The Lazy Delight of Burnt Butter Cupcakes

Usually, when I feel like baking, I don't have the slightest problem hopping in my car and buzzing off to the nearest grocery store. But last week, I was tired and it was cold outside and I didn't want to spend any money and, gosh darnit, I was feeling whiny and there was nothing in the world that would set me right but an easy, no-hassle, delicious cupcake.

Luckily, Nigella Lawson came to my rescue with her Burnt Butter Cupcakes from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Every ingredient in the recipe was already lurking somewhere in my fridge or pantry, so I didn't have to do anything but hike up my sweatpants and bake. I call that a pajama WIN!

The completed Burnt Butter Cupcakes

These sound pretty strange--how often, really, do recipes call for purposefully burning something? But I was intrigued because of an article I read in Vogue last summer. Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue's regular food critic, wrote an article about the wonders of brown butter and how, if done properly, it can add a rich, nutty, smokey flavor to almost any savory or sweet dish. 

So what does burnt butter taste like, exactly?

Toffee. That's it. I'll admit that I was surprised by this when I first sampled the batter, but then I had a total *duh* moment: what else is toffee but burnt butter and sugar? Of course these would taste like vanilla toffee!

The very first step of the recipe, burning the butter, was its most nerve-wracking part. Burning butter just doesn't seem like a wise thing to do. What if I burn my butter beyond repair?, I worried. What if my burnt butter tastes terrible because, well, it's burnt, even if Nigella's tastes mind-bendingly good?

But the process was actually quite simple, and it was easy to tell when the butter was properly burnt. (I couldn't take a picture of this, however, since the butter was too foamy to tell that its oil was turning brown!)

The unsalted butter melting over medium heat.

The butter bubbling and foaming mid-way through its burning.

The finished burnt butter, with the sediment strained out on a piece of cheesecloth.

As always, Lawson's recipe was very easy to follow. My only hiccup was that, even after thirty minutes of sitting out/in the fridge, my burnt butter would not solidify like it was supposed to. So I just threw it in my batter as a liquid, and it didn't seem to do any harm. In fact, it possibly improved the airiness of the cupcakes' texture!

The mixed batter.

The recipe produced very few cakes (only eleven very tall cups), and they baked very quickly, so the most time-consuming part of this recipe was prepping the butter. The cakes turned out to have a fine, tender crumb and to be light golden in color. They reminded me of cornbread, only sweeter and without that unpleasant density and dryness common to most cornbreads.

The high domes on the baked cakes.

 

If you look closely, you can see the fine crumb.

The frosting was the only thing I didn't like about this recipe. It was far too sweet for me, and a little heavy, to boot. After the light, sweet, mellow burnt buttery-ness of the cupcakes, I didn't enjoy how sweet the frosting was or how strongly it tasted of burnt butter (you burn even more butter for the frosting recipe!). It was kind of like eating caramel frosting --ack!!! *cough, hack, pitooey*--only grainier. I would have much rather topped these with a puffy whipped cream frosting or some mild cream cheese frosting.

The super-sweet, super-smoky frosting.

However, others disagreed with me. My mom liked the frosting as-is, but thought it was very rich, and Charlie downright loved the frosting. I think my dad was fond of it, too.

Aren't these purdy?

At the end of the night, happily stuffed with buttery, toffee-flavored, crumbly-rich goodness, I would definitely recommend these burnt butter treats to anyone. These were easy-to-make, but they possessed a certain sophisticated je ne sais quoi after a lifetime of boring old white cake recipes. So go ahead: burn it, baby!

Neil Gaiman's Sandman, or Why I Read Graphic Novels

Since I've been able to read, I've been reading comic books.

I loved the Wonder Woman series as a kid. When I was eight, I bought copies of her 1980s and early 1990s issues on sale for ten cents apiece at my local comic shop. I loved her character--she was tough, kick-ass, selfless, and, well, pretty--and her life was a fascinatingly bizarre mix of superheroes, characters from Greek myths, and regular folks. In fact, I credit Wonder Woman with my passion for Greek mythology.

I admit it: I wanted to be Wonder Woman when I grew up.

Ever since Wonder Woman, I've read the occasional comic book and graphic novel, hoping to recapture my love for the genre. But all the Batmen and Supermen and X-Men have fallen flat, as have most of the graphic novels I've read. I covered classics like Ghost World and Watchmen and a spate of dull, narcissistic indie graphic novels, and they all fell short of their hype.

But a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes at the library. I remembered The Sandman series being very trendy among adult comic geeks in the 1990s, but I had never thought of reading it. I had some serious doubts about a comic book whose main character was a dream god/super hero who looks like the The Crow, tromps through people's dreams, and sports a real-life bag o' magic dust.

