And Then There was Gin

Just a quickie post this time—indeed, you can read this post in the time it takes you to throw a cold gimlet down your gullet. Because gimlets are exactly what we are going to discuss this morning, people. (No, it isn’t even 10am yet but I’m merely talking about a gimlet not drinking one. Anyway, don’t judge…).

Of the many wondrous things that Mad Men has brought into my life over these past three years, the gimlet is perhaps the most treasured. More so even than the hours it has given me to watch Jon Hamm being perfect in my living room. This is really saying something because Jon Hamm looks like this: 

You see, I grew up among teetotalers, so other than the rare tipple of Bailey’s Irish Crème that my godmother would slip me at her hairdresser’s shoppe (if they are serving cordials to the ladies under the bonnet dryers, then the place deserves two p’s, don’t you think?), my early experiences with cocktails were despairingly limited. (One more thing to resent about growing up in the ‘80s…cocktails were so "out." Thanks, Michael Crichton for making everyone drink Asahi). Anyhow, in college and graduate school, I explored the worlds of wine and, later, beer, punctuated by the occasional Cape Codder. It seems foolish to have limited myself like this but I suppose I thought I was being an intellectual. How wrong I was about all of that...

It was only when I received a tenure track job (while still finishing my dissertation…) that I turned to the hard stuff with any regularity. I like to think that this stemmed less from the newly arrived burdens of adulthood than from the revival of The Cocktail in American food culture. Either way, I started flavoring my own vodkas so that I could mix up pitchers of Bloody Marys on Sunday mornings. I made Sea Breezes for dinner guests. I started drinking Hot Toddies on cold winter nights. I discovered the caipirinha on a friend’s porch one spring evening while the sky turned green.

I moved on to gin not long after that first winter on the Plains. Ah, gin. My first meaningful encounter with this alimentation came in the form of a fairly wet martini served to me by a wonderful friend, esteemed scholar, and all-around libertine to whom I shall always be grateful. It was garnished with an anchovy-stuffed olive and presented with the mischievous warning that, unlike other victuals, “gin goes straight to your brain stem.” Perhaps it was my brain stem talking but I fell in love with gin then and there. And I fell hard.

The OED first defines the word ‘spirit’ as “the animating or vital principle in man (and animals); that which gives life to the physical organism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life.” If ever a liquid spirit has reached that potential, for me, it is gin. Sweet and good and honest gin. It is piney and healthful. It enjoys company. It is also happy to sit quietly, alone, being itself, with nothing but a lowly twist of lime to keep it amused. From that first martini onwards, my kitchen became a ginocracy. I bought artisanal tonic water. And just like that, my evenings began with mixing a martini for Mr. and a G&T for myself.

And then Betty came into my life. Vain, frivolous Betty. In episode 2 of the first season of Mad Men, Betty joins Don and the Sterlings for dinner in the city. Don orders an old-fashioned, Roger orders a vodka martini, and Betty orders a vodka gimlet. “What is this gimlet,” I asked. I googled ‘gimlet.’ And I said, to no one in particular, “Gimlets? Originally made with gin? What? What is wrong with Betty Draper? Could it be the calories? Oh Betty....” The rest is history. On the cusp of my 3^rd decade on earth, I discovered my cocktail and I began liking Don’s mistresses more than his wife. Sorry, Betts.

 

Which brings me to the topic of today’s post: gin + cake! More specifically, gimlets + cake! Inspired by the ladies at Purity and Danger, I have begun to explore creative mergers between dessert and liquor. Dolly and Laine @ P&D produced an ingenious gin & tonic inspired angel food cake. I decided to experiment with all things gimletty. And, so, today’s recipe: Gimlet Cake with Blackberry-Gin Sauce. The recipe is based on Smitten Kitchen’s Lime Yogurt Cake with a few important alterations. I provide my version here:

Cake

3/4 cup whole milk plain unsweetened Greek yogurt

¼ buttermilk

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 cup sugar
zest of three limes
1/3 cup lime juice
2 tablespoons gin

2 eggs
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Like this (note the Corona has no role in this recipe...except moral support):

Sauce

12 ounces fresh blackberries (I have only used fresh but I imagine you could use frozen if you reduced the amount of water in the recipe)
3 tablespoons water

3 tablespoons gin
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Cake:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Generously grease a springform pan with oil (if you don’t have a springform pan, line the bottom of a regular 9-inch cake pan with parchment paper after greasing).

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the yogurt, buttermilk, oil, sugar, gin, zest and juice. Add the eggs one by one, whisking well after each addition.

Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together, right over your liquid ingredients. Stir with a spoon until just combined. It will look a little lumpy.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is pale brown and a knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a cooling rack and let stand for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the pan to loosen. If you’re using the springform pan, release your cake! Otherwise, flip the cake onto a plate and flip it back on the rack. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature. Continue to cool for another 10 minutes or so. Sift powdered sugar on top. If you want to eat this cake warm, dig in. I, however, prefer it cold, gimlet style,

Sauce:

Combine blackberries, water, gin, sugar and lime juice in blender. Purée until very smooth,. The sauce will seem thin in the blender—don’t worry about this! Then press through a fine mesh strainer to remove the seeds. Put this in a jam jar and refrigerate until cold.

