The Best Chocolate Icing

In the last couple of days, I've made a couple of cakes and a few dozen cupcakes. I've used the same recipes for basic chocolate cake and vanilla cake for years and years, but I've recently started to use Martha Stewart's Dark Chocolate Frosting, and I have to say that is, hands-down, the best recipe for a simple buttercream that I've used in the twenty years I've been baking.

Here it is:

Dark Chocolate Frosting


1 pound best-quality bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
6 T Dutch-process cocoa powder, good quality
6 T boiling water
3 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
pinch of salt


Place chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over (but not touching) simmering water. Turn off the heat; stir occasionally until chocolate has melted completely, about 15 minutes. Set bowl on countertop and let chocolate cool to room temperature, about 30 minutes. 


Meanwhile, combine cocoa powder and boiling water in a small bowl; stir until cocoa is dissolved.


In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle, beat butter, confectioner's sugar, and salt on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes. Add melted chocolate; beat on low speed until combined, 1 to 2 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Beat in the cocoa mixture.


Lick the glossy frosting until you feel queasy.

Local Cookbook Signing

I think one of the last independent bookstores in the universe is in my neighborhood, and it's one of my favorite places in Los Angeles. Given my book nerdiness, and the expertise of the men and women who work at Chevalier's, I never leave the place without purchasing one or two or three new books to add to my already groaning shelves. The cookbook section is especially amazing, filled with both the usual bestselling cookbooks and the sublimely esoteric.

If you're in Los Angeles this weekend and next, I want to encourage you to attend two signings of two new and fabulous cookbooks.

The first is called Made in America: Our Best Chefs Reinvent Comfort Food by Lucy Lean. I flipped through it the other day and practically started salivating. A press release says this: as representing the entire United States, chefs have been selected for their accomplishments, talent, and focus on local and sustainable cooking. From Ludo Lefebvre’s Duck-Fat-Fried Chicken with Piquillos Ketchup to Alain Ducasse’s Gratinéed French Onion Soup to Mario Batali’s Pappardelle Bolognese to John Besh’s Jumbo Louisiana Shrimp to April Bloomfield’s Spicy Ginger Whoopie Pies, Made in America showcases our favorite dishes as conceived by our finest chefs.


Lucy will be signing copies of her book at Chevalier's this Sunday, October 9th from 12:00 until 2:00. 

The second book signing that I want to promote at Chevalier's happens on Sunday, October 16th from 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning. The famous chef and baker extraordinaire Nancy Silverton will be signing her new cookbook, The Mozza Cookbook: Recipes from Los Angeles' Favorite Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria. Silverton is the creator of the original La Brea Bakery, and if you've never tried any of her food, you don't know what you're missing!




I urge any of you Angelenos who are around this Sunday or next to come out and support Chevalier's Books and these superlative cookbooks. You can grab a coffee on Larchmont, go to the wonderful farmer's market and stop by Chevalier's to get a great gift for yourself or friends. When you cook from the books, you'll be supporting independent bookstores, too!

Sunflower Mermaid

The day dawned bright blue sky and brilliant sun, crisp air and wet grass. I've been to Trader Joe's and bought sunflowers and pumpkins, peppers and sausage for dinner, an almond croissant to finish my coffee and chocolate for a cake that I must get busy and make. I'm grateful for the day, for my children and my home, for sunflowers and pumpkins and a cloudless sky.

Revolution

I felt teary yesterday when I heard about the death of Steve Jobs.

Here's to the revolutionaries and the tiny, inexhaustible voices.

Hitting the floor, not the fan

That would be shit.

This is going to be a shit-filled post, so click off if you can't take the shit.

It rained in Los Angeles today -- actually, it didn't just rain. It poured. Los Angeles doesn't take to rain very well, and it was a shitstorm.

See where this is going?

When the boys and I opened the front door into our living room, we nearly stepped into a huge pool of dog shit. Dog diarrhea. There was some sympathetic gagging, but I managed to clean it up and prevent my poor, frail sons from doing the job themselves.

Sophie's bus pulled up just as I put the mop down, so I walked outside to help her off and escort her inside. On the way back, I stepped into some dog shit on the sidewalk and muttered Shit under my breath.

The rain was coming down in buckets, but I managed to get Sophie onto the porch and just as I walked through with her, she went down in a huge shi-- seizure.

I swooped her up and literally threw her seizing body over the side of the couch and yelled Shit!


You really can't make this shit up.

