Photo @madeleinediaries
I struggled for so long to figure out what in the world this first post would be about, and then, of course, it came as I least expected it.
I do not intend to write much about politics around here, in fact it was the last thing on my mind for this site. But this past Wednesday, as I was on my way home and decided, on a whim, to buy a cake to go with the champagne we were about to have in celebration of the presidential inauguration and the end of four painful years which made me and my family profoundly reevaluate our future in the United States, I thought “well of course, my first post just had to be about this cake, and this new year finally beginning after a difficult and scary start.”
This cake happens to be one of the three favorite cakes I can buy in New York these days. After so many businesses shut down over the past year, I have been lucky that they are still available. For birthdays the kids, and sometimes my husband, always have the fun and delightful birthday cake from Milk Bar, which is thankfully located only two blocks from us. It is a small, round, four-tiered cake with white frosting, covered in sprinkles and candy-hued crumble - it is just perfect, and indeed the epitome of a childhood birthday spirit as I could only have dreamt it. For myself, however, I will usually request the Banana Cake from Billy’s Bakery, although I have been known to go the Milk Bar way depending on my mood.
The third cake, which we only actually have had a couple of times because I only discovered it last year at a friend’s house, is more European in style and substance, the kind of pastry one would get in Paris – or Milan for that matter, I guess. It is sold by Sant Ambroeus, an upscale Italian restaurant and café that serves ridiculously small and scandalously overpriced portions at lunch but makes by far the best cappuccino in town. In pre-pandemic times one of my favorite post-kids-drop-off treat would be to walk all the way there from school, and then order a cappuccino at the counter – one the few genuine “zinc” counters in New York, where one can stand for as long as one wants, browsing the newspaper on one’s phone while eavesdropping on surrounding conversations. It has the smell and sounds of an Italian or Parisian café, this unmistakable hiss of the espresso machine that never gets replicated properly at Starbucks or any of the other ubiquitous coffee chains in the U.S., no matter how hard they try.
This cappuccino stop is one of the few things I miss the most about pre-pandemic times, as one can now only get one’s coffee to go in a paper cup and sit outside on a bench, which is absolutely not the same experience. But it is still possible to pick up a cake from the pastry glass cases and bring it home on a cold Winter night. Especially when this cake happens to feature one’s favorite pastry ingredients, hazelnut and praline. This Gianduja Cake is a pure delight of chocolate ganache, praline and crunchy biscuit, and even though it is not quite at the level of refinement you would get from an upscale pastry shop in Paris, it is definitely close enough. For me at least, it was just the perfect thing to add a touch of celebration to a special day, and bringing it home in its pretty signature Sant Ambroeus box felt like a true gift.
As it happened, I realized when I got home that my plan for that evening was to make pasta with broccoli, fontina and hazelnuts, from a recipe I photographed in a cookbook while staying at an Airbnb in Connecticut over Christmas. It was from a wonderful author I didn’t know, Anna Jones, who seems, with good reason, to be a cooking and food writing reference in the U.K. and beyond. The Modern Cook’s Year is a beautiful vegetarian book and even though I am not a vegetarian this recipe for “Christmas Orecchiette” called my attention, mostly because of its intriguing name, and also because it featured hazelnuts. Not being a vegetarian myself, this is not something I would consider eating on Christmas Eve or even Christmas Day, but I liked the idea of a simple celebration pasta and saved it as something I could make this Winter if the occasion arose. As it turned out, I had given up on the idea of making it a “special” pasta and had just decided to make it that day because I was out of ideas for our Wednesday pasta night and needed to get rid of the three packages of hazelnut I had bought over Christmas when I got a little carried away with ambitious baking plans that never quite materialized. But it all made sense when I bought the Gianduja cake, and having the evening turn into an ode to the hazelnut seemed perfectly fitting for the hazelnut-lover that I am.
Indeed, Wednesday definitely felt a bit like Christmas, if not better, as I have been known to experience a variety of conflicting feelings on that day, while turning the page on the past four years of American politics only brought unadulterated relief and joy.
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