Cake And Coffee Quotes

Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling.

Vivienne Westwood, The Sex Pistols, Seven Stars, coffee with milk and strawberry cake. And Ren flowers. Nana's favorite things never change. It was so cool for someone like me who keeps on changing their mind.

Nina threw herself into a chair at the table and wriggled her feet out of her jewelled slippers, digging her toes into the plush white carpet. “Ahhh,” she said contentedly. “So much better.” She shoved one of the cakes from the coffee service into her mouth and mumbled, “What do you want, Kaz?” “You have crumbs on your cleavage.” “Don’t care,” she said, taking another bite of cake. “So hungry.” Kaz shook his head, amused and impressed at how quickly Nina dropped the wise Grisha priestess act. She’d missed her true calling on the stage.

Can we leave now?” She laughed. Yeah, she probably shouldn’t have found it amusing that her mate was in hell surrounded by people … “Let me finish my cake and coffee.” … “Wrap up the cake with a napkin and bring it with you.” Grinning at the impatience in his voice, Shaya said, “No, I want to eat it now.” “But… people keep smiling at me.” “So smile back.” “I don’t want to.

Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would not take the garbage out! She'd scour the pots and scrape the pans, Candy the yams and spice the hams, And though her daddy would scream and shout, She simply would not take the garbage out. And so it piled up to the ceilings: Coffee grounds, potato peelings, Brown bananas, rotten peas, Chunks of sour cottage cheese. It filled the can, it covered the floor, It cracked the window and blocked the door With bacon rinds and chicken bones, Drippy ends of ice cream cones, Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel, Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal, Pizza crusts and withered greens, Soggy beans and tangerines, Crusts of black burned buttered toast, Gristly bits of beefy roasts. . . The garbage rolled on down the hall, It raised the roof, it broke the wall. . . Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs, Globs of gooey bubble gum, Cellophane from green baloney, Rubbery blubbery macaroni, Peanut butter, caked and dry, Curdled milk and crusts of pie, Moldy melons, dried-up mustard, Eggshells mixed with lemon custard, Cold french fried and rancid meat, Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat. At last the garbage reached so high That it finally touched the sky. And all the neighbors moved away, And none of her friends would come to play. And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said, "OK, I'll take the garbage out!" But then, of course, it was too late. . . The garbage reached across the state, From New York to the Golden Gate. And there, in the garbage she did hate, Poor Sarah met an awful fate, That I cannot now relate Because the hour is much too late. But children, remember Sarah Stout And always take the garbage out!

Meghan pushed her chocolate cheesecake across the table to me. I hadn’t gotten paid yet for November, so I had only ordered coffee. “Here,” she said. “Don’t you want it?” “Sure I want it. I ordered it. But I’m giving it to you.” “Why?” Meghan stood up and got me a fork. “Remember what Nora said about love? In your movie?” “Love is when you have a really amazing piece of cake, and it’s the very last piece, but you let him have it,” I said. “So it’s really amazing cake,” said Meghan. “And I want you to have it.

The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.

At some point, a cake was produced, with red and gold Gryffindor icing, and twelve pink candles. When Remus cut it open (all the while encouraged to make a wish, but not able to think of one single thing he wanted) he was amazed to find that it was made up of four different flavours – a quarter chocolate, a quarter lemon drizzle, a quarter Victoria sponge and a quarter coffee and walnut. “Like your toast.” Sirius grinned, looking thrilled at the expression of surprise on Remus’ face, “Thought you might get bored if it was all one flavour.

Then everyone would retreat for a nap, after which we would have coffee and cake, sometimes an argument.

We think there's a reason for everything, as if life was supposed to make sense. It's not exactly math. People aren't numbers. Everybody knows life doesn't make any sense at all, so we just better deal with the whole mess. Have a beer. Have a cup of coffee. Have a piece of cake. Go out to a movie. Enjoy the Popcorn.

What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. "I just go along. I dig life." He repeated it, following Dean's line. He had no direction. He sat reminiscing about that night in Chicago and the hot coffee cakes in the lonely room.

She delighted in serving her guests a soothing cup of coffee, a slice of cake, and when the occasion called for it, a prayer of encouragement.

Examples: ツアー -> tsu-ā -> tour メール -> mē -ru -> email ケーキ -> kē-ki -> cake コーヒー -> kōhī -> coffee

If she had known who was a perfect match for Karen/Kelly, she wouldn’t put cake on her plate, but instead add poison to her coffee.

The thing I've noticed about life-' Zoe pauses to drain the last of her coffee and lick the foam off her lips, 'is that it just keeps coming at you. And it can be a real bummer. What you need to remember, Tiff, is that you're not alone. You've got friends and family. That's how we get by. We talk and share and eat cake and giggle in the dark, even when we're scared - no, especially when we're scared.' Wow. Reggie would be impressed. She's as good as Dr Phil. And not bald.

I read it too, imagined I was one of the group, munching coffee cake (none handy) and sipping wine (this I managed). “What did you think of Jude, Anna?” Christine Gray would ask me, and I’d say I found it rather obscure. We’d laugh. They’re laughing now, in fact. I try laughing with them. I take a sip.

THE HYGGE MANIFESTO 1. ATMOSPHERE Turn down the lights. 2. PRESENCE Be here now. Turn off the phones. 3. PLEASURE Coffee, chocolate, cookies, cakes, candy. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! 4. EQUALITY “We” over “me.” Share the tasks and the airtime. 5. GRATITUDE Take it in. This might be as good as it gets. 6. HARMONY It’s not a competition. We already like you. There is no need to brag about your achievements. 7. COMFORT Get comfy. Take a break. It’s all about relaxation. 8. TRUCE No drama. Let’s discuss politics another day. 9. TOGETHERNESS Build relationships and narratives. “Do you remember the time we . . . ?” 10. SHELTER This is your tribe. This is a place of peace and security.

He looked round once more at the piled boxes, glass dishes, fondants, ribbons, rosettes, cracknels, violet creams, mocha blanc, dark rum truffle, chili squares, lemon parfait, and coffee cake on the countertop with an expression of slightly blank amazement.

He had another cup of coffee, another cake, gulping them down, still looking at the clock every few minutes feeling a need to rush, no thought from what or to where, but only a vague yet crushing pressure of time, time that seemed to wrap itself around him like a python.

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone.

I think how heavenly it must be to nibble on tiny cakes and swirled caramels and plum ginger puffs all day. Tea with lemon petit fours in the afternoon; after-dinner mint truffles with butterscotch coffee in the evening. My mind swims with the notion of it. The easy, sugar-induced lull that would follow me into candy-tinted dreams each night. Life here, in Valentine's Town, would surely be simple and uncomplicated.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee.  Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam.  At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits-- cherries, pears, peaches.  At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.

Strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. For instance, as you wait in line at a coffee shop, comment on the pastries and then ask your neighbor an open-ended question, such as: “I’m trying to decide which is the most sinful: the muffin, the brownie, or the cake. How would you rank them?

