House Girlfriend

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House Girlfriend No-Bake Baking Orangette Cooking 3 months ago

No-Bake Baking for Valentine’s Day, Part 2.

I think I am beginning to understand why I am terrified of baking. As a control freak of sorts, I am more at home cooking elaborate meals than barely-complicated sweets. The thing I like about cooking (besides the inevitable eating, that is) is the constant tinkering: I can stir and fiddle to my heart’s contentment. And I do. I will slave away over a hot stove for literally hours, tasting a concoction hundreds of times before I put it out for public consumption. I can adjust flavors as I go, fix road-bumps (or butter clumps) along the way, improvise solutions to things turning out poorly and, most often, I end up with something completely delicious.

And that’s not to say that my baking thus far hasn’t been delicious. It has. But I do miss the hours of care that cooking demands. And I do hate the unknowing of putting something into the oven and not being able to check on it again for hours. Like sending your child off into the world, not knowing what will happen to them out there- not knowing if they’ll still be edible when they come back from college… 

I’m good at the specificity. Bad at the unknowing. 

But I’m trying. For Valentine’s Day, I wanted to challenge myself and I knew I couldn’t do that with a meal: The Boyfriend and I had our eyes on a new restaurant downtown (The Spice Table, if you’re interested, which was beyond…). So dessert, my dreaded baking, loomed ahead. And all I knew was it needed to involve raspberries.

Now, why I had to choose a recipe that involved cheesecloths, a sieve, and just-melted chocolate (all things I’ve never tackled) is beyond me. But what we came out with was just as far beyond my expectations as dinner: a real culinary masterpiece, in fact. And all due goes to Orangette. 

I was never one to read food blogs before I unofficially started one- they made me too hungry. But as soon as I started writing, I began hearing about Molly Wizenberg. 

And here I am, poring over her lovely book, A Homemade Life, nightly and dreaming of leading a life like hers. At least I can eat a life like hers… and I started with the Coeur a la Creme with Raspberry Puree. 

Or, I can if I can figure out what to do with this cheesecloth:

Or how to get these raspberries through a sieve to make a puree:

Or how to stop worrying about this dessert while it sets in the refrigerator overnight:

I needn’t have worried. Molly blessed our late night Valentine’s Day dessert with her brilliance. 

Dome a la Creme with Raspberry Puree!

Beautifully light and marvelously airy, sweet and tart and all around heartwarming… who knew I could create such a beautiful thing?

About the House Girlfriend

A MODERN GIRL'S (ATTEMPTED) GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING...

That's what I need. A guide. I used to have a job (a career even!) but more often than not, I now find myself in pajamas well past the acceptable time to be found in pajamas, pondering ice cream for breakfast and which version of Pride and Prejudice to waste my afternoon on. I've worked almost every day since I was sixteen... until now. And I don't quite know what to do with myself.

I purposely never learned to clean because I never wanted to have to. I purposely never learned to cook because the idea of winning over a man through his stomach seemed archaic and insulting. I purposely never learned to garden because I’d hate to ruin my manicure- if I ever actually got one.

But here I am. Nothing to do but pull my weight around our apartment, i.e. cook, clean, and generally keep house for The Boyfriend, who lovingly doesn't seem to mind if I never go back to work again.

And when I can get out of my pajamas at a reasonable hour, I find I don't hate it, this housekeeping thing. In fact, I might love it, being a House Girlfriend- and maybe I'll write that guide myself. If only I could get up the courage to scrub out the bathtub...