In Alison’s absence, Matt and I had speculated about how much she must have known about the fleas. She had to have noticed them, we both decided. So why didn’t she do anything about them? Or at least warn me? But after a couple of weeks of living with her, I realize that she’s the kind of person who may not have noticed them, or who if she had, could have just shrugged and carried on making her lunch. Alison’s base state is relaxed and easy. She goes to yoga; she subscribes to Spirituality & Health; she cooks without using a recipe and makes large piles of garden trimmings, which is to say that she knows how to garden, which is to say, we are different in ways that fascinate me.
Despite an inauspicious start, we become fast friends, lingering over our morning coffees and nighttime glasses of wine. She makes the most delicious sweet potato black bean soup, which she serves with shredded cheddar cheese on top—imparting to me the basic lesson that all soup should be served with at least some sort of accoutrement on its surface. She roasts a chicken on top of a bunch of vegetables in a giant pot and invites all of our friends over. It’s inspiring and makes me realize that Matt and I barely had anyone over to our new apartment over the summer.
Fall flies by in the way it always does when you’re a student. And by December, I’m not only ready to return to Matt and Los Angeles, I’m also ready to try my hand at entertaining. I’ll be there for almost four weeks, two of which we’ll be dog-sitting for our friends Sara and Sean at their three-bedroom, two-bath house in Hollywood.
Before I can leave, though, I must go to the dentist.
Last year, I had a troublesome cavity, which led to multiple follow-up appointments, during which my dentist and I got to know each other a bit. It was right after Matt’s script had been named a semifinalist in that big competition, and I must’ve overstated his Hollywood prowess because now the dentist seems to believe that Matt is something of a big shot, or at the very least, a working writer.
Up until this point, I’ve kept my recipe sourcing to Real Simple magazine and Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food. But in the dentist’s waiting room, I pick up the December issue of Bon Appétit, drawn in by the cover image of a towering, multilayered slice of chocolate cake with white chocolate peppermint mousse filling. Inside, I find a fancy recipe for macaroni and cheese that seems doable and that I know Matt would love.
Soon, the receptionist calls my name, interrupting my imaginary meal planning, and in another few moments I’m wearing a paper towel for a necklace and fielding questions about what Matt is writing now. I tell my dentist it’s an action-adventure script. I tell him there is no hard deadline but that Matt hopes to have it done soon. He asks about Los Angeles and I tell him how the nights and mornings get chilly in winter and how the city seems to clear out for the holidays, leaving the roads eerily traffic-free. I don’t tell him that Matt’s not getting paid for this work and that, in actuality, he’s been unemployed for going on seven months now, nor that all of our money goes into rent and plane tickets. Neither do we discuss the economic climate; how it’s December of 2008, and the beginning of what people are calling the worst US financial crisis since the Great Depression; how it isn’t a great time to dream or to be pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing either; how, really, it’s a time to find any manner of available work and to sell dispensable things on eBay; how it’s a time to have an undeniable, specific skill, like filling cavities and performing root canals.
I’m sent home with clean teeth, a new toothbrush, and a strong desire to make the cake from the cover of Bon Appétit. I’m not sure why exactly, perhaps because of the embellished conversation about my Hollywood husband, or the idea of having access to a KitchenAid mixer and a three-bedroom house over Christmas, or having just recently completed a semester of Intro to Cooking and Entertaining by Alison, or the issue of Bon Appétit itself—the beautiful images of which don’t just give me the notion that I’m merely a numbered list of steps away from eating that chocolate-peppermint cake; they also subconsciously ignite the desire for the lifestyle surrounding that cake.
The overhead shot of a perfectly cooked apple pie next to a sweet-potato meringue pie whose tips are crisp and mottled brown doesn’t just make me hungry for buttery crust and melted cinnamony apples. It slyly reminds me of the best things about the holidays: collapsing carefree into an oversize chair in your parents’ living room, feet tucked underneath you, plate of pie slices in your hand, glass of wine on the end table, fire still going, dogs sleeping, and family members laughing, without a single flea in sight.
