The Bauer Confidential

Jocelyn’s first tooth!  April 28, 2009 (came in Saturday/Sunday).

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And these three were just too cute not to show:

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Hurry home, look what’s waiting for you!

And, you know how when you asked me this morning if I was going to bake you a cake and I said no?  Well, it wasn’t lie because I’d already baked you one.  Since you said it’s OK to celebrate a little, we’ll be grilling steaks and eating chocolate black-out cake.

I’ve been lurking around a few on-line cooking communities for a few years now.  You see, I have a problem, an addiction really, I love to bake.  And I can judge that by the tightness in my jeans these past few days, this obsession is starting to take its toll.  So I’m officially on a diet, but before I started I finished all the sweets in the house so as not to be tempted by them (I know this sounds counter-productive, but you start diets your way, and I’ll start them mine).  Before cutting down on my baked goods, last week I had a particularly annoying day in lab (why is there one stupid, tiny, little box on the RT-PCR machine that you must click if you want it to actually record your data, why is it so darn small?), and what better way to recover than baking.  I’d bought a couple cake mixes and frostings on sale a few weeks back with the plan of making some cake truffles.  After seeing them made here, and then checking out Bakarella’s amazing creations, I thought I should give them a try.

So I baked up a Devil’s Food Cake, I took a picture of the cake because, though boring, it was a nice flat looking cake.  No it wasn’t attacked by a vampire, those two holes in the center are from testing it with toothpicks.

Once the cake has cooled, you tear it up.  You heard me right, you take that nice cake and demolish it.  It’s sort of cathartic.  This is what it looks like.

Then you mix in a can of frosting, I used cream-cheese (Bakarella’s favorite).  I tasted it at this stage and thought it was a little bland, so I added some mint extract.

I let it cool and then rolled it into balls, which I then put in the freezer.  I coated the balls with a mixture of 60% Cacoa Ghiradelli chips and Guittard mint chips (with a few vanilla melts thrown in to give it a nice consistency).  Here’s the final result.

They were pretty tasty and well recieved by my co-workers.  I honestly would prefer a nice piece of cake with frosting.  If I were going to do this again, I’d use a chocolate frosting with a chocolate cake because I think the cream-cheese frosting sort of diluted out the chocolate flavor.  I also used the whole can of frosting, which I think was a bit too much and the centers were really soft.  I doubt I’ll go to the trouble of making these again, unless I have a party or something where it would be fun to decorate.

This book review is sort of a two-fer.  It was my turn to select a work for the book club to which I belong.  Instead of searching the internet for a well-reviewed piece as I normally do, I decide to peruse The Book Club Cookbook, a compendium of popular selections from book clubs around the nation.  I really enjoyed flipping through this book, each novel is briefly summarized, then a book club who chose said novel is described which is followed by a recipe that relates to the selection provided either by a book club member or occasionally the author of the work in question.  I now have a list a mile long of books I’d like to read thanks to The Book Club Cookbook and an almost equal number of recipes I’d like to try, I would definitely recommend this particular cookbook if your a cookbook lover or even just a book lover, and especially if you belong to a book club because it will give you endless ideas.

Now on to this month’s book club selection, I chose The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty based on its entry in The Book Club Cookbook.  This is far-and-away the most literary work I’ve read in a long time.  Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Optimist’s Daughter is one of Eudora Welty’s most respected works.  A relatively short novel, The Optimists Daughter is an a study in opposite characters.  Laurel, the genteel southern daughter of small-town judge, comes home to bury her father and butts heads with his second wife.  In addition to exquisite descriptions of the tension between the two women, Laurel recounts her childhood and delves into memories of the relationship between her father and mother.  The Judge’s first marriage, by his daughter’s account, is one of real love and companionship, while his second, to the much younger Fay, is a ridiculous embarrassment.  The harder Laurel looks at her parents marriage, the more she sees the betrayal of her mother and her mother’s memory that happened long before her death.

In addition to conflict and clashing wills, The Optimist’s Daughter is a story about coming home and loosing home.  Laurel has long been absent from the town of her childhood, moved to Chicago and widowed years earlier.  There are poignant moments where Laurel begins to feel that she will never be able to belong in her former home-town, with her father gone, despite deep friendships, she becomes a visitor, an outsider.

Though it was challenging, I really enjoyed this book.  At times I felt like I was back in a high school english class, thinking about symbolism and deeper meanings.  At least one person in my book club found passages of this book “hard” not because of difficult vocabulary, but rather the characters are so realized that your feelings about them become very strong.  If you’d like a book that will make you think about the meaning of love and loyalty, of home and memory, this is an excellent choice.  I found this quote, which is from The Optimist’s Daughter, and found on Eudora Welty’s grave, particularly meaningful: “For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”

April bought a cute dress for Jocelyn’s first Easter.  We even went to Church, and Jocelyn was perfect.  Afterward, we walked up to a park to take some pictures, but having missed her nap, Jocelyn’s smile was a bit elusive.

A picture of perfection those two!  After an afternoon nap, we tried to get more pictures of Jocelyn.

She can stand for a bit (with some assistance).

Like I said…only for a bit.

Berkeley, CA.  April 2009.

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Stinson Beach, California, March 2009.

Photo Credit: Grandpa Bauer

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