Flour children

What is that weird and gorgeous thing?

Recipes I've cooked from Sweet by Valerie Gordon: 

1. brownies (A)
2. sugar cookies (A-)
3. Durango cookies (A+)
4. goat-cheese cheesecake (B+) with almond crust (B-)
5. whole-grain muffins (A)
6. Blum's coffee crunch cake (C+)
7. oatmeal raisin cookies (A)

Even with the C+, that's a pretty stellar GPA.

I've written about the brownies, sugar cookies, and Durango cookies. (I didn't do the Durango cookies justice in the last post. They're magical. Make them.)

Durango cookie, whole grain muffin

Now, about the goat-cheese cheesecake:

Isabel thought it was too lemony. Mark wasn't a fan. Owen didn't try it. I thought the cake was dry (in a good way) and had a lot of great, goaty character. That said, I didn't like it as much as I like a creamy, snow-white cow's milk cheesecake with a supersweet graham cracker crumb crust. I feel this is like admitting I like grape juice better than wine.

About the whole-grain muffins:

As I wrote in the last post, Gordon grew up with a big crush on a glamorous San Francisco bakery called Fantasia, but she later reveals that there was a second, very different San Francisco bakery that shaped her baking style: Tassajara.

The Tassajara Bakery was the offshoot of a Zen Buddhist center and while I don't remember the bakery itself, I remember the breads -- big, rustic, rugged loaves that were sold at a famous vegetarian restaurant called Greens. If Fantasia was the impossible dream, Tassajara was the earnest, earthy reality of San Francisco in the '70s and early ‘80s. My reality.

Just look at my mother circa 1978:

Although never a hippie, she favored ethnic clothing, sweetened everything with honey and ground her own whole-wheat flour. If she made brownies, they were carob.

You can see the Tassajara influence on a handful of Gordon's recipes, like her whole-grain muffins. On Saturday, I got up early and baked a batch of these because it seemed like a nutritious breakfast for Isabel, who was heading off to take the SATs. They’re full of everything considered healthy in the Aquarian Age: whole-wheat, millet, oats, honey, prunes, yogurt, eggs, mashed bananas. There's not a single ingredient on that list that is universally embraced by the dietary police of today. Not one.

When they came out of the oven, the muffins looked like big blobs of indigestible hippie love and Isabel said, apologetically, “I really don’t want something heavy right now. Can I have one for breakfast tomorrow instead?” 

I understood. Isabel headed of to the SATs on a breakfast of peanut butter toast, bacon, and a Starbucks vanilla latte.

Then I ate a muffin and was happily surprised. What you can’t tell from their lumpy brown exteriors is that these muffins are actually very light, fruity, and delicious. A lovely homage to a bygone baking era.  

About the Blum's coffee crunch cake: 

I'm getting sick of writing about bygone San Francisco bakeries, but there's no escaping it. Blum's was yet another legendary and influential San Francisco bakery, one I don't personally remember. (The last Blum's closed in the late '70s.) It was famous for a coffee crunch cake that consisted of layers of white cake frosted with coffee whipped cream and topped with chunks of cinder-like coffee-flavored toffee. People who grew up with this cake are obsessed with it, among them Valerie Gordon who created her own version of this "extinct" (her word) dessert.

I didn't grow up with this dessert and am not obsessed with it. I baked and assembled Gordon's version of the cake and took it to my sister's last night. Everyone complimented me, but I was deaf to their praise. The cake layers were lemony!  I've never understood lemon peel in espresso and I don't understand why you'd want to eat a lemony cake slathered in coffee whipped cream. Maybe you just have to grow up with it. That was my first issue. Then, there was a problem with the coffee crunch topping, which looked fabulous, but tasted of baking soda. I've looked at other recipes for coffee crunch and the proportion of baking soda in Gordon's version does indeed look a bit high. It's also possible I made a mistake. 

In any case, the cake was beautiful, but in my view, a bust.

About the oatmeal raisin cookies: 

These were amazing. The cookies in this book have been so consistently amazing that I'm planning to make them all.