Happiness and Chocolate Lava Cake

My husband is both hard to please and easy to please. If he doesn't like something, there is absolutely no convincing him that he will like it (change, vinegar, painful comedy, and dark chocolate), but if he does like it, he will stay unconditionally true to it (me, Hawaii, and milk chocolate). 

Jake and I have been talking more about things that we don't like. We’re frustrated with certain elements of our lives and are being more daring in our possible plans, most of which involve leaving Hawaii, the place we've made our lives together. I’ve been looking forward to how some of our ideas would play out and the feeling of change in the air.

Immediately after having these thoughts, we had a string of gorgeous, heart of the watermelon kind of days. Days that only could have happened in Hawaii. Suddenly, everywhere I look, Hawaii is the most amazing place on the planet. I've had this feeling before, but honestly, what am I thinking? Why would I ever want to leave this?

I I know some people are thinking, “Oh, you. You would have great experiences in other places too.” I’ve thought long and hard about this very claim. I don’t think it’s as true, for us. 

We have so much and we have been blessed with so many advantages. Jake heard a podcast recently about happiness, and according to these researchers, people that invested in experiences rather than material items seemed to be happier. Well, this is certainly our investment. So right now I'm trying to shift my thinking to figure out how I can make what we have, work even better.

I'm willing to eat the crusts of life, if there's a promise of dessert.

Part of me thinks, “Duh, you obviously knew this.” But that’s the funny thing about being happy. You have to keep remembering. You have to keep being reminded. You have to keep saying, “Duh, I knew this.” Otherwise you think how you feel in a moment is how you’ve felt the whole time. This principle has had many applications in my life.

Despite his supposed hatred of dark chocolate, or however fancy I get with my Momofuku cakes, he’ll always come back to requesting a chocolate lava cake for special occasions. I've pretty much got the recipe down pat, it’s easier than easy, and this is the best one out there. I love the flowing lava the first day, and I really like the dense truffle cake out of the fridge the next day just as much. It improves with time.

As long as he keeps liking chocolate lava cake I think we’ll be ok. He wrote me a note today and he said, “It’s amazing we still have things to talk about after all this time, and hey! I still like you.”

Yes. I do. I would say it as quickly today as I did then, and 32 is way smarter than 20.

Here's to 12 times 12 more years (and more) of married life with this guy and being happy wherever we are.

Chocolate Lava Cake (makes many, depending on your ramekin size)

• 8 oz dark or semisweet chocolate chips (or good quality dark chocolate is better)
• 12 Tbsp unsalted butter (extra for ramekins)
• 1 Cup plus 2 Tbsp sugar
• 6 Tbsp all purpose flour
• 4 eggs

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter the whole inside of 6-8 ramekins. The number you use will depend on the size. I have 4 oz and 6 oz ramekins, I used 3 of each. Don’t be shy with the butter.
2. Put the chocolate chips into a microwave safe bowl with the butter. Microwave for 1 minute, stirring after thirty seconds. After 1 minute stir and make sure it is completely melted. Microwave 20 seconds more if needed. Stir and stir. It may appear to be not melted and then suddenly meld together. Let cool while preparing the rest of the batter.
3. In a separate bowl, mix up the sugar, eggs, and flour until uniform
4. Stir the chocolate into the eggs and incorporate completely.
5. Pour the batter into the ramekins until about 2/3 the way full. Put into the oven and bake for about 12 minutes. Check the doneness. The thickness of the ramekin walls can change this. The edges should be drip, the middle should have just the slight appearance of wetness but should seem a bit thicker. Bake for a minute or two more if it is too liquid. Pull them out and let sit for a few minutes. 
6. Use a sharp knife to release the edges from the sides of the ramekin, and invert very quickly onto a plate. You can also eat it straight from the ramekin. If you want to have it the next day, you can eat it cold or heat it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

A Momofuku Wedding Cake

 

In the last 6 months I’ve been making more than my share of cakes. I think I’ve filled my quota of cakes, in fact.

