The gustatory voyage, an interlude

(Part of the Blog for Darwin blogswarm)

Few things make you appreciate food the way making it yourself does. One food I don’t particularly appreciate is cake – I’ll eat it, but I prefer my desserts chewy and unfrosted. So I decided to take the occasion of Darwin’s birth to temper my sweet indifference, and made him a birthday cake. Not the pour out of a box add an egg into the oven kind, but an honest to goodness full-on buttercream frosted layer cake from scratch.

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For this special event, I used Dorie Greenspan‘s “Perfect Party Cake” recipe – a white cake that sounded simple, elegant, and delicious. Lemon zest and lemon extract adds a special touch. For the base, I followed the recipe exactly, using buttermilk where it gave the option. While baking, however, I may have pulled the two rounds from the oven a couple minutes too soon; a toothpick inserted into the middle came out clean, but the tops probably should have been a bit springier. No matter, I popped them out to cool and set to work on the frosting.
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Not much for frosting, and aghast at the amount of butter that went into it, I cut the buttercream recipe in half and made a batch of fresh whipped cream to substitute (not exactly healthier, but I love whipped cream and at least I don’t have to see the sticks of butter going in). I probably stopped mixing the buttercream mixture too soon before adding the lemon juice since I wasn’t sure what “thick and smooth” meant and I was getting impatient (really? 6-10 minutes of mixing?!), but afterward I was able to beat it into more of a frosting consistency (oh, that’s what thick and smooth means!). Making whipped cream is always a test of patience as well. Times like these I wish I had a stand mixer – I did a good 20-30 minutes of hand mixing for this! All for you, Mr. Darwin.
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Then came the most dreaded part – sawing the cake rounds in half. Terrible visions of lopsided, crumbled cake fragments filled my head, but I did fine. Not wanting to push my luck, I opted to leave the second round alone, as it wasn’t quite as thick. Then came the fun part – assembling and decorating the cake! Alternating cake rounds with layers of raspberry jam and whipped cream, I topped off the final round and the sides with the buttercream frosting. My first buttercream frosted layer cake! Adding another first, I tried the baker’s trick of using a Ziploc bag to pipe a border of whipped cream around the top. Now, what to put on the blank canvas? A drawing of the Beagle or a beagle? A map of the Galapagos islands? A phylogenetic tree? I settled on the birds that inspired Darwin’s theory of speciation. Finally, I finished the decoration with fresh berries, rather than coconut as the recipe suggests.
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Below is the recipe transcribed from Greenspan’s book, Baking: From my home to yours, with my variations.

For the cake:

2 1/4 cups cake flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 14/ cups buttermilk (or whole milk)
4 large egg whites
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 tsp grated lemon zest
1 stick (8 Tbsp) unsalted butter at room temperature
1/2 tsp pure lemon extract

Center a rack in the oven and preheat to 350 deg F. Butter two 9×2″ round cake pans and line the bottoms with a round of buttered parchment or wax paper. Put the pans on a baking sheet.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Whisk together buttermilk and eggs. Put the sugar and lemon zest in a large bowl and rub together with your fingers until the sugar is moist and fragrant. Add the butter and beat at medium speed for a full 3 minutes, until the mixture is very light. Beat in the extract, then beat in 1/3 of the flour mixture. Beat in half of the egg mixture, then half of the remaining flour mixture, then the rest of the egg mixture, and finally the rest of the flour mixture, beating until well incorporated each time. Beat the batter for an additional 2 minutes to ensure that it is well mixed and aerated.

Divide the batter between the two pans, smooth the tops (you might try making a slight depression in the middle to reduce doming), and bake for 30-35 minutes, or until the cakes are well-risen and springy to the touch. A toothpick inserted into the centers should come out clean. Transfer the pans to cooling racks for about 5 minutes, then remove the cakes from the pans, peel off the liners, and let cool completely right side up.

To make the buttercream (for top and sides only):

1/2 cup white sugar
2 large egg whites
1 1/2 sticks (12 Tbsp) unsalted butter at room temperature
1/8 cup fresh lemon juice, strained
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Put the sugar and egg whites in a medium heatproof bowl and fit it over a pan of simmering water. Whisk constantly over the heat until the mixture feels hot to the touch, about 3 minutes. Remove the bowl from the heat and beat the mixture with a whisk or hand mixer at medium speed until it is cool, about 5 minutes. Add the butter 1/2 stick at a time, stirring with a spatula. Once the butter is all in, beat the buttercream on medium-high speed until it is thick and very smooth – the consistency of frosting – about 6-10 minutes. If the buttercream curdles or separates, just keep beating and it will come together again. Gradually beat in the lemon juice on medium speed, waiting until each addition is absorbed before adding more. Finally, beat in the vanilla. Press a piece of plastic wrap against the surface of the buttercream and set aside.