But whatever the exact reason is, I slip the issue of Bon Appétit into my oversize purse, return home to my small historic house, and keep reading. I make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and begin to imagine, and then to plan. What if Matt and I had people over for a Christmas Day brunch? What if, despite never having made a cake from scratch before, I came out of the kitchen with this chocolate and peppermint cake on a platter? I can see it: the fire going, the Christmas tree up, our temporary miniature schnauzer by my side, our friends sitting cozily on the couch indulging in a slice of my miraculous cake. Wouldn’t that be something? And something possible too. Not only could I make this cake happen, but I could have the cozy, moneyed lifestyle attached, if only for a day.
What I don’t imagine nor plan for is the twenty-minute struggle for a parking spot in the Whole Foods parking lot on Christmas Eve, the trips to three different stores to find peppermint extract, the price of “good” white chocolate, the fact that Sara and Sean’s kitchen, despite belonging to real grown-ups, still only has one cake pan, leaving me to estimate what half of the batter looks like, bake it first, wash the pan, then bake the rest of the batter separately. (Both of these layers, by the way, need to be to cut horizontally in order to arrive at the four total layers the recipe calls for.)
But after a day and a half, I have done all of these things. And what’s more, I have done them ahead of time, so that Christmas morning, I can wake up leisurely in our temporary California king-size bed with our temporary dog in our temporary Hollywood, 1920s-era, cottage-style house with vaulted ceilings, at which Matt and I like to look around and say affirmingly: We could have this by the time we’re thirty-seven too. Thirty-seven is because that’s how old Sean is. (We conveniently disregard the fact that Sara is our age.)
Our guests are set to arrive at eleven, and so at ten-thirty, after a cup of coffee and a shower, and with Matt by my side, as he’s become invested in my project as well, I finally begin assembling my masterpiece. We had registered for and received a cake stand as one of our wedding gifts, and we’d brought it over from our apartment for its inaugural use. Layer one is chocolate cake. Next is the dark chocolate ganache, followed by the white chocolate cream. Cake, ganache, cream. Three more times, just like that, until we reach the final step—quite literally the icing on the cake.
This isn’t just any icing, mind you. It’s a fluffy peppermint icing I’d whisked with an electric hand mixer for eight to nine minutes over a saucepan of gently simmering water, until it resembled marshmallow crème, to which I added the extremely-difficult-to-find peppermint extract before moving the mixture to a regular stand mixer and beating for another seven to eight minutes, at which point it was just as it should be: “very thick.”
But from the first moment’s dollop of this very thick icing on the top layer of cake, I know we are in trouble—the sheer weight of all that sugar, egg, and air pushes the cake’s structure into a diagonal panic. We move forward anyway, trying to ice it quickly. Quickly! As if covering it with icing might somehow save it from its ever-growing list. I ice and ice until we can no longer deny reality. The top layers are sliding off. It’s now just a matter of catching them before they hit the ground.
For no real reason other than excitement over what I was accomplishing, Matt has been taking pictures of the process, and now, as he holds the cake in his hands, trying to slide the mass from the cake stand onto a plate, I grab the camera and take some more. It’s absurd—like the
plot of a sit-com. It’s Christmas morning, our friends will be here any minute now, and the dessert is in pieces.
In the end, we decide the best option is to put it all in a large serving bowl. We scoop in the bottom layers and then the top, so that it almost looks intentional, like a trifle with a smooth layer of icing to cover all of the broken bits. Merry Christmas!
End of story? Not quite.
I’m enthralled with the chronology of the photos of the rise and fall of my Christmas Day cake. To click through them is like watching some strange flipbook version of a marathoner about to break the tape at the finish line and then suddenly, trip, fall, get passed, and lose. And when our friends begin to trickle in for the holiday potluck, I flip my digital camera around to take them through the entire progression. It’s as if I’ve discovered a new scientific element. Look! Look at what I found! This is Failure (Fa).