Dream and his sister Death, chillin'.

 

But I decided to give Gaiman a chance, mainly because he is known for writing the young adult novel Coraline. I saw the movie last year and loved its visual creepiness. Then, earlier this year, I read the graphic novel version of Coraline, which made me appreciate Gaiman's writing much more, especially his use of common childhood fears and desires in his truly frightening fairy tale.

So based on the strength of Coraline, I gave the first collection of The Sandman series a try, and boy, was I glad.

 

The cover of The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.

The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes tells the story of Dream (the immortal god/spirit/anthropomorphic embodiment of dreams) in the 20th-century. After Dream escapes from eighty years of captivity under a glass bowl created by a powerful magician, Dream goes about reclaiming his magical tools, regaining his strength, and rebuilding his dreamworld empire, flitting between the dream world, the real world, and Hell.

*sigh*  

Rereading the above paragraph, this novel sounds remarkably silly, but it isn't! I promise! It's dark, terrifying, haunting, and occasionally funny, but it's never silly. Dream isn't a very interesting character in himself--at least not yet--but it's the places he goes and the lunatics he encounters that are truly fascinating.

What attracts me to Gaiman's work is his ability to combine mythical figures (the Fates, Lucifer, and Death all show up in these pages) with realistic characters and an incredibly dark vision of human nature. His imagination is relentless, and he knows exactly how to work with his excellent team of illustrators. (These books, by the way, are beautiful, from the collection's front cover to its final page.)

Traditionally, comic books are able to combine the imaginative thrill of fantasy writing with the grittiness of film noir and detective novels. Gaiman does just that in The Sandman series, crafting plots that feel real, compelling, and, more than twenty years later, relevant. He's made me glad that I didn't give up my search for a great graphic novel too soon; I've finally found one here.

Poem a Day: Days 3 & 4

The first three days were easy.

Today, not so much.

That's how it always goes. Even though I've never tried to write a poem daily before, I wrote four or five days a week in grad school. So I'm very familiar with sitting down and staring out the window for ten minutes without having a single idea I can stand putting on the page. I know this feeling all too well: the ennui, the dull laziness, and the sense that I have nothing to say and have never had anything to say before.

But I persevered. And that's the whole point, right?  : P

Yesterday's poem is about a pest-infested shed. Today's poem is about the Lazy River water "ride" at Worlds-of-Fun. Enjoy!

---------------

Day 3

"you find it everywhere, 

behind hollow walls, wriggling

between rotted boards, dangling

from exposed beams--life! 

dark-eyed, glinting things: 

a sea of insects glittering

in soft-sheen shells . . ."

---------------
Day 4

"parched maple leaves clinging to the damp tube,
a rosy pall of sunburn blushing down your stomach
as you bump and swirl your way into the future
on sheer, blue, burbling, bleachy waters . . ."


Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010

Poem a Day: Day 2

Today, I was thinking of the basement in the house I grew up in. We had our washer and dryer down there, and a TV, and a huge wooden desk my mom used for crafting. For a few years, she made wooden Christmas tree ornaments using a jigsaw and acrylic paint. The poem I wrote today was about that basement, how it frightened me when I was little, and how it smelled when my mom was at her work table.

"the crinkle of newspaper
being spread across a table, the smell
of dust and mildew, cigarette smoke, the sawdust
thick upon the air, softening the floor with its powder . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens 2010

A Poem a Day

I'm finally done teaching my literature course (at least until the next session begins), and I've finally settled into a schedule at the cafe. So what does this mean for this blog, you may ask?

Fortunately, I'll be writing here more often, baking more often, job hunting more vigorously, and writing a poem a day!

Writing a poem a day is not a new idea. I first heard of it while researching David Lehman's The Daily Mirror (1996) for a class in college. He wrote the entire collection by writing a poem a day for 140 days. Some poems, he has said, were awful and were scrapped, but some were good enough to be published in the final manuscript.

Lehman's idea has spread rapidly since then, and writing 31 poems in a month is popular enough to have caught the attention of Writer's Digest and to have inspired at least one independent web site supporting the project.

So I've decided to finally try my hand at the Poem a Day project as a way to make good use of my new free time. And, folks, I'm depending on you all to keep me honest! So I'll post a few lines from each day here. (I can't post whole poems in case I want to publish them elsewhere later!) The lines will be rough, I promise you, and they may not make much sense on their own, but the whole point of the project is to create frantically, joyfully, and consistently, all without paying too much attention to my internal editor!

So here are the inaugural lines of the PoemsAboutOranges Poem A Day project. I hope you enjoy reading along with me in this process!

"This time of year, geese fly overhead,
soft white bellies, brown-black wings,
trailing out flawed V's, branching figures,
aerial charts like family trees . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010