To make the whipped cream:

1 cup heavy whipping cream, chilled
1/8 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Combine the cold whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla in a medium bowl. Beat on medium-high speed until stiff peaks form, about 10-15 minutes (chilling the bowl may speed up this process). You want the whipped cream to be fairly thick.

To assemble and decorate the cake:

Prepare about 2/3 cup raspberry jam by stirring vigorously to loosen.Using a sharp serrated knife and a gentle sawing motion, slice each cake round horizontally in half (if the round is at least 1 1/2 inches thick). Put one layer cut side up on a cake plate or cardboard cake round. Spread it with the jam, then cover with a layer of whipped cream. Top with another cake round, and spread again with jam and cover with a layer of whipped cream. (Repeat if you have 4 total cake rounds.) Place the last layer cut side down on top of the cake and frost the top and sides with buttercream.

To finish this lovely cake, decorate with your favorite icings, cake decorating pens, more whipped cream, fresh berries, mint leaves, chocolate curls – whatever floats your Beagle!
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The gustatory voyage of the Beagle, part 1

I have a soft spot for food writing in books that are not about food. Experiments in living off the land in My Side of the Mountain, the expansive feasts put on by the woodland creatures in the Redwall series, the culinary culture of the Lenape Indians – the depictions of food and food preparation in these stories are what stand out in my memory.

So to commemorate Darwin’s 200th birthday this week, I’ll highlight some of my favorite culinary passages in The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin’s diaries describing the years he spent traveling around the world as the naturalist on board HMS Beagle. I’m only part way through, so consider this part 1.

It is often the case that Darwin exposes his wry humor when speaking of food. Take, for example, his description of the difficulty they sometimes had in procuring food from their hosts:

On first arriving it was our custom to … ask the senhor to do us the favour to give us something to eat. ‘Anything you choose, sir,’ was his usual answer. For the first few times, vainly I thanked providence for having guided us to so good a man. The conversation proceeding, the case universally became deplorable. ‘Any fish can you do us the favour of giving?’ — ‘Oh! no, sir.’ — ‘Any soup?’ — ‘No, sir.’ — ‘Any bread?’ — ‘Oh! no, sir.’ — ‘Any dried meat?’ — ‘Oh! no, sir.’ … It not unfrequently happened, that we were obliged to kill, with stones, the poultry for our own supper. When, thoroughly exhausted by fatigue and hunger, we timorously hinted that we should be glad of our meal, the pompous, and (though true) most unsatisfactory answer was ‘It will be ready when it is ready.’

Contrast this with a sumptuous dinner hosted by a well-stocked relative of a member of Darwin’s party just a few days later:

[The] profusion of food showed itself at dinner, where, if the tables did not groan, the guests surely did; for each person is expected to eat of every dish. One day, having, as I thought, nicely calculated so that nothing should go away untasted, to my utter dismay a roast turkey and a pig appeared in all their substantial reality.

When describing the animals he encounters, Darwin sometimes includes a note about its culinary value. For instance, the meat of the water-hog (Hydrochoerus capybara), the largest living rodent in the world, is apparently “very indifferent,” though it supposedly tastes like pork and is considered a delicacy today. Of an aggressive carrion-eating bird, the Polyborus Novae Zelandiae (probably a species of Caracara), Darwin writes, “the sealers say that the flesh of these birds, when cooked, is quite white, and very good eating; but bold must the man be who attempts such a meal.”

Photo by kaptainkobold on Flickr

Neither of these sounded particularly appetizing, but later on Darwin mentions that armadillo is “a most excellent dish when roasted in its shell.” I <3 roasting, so this claim prompted me to search for recipes online – pointless, in retrospect, since I lack the means to procure armadillo in suburban California. At any rate, all I could find were some armadillo-inspired dishes and a bare-bones fact sheet confirming that people do indeed consume armadillo roasted in the shell. Ah well. Now I know what to ask for when I visit South America, or, hey, even Texas!

Original photo by SDCDeaCerte on Flickr

It’s said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. So Happy Birthday, Charles – can’t wait to learn more about you through your culinary adventures!

Blog for Darwin

Feb 12th, 2009 is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. The impact of this man on modern science cannot be emphasized enough. We understand so much more about life on this planet because of his revolutionary ideas, and owe many of our advances in medicine, agriculture, and green technology to them.

Unfortunately, there is some confusion in the general public over the exact nature of his theories and how they have changed over the years as we gather more evidence. Darwin postulated a mechanism by which adaptation and speciation can occur, a mechanism that has been proven again and again in the lab and observed in the wild. That is no longer controversial and is essentially fact. We are, however, constantly learning and relearning how this mechanism plays out and how environment and biology are complexly intertwined.

So in honor of Darwin’s bicentennial and the sesquicentennial (150th birthday) of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, I’ll be joining many others in blogging for Darwin on Feb 12th. I’m a bit embarrassed to reveal that I haven’t actually read any of his books, so I’ll be using this occasion to do so, and will blog about what I read. If you’re in the same boat as I am, I encourage you to do the same!

(via FYI: Science!)