Celebration is the sparkle in the eye of the one who glows. It is the song that plays in the house of freedom. Celebration is the dance of life, it’s the one dancing to the drumbeat of the heart, it’s your birthday cake, it’s you blowing out the trick candles, it’s you delighting in the fire of life.

At Rainbow Cake, January's special flavors would be dark chocolate and coffee, those pick-me-ups we all needed to start the day- or a new year. To me, their toasty-toasty flavors said that even if you only had a mere handful of beans and your life went up in flames, you could still create something wonderful. A little trial by fire could do you good. After all, if it worked so well with raw cacao and coffee beans, it could work for others, including me.

That looks feasible. What do you want for lunch? Cake, sandwiches, fruit, and coffee will be all that is necessary, I suppose?" "Oh, dear, no! We must have cold tongue and chicken, French chocolate and ice cream, besides. The girls are used to such things, and I want my lunch to be proper and elegant, though I do work for my living.

We have had for breakfast, toasts, cakes, a yorkshire pie, a piece of beef about the size and much the shape of my portmanteau, tea, coffee, ham and eggs...

In Vermont, there is maple syrup in it—it doesn’t matter what it is. Cake. Ice cream. Coffee. Soup. Mustard. Concrete.

A big jug of coffee had just been set in the hearth, the seed-cakes were gone, and the dwarves were starting on a round of buttered scones, when there came a loud knock

Warraner looked pleasantly surprised at the question, like a Mormon who had suddenly found himself invited into a house for coffee, cake, and a discussion of the wit and wisdom of Joseph Smith.

Both the ferial and the festal cuisine, therefore, must be seen as styles of unabashed eating. Neither attempts to do anything to food other than render it delectable. Their distinction is grounded, not in sordid dietetic tricks, but in a choice between honest frugality or generous expense. Both aim only at excellence; accordingly, neither is suitable for dieting. Should a true man want to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him to do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it. Any cake he could do that with would be a pretty spooky proposition - a little golden calf with dietetic icing, and no taste at all worth having. Let us fast, then - whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts.

Sitting there over your coffee cup in a wasteland of worn-out silver wedding rings, feeding yourself confections of motherhood like the display cakes in the bakery where you worked all trimming over cardboard

The coffee was terrible and the bacon was ordinary, but the pancakes were avatars of some perfect Ur-cake whose existence until now could only be deduced from the statistical variations in other, lesser pancakes.

Carrie, sitting there over your coffee cup in a wasteland of worn-out silver wedding rings, feeding yourself confections of motherhood like the display cakes in the bakery where you worked- all trimming over cardboard.

When our mothers die, we are on our own; there is no one to call for help, no one to blame, and no one left who has a copy of your grandmother’s recipe for the traditional Christmas coffee cake, which you can’t find anywhere. Her

I’m not sure how the ponies happened, though I have an inkling: “Can I get you anything?” I’ll say, getting up from a dinner table, “Coffee, tea, a pony?” People rarely laugh at this, especially if they’ve heard it before. “This party’s ‘sposed to be fun,” a friend will say. “Really? Will there be pony rides?” It’s a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it’s hard to weed it out of my speech – most of the time I don’t even realize I’m saying it. There are little elements in a person’s life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with your personality. Sometimes it’s a patent phrase, sometimes it’s a perfume, sometimes it’s a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies. I don’t even like ponies. If I made one of my throwaway equine requests and someone produced an actual pony, Juan-Valdez-style, I would run very fast in the other direction. During a few summers at camp, I rode a chronically dehydrated pony named Brandy who would jolt down without notice to lick the grass outside the corral and I would careen forward, my helmet tipping to cover my eyes. I do, however, like ponies on the abstract. Who doesn’t? It’s like those movies with the animated insects. Sure, the baby cockroach seems cute with CGI eyelashes, but how would you feel about fifty of her real-life counterparts living in your oven? And that’s precisely the manner in which the ponies clomped their way into my regular speech: abstractly. “I have something for you,” a guy will say on our first date. “Is it a pony?” No. It’s usually a movie ticket or his cell phone number. But on our second date, if I ask again, I’m pretty sure I’m getting a pony. And thus the Pony drawer came to be. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but almost every guy I have ever dated has unwittingly made a contribution to the stable. The retro pony from the ‘50s was from the most thoughtful guy I have ever known. The one with the glitter horseshoes was from a boy who would later turn out to be straight somehow, not gay. The one with the rainbow haunches was from a librarian, whom I broke up with because I felt the chemistry just wasn’t right, and the one with the price tag stuck on the back was given to me by a narcissist who was so impressed with his gift he forgot to remover the sticker. Each one of them marks the beginning of a new relationship. I don’t mean to hint. It’s not a hint, actually, it’s a flat out demand: I. Want. A. Pony. I think what happens is that young relationships are eager to build up a romantic repertoire of private jokes, especially in the city where there’s not always a great “how we met” story behind every great love affair. People meet at bars, through mutual friends, on dating sites, or because they work in the same industry. Just once a coworker of mine, asked me out between two stops on the N train. We were holding the same pole and he said, “I know this sounds completely insane, bean sprout, but would you like to go to a very public place with me and have a drink or something...?” I looked into his seemingly non-psycho-killing, rent-paying, Sunday Times-subscribing eyes and said, “Sure, why the hell not?” He never bought me a pony. But he didn’t have to, if you know what I mean.

When the Apocalypse comes, you'll find me pushing Marie Antoinette out of the way and saying, 'Let me eat cake! Forget them; I want the cake! Two helpings! I have some friends with me! Is there coffee with the cake, Marie? I'm just asking.

I didn't know until I licked the mocha buttercream from my third devil's food cupcake that this was the flavor of starting over- dark chocolate with that take-charge undercurrent of coffee. I could actually taste it, feel it. And now I craved it.

At some point the chocolate cake was gone (...) I got up from the table, put the kettle on, and emptied two spoonfuls of coffee into the French press. I took some painkillers, I drank coffee, I watched murder mystery on Netflix. A certain peace had come to me (ch.29, p.300)

Beginning with Bilbo's unexpected party in chapter 1 with its tea, seed-cakes, buttered scones, apple-tarts, mince-pies, cheese, eggs, cold chicken, pickles, beer, coffee, and smoke rings, we find that a reverence, celebration, and love of the everyday is an essential part of Tolkien's moral vision

If I ever have kids, this is what I'm going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil—preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp—destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you've been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the woman are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

Ivie lowered her coffee cup onto its saucer. “You would do that? I mean, Silas, seriously, these are not your peeps. My dad has tattoos and a Harley. He and my mahmen live in a prefab house out on a farm, and eat their own chickens. We’re talking beer out of a can, a store-bought cake, and hunting dogs running around under the table

The other bloodcoats finally noticed the undead livestock situation. Curly mustache slashed at the animal’s now-fully-risen corpse, but Horse didn’t mind, being already dead. If anything, he seemed curious, nuzzling at his gore-caked shoulder with a bloody nose, neck hanging open like a second mouth. The long lashes around his opaque eyes fluttered, dislodging a fly that had landed there. “Sorry, Horse,” Lore mumbled, then heaved up her coffee on the cobblestones. When she looked up, Curly Mustache was staring at her, at all the ways channeling Mortem had made her monstrous, his face gone nearly as pale as her own. “Heresy,” he said, voice hoarse from shouting. “Evil!” “Melodrama.

