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[Pacific Ocean, December 2009.]

Love, of course, can be many things. It can be clear blue skies and an unexpected picnic in August. It can be your brother picking you up at the airport no matter what time you come in, in Maine and California and Greece, too, or a soon-to-be-sister-in-law saying what you also feel — that it seemed like not a day has passed since you saw each other last. It is cups of tea in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep and a re-read of “Cannery Row” at just the right time. It is watching “Anne of Green Gables” with your best girlfriend and rain against the windows with no-where at all to go. It is your best friend’s baby and lasagna in England. It is the high mountains, and a sky full up with stars, and long, deserted California beaches in winter.

Love is also, dear friends, in a chocolate cake recipe via Alice Waters. I don’t have a photo to convince you but trust me when I say you should seriously consider pulling out your butter and flour and chocolate today to bake regardless of physical evidence.

This cake … Well, let’s just say it’s a quite simple but absolutely delicious bit of decadence that will cause friends and loved ones alike to swoon in happiness. There’s magic in this cake I think; the first time I made it I didn’t have a hand mixer and used brown sugar instead of white because it’s all there was, and the milk chocolate frosting I whipped up Ithought might be too lumpy because of said lack of hand mixer but yet, somehow, it all came to rights in a kind of mysterious alchemy that seems perfect for today; isn’t love also mysterious and ethereal?

Whatever — this cake is tops. It is a chocolate dream, with a tender and yielding crumb that begs for a scoop of softly melting vanilla ice cream to serve alongside. But even that’s not entirely necessary; this cake is delicious as-is, mixer not required. Make it either just for you, to share with your special person, or take to a beloved friend. And it will be perfect the next day, and the next, and the day after that, too. Please, please trust me on this one.

Chocolate Cake, from the Art of Simple Food, by Alice Waters

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 cups cake flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
6 tablespoons cocoa powder
Stick of butter (8 Tbsp), softened
2 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs, room temperature
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 1/4 cups boiling water

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Butter a 9 inch cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. Butter the parchment and dust the pan with a little cocoa powder. Shake out the excess.

Melt the chocolate. Set aside.

Sift the dry ingredients together.

In a large bowl, cream butter in mixer. Add the brown sugar and vanilla and mix until fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and mix well to incorporate.

Stir in melted chocolate. Add half the dry ingredients and combine. Add the buttermilk and the rest of the dry ingredients and combine. Add the boiling water on low speed until just incorporated.

Pour batter into pan and bake for 30-35 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool completely and frost with your favorite chocolate frosting (I like to use a mix of 1/2-milk chocolate and 1/2-bittersweet chocolate chips to make a simple ganache).

[Drake's Beach, March 2009.]

My wish for you today is that you will always have love, and that you will always remember what it is. It is so many things, yes. But mostly it is true and right and good and kind and exhilerating and home. And it is everywhere, if we but take the time to look.

So dearest Valentine: I hope your day is as sweet and delicious as you.

And

so comes love

let it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love

(e. e. cummings)

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[Coconut bread, and tea, January 2010.]

Quite a few years ago I read a book that would become one of my very favorites — My Dream of You, by the Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain — and which I subsequently have passed around to various loved ones. I first read it one long weekend in Ohio; it was lent to me by a family friend who has uncannily similar reading taste to my own, and when she told me she was half-way through and could hardly put it down I knew I must read it, too.

It was bitterly cold, that weekend; I think the temperature hovered around 5 degrees, which for a Northern California girl by way of Washington DC was cold (DC gets cold but it’s a rare day the temperature dips below 10 — or at least, that’s what I remember). The wind whipped energetically about and it was fantastically invigorating, if I wished I’d brought about five more sweaters. There were a few walks in the afternoons to see a frozen waterfall, and I missed my brother terribly (it was the strangest thing; every time I’d look over at my then-boyfriend in front of the fireplace I was slightly startled, expecting to see my brother there instead as he would have been all throughout childhood. Sense memory, I suppose.). There was Australian-Open watching and fires in the fireplace where I planted myself in order to stay up late to read and a small tragedy, too: one of the dogs got awfully sick and didn’t survive (vodka-and-cranberries, homemade soup, and a bit of piano-playing helped mediate the sadness the tiniest bit). There was also a lot of tea.

But mostly there was that book. I could hardly put it down either. And in it, there was a particular scene in it that lasted throughout future readings and hovering around the peripherary of my kitchen ever since. It was not — though it came close — the part about the neighbor’s cat and how Kathleen, the narrator, never once knew its name or even touched it yet would return from a trip looking for it immediately, and when she moved from her apartment she knew the cat was the one thing she would miss. That was beautifully written and achey-lovely (and there are many more like this besides), but it is not my favorite part. No: my favorite bit involved coconut cake.