Despite my twenty-seven years of life experience, I have held on to this childlike notion that life is somehow fair, that if I just work hard enough for what I want, the world will eventually comply and give it to me. (Specifically, I’m most interested in money and/or recognition for one of Matt’s or my creative endeavors, though ideally Matt’s because screenwriting pays a lot better than short-story writing.) And yet, here is tangible, unequivocal proof that if you work hard and follow the rules to a tee, your cake may still fall over and need to be scraped into a bowl on Christmas Day.
Hard work amounting to failure? My version paling in comparison to someone else’s? It all feels so familiar, but what’s remarkable is that it isn’t painful. It doesn’t feel personal. Because whether or not I can successfully make a layer cake doesn’t factor into my identity.
Failure in food. Now, this is something I can work with.
Chapter 21
Arising Out of Necessity
Cake Wrecks is already taken,” I tell Matt over the phone from my bedroom in Wilmington. “But what about Bon Appétempt?” I pause momentarily for his reaction. “Get it?”
“Bon App-attempt?” he says. “Yeah, I like it.”
And so begins my new side project: a food blog. Going into my first post, all I know for sure, structure-wise, is that each one will begin in the same way, with an image of a magazine’s perfect version of a finished recipe followed by an image of my much, much worse version. Of course, the first post will be the chocolate peppermint cake. And though I haven’t picked out, nor attempted, my second recipe, I expect it to have a similarly disastrous (though possibly delicious) outcome.
My aim for the blog is that it show the inherent ridiculousness of the faux perfection found in the food magazines at the checkout line of your local grocery store. I want to show what we normal people are competing with: namely, the efforts of a team of professionals, from the chef to the food stylist to the photographer, not to mention all of their assistants. I want to show what life is like for the rest of us: messy, poorly lit, and falling well short of our aspirations.
Of course, more than anything, I want it to be funny.
The image of the orange polenta cake I find on Gourmet’s website wins me over instantly. It’s both elegant, with glistening cross-sections of oranges adorning the top, and rustic, as the edge on the left side has browned perhaps just a bit too much and the whole thing (minus one slice) sits unassumingly on a wrinkled piece of parchment paper. Someone—the cook, I presume—has helped herself to a warm piece straight out of the oven. The rest she will slice, pack up, and take with her on a picnic in a meadow in Tuscany with a couple of her dear friends.
It’s a no-brainer to make for the next blog post. Of course, I’m no longer housesitting in a Hollywood home with a well-stocked kitchen. I’m back in my humble shotgun-style house in Wilmington, living across the street from a local drug operation and next door to a nice woman named Lamonica Toaster (which I mention solely because I like to say Lamonica Toaster), and though I’m now bug-free, I still have an upstairs closet that the washing machine repairman/local handyman tells me I should occasionally check for droppings, as he once helped out the owner of the house with a “pretty bad vermin issue.” Ah, coastal city living!
I do a sweep of the meager kitchen tools we already have, so that when I write down the list of ingredients I need to get, I also include basic items like a cake pan, a whisk, and a roll of parchment paper. The three ingredients I’m most worried about finding are quick-cooking polenta, ground almonds, and orange-flower water. At the largest nearby Harris Teeter, I find zero of the three. At the fancier Fresh Market near the beach, I give up on finding the last—convinced that something called orange-flower water has to be superfluous—but I find polenta and a bag of almond slivers, which I decide that I can chop into tiny bits. (We don’t have, nor do I plan on purchasing, a food processor.) At the checkout line, I realize how pricy this whole endeavor has become and bid adieu to the five-dollar orange marmalade sitting in my basket, reasoning that this cake doesn’t need the glaze on top.
My roommate is out on a date, and so after a simple dinner by myself, I begin to make my cake. As I’d expected, I run into problems right from the beginning. I make the caramel orange layer, but since I didn’t spring for a pastry brush, I can’t wash down any crystals from the side of the pan. I also feel very unsure of whether my caramel is “coloring evenly” or if it is dark amber enough; my attempt to remove all of the peel from the oranges and to slice them evenly into pretty cross-sections is a sloppy one at best. All of this goes into my buttered and parchment-lined pan anyway.