Back then, come July, and the blazers would again make their way out of the steel trunks and evenings would be spent looking at snow-capped mountains from our terrace and spotting the first few lights on the hills above. It was the time for radishes and mulberries in the garden and violets on the slopes. The wind carried with it the comforting fragrance of eucalyptus. It was in fact all about the fragrances, like you know, in a Sherlock Holmes story. Even if you walked with your eyes closed, you could tell at a whiff, when you had arrived at the place, deduce it just by its scent. So, the oranges denoted the start of the fruit-bazaar near Prakash ji’s book shop, and the smell of freshly baked plum cake meant you had arrived opposite Air Force school and the burnt lingering aroma of coffee connoted Mayfair. But when they carved a new state out of the land and Dehra was made its capital, we watched besotted as that little town sprouted new buildings, high-rise apartments, restaurant chains, shopping malls and traffic jams, and eventually it spilled over here. I can’t help noticing now that the fragrances have changed; the Mogra is tinged with a hint of smoke and will be on the market tomorrow. The Church has remained and so has everything old that was cast in brick and stone, but they seem so much more alien that I almost wish they had been ruined.’ ('Left from Dhakeshwari')

The King Cake is a large doughnut-shaped coffee cake, sprinkled with purple, green, and gold sugar with a plastic doll hidden inside. At these parties, the cake is sliced, everyone gets a piece and whoever gets the hidden doll in their piece, must give the next party. Parties are expected to happen weekly for the entire Mardi Gras season. This is only about six weeks.

Patrick thought about the meals around Geraldine and Stephen's kitchen table. The roast chickens fragrant with tarragon and lemon, the rich casseroles, Stephen's tangy, oozing blue-cheese burgers. The mismatched crockery, the casual, relaxed conversation. Something Hannah had baked- raspberry roulade, apple strudel, sour-cream coffee cake- usually rounding off the meal.

Back to that very first bite of hidden cupcake in the pantry: a soft cap of vanilla buttercream giving way to light, creamy mocha cake. I kept eating, turning the cupcake slowly in my hand. This was not rich, one-bite-and-you-couldn't-possibly-have-more chocolate. This was refined, complex chocolate cut with a hint of coffee and what else... Currant? Salt? A grown-up, masterful cupcake. It was perfect.

I pushed my fork through the top layer of creamy frosting, then all three layers of the cake. Keeping my eyes down, I put the fork to my mouth. He'd used good chocolate, I knew, and after a moment, I picked up a note of coffee, which only intensified the flavor of the chocolate. The frosting was decadent and smooth, but not cloying. In fact, the entire bite struck the precise balance of sass and sweet.

I sometimes wake up to this feeling of overwelming beauty you know? Life amazes me. I often feel stupidly happy about all the little things that bless my daily life. I think about how lucky I am, how lucky we are to be given this whole entire existence. Where there is coffee and warms beds, hugs, laughter, forests and chocolate cake. Everytime I feel bad about something I just think about this and a smile comes to my face. We are truly blessed.

It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one—a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive—as follows: Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie liens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry. Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

Sit down," she said. She pushed the plate across the table towards him. The smell of the lemon was very alluring. Fred sat down, stirred his coffee, and looked at the cake with a kind of distant admiration. "Can't quite manage the cake yet," he said. "Too terrified to eat." "Terrified?" said Jess. "Of what?" "Well, of you, of course. As you know cowardice is the bedrock of my character. It's taken me hours to summon up the courage to come here. I even had to have a vitamin C tablet.

and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy,

I looked up to see the sun struggling behind a gray mass of snow clouds. I could relate. And then a beam of sunlight found a way through. A sign? Maybe. But what was this? I gasped. The bakery esters had refracted into visible bands of flavor. Red raspberry, orange, and the yellow of lemon and butter. Pistachio, lime, and mint green. The deepest indigo of a fresh blueberry The violet that blooms when crushed blackberries blend into buttercream. The Roy G. Biv that a baker loves. And then the darkness: chocolate, spice, coffee, and burnt-sugar caramel.

They talked for another hour. Bryson got coffee and pound cake for everyone, and they swapped stories, showed her things on Bryson’s old NetPad—even pulled out the ancient NetTab for a while to share some of the odd stories they’d researched about possible Tangent sightings around the world. Michael told Gabby about his old life, about his family, about Helga, about everything. Sarah brought her up to speed on Kaine and what he’d done to them. Bryson told her how they needed to get into the VNS and confront Agent Weber. They talked and talked and talked, and Gabby listened. Finally, as if they’d exhausted the English language, silence fell upon the table.

Driven by heartache, she beat the eggs even more vigorously until the glossy meringue quickly formed into stiff, bird's beak peaks. "Philippe, do you have any orange liqueur?" Marie asked, rummaging through her brother's pantry. "Here it is," Philippe said, handing a corked bottle to her. "What are you making?" "A bûche de Noël," Danielle said, concentrating on her task. Carefully measuring each rationed ingredient, she combined sugar and flour in another bowl, grated orange zest, added the liqueur, and folded the meringue into the mixture. "It's not Christmas without a traditional Yuletide log." Marie ran a finger down a page of an old recipe book, reading directions for the sponge cake, or biscuit. "'Spread into a shallow pan and bake for ten minutes.'" "I wouldn't know about that," Philippe said. "I don't celebrate your husband's holiday," he said pointedly to Marie. "Let's not dredge up that old argument, mon frère," Marie said, softening her words with a smile. "I converted for love." A knock sounded at the front door. Danielle threw a look of concern toward Philippe, who hurried to answer it. "Then we'll cool it," Danielle said, trying to stay calm. "And brush the surface with coffee liqueur and butter cream frosting, roll it like a log, and decorate." She thought about the meringue mushrooms she had made with Nicky last year, and how he had helped score the frosting to mimic wood grains.

Strong, good smells clash with each other, garlic against cinnamon, savory against sweet. Two dressings, Ma's traditional corn bread version as well as the stuffing she made last year for a change of pace, a buttery version with cherries and sausage and hazelnuts. The herb-brined turkey, probably larger than we need, and a challenge to manhandle into and out of the refrigerator. A deep dish of creamy, smooth mashed potatoes, riced and dried to make them thirsty, then plumped back up with warmed cream and butter. For dessert, a mocha cake I came up with one day. In the batter is barely sweetened chocolate and dark, strong coffee. The layers are sealed together with more chocolate, warmed up with a hint of ancho powder.

