Welcome to Part 2 of my Christmas cookie bake-a-thon! (Part 1: Butterscotch Bars)
The thing about baking is that unless you're a pasty chef, or exceptionally gifted in the kitchen, or happen to have memorized countless ratios of fat to sugar, you can't really bake without a recipe. It's different for savory dishes, like a stew or salad, whose recipes afford lots of room to add, subtract, or substitute ingredients according to your taste. That's why baking recipes are still so important to me, why 90% of the recipe hunting I do in my life is geared toward cookies, pies, and cakes. It's also why it's so important to share the good recipes when we find them. Bakers must be a society of sharers.
It's been about 5 years since I was lucky enough to dig into a slice of my pal Diana's drool-worthy apple cake, and when I tasted this today....oh, man. There was much more going on than I even remembered. Appleness, like juicy red and dangling from the tree. Pecans. Cinnamon--a proper, generous amount of it. But what really flipped me out was that I'd totally forgotten about the caramel glaze. When Diana sent her recipe a couple of weeks ago, it just said "glaze"--nothing about the caramel nature of it, nothing about the science project that it truly is (although an easy one; I have tips!). By glancing at the ingredients (sugar, butter, buttermilk, soda), you'd have to be a pretty frequent baker or candy-meister to say, "Oh yeah--that's caramel." I thought it was going to be a light, translucent, pouring glaze like my mom used to use on lemon jello cake. I was totally wrong. Eating this cake is like eating a caramel apple that somebody thoughtfully dosed with cinnamon and pecans, but it's a lot less messy and goes great with coffee. It's inspiring.
