BAKING

My Senses, Reborn

Oh my goodness, I’ve been reborn and the catalyst for this wonderful shift is Diane Ackerman’s glowing manifesto of the senses, “A Natural History of the Senses”. Repleat with historical facts and fascinating anecdotes, I was like a undernourished cat, lapping up the warm cream from the top of a freshly squeezed pail of milk with each successive page…everyone should enjoy this book in such a manner. So rare is it that we find something that for no other reason at all, makes us happy from its shear beauty.

So too does cooking and baking effect the soul that resides within each one of us in this way: in cooking as in the creation of a perfume, we are striving to capture the ineffable in a fleeting moment of shared enjoyment, be it in the guise of a pot de feau or a creme brulee, it is the process of creating this thing that will enable a large group of people to have the same sensory experience at the same time…at least this is our aim as chefs and bakers, right?

Speaking of wonderful shared moments, a good friend of mine just turned me onto a Southern delicacy that I hadn’t tried in a million years: The Hummingbird Cake. So aroused was I about creating a gluten free version, I set to work as fast as I could and came up with one just in time for a birthday celebration that was stellar!

For those of you who don’t know what a Hummingbird Cake is, it is essentially a banana cake with toasted pecans, crushed pineapple, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla, finished off with a nice cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut; nothing could of taken a single plate from the hands of all the dinner guests…

Ah, YES, a new leaf is about to be turned!



Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918
The Sunflower, 1905
Private Collection
Austrian Abstract Expressionist

August 7th, 2008 — 4:13 pm

2 comments | add comment