When I lived in New York and went to Chinatown, I learned that these flavors and their meanings were actually a foundation of ancient Chinese medicine. Salty translated to fear and the frantic energy that tries to compensate for or hide it. Sweet was the first flavor we recognized from our mother's milk, and to which we turned when we were worried and unsure or depressed. Sour usually meant anger and frustration. Bitter signified matters of the heart, from simply feeling unloved to the almost overwhelming loss of a great love. Most spices, along with coffee and chocolate, had some bitterness in their flavor profile. Even sugar, when it cooked too long, turned bitter. But to me, spice was for grief, because it lingered longest.

That sandwich man I’d replaced had little chance of getting his job back. I went bellowing up and down those train aisles. I sold sandwiches, coffee, candy, cake, and ice cream as fast as the railroad’s commissary department could supply them. It didn’t take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they’d buy anything you offered them. It was like popping your shoeshine rag. The dining car waiters and Pullman porters knew it too, and they faked their Uncle Tomming to get bigger tips. We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.

You see I'm wearing the tie," said Bingo. "It suits you beautiful," said the girl. Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex; but poor old Bingo simply got all flustered with gratification, and smirked in the most gruesome manner. "Well, what's it going to be today?" asked the girl, introducing the business touch into the conversation. Bingo studied the menu devoutly. "I'll have a cup of cocoa, cold veal and ham pie, slice of fruit cake, and a macaroon. Same for you, Bertie?" I gazed at the man, revolted. That he could have been a pal of mine all these years and think me capable of insulting the old tum with this sort of stuff cut me to the quick. "Or how about a bit of hot steak-pudding, with a sparkling limado to wash it down?" said Bingo. You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head-waiter at Claridge's exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet au champignons, and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn't just right. Ghastly! Ghastly! A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them, and Mabel hopped it.

I’m picking you up for lunch because I want to go over with you what will happen on the tour.” Do I get a choice? “Shouldn’t that be your assistant’s job to talk to me about that stuff?” I question. “Well if I wanted my assistant to have lunch with you then yeah it would be, but I don’t, so you’re getting me – okay?” “What if I already have plans?” “Do you?” “Yes?” Silence. “With?” Do I detect a hint of jealously there, Jake? “Starbucks. I meet him every day at one for a coffee and blueberry muffin.” I hear him exhale down the line. “Would you consider ditching him for me?” His voice has gone all seductive and flirty again. “I don’t know … it’s a pretty serious thing me and Starbucks have going on.” “I’ll make it worth your while.” “Go on?” “I’m talking cake, Tru, lots and lots of cake…” “Starbucks who?” I giggle

Mr. Clutter enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it—no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at charity cake sales—but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts. That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City’s First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire.

The sauce. Memories flooded into her brain. It was zabaione. She had a sudden vision of herself, that first night in Tomasso's apartment, licking sauce from her fingers. Coffee. The next taste was coffee. Memories of Gennaro's espresso, and mornings in bed with a cup of cappuccino... but what was this? Bread soaked in sweet wine. And nuts--- a thin layer of hazelnut paste---and then fresh white peaches, sweet as sex itself, and then a layer of black chocolate so strong and bitter she almost stopped dead. There was more sweetness beyond it, though, a layer of pastry flavored with blackberries, and, right at the center, a single tiny fig. She put down the spoon, amazed. It was all gone. She had eaten it without being aware of eating, her mind in a reverie. "Did you like it?" She looked up. Somehow she wasn't surprised. "What was it?" she asked. "It doesn't have a name," Bruno said. "It's just... it's just the food of love.

he herself will serve them coffee in tiny, cracked cups of precious porcelain and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other, gaping at the beautiful Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean, brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck. Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the Countess' cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bone that have lodged there.

When Sam and I were living in Australia, one winter weekend we rented a cottage in the countryside. We toured local wineries by day and at sunset we wrapped ourselves up in blankets on the porch overlooking the valley below, tucking into our bounty of wine and local cheese. I can’t remember who initiated it (OK, fine, probably me), but we decided that during this magic hour while day turned to night we could ask each other anything. This moment in our relationship changed everything. I got to ask all my questions and so did Sam. We also had to answer them. I think for both of us it’s the night we tipped over from infatuation to falling in love. Even now, the phrase ‘wine and cheese hour’ is shorthand for this safe space, when we need to sit down and reconnect. This is so bougie and painful to admit, especially because I don’t even like wine and this is now far more likely to be ‘coffee and Jaffa cake hour’. (Vodka and Pringles works, too.)

I think it would be true to say that every boy in the school hated and feared her. Yet we all fawned on her in the most abject way, and the top layer of our feelings towards her was a sort of guilt-stricken loyalty. Bingo, although the discipline of the school depended more on her than on Sim, hardly pretended to dispense justice. She was frankly capricious. An act which might get you a caning one day, might next day be laughed off as a boyish prank, or even commended because it “showed you had guts.” There were days when everyone cowered before those deepset, accusing eyes, and there were days when she was like a flirtatious queen surrounded by courtier-lovers, laughing and joking, scattering largesse, or the promise of largesse (“And if you win the Harrow History Prize I’ll give you a new case for your camera!”), and occasionally even packing three or four favoured boys into her Ford car and carrying them off to a teashop in town, where they were allowed to buy coffee and cakes. Bingo was inextricably mixed up in my mind with Queen Elizabeth, whose relations with Leicester and Essex and Raleigh were intelligible to me from a very early age. A word we all constantly used in speaking of Bingo was “favour.

Immigrants' resistance to formal and informal pressures to Americanize their food habits varied. Only the most frugal could resist taking advantage of the greater availability of high-status foods which had rarely graced their tables in Europe. They commonly ate more meat in America, particularly beef but also poultry, lamb, and pork. They also indulged more in sweets, particularly sweet cakes and rolls, something many regarded as a peculiarly American habit. Coffee drinking, which perplexed reformers, was in most cases an American-acquired habit. In much of central, eastern, and southern Europe coffee was a high status drink which the poor, especially the peasants, could hardly afford. Slavic immigrants seem to have manifested a particular weakness for coffee. In their homes it was customary to have a pot of coffee on the stove all day long, with members of the family helping themselves at will. Asked if she had changed her diet upon coming to America, a Polish woman replied, 'Naturally, at home everyone had soup for breakfast, and here everyone has coffee and bread.' A Czech immigrant who arrived in 1914 perhaps exemplified the most common attitude toward the presence of all of these old-country luxuries on the table when he recalled that his family thought that in America 'we ate like kings, compared to what we had over there. Oh, it was really heaven.