Isn't this promising?

This cake is ridiculously easy--you make the whole thing in one bowl. And, if you are a Mad Men devotee, then what better way could there be to celebrate the beginning of season 4? If you are not, then, I repeat: GIN + CAKE!!!!

Here is a slightly fuzzy picture of the final product, fuzzy like it would be after a few gimlets.

puzzled by peaches...

In the dreams of many a hapless home cook reside images of all the beautiful golden pies and impossibly tall and delicately decorated cakes that you wished you had the talent to make. Those of us in the cook camp often redouble our efforts to develop baker’s skills but generally do so only to our own emotional peril. The (sometimes spectacular) failures over which I have presided have only served to reinforce my belief that there are cooks and there are bakers and rarely can any one person be both. Indeed, the very skills that make for a good cook-- adventurousness, improvisation, inexactitude--tend to undermine the attention to detail and impossible patience that is demanded of the baker. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve made pies and cakes that I thought tasted good…but I don’t think I’ve made many that seemed genuinely worth the effort they required.

In the summertime, however, the cooks get a reprieve. That reprieve comes in the variety of ways one can turn summer berries and stone fruit into, if not pies, at least a series of “pie-like” creations. Cobbler, Buckle, Brown Betty, Crisp—redolent with the sort of burnished Americana for which all of us (even non-Americans) are, I imagine, hard-wired to feel nostalgic—are the closest a cook like me really gets to a successful pie. One need only throw some fruits into a dish with some butter, flour, and sugar and the oven yields rare, sweet pleasures with a minimum of the pain that some of us refer to as “baking.” Rather than rolling or crimping or doing that tedious basket-weaving thing—all of which practically give me night terrors when Thanksgiving is near—one need only sprinkle or press crusts and toppings into place for cobblers and their cousins. Indeed, the cobbler family of desserts transfers the responsibility for ultimate success from the cook to the fruit and offer the added bonus of intending to look rustic instead of refined. For what more could the cook ask?

This all brings me to a puzzle—a peach puzzle to be exact. Had I heard of this exquisite baked dessert without having had the opportunity to eat it, I’d have accused the recipe-writers of trying to sneak a pie recipe under the noses of wary cooks. On the face of it, the peach puzzle really does seem to be the black sheep of the cobbler family. Relying as it does on what the recipe refers to as “the abracadabra of a magic trick” (incidentally, if you want to know if you're a baker or a cook, ask yourself whether that description tantalized or terrified you), a trick demanding inversion before serving, the puzzle seems awfully ripe with potential for disaster. It also requires some work with a rolling pin. (Admittedly not more than do a batch of biscuits, but still...) A pie in disguise is how I might have described it. This is not auspicious for the pie-wary.

Happily, a friend of mine—one who is that most secretly envied of all things, a good cook and a good baker—prepared this recipe for me from local Indiana peaches last summer and despite her mad skills, my fears were laid to rest by her assurances of its level of difficulty. The recipe (the link is here) was the grand prizewinner in a contest run by Cook’s Country Magazine (part of the America’s Test Kitchen empire) for the best heirloom recipes in the United States. It is nothing more complicated than a biscuit crust laid over some lovely ripe peeled peaches. In the middle of the dish, you place an inverted ramekin to eventually collect the juices. Before laying the crust on top, you pour a little slurry of brown sugar, melted butter, and water over the peaches to help make those juices more, well, juicy. What could be easier?

Okay, so the other night, in celebration of my birthday, I decided to make peach puzzle again. By the time we got through dinner and into the kitchen to make dessert, it was, like, 11:30-ish at night. I was tired but committed. Like the cook that I am, I cut several corners, including pretty much every step in the recipe. The result was a crust too small for the plate but I persisted. It was my birthday. I wanted dessert, dammit. After taking this out of the oven, I was pretty concerned. The “magic trick” referenced above consists of a process by which the liquid from the peaches and brown sugar mixture somehow gets sucked into the upside-down ramekin you place in the pie dish. This means that you get a crispy biscuit crust, beautifully poached peaches, and a little dish of peach syrup perfect for topping the necessary scoop of vanilla ice cream that you put on top of each serving. When I took the puzzle out of the oven this time, the juices were still in the pie dish; not in the cup. This was ominous. I let the plate cool (turns out I had forgotten this was the essential step) for the requisite half an hour and while the result was not quite as perfect as my first attempt, the magic did work, the cup did fill with the lovely syrup, and the whole thing was still delicious. (Though served about an hour after my officialy birthday had passed...). I still don’t really understand how the magic trick works save to say that it has something to do with contraction and expansion and steam (right???) but what is important is that it does work.

We have snacked on our puzzle through three nights of remedial “Mad Men” viewing, which demonstrates the extent to which the dish holds up in the fridge if you’re worried about making a large dessert for a small crowd. So, there is no excuse not to try this if peaches are anywhere in your vicinity. Hurry up, too. I can already feel the chill of fall in the air.

before the crust is place on top...








smacking of failure...







not half bad for the middle of the night.