Now that I’ve discovered the goodness of the Momofuku cake, and because I’ve recently bought 500 feet of acetate cake strips on-line, there will be no end to the cake baking at my house.

I roped my husband into making the chocolate marshmallow cake for Mother’s day. He was cursing my name while lovingly mixing and baking for 6 hours on the Saturday night before.

Poor thing. I didn’t feel bad as soon as I bit into it.

The roasted marshmallows were the key. I ate too many pieces.

 

Then I made the chocolate chip lilikoi curd cake that Christina Tosi made for David Chang’s birthday. Jake didn’t like the chocolate and passion fruit flavors together but I was ecstatic. The chocolate crumb was so rich and I love how Tosi pairs crunchy and creamy and tart together.

I learned a lot about baking.
1) So much easier to weigh the ingredients.

2) Quarter pan size is not the same as half sheet pan size. Oops.

Some friends asked me to make the cake for their son’s wedding. The Springs are family to me and Austin is the same age as my brother. I said yes, even though I am terrible at decorating.

Luckily another friend took the decorating part over.

I had a real wedding cake baker, of Paradise Pastries,  to help consult on the structure.

Jake kept Mozely busy and I stayed up late only a few nights in a row. Austin and his sister, Noelle, helped bake the cakes and all the parts, hours of work, and especially, hours of stirring slowly thickening curd on the stove top. 

We only had one mishap.

Lesson #3: Eggs are necessary in this cake.

We still ate part of it, even though it dripped all over the oven floor, caught on fire, and filled the house with smoke.

11 lbs of butter later we had a wedding cake.

It takes up a whole fridge. Just in case you were considering making your own.

Birthday Cake Layers (without the sprinkles) and Lilikoi Curd, Birthday Cake White Frosting, and Milk Crumb. It could only be upstaged by the bride and groom. 

I’ll be posting a lot more. Promise.

(Next week I’ll have a Shabby Apple Giveaway, and after that, an OXO giveaway. What a great way to kick off the summer, right?)

What I’ve Learned in Ten Years of Marriage

Two is oh-so-much better

for cleaning up.

If you had told me ten years ago that cleaning up, and just the general business of living together was, almost, as important as sex, I would have really laughed at you.

It’s important that both of those things happen in a good marriage, even if it involves some work. Plus the value of it increases with time.

And when one person leaves, let’s say, for a two week trip to American Samoa (and leaves you alone with two kids)---

you’re pretty happy to have that person back.

For at least two reasons.

P.S.

How awesome is my ten-years-ago teenage brother?

The angst-icon for a new generation.

Sendai

I just checked the news.

Sendai looks terrible. The word seems woefully insufficient.

Elle Marie is there. She is a lovely person whom I only know through words, but I feel like we have met.

I hope you will send all of your positive energy towards her. Every ounce of it. I absolutely hate that I can think of nothing to do beyond that. If you can think of something, anything we can do, I will do it.

Charter a plane and go pick her up? Can I do that?

The Things You Love

There are few times that you come face to face with what is important and what is not.

A tsunami warning evacuation makes what is important very, very clear.

When you’re preparing to leave a house that you may never see again, even your favorite jeans or your movie collection is something you can definitely live without.

One toothbrush can be enough. Apples suddenly seem like a delicious luxury. All the diapers in the house are necessary.

I prepared myself to lose a life’s worth of pictures, memorabilia, wardrobe, books, music, and whatever forgotten Christmas wrapping paper lurks in our closets. The idea that we might be starting over from scratch actually didn’t sound horrible in that moment. I filled the car with practicality instead of sentiment.

Just in case it was just a small flood of water, I picked the computer up off the floor and put it on the table. I looked through my bottom shelf, filled with cookbooks, and picked out The Joy of Cooking, Momofuku, Baking Illustrated, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, Dorie’s book, Baked, and Veganomicon and put them up higher too. I’m a materialist cook. What can I say.