The Grocers'! oh the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of like mistakes, in the best humor possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eighteen pounds in the early nineteenth century. However, growing cane and extracting its sugar was a labour-intensive business. Few people wanted to work long hours in malaria-infested sugar fields under a tropical sun. Contract labourers would have produced a commodity too expensive for mass consumption. Sensitive to market forces, and greedy for profits and economic growth, European plantation owners switched to slaves. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations. Labour conditions were abominable. Most slaves lived a short and miserable life, and millions more died during wars waged to capture slaves or during the long voyage from inner Africa to the shores of America. All this so that Europeans could enjoy their sweet tea and candy – and sugar barons could enjoy huge profits. The slave trade was not

The sparkles that came from the firecracker are coffee crumbles!" Originating in Ireland, Crumbles are a baked dessert generally consisting of fruits topped with a crumbly crust. The crumbly mix can be made with rolled oats, crushed almonds and even crushed coffee beans! "How refreshingly tart! I can taste a faint hint of grated tangerine zest. Its fruity flavor pairs exceedingly well with the mildly sweet, clean flavor of the cake. And the hidden piece of the puzzle that ties them both together... ... is this cream that's coating the outer layer of bark!" "Man, you catch on fast! That's right. That's another variation on the cream I used as a filling for the center of the cake. I used that dark cream and thinned it into a brown cream that would melt at room temperature." "Oho! How clever. The crumbles, while sweet and delicious, tend to have a very dry and, well... crumbly texture. Not so with this cake." The brown cream brought just the right amount of moisture to the crumbles... enough to prevent them from being dry but not so much that they lose their crispy crunch. Plus, it firmly ties the flavors of the crumbles and the cake itself into one harmonious whole! Now I see. "That must be the other reason why you chose not to use any dairy or added sugars in the cake! Either would have overwhelmed the coffee crumbles! But you wanted to emphasize their delicate flavors... the light flash and sparkle of their tartness and bitterness!" "Refreshing at first, with a full body... capped off with a flash of invigorating bitterness!" "This is a gem of a dish that will captivate everyone, young and old!

Saturday is birthday cake day. During the week, the panadería is all strong coffee and pan dulce. But on weekends, it's sprinkle cookies and pink cake. By ten or eleven this morning, we'll get the first rush of mothers picking up yellow boxes in between buying balloons and paper streamers. In the back kitchen, my father hums along with the radio as he shapes the pastry rounds of ojos de buey, the centers giving off the smell of orange and coconut. It may be so early the birds haven't even started up yet, but with enough of my mother's coffee and Mariachi Los Camperos, my father is as awake as if it were afternoon. While he fills the bakery cases, my mother does the delicate work of hollowing out the piñata cakes, and when her back is turned, I rake my fingers through the sprinkle canisters. During open hours, most of my work is filling bakery boxes and ringing up customers (when it's busy) or washing dishes and windexing the glass cases (when it's not). But on birthday cake days, we're busy enough that I get to slide sheet cakes from the oven and cover them in pink frosting and tiny round nonpareils, like they're giant circus-animal cookies. I get to press hundreds-and-thousands into the galletas de grajea, the round, rainbow-sprinkle-covered cookies that were my favorite when I was five. My mother finishes hollowing two cake halves, fills them with candy- green, yellow, and pink this time- and puts them back together. Her piñatas are half our Saturday cake orders, both birthday girls and grandfathers delighting at the moment of seeing M&M's or gummy worms spill out. She covers them with sugar-paste ruffles or coconut to look like the tiny paper flags on a piñata, or frosting and a million rainbow sprinkles.

The menu is spectacular. Passed hors d'oeuvres include caramelized shallot tartlets topped with Gorgonzola, cubes of crispy pork belly skewered with fresh fig, espresso cups of chilled corn soup topped with spicy popcorn, mini arepas filled with rare skirt steak and chimichurri and pickle onions, and prawn dumplings with a mango serrano salsa. There is a raw bar set up with three kinds of oysters, and a raclette station where we have a whole wheel of the nutty cheese being melted to order, with baby potatoes, chunks of garlic sausage, spears of fresh fennel, lightly pickled Brussels sprouts, and hunks of sourdough bread to pour it over. When we head up for dinner, we will start with a classic Dover sole amandine with a featherlight spinach flan, followed by a choice of seared veal chops or duck breast, both served with creamy polenta, roasted mushrooms, and lacinato kale. Next is a light salad of butter lettuce with a sharp lemon Dijon vinaigrette, then a cheese course with each table receiving a platter of five cheeses with dried fruits and nuts and three kinds of bread, followed by the panna cottas. Then the cake, and coffee and sweets. And at midnight, chorizo tamales served with scrambled eggs, waffle sticks with chicken fingers and spicy maple butter, candied bacon strips, sausage biscuit sandwiches, and vanilla Greek yogurt parfaits with granola and berries on the "breakfast" buffet, plus cheeseburger sliders, mini Chicago hot dogs, little Chinese take-out containers of pork fried rice and spicy sesame noodles, a macaroni-and-cheese bar, and little stuffed pizzas on the "snack food" buffet. There will also be tiny four-ounce milk bottles filled with either vanilla malted milk shakes, root beer floats made with hard root beer, Bloody Marys, or mimosas.

Chris- the one who wrote the halfway creepy thing about missing me so much when I didn't post and thinking I was dead- found it mind-boggling that before the Julie/Julia Project began, I had never eaten an egg. She asked, "How can you have gotten through life without eating a single egg? How is that POSSIBLE???!!!!!" Of course, it wasn't exactly true that I hadn't eaten an egg. I had eaten them in cakes. I had even eaten them scrambled once or twice, albeit in the Texas fashion, with jalapeños and a pound of cheese. But the goal of my egg-eating had always been to make sure the egg did not look, smell, or taste anything like one, and as a result my history in this department was, I suppose, unusual. Chris wasn't the only person shocked. People I'd never heard of chimed in with their awe and dismay. I didn't really get it. Surely this is not such a bizarre hang-up as hating, say, croutons, like certain spouses I could name. Luckily, eggs made the Julia Child way often taste like cream sauce. Take Oeufs en Cocotte, for example. These are eggs baked with some butter and cream in ramekins set in a shallow pan of water. They are tremendous. In fact the only thing better than Oeufs en Cocotte is Ouefs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari on top when you've woken up with a killer hangover, after one of those nights when somebody decided at midnight to buy a pack of cigarettes after all, and the girls wind up smoking and drinking and dancing around the living room to the music the boy is downloading from iTunes onto his new, ludicrously hip and stylish G3 Powerbook until three in the morning. On mornings like this, Oeufs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari, a cup of coffee, and an enormous glass of water is like a meal fed to you by the veiled daughters of a wandering Bedouin tribe after one of their number comes upon you splayed out in the sands of the endless deserts of Araby, moments from death- it's that good.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

