In the hottest days of summer, we’d make ice cream. We had an old wooden ice cream machine—the sort that looks like it belongs in a scene out of The Music Man or Meet Me in St. Louis, with a silver hand crank and a spindly metal handle and a red medallion on the front that spelled out the words White Mountain. It held four quarts of ice cream: first you’d make the custard base, then pour it into a narrow metal canister which fit inside the wooden bucket. You’d pack the space between the canister and the bucket walls with ice and rock salt, then fit the crank on top and get to work.
Read moreDOUBLE VANILLA ICEBOX CAKE
In the pantheon of packaged snack food, I consider Nilla wafers woefully under-represented. Or, under-appreciated, more specifically. If you walk down the snack food aisle (ha! remember leisurely doing grocery shopping without anxiety?), Nilla wafers are usually tucked down on a bottom shelf, placed suspiciously close to the organic granola and rolled oats section. They are overlooked in favor of splashier boxes and bags: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos! Cool Ranch Doritos! Pringles! Oreos! Parmesan Goldfish (don’t make that face at me, this is the best flavor and it’s not up for discussion)!
Read moreBASIC MUFFINS
I was planning to write about icebox cakes today, but as I sat down outside with my tea to start writing, I couldn’t summon the words. The temperature dropped overnight and there’s a gentle but firm breeze; the sky is overcast and the humidity has abated for now—it feels strangely like fall, or rather, like that brief string of days that teeter between summer and fall, when it’s warm enough for shorts but there’s a definite crispness to the air, as if the promise of sharpened pencils and new notebooks and apple cider and woodsmoke and flannel shirts and Halloween candy is hiding just around the bend.
Read moreBITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE ESPRESSO SABLES
I start to drink coffee in earnest when I graduate from college. At my first job—as an intro-level advertising associate—I caffeinate like a real New Yorker: like a ritual, like sustenance as useful as dinner. I take the elevator up to the 20th floor of a sprawling, faded building smack in the middle of Times Square and drop my bag, stuffed with running shoes and a dog-eared novel and tangled headphones, onto my desk. I quickly make my way past rows of open cubicles to my friend Caroline’s desk: identical to mine with its jumble of candy-colored pens and tubes of chapsticks and piles of paper all askew, printed with months’ worth of status reports, their rows of Excel data marching endlessly across the white pages.
Read morePISTACHIO CARDAMOM CUPCAKES
It’s awfully nice to have things to look forward to. Anticipation is so much of what drives a pleasurable life—it’s the forward-thinking cousin of nostalgia. Because we aren’t able to eagerly await many of the normal events lately (travel, vacations, weddings, parties, meeting a random stranger, ANYTHING BASICALLY), we have to craft our own excitements.
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