For the cake batter, I need two cups of ground almonds. I start chopping the slivers, but after a few minutes, I can tell that I’ll never get the bits tiny enough. I decide to scoop them into a freezer bag and then beat them with a rolling pin. (We do have a rolling pin!) It doesn’t take long until I feel a bit crazy—the sound the pin makes as it hits some of the almonds but mainly the cutting board is so loud, it’s almost terrifying. It’s also physically demanding. I realize I’m sweating through my shirt and decide I’ve done well enough. I mean, some of the almonds appear to be ground-ish.
The first step tells me to “beat butter with sugar using an electric mixer until just combined.” I use the whisk and my arm until the latter feels like a dead, dull weight attached to my shoulder. But I must recover quickly, as I have three eggs to add, as well as all of the dry ingredients.
By the time I pour my batter on top of the orange caramel layer and the orange slices, it’s ten o’clock. The cake needs an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes in the oven. As it bakes, I clean up.
In Los Angeles, Matt and Geordie turn in a draft of Safari to their manager. Though the high-concept story is not one they would have arrived at on their own, I read it and must admit that they’ve made it their own. They’ve created an entire world specific to the story and the characters. I’m proud of them.
Over a week later, they get a brief e-mail from their manager, Darren, setting up a time to talk to them on the phone.
A few minutes into the call, it feels as if Darren has completely forgotten that he’d OK’d this concept. He doesn’t like how they’ve created this new world. He wants them to reconceptualize the entire story so that it’s “more Jurassic Park.”
The MFA program I’m enrolled in typically takes three years to complete, but I realize now that my living in Wilmington doesn’t work for Matt and me in the long run. I realize that I don’t stomach LA after all. The truth is, I miss it. I miss the crowds and the sounds. I miss the feeling of being just one of the cogs in this big machine. I miss the grocery stores, the farmers’ markets, and avocados. I miss our West Hollywood neighborhood and its jacaranda-lined streets.
I’d taken an extra class last semester on the chance that I’d want to finish early, and now, knowing this is the case for sure, I take an extra class this semester as well so that by this coming May, all that I’ll have left to complete are my thesis hours, which I can do remotely from the West Coast.
To keep themselves from overth
inking the story, as Darren doesn’t seem to appreciate thinking much at all, Matt and Geordie hustle to get him a brand-new draft within a month. But when they turn it in, almost two weeks go by without a response. Finally, they get another one-sentence e-mail setting up a phone appointment.
Over the phone, Darren has a mountain of vague notes, but what’s crystal clear is that what he would really like is if Matt and Geordie could time-travel back to 1992 and write Jurassic Park.
It’s ridiculous. But they tell Darren they’ll get him another draft soon.
And they will. Though they also start to realize they should distance themselves from the project; they need to manage their expectations.
Before they had even met Darren, they’d been working on a pilot for a kids’ show set at summer camp. And as a way of distracting themselves from the frustration associated with Safari, Matt and Geordie reach out to a mutual acquaintance, producer/director and fellow ex-camp counselor, Will Gluck.
Will adores the camp script and immediately sets them up with his agent at ICM, who, in turn, gets them meetings with Disney. Matt and Geordie pitch the show, and it goes well. Disney is very interested. They set up another meeting. And then another.
Is it even worth mentioning that the third draft of the monster script is again shot down with notes and concerns from Darren and, that at this point, I hate Darren?
It’s April, my last full month living in Wilmington. In five weeks, Matt will fly into town and help me pack my possessions into my tiny car before we begin the westward cross-country drive to Los Angeles. Apart from the occasional temp assignment, Matt has been unemployed for almost a year now. We’ve officially spent all of our wedding money (as well as the money I got from selling my wedding dress) just to stay afloat. And yet, our spirits are high because Matt has lined up another big meeting with Disney.
Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) Page 14