What’ll it be?” Steve asked me, just days after our wedding. “Do we go on the honeymoon we’ve got planned, or do you want to go catch crocs?” My head was still spinning from the ceremony, the celebration, and the fact that I could now use the two words “my husband” and have them mean something real. The four months between February 2, 1992--the day Steve asked me to marry him--and our wedding day on June 4 had been a blur. Steve’s mother threw us an engagement party for Queensland friends and family, and I encountered a very common theme: “We never thought Steve would get married.” Everyone said it--relatives, old friends, and schoolmates. I’d smile and nod, but my inner response was, Well, we’ve got that in common. And something else: Wait until I get home and tell everybody I am moving to Australia. I knew what I’d have to explain. Being with Steve, running the zoo, and helping the crocs was exactly the right thing to do. I knew with all my heart and soul that this was the path I was meant to travel. My American friends--the best, closest ones--understood this perfectly. I trusted Steve with my life and loved him desperately. One of the first challenges was how to bring as many Australian friends and family as possible over to the United States for the wedding. None of us had a lot of money. Eleven people wound up making the trip from Australia, and we held the ceremony in the big Methodist church my grandmother attended. It was more than a wedding, it was saying good-bye to everyone I’d ever known. I invited everybody, even people who may not have been intimate friends. I even invited my dentist. The whole network of wildlife rehabilitators came too--four hundred people in all. The ceremony began at eight p.m., with coffee and cake afterward. I wore the same dress that my older sister Bonnie had worn at her wedding twenty-seven years earlier, and my sister Tricia wore at her wedding six years after that. The wedding cake had white frosting, but it was decorated with real flowers instead of icing ones. Steve had picked out a simple ring for me, a quarter carat, exactly what I wanted. He didn’t have a wedding ring. We were just going to borrow one for the service, but we couldn’t find anybody with fingers that were big enough. It turned out that my dad’s wedding ring fitted him, and that’s the one we used. Steve’s mother, Lyn, gave me a silk horseshoe to put around my wrist, a symbol of good luck. On our wedding day, June 4, 1992, it had been eight months since Steve and I first met. As the minister started reading the vows, I could see that Steve was nervous. His tuxedo looked like it was strangling him. For a man who was used to working in the tropics, he sure looked hot. The church was air-conditioned, but sweat drops formed on the ends of his fingers. Poor Steve, I thought. He’d never been up in front of such a big crowd before. “The scariest situation I’ve ever been in,” Steve would say later of the ceremony. This from a man who wrangled crocodiles! When the minister invited the groom to kiss the bride, I could feel all Steve’s energy, passion, and love. I realized without a doubt we were doing the right thing.

So, what did you want to watch?’ ‘Thought we might play a game instead,’ he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. ‘Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won’t froth like that.’ Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she’d got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. ‘The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I’ll totally kick your arse.’ Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. ‘You’re gonna kick my arse?’ ‘Until it’s black and blue and you won’t be able to sit down for a week.’ That sounded very arrogant. ‘Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.’ ‘Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it’s logic and tactics,’ Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake. For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get Max back for that snide little speech, but he just licked the back of the spoon thoughtfully. ‘This is surprisingly more-ish, do you want some?’ ‘I think I’ll pass.’ ‘Well, you’re not getting out of Scrabble that easily.’ Max leaned back against the cushions, the mug cradled to his chest, and propped his feet up on the table so he could poke the Scrabble box nearer to Neve. ‘Come on, set ’em up. Unless you’re too scared.’ ‘Max, I have all the two-letter words memorised, and as for Carol Vorderman – well, she might be good at maths but there was a reason why she wasn’t in Dictionary Corner on Countdown so I’m not surprised you beat her at Scrabble.’ ‘Fighting talk.’ Max rapped his knuckles gently against Neve’s head, which made her furious. ‘I’ll remind you of that little speech once I’m done making you eat every single one of those high-scoring words you seem to think you’re so good at.’ ‘Right, that does it.’ Neve snatched up the box and practically tore off the lid, so she could bang the board down on the coffee table. ‘You can’t be that good at Scrabble if you keep your letters in a crumpled paper bag,’ Max noted, actually daring to nudge her arm with his foot. Neve knew he was only doing it to get a rise out of her, but God, it was working. ‘Game on, Pancake Boy,’ she snarled, throwing a letter rack at Max, which just made him laugh. ‘And don’t think I’m going to let you win just because it’s your birthday.’ It was the most fun Neve had ever had playing Scrabble. It might even have been the most fun she had ever had. For every obscure word she tried to play in the highest scoring place, Max would put down three tiles to make three different words and block off huge sections of the board. Every time she tried to flounce or throw a strop because ‘you’re going against the whole spirit of the game’, Max would pop another Quality Street into her mouth because, as he said, ‘It is Treat Sunday and you only had one roast potato.’ When there were no more Quality Street left and they’d drunk all the champagne, he stopped each one of her snits with a slow, devastating kiss so there were long pauses between each round. It was a point of honour to Neve that she won in the most satisfying way possible; finally getting to use her ‘q’ on a triple word score by turning Max’s ‘hogs’ into ‘quahogs’ and waving the Oxford English Dictionary in his face when he dared to challenge her.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

HOMEMADE SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK cup boiling water 4 tablespoons butter ¾cup sugar ½teaspoon pure vanilla extract 1 cup powdered milk (I used Carnation Nonfat Pow- dered Milk, but I’ve also used my local grocery store brand.) In a blender, or using an electric mixer set on LOW, blend together the boiling water and butter. Add the sugar and let it run for a few seconds. Add the pure vanilla extract and let it run for several additional seconds. Shut off the blender or mixer, pour in the powdered milk, and then blend or mix on LOW until the resulting mixture is thick. Use immediately, or store in a covered container in the refrigerator. This homemade version of sweetened condensed milk will last for up to one week in the refrigerator. Yield: This recipe makes the equivalent of one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk that can be used in pies, cakes, cookie bars and flans. Hannah’s Note: My Grandma Ingrid made this up every Sunday morning and put it in the refrigerator to use in coffee for the whole week. SUBSTITUTE FOR SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK (for anyone who needs to avoid milk or dairy) 2 large eggs 1 cup brown sugar (pack it down when you measure it) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 Tablespoons flour ½ teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt Hannah’s 1st Note: This is easy to make if you use an electric mixer. You can also make it in a blender. You must make it fresh for each recipe you bake. Beat the eggs until they’re of a uniform color and thoroughly blended. Add the brown sugar and mix it in. Add the vanilla extract. Mix it in. Add the flour and beat for one minute, making sure it’s thoroughly incorporated into the mixture. Add the baking powder and the salt. Beat for another minute. Set the resulting mixture aside on the counter until you need it in your recipe. Then add it when your recipe calls for sweetened condensed milk. Hannah’s 2nd Note: This substitute can be used in any BAKED dessert recipe, including pies, cakes, and cookie bars. DO NOT use it in frostings or candy. Yield: One recipe makes enough to substitute for one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk. (That’s the store-bought size.)