Politically correct and culturally competent

Last night, Oliver and I labored through an online English/Language Arts site, reading paragraphs and answering multiple-choice questions. This is what they sounded like:

  Markeesha was tired of working so hard on her homework. Her mother and father both worked all day in the city, so she decided to take a break and do something that she wasn't supposed to do. She picked up the phone and called her friend Esteralda. Esteralda invited Markeesha to come over to her house and hang out with her, Duwayne and Carlos. Even though Markeesha wasn't supposed to go over to someone's house without her mother Akim's permission, she decided that she would, just this once.

I'm all for being culturally competent and sensitive, but I have to tell you that I miss Tom, Betty and Susan, if only to make reading easier for my already learning disabled son. Then again, being learning disabled is becoming sort of politically correct as well.

Sigh.

Selling one's soul, again

I'm waxing poetic about boys, adolescence and deodorant over at my review blog. If you have a minute, go over there, read the post, leave a comment and get a chance to win a $100 Visa gift card. Seriously! Think of how much deodorant you could buy with $100.

Cotillion

Oliver and one of his oldest friends

The ancient rite of dance and manners has swung round again.

Henry and Oliver went to their first cotillion of the season, and despite their propensity for jock-i-ness, they loved dressing up. I felt so proud of my two handsome boys, I nearly burst. The only trouble was that I could not get a non-goofy photo.

Philip Whalen

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis


I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick 
                                        splashed picture - bug, leaf,
                                        caricature of Teacher -
   on paper held together now by little more than ink
  & their own strength brushed momentarily over it.
Their world and several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they know it -
Cheered as it whizzed by -
&conked out among the busted spring rain cherry blossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.


Philip Whalen, 1963

Stealing

Monday, Monday

can't trust that day.

I actually trust Mondays, love Mondays. And I'm looking forward to this one. Here's a cheerful weekend wrap-up, probably a welcome respite from the doom and gloom around here of late.

Our neighbor K made this beautiful swing frame for Sophie. She is in heaven under the tangerine tree once again.

I made this butterfly cake for a little girl's birthday:

Vanilla Cake with White Frosting

and I made this ladybug cake for the little girl's sister's birthday:

Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Frosting

Red Fondant

I sat on two blazing hot ball fields:

That's Henry playing catcher

and I didn't take a photo of Oliver playing flag football, but it was hot:

We saw the movie Moneyball, which I highly recommend. Brad Pitt did such a great job in the movie that I actually loved learning about baseball and statistics. I'm not kidding. And I'm not crazy for Brad Pitt or anything (right now it's Ryan Gosling that I'm a tad obsessed with):

So here's a photo of Ryan Gosling, because that's really where I've been heading this entire post:

Oh Monday morning, Monday morning couldn't guarantee
That Monday evening you would still be here with me.

Sunday Reverie

Up early with the light to make frosting and decorate cakes, I see that the Earth has tilted just so on its axis and the light streaming into the windows, this second day of October, washes over the table in a slightly different way than it did yesterday. I blink and it tilts again; I close my eyes and think of Lueza, the seventeenth year of her birth, her smile in my mind's eye, the tilt of her head, and I am spinning with her memory, different than yesterday.

How We Do It: Part IV in an ongoing series

Sophie and Henry, 1999

When Sophie had a big seizure at breakfast this morning, like she does most mornings, I undid her seat-belt and tried to prevent her arms and legs from banging into the table. I gathered her, jerking, into my arms and sat in the seat myself and noticed that her bony limbs were cushioned by my soft, perhaps too soft but then again, maybe in a good way, soft hips and arms and breasts and that is what I thought about as I sat there, enclosing her, Henry tipping his blue and black baseball hat to me and stroking Sophie's leg with his own broad hands. I thought of bones and tissue, what knits the two together, the point of her elbow wedged into the soft curve of my breast, a hip sharp in my stomach, an extended leg stiff against my thigh. Her bones grew inside me and still, I hold them, awkward and tensed, articulate in the folds.

Delayed Reaction

This is Henry, aged thirteen, at 9:00 on a Saturday morning. A voracious reader, he came of age in the Harry Potter days, but he hated fantasy books and spurned what the rest of world devoured. While I enjoyed the first one, and Oliver knew the first as it was read aloud in class, our family might have been one of the only ones in the universe that hadn't seen any of the movies or read the entire oeuvre (because oeuvre is the proper word for the Potter franchise, isn't it?)

One of the requirements of an elective at school this year is to read the first Harry Potter book, and that's what he did, three weeks ago.

He's now on Book V and only grudgingly admits that they're good, setting himself the challenge to read all seven by November.