We loaded the kids in last. Our most important things. The things we love.

After parking up on higher ground towards the mountains, I listened to the radio in the dark and felt a strange kinship with the people who called in to the station asking the same dumb questions, the kind you want someone else to ask. We heard updates of what had happened in Japan and we all held our breaths when the time of the first tsunami was supposed to hit. I felt part of a strange network of stress and relief through those airwaves.

If you’ve lived on the island your whole life, like my husband has, you have a certain bit of skepticism for all the work that goes into preparing to evacuate. No evacuation has ever turned out necessary, in his lifetime. After the first wave did not hit, there were people heading back down to town and even walking along the beaches. Waves actually increased in size in different areas along the island chain over the next several hours, but it didn’t hit in our bay. Since the word ‘Tsunami’ still has shock value for me, I waited until scientists told me that the worst was most likely over. I don’t put that kind of authority in my own instincts. I’m ok with being wrong in this case. Give me a few more false alarms and you can save me from my own apathy.

When the sun came up we stretched out of the car and ate chocolate granola bars and string cheese. The kids were happy to see the morning.

We lost sleep, time, and a good deal of patience.

The waves that hit our island were a nuisance instead of life threatening.

We had hours of advance notice.

We were together.

We are lucky.

I already told Jake, he is not allowed to go surfing today.

I don’t care if the waves are epic.

Plans You Can’t Count On and Italian Buttercream

Valentine’s Day is NOT a day that anyone likes to feel disappointed.

About five minutes into making Valentine’s Day cards, Amaya got up to leave.

“Where are you going? We’re making Valentines! That’s the plan!” I said, alarmed.

She looked at me with her little four year old squint and said, with a side pinched mouth, “That was your plan. That wasn’t my plan! I just want to have fun!”

She walked away without one bit of guilt or even one backwards glance at her abandoned list of friends who would have one less Valentine.

Predictably, for our Valentine’s Day, my hub and I were having a bit of a squabble about “adult stuff” and acting like kids about it.

To top it off, my culinary class was supposed to make cupcakes, and I forgot the flour.

I mean, who said cupcakes have to have flour anyway? Why are we forced to give Valentines on February 14th? Why does an argument have so much more weight on an arbitrarily assigned day of the year?

Bah. Humbug.

Basically, every week I have to drag my entire kitchen to my car, from my car to my classroom, then my classroom to the kitchen classroom, and then back again. So when I came back from my all day field trip in time for 7th period, there was no time to problem solve having no flour. My google searches for "substitutions for flour” weren’t going to save me.

I apologized to my students, and the grumbling from those teenagers was even louder than my own grumbling. What if you were promised an hour to cook and then had to write notes on leaveners instead?

I tried to salvage my own romantic Valentine’s Day by ordering takeout. Both places I thought would be appreciated happened to close early on Monday. I went to the store to get some inspiration, and by the time I got home, it was already time for dinner. I basically completely failed to do anything for my significant other. And I had to ruin the rest of our evening because now I had to make 90 red velvet cupcakes. 

Today I brought in the cupcakes. My friend, co-owner of the local cake shop Paradise Pastries, came in to talk with my class about her expertise, and made us some Italian Buttercream.

She whipped up that buttercream like someone who could do that in sleep. I was impressed. I’m very impressed by anything that requires thermometers, whipped egg whites, sugar that could burn your skin off, and pounds of butter. There’s a lot that can go wrong with this recipe. The variables are hard to account for. She could make that alchemy work up into a perfect sweet frosting while I struggled to work out using a phone to order take out.

Stress momentarily melted into that pillowy buttercream. If this is what Italians eat, get me on a plane right this moment. I may have eaten more cupcakes than I originally intended. I’m not normally a frosting person, but I was basically using the cupcake like a plate for frosting.