When Kate arrived, Alice offered her breakfast: strong coffee, coffee cake made from a sweet yeast dough, and bacon baked on a cookie sheet in the oven. When they finished eating, Alice handed Kate a black-and-white-speckled notebook filled with details about her childhood in North Carolina. With growing interest Kate read about the gentle slope of land upon which Alice's family built their farm and how in the mornings the dew looked like steam rising from the grass. She read about the pigs Alice's family raised, how they were finished on acorns, making their meat unbelievably silky. Kate read about Alice's mother's cooking, how she could turn the humblest ingredients into something magical: creamy chess pies, tender squirrel stew, butter nut cookies at Christmas time that were both salty and sweet.

But many things we do have meanings beyond their simple physical effects. The basic purpose of food and drink is to keep the body alive, yet we eat and drink for many other reasons—having a slice of cake at a party, a cup of coffee with a friend. While marriage is the right setting for sex, the sexual union of two people means much more than making babies.

She entered her home and stood in the kitchen, stopped cold by an aroma that was so thick and familiar it overwhelmed her: a mix of cigarette smoke and coffee, bacon grease, fruity pies and cakes, thick beef and venison stews that Nineva simmered on the stove for days, steam from the canning of stewed tomatoes and a dozen vegetables, wet leather from Pete’s boots in a corner, the sweet soapy smell of Nineva herself. Liza was staggered by the dense fragrances and leaned on a counter. In the darkness, she could hear the voices of her children as they giggled over breakfast and got themselves shooed away from the stove by Nineva. She could see Pete sitting there at the kitchen table with his coffee and cigarettes reading the Tupelo daily. A cloud moved somewhere and a ray of moonlight entered through a window. She focused and her kitchen came into view. She breathed as slowly as possible, sucking in the sweet smells of her former life.

At last that great supper was over, everything had been eaten; the enormous roast goose had dwindled to a very skeleton. Mr. Sieppe had reduced the calf’s head to a mere skull; a row of empty champagne bottles—“dead soldiers,” as the facetious waiter had called them—lined the mantelpiece. Nothing of the stewed prunes remained but the juice, which was given to Owgooste and the twins. The platters were as clean as if they had been washed; crumbs of bread, potato parings, nutshells, and bits of cake littered the table; coffee and ice-cream stains and spots of congealed gravy marked the position of each plate. It was a devastation, a pillage; the table presented the appearance of an abandoned battlefield

The first Monday's cupcakes had been elderflower, two days later and three tiers in honey and walnut, the day after that and toffee apple, the next cake- coffee and walnut, then banoffee, then chocolate and maple.

She moves deftly and quietly through misogyny. In recent years her voice has become more pervasive, more intriguing. She has been too easily labelled and stuffed back down, she is careful not to wear a sticker defending herself. She rose lately as ‘feminist’, but that was torn away from her, made distasteful, attacked and vilified. So now she is creeping in simply as female, as feminine, as a billion different women pursuing a million different injustices. She is at every corner; she is calling us out. She isn’t yelling. She is writing, singing, tweeting and sharing. She is meeting with other females, over cake, in meditation, with coffee and babies, with tea and trumpets. She is coaxing the males into their better power, requesting that they see, do and be better. She is recreating the earth in personal, unique and subtle ways. So small these steps she takes that one day we will turn around and say, ‘We women did that... We snuck our lives onto the agenda without it being noticed. We tore down the patriarchy one sentence at a time, one text, one status update, one outfit, one hairy armpit, one truth, one smile, one grimace, one Instagram post at a time.’ She does not go head to head with The Emperor. That failed. She cannot win at his game.

Gator returned to the living room with a coffee cake on a large plate. He’d cut it into pieces so there was enough for everyone. Armand

It was right about then that a drink dropped down in front of me on the table, Brant sliding into the open chair to my side. "You know I can't have..." I started, big-eying him so I didn't have to say it. "Raspberry mocha shake with skim milk but full fat whipped cream," he explained, popping the little piece of paper topper off the straw. "Not a damn bit of actual coffee in it," he said, looking disgusted at the very prospect. "Oh, and here," he said, pulling my phone out of his pocket. "You know, you can't pull the 'pregnancy' card every time your phone has an issue and you don't want to go to Verizon." "True," I agreed, taking a long sip of the shake he made and closing my eyes on a sigh. "But I can for the next eight or so months," I concluded, giving him a saucy smile. He chuckled at that, reaching for the piece of paper I had in front of me with the design for the macaron wedding cake. "Macarons, huh?" he asked, looking excited. It didn't matter how many different recipes I came up with, he never seemed to get sick of them. "It's not too soon," he informed me, reading my thoughts as I looked down at the perfect princess cut ring. "It hasn't even been a year," I had insisted, shaking my head. "Sweetheart, I knew this was where we were heading that first time you moaned like a porn star over your break-up frappe." I looked around my mother's and mine and Brant's little shop, feeling it down to my soul: peace. Then I looked over at Brant, feeling it down to my bones: love. And finally, to the plate at the center of the table where Brant and I reached toward simultaneously and grabbed one each: macarons. It was all I would ever need.

You just happen to be our ten thousandth customer," I lied, "and this is our special thank-you." I slid the bakery box across the counter to him. "Hmmmmm. Usually, I prefer to be number one, but I guess I can make an exception this time." He grinned. "What's in here?" He snapped the red-and-white -striped string on the white bakery box and opened the lid. A little greedy, too, I thought. Wanted to enjoy life now. He downed the cupcake in two bites- all moist devil's food with a dark truffle center, spread with a white-chocolate-and-coffee frosting I made with confectioner's sugar, the easy kind of buttercream. He grabbed a napkin to wipe the crumbs from his lips. "That was some cupcake, Cupcake." And I knew I had gotten him right. Strong, dark, and handsome chocolate truffle- that masculine "shoulder to lean on" fix that women loved. Risk-taking devil's food. Gregarious white chocolate, because it's boring alone, but good with almost any other ingredient. And take-charge coffee.

The waited stopped by and Nathan order a cup of coffee. "No cake?" I asked, surprised. He patted his flat stomach. "Trying to watch my figure." I laughed. "Whatever, Captain Skittles.

I was beginning to taste it. Something bitter, but warm. A flavor that woke me up and let me see things clearly. A flavor that made me feel safe, so I could let those things go. A flavor that held my hand and walked me across to the other side of loss, and assured me that one day, I would be just fine. A flavor for a change of heart- part grief, part hope. Suddenly, I knew what that flavor would be. I padded down to the kitchen and cut a slice of sour cream coffee cake with a spicy underground river coursing through its center, left over from an order that had not been picked up today. One bite and I was sure. A familiar flavor that now seemed utterly fresh and custom-made for me. Cinnamon. The comfort of sweet cinnamon. It always worked. I felt better. Lighter. Not quite "everything is going to be all right," but getting there. One step at a time.

