COCONUT SWEET ROLLS

September 8, 2020 Posie Brien

Let’s talk about birthdays. Are you the gung-ho sort when it comes to celebrating your own? The kind of person who proclaims an entire birthday week? When you were little, did you demand to be treated royally for the entire day, loudly stating “it’s my birthday!” to anyone within earshot? Or do you shy away from the whole ordeal, feeling sheepish about being feted for the mere fact of being born?

You might fall somewhere in between—increasingly indifferent to the showiness of it all, but fully willing to blow out some candles and request a special dessert.

Which brings us to the question at hand: what would your ideal birthday dessert be? Are you a classic traditionalist, preferring a golden yellow cake with a sturdy crumb swathed in rich chocolate buttercream? Maybe you like cake, but you’d indulge your inner 5-year-old and opt for funfetti with a fluffy vanilla frosting coated in sprinkles. Maybe you’d go with red velvet with cream cheese frosting or lemon layers with lemon curd and piles of seven-minute meringue frosting.

S'MORES CAKE

September 7, 2020 Posie Brien

There’s an intangible but precise shift just before Labor Day—the air takes on a crystalline quality. Overnight, the hazy humidity of August disappears, as if it was absorbed by the ocean or as if a storm swept in and washed it away, like rinsing water on a glass then wiping it away, leaving it perfectly clear.

I love this time of year. It can carry a tinge of melancholy as summer wanes and slips away from you, but it’s such an achingly beautiful few weeks that you can’t help but be glad. The beaches are empty, showcasing their wild rambling loveliness. Waves tip up onto the rock-strewn sand, spilling white foam over the smooth surface of the boulders. Tangles of greenery cover the gently sloping dunes that hug the scalloped curves of the shore for miles. I learn the names slowly: northern bayberry and beach plum and winged sumac and creeping juniper and coastal sweet pepper bush.

CHERRY TOMATO JAM

September 5, 2020 Posie Brien

If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s that I need very little in the way of stuff. I suppose that intellectually I always knew this to be true; I’ve lived at plenty of times over the years out of a backpack or a camp trunk or a suitcase—but those were always brief interludes to normal life. These days, 90% of my belongings are crammed higgledy-piggledy in a storage unit somewhere outside of Baltimore. I think (fingers crossed!) that most of my clothes and books and…well, everything I own…is still there, but for the first time ever, movers packed it up (unsupervised) so I can only hope and cross my fingers and toes.

TWO-BANANA BROWN BUTTER BANANA BREAD

September 4, 2020 Posie Brien

Wait a second, you’re thinking. She just posted a rye banana bread recipe. This girl is either floundering under the waves of early parenthood and actually losing her mind OR she is strangely fixated on banana bread.

And I’d ask you: can’t it be both? Just kidding! Not floundering! I promise. But to be honest, some days I do arrive at 5 PM and look back with wonder at the morning, thinking it must have been weeks ago that I woke up, not mere hours. There is a lot more occupying my mind—and my hands—these days, in the nicest way possible, and it is not inconceivable that I would forget about having just posted a similar recipe. Just as I might forget to switch the wet laundry to the dryer, or be unable to remember where I put the stamps, or completely lose track of my phone for the one millionth time.

PERFECT COUSCOUS

September 3, 2020 Posie Brien

I woke up this morning to a gray world outside. The trees outside my window were obscured by a thin veil of drizzle—it wasn't raining in earnest yet, but the skies were a dull pewter and the roses climbing our neighbor’s trellis trembled in the wind.

Instead of staying under the covers—the pintucked white duvet pulled snugly around my still-sleepy form—I got up. (See, there’s this cool new kind of real life alarm clock called a 5-month-old baby. Works like a charm, man.)

Eating and adventuring.

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