We played around with decorating, and let’s just say that my technique could use some work. One of my students seems to have a knack for food styling, and she made a rose on her first try. My cupcakes look like Zac Efron’s hair. The “all bangs” look.

I came home to a surprise. These nun orchids have been my Valentine’s Day staple since we first started dating in 2000.

That’s something I can count on.

Valentine’s Day magic lives on. Even a day late.

 

Resources:

My friend normally makes a lot more buttercream than you would need, and buys egg whites by the bucket, but this recipe is closest I could find online to what she used.

I made Annie’s Red Velvet Cupcakes. Easy peasy. Even 90 of them.

Wilton’s website is a great source for decorating techniques using buttercream frosting. Something I will be studying.

Love and Peanut Butter Chocolate Luvah Cake

I have been calling in all my favors.

Chances are, if you know me, you’ve done me a favor lately, whether you owe me one or not.

I need to thank those who wrote me letters of reference, featured my blog in the newspaper, invited us for dinner, helped edit my pictures, gave me advice, gave me pictures, listened to me complain, held my crying baby, gave my baby gifts (even from London), entertained my crazy kid, helped me do my work, and forgave me for my flakiness.

Oh, and thank you to the person who let me borrow 24 ramekins on a moment’s notice so I could make chocolate molten lava cakes with my culinary class.

Thank you, dear readers and commenters and people who have been so complimentary. You have helped keep up my spirits in this stressful time.

Special thanks to chocolate lava cakes that keep giving me reasons to show up and run nightly, and scales that never lie.

But the person I need to thank the most, our resident artist:

My love. I didn’t give you any credit in that article, and I’m feeling pretty silly for it. You’re the one who makes the magic happen. You are the glue that holds this crazy together.

I never make thank you cards, but sometimes I make thank you treats.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Luvah (Lava) Cake (serves 4)

(print this)

Confession: this is the easiest and fastest cake to make. Ever. I’ve made 5 chocolate lava cake recipes in the last two weeks and this lava cake base is my favorite for its ease and flavor. Some of my students found it to be too much chocolate while others were happily scraping their plates. Predictably, there were some students who preferred Hershey’s milk chocolate to Green and Black’s dark chocolate during our chocolate tasting lesson. Leave out the peanut butter if you like. Other add-ins we tried with my class were nutella, crushed oreo cookies and bananas. Experimenting is just a good excuse to make more.

• 5 oz dark or semisweet chocolate (semisweet chocolate chips do work here)
• 1/4 lb unsalted butter
• 3/4 Cup sugar
• 1/4 Cup flour
• 3 eggs
• 4 teaspoons peanut butter

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter 4 4oz ramekins (the whole inside, not just the bottom). Don’t be shy with the butter. Chop the chocolate into small pieces and put into a microwave safe bowl with the butter. Microwave for 1 minute, stirring after thirty seconds. After 1 minute stir and make sure it is completely melted. Microwave in 20 second intervals if it is not.
2. In a separate medium bowl, with a wooden spoon mix the sugar, flour and eggs until completely combined.
3. Add the chocolate mixture slowly into the eggs while stirring until one uniform color.
4. Put about 1/4 C of the batter into each of the ramekins. Place a teaspoon of peanut butter into each ramekin on top of the batter. Cover with more batter until about 3/4 way full.
5. Bake the cakes for 10-15 minutes. The time will depend on the actual heat of your oven and the thickness of the ramekin walls. I check often and remove them just when the sides look softly set, the top looks dry and beginning to crack, but it still jiggles in the middle just a little. If you overcook it you will have just a very moist chocolate-y cake (which is good, too). Mine took 13 minutes and two of the ramekins were perfect while the other ones (with thinner walls) were slightly over done.
6. Softly pull the sides of the cake away from the walls of the ramekins with a knife or spoon, and invert onto a plate. You can also eat it straight from the ramekin. Dust with powdered sugar or garnish with a strawberry if desired. Serve immediately with ice cream, milk, or something to balance the extreme chocolate goodness.

