Author: John Fladd

This is not an authentic Mardi Gras King Cake. An actual New Orleanian would sneer at this hard enough to sprain her lip. But a real King Cake is actually a member of the bread family and takes about five hours to make. This is a delicious, dense, moist almond cake that will serve you in good stead.

Cake

• 2½ cups (300 grams) all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¾ teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ cup (162 grams) whole milk
• ½ cup (120 grams) sour cream
• 2¼ cups (450 grams) sugar
• 7 ounces (1 tube) almond paste – you can find this in the baking/spices section of your supermarket
• 2 teaspoons orange zest – the zest of one large orange
• 1 8-ounce package cream cheese
• 4 eggs
• 3 Tablespoon (45 grams) amaretto
• ¼ teaspoon almond extract

Glaze

• 2 cups (227 grams) powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• pinch salt
• 2 to 3 Tablespoons milk – enough to make a spoonable glaze

Garnish

• Gold, purple, and green sprinkles or sanding sugar – you can find these online or at a craft store

A small plastic baby that you will bake into the cake for luck. You might or might not actually have a small plastic baby to hand. If you do not, you can substitute some other small non-poisonous object in its place, such as a foreign coin, a marble, or one of those small ceramic figures that are sometimes included in boxes of tea.

Bring all the cake ingredients to room temperature. This recipe will work if the cream cheese and almond paste are cold, but they will be temperamental and will require some persuasion to blend together gracefully.

Preheat your oven to 350ºF. Prepare a large Bundt pan — I brush the inside with a mixture of equal parts shortening, vegetable oil and flour.

In a medium bowl, combine the dry ingredients — the flour, salt and baking powder. Set aside.

In a jar or measuring cup, combine the milk and sour cream. Set aside.

In a stand mixer, or using a hand-held electric mixer, combine the almond paste — cut into small pieces — and the sugar. Mix at slow speed; the mixture looks like damp sand. If you do not cut the almond paste into small pieces, it will fight against its fate and throw plumes of sugar out of your mixing bowl in protest. If this starts happening, cover the bowl with a tea towel and be careful that it doesn’t get sucked up into the beaters.

Add the orange zest and cream cheese. Mix to combine. Again, this will go more smoothly if the cream cheese is at room temperature.

Mix in the eggs, one at a time, then add the amaretto and almond extract. Scrape down the sides of the bowl if you need to. Once everything is thoroughly mixed, beat at a higher speed, until the proto-batter is a little fluffy.

Add the dry ingredients and the milk/sour cream mixture a little at a time, alternating between the two, until the batter is smooth and battery.

Pour half the batter into the prepared Bundt pan, which has been patiently waiting for you.

Drop your small plastic baby into the Bundt pan. “Godspeed, my friend,” would be a good sentiment to express at this point. Extra points if you say it in French.

Pour the rest of the batter into the pan, covering your Cake Baby.

Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean or it reaches an internal temperature of 200ºF.

Cool on a rack for 20 minutes before inverting onto a plate. Let it cool thoroughly before glazing and decorating it. Decorate a third of the cake in each of the colors of sugar or sprinkles. This is not a time to exercise restraint. “Garish” should be the absolute minimum level of decoration you are looking for.

This is a first-class snack cake. It is meant to be shared. A traditional King Cake is supposed to be eaten with friends. Whoever finds the baby in their slice is supposed to host the Mardi Gras party the following year. You should feel free to set the stakes to work with your particular group of friends, relatives, or co-workers.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Featured photo: Not King cake. Photo by John Fladd.

I have to admit there have been a lot of cookies over the past month or so.

And cake and homemade ice cream as well.

And, of course, beer and wine and cocktails.

And, now that I look back on it, a truly injudicious amount of melted cheese.

In fact, for the past week or so there has been a herd of angry wildebeests rampaging through my digestive tract. If I don’t eat something green soon, I’m not entirely sure I can control them. I’m long overdue for a salad.

Looking for an authoritative expert on salads, I consulted a tragically overlooked seminal treatise on the subject, Thomas J. Murrey’s 1885 classic, 50 Salads (By the author of 50 Soups). Mr. Murrey clearly took his salads seriously.

“Of the many varieties of food daily consumed,” he writes, “none are more important than a salad, rightly compounded. And there is nothing more exasperating than an inferior one. The salad is the Prince of the Menu, and although a dinner be perfect in every other detail except the salad, the affair will be voted a failure if that be poor.”

He continues, “It is therefore necessary for those contemplating dinner-giving, to personally overlook the preparation of the salad if they wish favorable criticism.”

The Prince of the Menu, indeed. At this point I’m with him on Team Salad, although I have to imagine his cook or his wife was not impressed with his personally overlooking their salad-making to make sure there were no salad shenanigans going on.

His actual recipes, however, seem to be of extremely variable quality. There is a Cherry Salad, for instance, which sounds delicious — fresh cherries marinated in three types of alcohol. But others, like Pigeon Salad and Frog Salad, are clearly of a particular moment in history. And yet others really seem to have been phoned in. Eels Mayonnaise calls for two ingredients, eels and mayonnaise. His Mint Salad calls for adding fresh mint to a salad.

