Cake of love

I have a recipe for a dessert called the Persian Love Cake. It’s not something you would find on a Persian table, but rather, it takes its cues from Persian cuisine: cardamom, rose water and pistachio lend their delicate flavors. It’s very showy, not too sweet, and extremely romantic, covered in candied rose petals and yielding in your mouth. I’ve made it for dear friends and anniversaries over the years, but this time, I’m making it for two friends who recently married. What makes it special is that they didn’t have the right to marry in the States, so they moved back to Switzerland (they’re a culturally ‘mixed’ couple like me and Darling Husband) where they chose to marry on Valentine’s day. I think a celebration is in order.

Candied rose petals
1 large egg white
¼ cup superfine sugar
Petals from 1 organic rose

The challenge of making this cake is not in the kitchen, it’s in sourcing the ingredients. I decided to make a half-cake, since Easter and lots of chocolate eggs are around the corner. The recipe starts with the garnish: candied covered rose petals. In the past, I have picked fragrant summer roses from the gardens of friends whom I know do not spray, or, in the dead of winter, have resorted to using salad flowers purchased at the co-op. Here, my fall-back plan was purchased marzipan roses and/or pansies. But I found pale pink Duftrosen, and I’ve purchased superfine sugar and free range eggs to candy them. The sugar hunt was an adventure, with many types vying for my attention: The everyday sugar used by German Hausfrauen is rather course, fine for everyday baking and sweetening coffee, but woefully inadequate for delicate rose petals. Powdered sugar is also represented, along with cubes (double-sized; if you want one lump, you have to break it in half), brown sugar, fruit sugar (as opposed to beet sugar), and jelling sugar, with added pectin. There’s also the Zuckerhut, or sugar hat, a cone of pressed sugar that features in a holiday specialty where hot rum punch is poured over the cone (I’m not really clear on this, but understand it’s a tradition not to be messed with).

Cake
½ cup cake flour
7 tablespoons baker's sugar or superfine sugar, divided
¾ teaspoons baking powder
pinch coarse kosher salt
2 large eggs, separated
4 tablespoons water
1/8 cup canola oil
½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
¼ teaspoon whole cardamom seeds (removed from about 5 green cardamom pods)

Flour in most of Europe is Type 405, a bit finer grind, with less gluten than we’re used to, but it will work fine, since there’s no separate flour used for pastry here. Baking powder in the US and the UK is what we call double-acting, and contains two leavening agents. I could go down to the pharmacy and ask for Natrium Karbonate (sodium bicarbonate) to rev up the German packet of Bakpulver, but I know from experience that this single-acting powder works well with Type 405. (There was actually a little jar of “household soda” in the baking section of the supermarket, but since they don’t list the ingredients, I’ll stick with the regular stuff, I’ll just use a wee bit more than usual.) Going down the list, everything else poses no problem whatsoever, until I get to the cardamom. Anticipating a problem, I picked up ground cardamom during my shopping spree in France earlier this week. The natural food store here in Ravensburg actually did have some, but nary a full pod of cardamom is to be seen anywhere in this burg.

Frosting
2 1/2 cups chilled heavy whipping cream, divided
Pinch of saffron threads
2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon rose water

German whipping cream is barely thick enough to whip, but I found some organic cream at the tiny cut-rate grocery store down the street, and it should hold together. I’m also tempted by a soy product from SoyaToo that consists of a tiny aseptic package of soy milk thickened with algae that’s supposed to whip up like cream. I think I’ll stick with cow’s cream for now, though. Saffron was missing from the shelves of Kaufland, but the natural grocery in town had a packet of saffron threads from India. These will be infused into the cream, which, once whipped a bit, receives some powdered sugar to sweeten it and rose water to augment the petals decorating the cake. I was expecting to find the rose water in France, but I found nothing like it there; it was the natural food store here in Ravensburg, tiny hole-in-the-wall that it is, that gave me a precious bottle—not only rose water, but from organic roses to boot.

Garnish
2 tablespoons natural unsalted pistachios

The green nuts set off the pink rose petals nicely, but they prove quite elusive. Finally, a tiny packet beckons from a Kaufland shelf. I don’t usually pay huge attention to price, but 100 grams of green pistachios from Israel set me back nearly three Euro—close to four dollars.

Our apartment has everything I need, except a mixer, but my accommodating Mother-in-law produces her backup hand mixer that I may borrow. The oven here on the farm even offers me a convection setting, so, we’re ready to bake. I’ll pop the finished cake in the fridge, awaiting the arrival of good friends. We’re hoping for a weekend of enjoying each other’s company, making a dent in all those bottles of French wine, and finding lots of chocolate eggs.

Three French squares

There is a certain irony that we bring our small family thousands of miles over the ocean, only to spend our “vacation” following a logic-defying route based on other’s schedules, sleeping on sofa beds and in guest rooms. We are working on setting up household in one spot and trying to convince people to come to us, and we’re having a bit of success. After a day of compiling a list of the usual suspects, using up all our prepaid cell phone credits and scheduling them in, we realized we had a single day for ourselves. Eager from a break of the grind of social obligations, we looked at each other and said, “France!” And France it was.

Despite the German Transportation Department’s best efforts, we spent the better part of the morning weaving our way west through a sun-soaked Swabia, the infamous Black Forest (still had a few patches of snow), and down to the Rhine Valley. With a quick stop in Freiburg, home to our Alma Mater, we headed, mapless, through the Kaiserstuhl (sunniest place in Germany=great wines) over to our old haunt, the Île de Rhin.