It is just gorgeous and perfect and sums up so much about this book in just a few paragraphs and here it is:

I smiled, going back up to my room, thinking about Roxy. She had been the first secretrary to stay with TravelWrite — the others always found our isolated attic too lonely. But … Roxy settled down with us, and from then on the office always smelled of West Indian food. Every day, she brought in a basket with the lunch her mother had cooked for her. A basket! And her mother would have had her in white ankle socks, too, if Roxy hadn’t been so very large. Her mother used to send us in wonderful cakes. There was a winter day, once — I rememer the yellow-grey sleet on the skylight — when I came back up from having a smoke in the basement with the messenger boys, and I stood in the doorway of our office and named it an enchanted playground. That was in honor of the particularly wonderful smell of Jamaican coffee and sugary coconut cake.

We were eating the cake and licking our fingers and going mmm! And okaay!

(My Dream of You, by Nuala O’Faolain)

[On the table, January 2010.]

This passage has stuck and stuck with me — something about that “okaay!” there at the end, maybe. Or actually just the idea of that coconut cake. I imagined that one day I’d also make a coconut cake (though, err, I think in memory it transposed to coconut bread, hence last weekend’s slightly erroneous baking project — I made coconut bread, not cake!) and would serve it with hot, milky coffee on a weekend afternoon (in my vision it must be savored on a weekend afternoon for some reason). It would probably be a winter afternoon, in a nod to my initial reading and the frozen Midwest; it might even be raining. And it would be marvelous, the best coconut cake ever tasted.

Basically, I built up the idea of this cake so much in my mind it would be nearly impossible for anything to even come close to the ideal.

Still, on Sunday I finally decided to give it a try. My first mistake was that I made a coconut bread which, while good, alas did not satisfy my hopes. This is entirely my fault and I shouldn’t even complain because hello! Could I not have reread that passage to refresh my memory? (Sigh …) Still, once I got over the initial disappointment-with-self I still found it lacking a little something (chocolate chips, I think). Or perhaps it was because I wasn’t sitting around my office with my feet up with my colleagues drinking strong, sugary coffee and talking about birthrights and class issues. Or maybe it was because a) my office isn’t in London to begin with b) my office also is not on the top floor of a row-house in said lovely city c) I wasn’t at home eating amazing coconut cake but was instead eating coconut bread whilst chained to my desk. Or maybe it’s because, oops, it was bread and not cake. (i.e.: it was my bad.)

It’s funny what the mind keeps, isn’t it? This and not that. That but not this. (Oh, but this.) Who knows if I’d come across My Dream of You at the library; would I have liked it as much (probably) and remembered that specific passage to acutely? Was it the combination of being with California friends-who-were family in Ohio, watching tennis and remembering a black lab and eating vegetarian lasagna, that made me gulp it down so greedily, as if the book itself were a slice of that elusive coconut cake?

Anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter. Happy accidents and all that. Though I still do need a good coconut cake recipe — and when I find it, by god, I will sit down with a pot of coffee and drink the whole thing while re-reading this book and saying okaay! while I eat my perfect cake. It will be glorious.

(This is not to say you shouldn’t make this bread — you should. My coworkers loved it. It is dense and moist without being heavy, and run through with delicious unsweetened coconut. I think if I made it again I might — gasp! — up the amount of buttter, maybe add some chocolate chips, definitely serve with slices of fresh pineapple alongside. I think the problem here is that I wanted something more cake than bread; to that end, as a coconut bread, this recipe is quite delicious indeed.)

Coconut Bread, via the Wednesday Chef, via Bill Granger

8 to 10 servings

2 large eggs
1 1/4 cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flour, more for dusting pan
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 cup superfine sugar
5 ounces flaked coconut (about 1 1/2 cups)
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Vegetable oil or nonstick cooking spray
Butter, optional
Confectioners’ sugar, optional.

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, whisk together eggs, milk and vanilla.

2. In a medium bowl, sift together 2 1/2 cups flour, baking powder and cinnamon. Add sugar and coconut, and stir to mix. Make a well in the center, and pour in egg mixture. Gradually mix with dry ingredients, until just combined. Add melted butter, and stir until smooth. Do not overmix.

3. Oil and flour an 8 1/2-by-4-inch loaf pan. Pour batter into pan. Bake until a toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Cool in pan 5 minutes, remove bread from pan, and finish cooling on a rack.

4. To serve, cut into 8 to 10 thick slices. If desired, toast lightly, spread with butter, and dust lightly with confectioners’ sugar.