I seem to be on my own here. What I want is a proper tossed salad — not a macaroni salad, or a Jell-O salad, or a lobster salad — a simple tossed, green salad.

At the risk of sounding Murreyesque, I also have some strong feelings about salad:

(1) A tossed salad shouldn’t have more than six ingredients, including the dressing. Any more than that, it gets too busy and the flavors get in each other’s way.

(2) A good tossed salad should be exactly that: tossed. Individual bowls of lettuce with dressing poured over the top are clumsy at best, and at worst depressing and a sign of poor moral character. The salad should be made in a large bowl, dressed, then thoroughly tossed with a set of tongs.

(3) Lettuce: There are two tribes in Lettuce Nation: crisp lettuce and tender lettuce. I fall strongly on the side of tender lettuce, but if you are a Romaine enthusiast, could I ask that you chop it reasonably well, so your guests aren’t left gnawing on Romaine stems?

Here is the salad I made tonight:

My six ingredients are Bibb lettuce; canned diced tomatoes (obviously, fresh tomatoes would be better, but there won’t be any good ones for another eight months); a diced avocado; shredded, mixed Italian cheese; sesame sticks, and a maple Dijon vinaigrette.

Maple Dijon Vinaigrette

• ¼ cup (80 grams) maple syrup
• 3 Tablespoons (32 grams) finely minced shallot
• 2 Tablespoons cider vinegar
• 1 Tablespoon Canola oil
• 1 Tablespoon whole-grain Dijon mustard
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1 garlic clove, finely minced

Put all ingredients in a bowl and whisk vigorously. If you have a miniature blender — a Magic Bullet, or something similar — that will work even better.

In addition to flavor, the mustard brings lecithin, an emulsifier that ties everything together. The maple syrup brings sweetness, and the vinegar brings acid, but the star of this dressing is the shallot. This is worth making once a week.

Featured photo: West 75th. Photo by John Fladd.

It was 1950. The war was over, the economy was booming New suburbs were springing up all over the country, and with them modern kitchens.

The Betty Crocker Cookbook circa 1950 was a sort of guidebook for America’s new generation of cooks. It taught readers the basics of middle-class cooking and introduced home cooks to new ideas. This is one of them.

Butterscotch Drops with Brown Butter Icing

• 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) room-temperature butter
• 1½ cup (320 grams) dark brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup (227 grams) sour cream
• 1 Tablespoon Scotch whisky – I used Glenlivet (Betty suggested “vanilla”, but I can read between the lines)
• 2¾ cups (330 grams) all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt

In a medium bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients — flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

In a stand mixer, or with a hand mixer, cream the butter and brown sugar together. If you have a robust stand mixer, and you forget to leave the butter on your counter to soften, your mixer will have your back; it will power through and cream everything. It will just take a little longer.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time. This should pull the mixture together into a consistent batter. Eggs are what is called an emulsifier: They make it easy for fatty ingredients to mix with everything else.

Add the scotch and sour cream, and mix to combine.

Mix in the dry ingredients. To avoid a cloud of flour poofing up out of the mixer, try spooning it in a couple of tablespoons at a time.

When everything is well-mixed, chill the dough for a couple hours or, ideally, overnight. I just leave it in the mixing bowl, cover it with a dollar store shower cap, and put it in the refrigerator to rest.

Later (imagine a harp-music montage), preheat your oven to 425°F.

Scoop “rounded teaspoonfuls” of batter onto either a lightly oiled baking sheet or one with a silicone mat or a sheet of parchment paper. Leave 2 inches between dough blobs. I found it difficult to make nice little teaspoon-sized dough balls; I used two teaspoons (like you actually use for tea) and used them to scoop up some wet dough and deposit it on the cookie sheet.

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes. They will be ready when they are very slightly brown and if you touch one you won’t leave an impression of your finger. When you remove them from the oven, let them cool on the baking sheet.

This makes about four dozen cookies. Apparently in the 1950s they didn’t take a half-hearted approach to baking.

“Burnt Butter” Butterscotch Icing

• 12 Tablespoons (1½ sticks) butter
• 3 cups (342 grams) powdered sugar
• 3 Tablespoons Scotch whisky

In a small saucepan, melt, then brown the butter over low heat. If you haven’t done this before, it is easy-peasy, but you have to watch it like a hawk. Swish the melted butter around in the pan frequently, and pull it from the heat just before it is brown like dark toast.

Combine the butter, powdered sugar and whisky, and stir until it forms an icing. If it is too stiff, add a tablespoon or so of water, but be very conservative about adding it. Use this to ice the cookies.

It might seem weird to use Scotch whisky in a cookie recipe, but butterscotch tastes extra intense and very, very good when you make it with real butter and real scotch. By themselves, the cookies have a delicate brown sugar flavor, a bit like the background flavor of a chocolate chip cookie, but when combined with the scotchy icing they become a flavor powerhouse.

Featured photo: Butterscotch Drops with Brown Butter Icing. Photo by John Fladd.