Quite literally neither here nor there, it is technically France, though the cell phone reception is both German and French, depending on which way you’re facing. Our destination was Le Ranch, a well-tended restaurant on the less popular side of the island, attached to riding stables. One side of the dining room offers a glassed-in view of the riding rink, a welcome distraction while you wait for your meal.

It was to this restaurant that we brought our guests when they visited us in Freiburg: my cousin Nickie, who stopped by on a ski trip to Switzerland, and my mother, who didn’t yet know of our engagement. Together we enjoyed excellent food at typically fair prices, delving into exotic dishes such as stewed rabbit and creamed salsify. Twenty years later, the restaurant sports a new coat of paint (pink!) and kitschy farm decorations, but the riding rink and the regulars are still here. We settle on a traditional Alsatian dish called Tarte Flambée (or Flammekueche in Alsatian), washed down with a glass of local Riesling. I describe it to our non-francophone kidlets as a French pizza: impossibly thin bread dough covered in thickened cream, cubed bacon and thinly-sliced onion, topped with a hint of Gruyère, and slipped into a hot bread oven for only a few seconds. We can’t quite finish them, so we wrap the last few up in a paper napkin for later.

At home, shopping is just another chore: here it is pure adventure. We take our full bellies to Colmar, where we opt for LeClerc, a typical example of the French hypermarché. Small boutiques line the entrance, but we push our cart into a refreshingly empty store. After an hour, we have an embarrassing assortment of the finest things la Belle France can offer: salt, mustard, herbes de Provence, chocolate, wine, cheese, bread and pastries. We happily pack the bottles into the back of our car, nestling them between the bags of groceries and unused coats.

We have a dessert of chocolate éclairs in the parking lot, and then turn back. After a quick stop for fruit and tea in a friend’s garden, we wend our way home. In the fading light, before the boys start their backseat ‘he’s-looking-at-me-are-we-there-yet’ game, we spot a sign for some Roman ruins. It is the perfect spot to pop open the back of our rented Renault Kangoo for a tailgate picnic à la française. A Laguiole knife slices open a crispy baguette, which opens wide to receive a smear of Rouleau cheese from Rians, a little village outside the town where we met and married. The remaining Tarte Flambée proves tasty even when cold. Badoit mineral water is our beverage of choice, though the wine is seriously tempting. A glug of the fizzy water transports me to the café across from our hotel room in the Marais, my first taste of Paris so many years ago. A few bits of dark raspberry-infused chocolate are our dessert. We arrive home well past bedtime, and fall into bed happy.

We continued our indulgence the next day with petit déjeuner: cups of Banania (a tasty concoction of cocoa fortified with grains and bananas, an important part of a balanced breakfast for the cleverest kids), with pain au chocolat to dunk in it.

Our three meals have consumed most of the fresh food, but I know that the remainder of these three bags of groceries will fill the corner of my larder for the months to come, each time re-filling me with the satisfaction of this warm day spent with my family.

Continental breakfast

We arrived mid-morning in Friedrichshafen, home to Zeppelins and only a short jaunt away from Darling Husband’s home town of Ravensburg, where a homemade cake (Käsecremekuchen) and tea (black) was waiting to greet us. Since German stores close at noon on Saturday, we figured we needed to eat quickly so we could shop for food for our Ferienwohnung (holiday flat). Relax, says my father-in-law, Kaufland is open until 10 pm tonight. And, interjects my mother-in-law, there’s another store on the other side of town that’s open all night. They seem so proud that this Americanism has come to their small town; never mind that they pointed out the folly of our ways when they visited the States for the first time 20 years ago.

So, off we went to the temple of retail, jockeying for a parking place, past the woman plying Tupperware and the towering aisles of Huggies and Pampers, finally reaching the “fresh” produce section. We are greeted by huge amounts of apples and oranges, basketball-sized heads of cabbage and leeks the size of little league baseball bats. But I am not in the least tempted by the lack of freshness; limp lettuces and tomatoes packed in plastic are testimony that this produce is anything but fresh. The same can be said of the vacuum-packed meats and little wrapped cheeses and yogurts. We do find a few attractive soy products (from Alpro), which are largely unaffected by their travels and the glaring lights due to their aseptic packaging.

Indeed, local products prove elusive; our most local purchase is not milk or produce, but a Late harvest burgundy (Spätburgunder) from Meersburg, a little town down the road graced by a lovely old castle.

We do swing by a Demeter bakery on the way out and pick up three salty pretzels and four Seelen (literally, “souls,” long wet-baked loaves garnished with coarse salt and caraway seeds). We’ll slather them in organic sweet cream butter and chocolate hazelnut spread for our Sunday breakfast.

I am always amazed at the examples of “greenness” that are widespread and acceptable in this conservative land (Southern Germany is very Catholic): Everywhere we look, we see huge barns covered in photovoltaic solar panels, green roofs crowning kindergartens, rain barrels in backyards, and grasscrete in parking lots and on the shoulders of narrow lanes. When we buy our orange juice, it comes in reusable glass bottles that we pay a deposit on, just like when I was a kid. But the temptation of inexpensive consumer goods is a strong force, and places like Kaufland are too attractive for most to resist. Come Monday, though, you will find me with my shopping bags downtown, shopping the small shops for local produce to sustain us.