egg whites, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons flour
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
Zest of 4 oranges
1 Tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts
1/4 cup chopped almonds
1/4 cup pine nuts
Directions
Preheat oven to 325
Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper
Place white in bowl of electric mixer and whip to soft peak
Add sugar steadily and beat 2 minutes
Stop machine and add flour, vanilla, zest and cocoa powder
Mix for 1 minute and stop machine
Stir in nuts quickly and place 2 inch blogs on cookie sheets, 1 inch apart
Bake 30 minutes until crisp
Remove and allow to cool on pan for 10 minutes.
Remove cookies and cool completely on rack.
Yield @ 30 cookies
I miss the 60’s. I’m not talking about the flower-child late 60’s. I would have been a terrible hippie—not enough structure and not enough bathing. No, I miss the early 60’s and it is Doris Day’s fault. When I was a kid Channel 9 used to show all those (I thought at the time) saucy movies with her trying to keep Rock Hudson at bay (no comment), their wink-wink banter and poor Tony Randall sneezing alongside them. She was a sassy career gal (who seemed to always have a full-time and even sassier housekeeper) with her own apartment, great pastel jackets with ¾ length sleeves and that perky helmet of white-yellow hair. 'Someday,' I’d think, 'I’m going to live just like that.'
Yeah, no. It didn’t exactly turn out that way. But, it should come as no surprise that I am a devoted Mad Men fan. Same era, same clothes, same dark handsome leading man. Although the show’s career gal has the frumpiest clothes, the creepiest looking bangs, a roommate and an apartment that looks like it could use a housekeeper, sassy or not.
Two recent events made my longing for those days even stronger. First, I finished reading “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s can’t-put-it-down-till-I-finish-it novel set in Jackson, Mississippi circa 1963.
And then season three of “Mad Men” came to a close. Such a great finale but how depressing to know it will be at least nine months before we see Don Draper again.
In an attempt to put living in the past in the past (until at least season four or the next time Doris and Rock are on TV) I decided to honor 1963 with a dessert. My father was a "mad man" himself, starting in the mailroom at McCann Erickson and spending his 40 odd year career on Madison Avenue (really the Pan Am building and West 23rd Street, but you get the point). Luckily for me I have a built-in Betty Draper—my mother. For the record she’s not a disappointed, passive aggressive sour-puss like Betty and, as far as I know, my father is not an identity stealing philanderer like Don. If anyone knows what the wives of mad men were making back in the day, it is Mom.
After some ‘hmmm’ing and ‘let me think’ing my mother called with an “I found it! Ann Seranne’s Mocha Torte. I thought I was such hot stuff and so sophisticated!” she said, laughing at the memory of herself at 23 when she became a “Mrs.” and had yet to set foot in a kitchen.
The thought of my mother attempting to make this cake in their tiny East 50’s walk-up gave me the energy to embark on my experiment. In the spirit of veracity I followed most of the original recipe’s instructions which made my project more time consuming (big shock that recipes would assume a woman had nothing better or else to do all day) and a little annoying. I did love the look of the chocolate disks on the side—groovy in a mod kind of way. Some of the techniques in the adapted version below are slightly updated but the photos chronicle my own experience.
(Note: This photo is per the instructions from the original recipe)
Fold chocolate/coffee mixture into egg/sugar/flour mixture till uniform in color.
Pour batter into prepared pans and bake 35 minutes till cake tester/toothpick comes out clean.
Cool in pans for 5 minutes. Invert onto wire racks, peel off parchment paper and let cool completely.
Ingredients-Mocha Butter Cream
In microwaveable bowl, melt chocolate in 30 second intervals as above.
(Again-photo is for original recipe's instructions)
Boil rapidly until syrup registers 236 on a candy thermometer.
Gradually beat the syrup into the egg yolks using whisk attachment of mixer, continue beating until the mixture thickens.
Switch from whisk attachment to paddle attachment and beat in the butter a little at a time until light and fluffy.
Ingredients-Chocolate Disks
10 minutes later, or whenever you are ready, pull sheet out of fridge and separate disks from sheet of chocolate.
Top with second layer and continue frosting.
Gently pull out wax paper strips.
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