Ok, one more. For the fans.

Hope you have a lovely Valentine’s Day. Make this for yourself even.

Bento Box Lessons of Love

Today I did not

drink water

pee

or eat food

until after 3:30 pm.

Instead I spent the entire day running around like a mad woman. I loaded up bags of supplies and tools for my culinary class. I wrote up hand outs and directions for simple things such as  “How to boil eggs” and drew maps of the classroom where everything would go. I mentally prepared myself for the chaos that would be 7th period with 32 students.

32 students. For 70 minutes.

Not to scare anyone out of the teaching profession (AAAAAAAHHHHHH! It’s a flaming zombie! Run away before you’re eaten alive!), but being in charge of 32 teenagers is like trying to wipe up a gallon of milk with a tissue. It’s like the test in the eye doctor’s office where you’re clicking the clicker for those random flashes of light in every peripheral spot. It’s like trying to play the piano while the baby is screaming.

Add some chef’s knives, gas stoves, and raw food to the mix.

Now it’s like teaching culinary.

Over the last few lessons I’ve been teaching my students about the visual appeal of food. I thought, how better to do that than with bento boxes? In addition we learned about portion control, balance, variety, and garnish. Since most of our periods are 40 minutes long, it’s difficult to get in much, but I did pack a lot of information in to 3 days. We even made bento box blueprints.

Today we put our plans into action. Every student made his or her own bento. I ran from station to station to thwart safety hazards (“Does it smell like gas in here?”) and answer questions like, “Can I just cook the rest of my SPAM for later?”

32 students need a lot of attention. Almost as much as my 4-year-old.

We even had a photography station and got a shot of each bento box for later grading. I stepped in for a few pictures as the entire concept of photographing food was definitely new to them (not that I’m any sort of expert). Some couldn’t be rescued, color and focus wise, because of the lighting in that room and the settings they chose because I was too busy to help them with each picture (probably this could be fixed more with photoshop but is beyond my capability). Some students are definitely naturals at design. Think we have a few future food bloggers?

They’ve had such small exposure to food, really. But there are such cute details in even the simplest bentos here.

The kids were so impressed with their pictures on that little LCD screen. They couldn’t believe they had made something beautiful. I heard one student say, “Now I remember why I like this class.”

Glad I could remind him.

And glad they could remind me.

Peace and happiness and lemon gelato.

One of the first things I do when coming back from a trip:

Go through the fridge.

After tossing all the stuff that went bad in ten days (in Hawaii, food has a much shorter shelf-life, period), I realized we had zero vegetables. When I don't have vegetables, I feel like my fridge is naked. I feel like I have no food, no matter how many beans and cans and cupboard food we have. I can't rest easy until I clothe that fridge.

Since the farmer's market is 3 days away (and the one I like the best is 5 days away), I knew we were going on a town trip if I wanted local and/or organic produce.

Town trips are torturous with kids. There's the fact that my boy cries the second you put him in the car seat and never falls asleep no matter how long the ride is. Then you've got diaper bags, bathroom pit stops, kicking the back of the seat... Add shopping to that equation and you're bound to come back with a headache.

Since we live an hour away, Moze and Amaya demand a snack in the car after our exhausting shopping. This is the only way to make town trips bearable. If we get through it, lunch is our reward.

Amaya had a pretzel roll sandwich with gorgonzola spread, salami, and veggies. She generously saved half for Jake. Moze had milk. He was a bit distracted and was trying to decide if he could have some sandwich instead.

We hung out in the car, ate, talked, took pictures. Afterwards we went back into the store to pee before our long trip back (because shopping trips must involve no less than 5 ins and outs of the car). I decided that a lemon gelato couldn't hurt either.

Amaya, I hope that spilling lemon gelato on your shirt will always be a good day.
Moze, I will love you even if you grow out of those blue eyes, but I sure do like them.

How do you make shopping with kids bearable?