The charm of a tray of brownies is their directness. They exist solely to overload and short circuit the taste buds with a melting overdose of one overpowering flavor profile. Which purpose I can’t help but admire, but I don’t like chocolate in bakery
This was an uncooking Christmas for me and I couldn’t have been happier. I mean, I could have been happier, but I doubt that I’ll be checking into a Whistler ski cabin with a spa bath on the balcony and a cold supply of those ethereal sparkling red wines you can get in northern Italy any time soon, so we’re not talking that level of happiness.
It rained at a steady pace all day and smelled lovely, and when it occasionally stopped all the neighborhood birds could be heard singing and cawing through the open balcony door. They’re loving this human quarantine, that’s for sure.
We didn’t eat all day. The night before, in my Christmas Eve tradition, I had ordered tiramisu, from a Japanese patisserie in our neighborhood, to eat late on Christmas Eve. I’m not surprised that Japanese pastry chefs have taken to tiramisu, just as they’ve taken to proper baked cheesecake. They exist in the same imaginative territory, texture wise, as traditional Japanese puddings. Tiramisu may not be difficult to make but I have no interest in preparing everything I eat myself out of thrift, which horrifies my mother even in an era in general defined by consumption and indulgence.
Winter is a romantic season for me. I got married in the March of my first winter in Vancouver, my first real winter spent outside of Australia at all. I had spent a previous winter, a couple of years earlier, travelling around Ireland by bus and train but it had been an exceptionally warm one, very wet, as wet as this rainforest, but not often cold.
Other people tell me that they weren’t particularly impressed with the food when they traveled in Ireland. Well, it always comes out that they’ve made the mistake of eating in “nice restaurants” and pubs. Don’t get me wrong, I could have moved in permanently to some of the pubs in Ireland but they’re for drinking, talking and music, not for eating. I found that almost all small towns and villages would have, near the center of town or within walking distance of the train station, a bakery-cafe, often bookish, which makes its own bread in-house, and utterly delicious sandwiches with it. Some would even have milk and butter from nearby farms to work with, and small Irish dairy is famous for good reason.
Anyway, I never saw snow until I came to Vancouver. It snowed all day three days out from my outdoor backyard wedding, but then the day of dawned bright blue, sunny and dry, and the patio heaters I had hired to put around the garden did their job very well. I did the catering for 15 people myself with help from my bridesmaid and then-colleague in running a coffee shop. My mother, an angel, offered to buy and choose the cake. My stipulation was that it be modest and easily edible out of doors in winter. She chose perfectly. A tiramisu frozen gelato cake, from the gelataria on our long, straight street lined with Italian shops. Every winter since, I would buy a tiramisu at some point, and the habit morphed into becoming part of late night dinner on Christmas Eve.
Both of us ate too much of it this year and woke up on Christmas morning feeling like never eating again. Between making our usual Christmas day calls as it rained and rained, we smoked joints, watched TV shows thanks to a friend giving me her HBO log=in, and drank pot after pot of green tea until our guts had recovered and hunger had crept back in. It was evening by this time. James set to his favorite kitchen job - seasoning and skewering a small beef round roast, the bone having been removed by the butcher, and cooking it rotisserie style in the little oven.
Despite having barely recovered from the overly festive sugar-liqueur-coffee-drug overdose of the day before, I set about tinkering with a brownie recipe that I wanted to convert to a non chocolate version. I don’t bake as a rule but I can bake well, which I sometimes do for James or for work. But anyone can make a small batch of brownies. The recipe I’m using as a base I got from my said bridesmaid, who’s a professional baker and social worker. It’s from the after school cooking class she runs at a community center, for children on the fetal alcohol spectrum.
The charm of a tray of brownies is their directness. They exist solely to overload and short circuit the taste buds with a melting overdose of one overpowering flavor profile. Which purpose I can’t help but admire, but I don’t like chocolate in bakery, hardly at all in fact, outside of a very few applications.
Although I drink it everyday, coffee has a strong winter association for me, and dishes made with coffee I find quite festive despite the familiarity. I often make a coffee granita for parties. A young friend in the Florida everglades, learning how to bake vegan in quarantine, had told me about a coffee flavored cake which had turned out beautifully for her a few days earlier, and it had stuck in my mind. As I don’t bake often, the only sugar I keep in the kitchen is cubes for tea and coffee. I’d recently been drawn to a pretty bag of golden yellow sugar while shopping though, remembering how lovely the pillowy texture of golden yellow sugar is, and how light on the tongue it is compared with darker sugars which almost seem to burn the mouth with molasses.
I intended to make a golden sugar brownie, powerfully flavored by a full cup of golden yellow sugar, with a generous tablespoon of vanilla bean paste to boost the caramel notes in the sugar like a bomb. While I was making the batter, my eye caught the jar of espresso powder which lives on a kitchen shelf with many and various tea and coffee things, and suddenly I was adding two tablespoons to the batter without even thinking about it. Even I was a little surprised at the radical change in flavor this meant, but the batter was delicious, moist and it held together well. It was a small batch and fit perfectly when spread on the non-stick tray of my countertop oven. I overcooked them this time but I’m still thrilled to announce the birth of Coffees, my non-brownie brownies.
When I’ve gotten the cooking time perfected and have tweaked the batter slightly, I’ll publish a final recipe. The scrappy outline at the moment is a cup golden yellow sugar melted slightly with half a cup of butter, one egg, two tablespoons of espresso powder and one tablespoon of vanilla bean paste, mixed into a batter with one cup of cake flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder, an eighth of baking soda and an eighth of salt. Spread on a tray, the Coffees will take about 14 minutes to bake at 350FBake in a vortex oven but I need to make them again to smooth out the right process exactly. The golden sugar version is good too. Like two different and surprising wearable Britney Spears fragrances, they speak in the same glitter language of sugar crystal baby whore pop princess hedonism, one sweeter and one darker. Merry Christmas!