Is the princess still in the fitting room?" "Oh no, darling. She appeared about half an hour ago. Poured herself a black coffee, and looked longingly at the cakes. That child is starving herself if you ask me. Now she's definitely too thin. European men do like a woman to have a little meat on her bones." "And Prince Nicolas, have you seen him recently?" "I haven't seen him since lunch. I gather he and Antone went out to shoot. And I expect Max went with them. They're only happy when they're shooting something. Apart from sex of course." "Mother!" I gave her a warning frown. My mother glanced around at the other women, who were tucking into their tort with abandon. "They won't understand. Their English is hopeless, darling. Besides, it is about time you are acquainted with the facts of life. I've hopelessly neglected my duty in that area. Men only have two thoughts in their heads. And those are killing or copulating." "I'm sure there are plenty of men with finer feelings who are interested in art and culture." "Yes, darling. Of course there are. They are called ferries. And they are quite adorable. So witty and fun to be with. But in my long and varied life I've found that the ones who are witty to be with are no use in bed. And vice versa.

Three square tiers of hazelnut cake filled with caramel mousse and sliced poached pears, sealed with vanilla buttercream scented with pear eau-de-vie. It's covered in a smooth expanse of ivory fondant decorated with what appear to be natural branches of pale green dogwood but are actually gum paste and chocolate, and with almost-haphazard sheer spheres of silvery blown sugar, as if a child came by with a bottle of bubbles and they landed on the cake. On the top, in lieu of the traditional bride and groom, is a bottle of Dexter's favorite Riesling in a bow tie and a small three-tier traditional wedding cake sporting a veil, both made out of marzipan. It took me the better part of the last three weeks to make this cake. Not to mention the loaves of banana bread, the cellophane bags of pine nut shortbread cookies, and the little silver boxes of champagne truffles in the gift bags. And the vanilla buttermilk panna cottas we're serving with balsamic-macerated berries as the pre-dessert before the cake. And the hand-wrapped caramels and shards of toffee and dark-chocolate-covered candied ginger slices that will be served with the coffee.

Yeah, this place needs a better-quality blueberry muffin." I raised a pointed finger. "And I could provide it." "You sound pretty sure of yourself," Jim said, placing a pat of butter on his baked potato. "And there are always blueberry pies," I said, pausing to think of other possibilities. "Turnovers, cakes, croissants..." I popped the fry into my mouth. "I don't think anybody's done blueberry croissants." "No," Jim said slowly. "I don't think they have." "Of course, I'd sell some other things, too. Can't all be blueberries," I mused as I began to envision the bakery- a tray of lemon pound cake, peach cobbler in a fluted casserole, a basket of pomegranate-and-ginger muffins. I could see myself pulling a baking sheet of cookies from the oven, the smell of melted chocolate in the air. There would be white wooden tables and chairs in the front room, and people could order coffee and sandwiches. Maybe even tea sandwiches, like the ones Gran used to make. Cucumber and arugula. Bacon and egg. Curried chicken.

At the other end of the spectrum we have fat Mr. Bakker. His record: one entire Limburg apple crumb cake and half of a second cake, washed down with a single cup of coffee. He didn’t offer anyone a bite. When he was done he took the leftover cake back up to his room. Everyone hates him.

She hadn't bothered to go to bed, since Tuesday was one of the days on which she rose before dawn to bake brioche, scones, cinnamon rolls, and- Tuesdays only- a coffee cake rich with cardamom, orange zest, and grated gingerroot: a cunningly savory sweet that left her work kitchen smelling like a fine Indian restaurant, a brief invigorating change from the happily married scents of butter, vanilla, and sugar (the fragrance, to Greenie, of ordinary life).

I pulled off the highway and found a motel. The room stunk of cigarettes and the shower was caked in mildew. I pulled the brown and maroon paisley comforter off, threw it on the floor, and doused my hands in sanitizer. I slept on top of towels I laid across the sheets. In the morning I grabbed a stale doughnut and weak coffee from the free continental breakfast in the lobby and headed out to my truck, where I discovered my bike had been stolen from the back. In my sleep-deprived state the night before, I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of my bike being stolen. I slumped into the driver’s seat and finished my disgusting doughnut. Still in the motel parking lot, I shaved with an electric shaver using the side mirror of the truck. After one half of my face was shaved, the batteries died. There are just certain times in life when every fucking thing we do seems so arbitrary. Why in the world did I shave my face to begin with? I drove to a drugstore and got more batteries and a lot of weird looks from shoppers. At checkout, the gum-popping, teenage female clerk smirked at me. I decided to let humor prevail. “Do you like this look?” I smiled and pointed to my face. “That’s dope.” “Thanks, dawg.” “Peace out,” she said, and I walked out. I didn’t turn around but I held up a peace sign and said, “Word.

pineapple coffee cake

Dewey was wrong when he said that being noble enough is all we can ask for in this world, because we can ask for much more than that. We can ask for a second helping of pound cake even though someone has made it quite clear that we will not get any. We can ask for a new watercolor set, even though it will be pointed out that we never used the old one, and that all of the paints dried into a crumbly mess. We can ask for Japanese fighting fish, to keep us company in our bedroom, and we can ask for a special camera that will allow us to take photographs even in the dark, for obvious reasons, and we can ask for an extra sugar cube in our coffees in the morning and an extra pillow in our beds at night. We can ask for justice, and we can ask for a handkerchief and we can ask for cupcakes, and we can ask for all the soldiers in the world to lay down their weapons and join us in a rousing chorus of ‘Cry Me a River,’ if that happens to be our favorite song. But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or two, somewhere in our travels, who will tell us that we are noble enough, whether it is true or not. We can ask for someone who will say, ‘You are noble enough,’ and remind us of our good qualities when we have forgotten them, or cast them into doubt.

Tonight's lesson was a breadcrumb cake, and the idea that so many Italian desserts were less about being impressive---as so many French recipes were---than about being resourceful. "After all," I said, "tiramisu is just cookies dipped in coffee and liqueur, layered with custard." For the breadcrumb cake, I walked them through how to make the breadcrumbs. "There's no sense in buying breadcrumbs, not in that quantity." We sliced the crusts off of the bread together, toasted the slices lightly, and ran the bread through the food processor. Afterward, we grated the dark chocolate, peeled and sliced the pears, cracked eggs, and measured cream. The thick batter came together quickly, and we placed them into the ovens. While the cakes baked, I walked them through the pasta fritta alla Siracusa, the angel-hair pasta twirls fried in a shallow amount of oil. We boiled up the pasta, then stirred together honey and candied orange before chopping pistachios and adding some cinnamon. One by one, they dropped the knotted pasta into the oil and cooked them on both sides. After draining them, we drizzled the honey mixture over the top, followed by a sprinkle of the pistachios and cinnamon. The process of frying the pasta bundles, one by one, kept everyone busy until the breadcrumb cakes finished baking.

Reading something challenging feels like biting into a thick cake or having a rich coffee.

Come on in - I'm in the middle of baking." "How is it?" I asked as I straightened. "Did you remember to add the coffee?" He rolled his eyes but grinned. "Yes." "Did you put in enough cocoa?" "Yep." "Did you grease the pans and put flour in them, so the cakes won't stick?" His eyes went wide. " Oh my God." "Rhys!