Amanda Hesser

Baking for Bocce III: Chocolate Dump-it Cake

Baking for Bocce III: Chocolate Dump-it Cake

Our bocce team is no longer in last place. I think we're second to last-- but still, let's celebrate the small victories. Chocolate seems to help. We definitely play a little better. I noticed this when I made Katherine Hepburn's brownies a few weeks back--so last week, I decided to test Amanda Hesser's recipe for her mom's Chocolate Dump-it Cake (found in Cooking for Mr. Latte), a birthday staple in the Hesser household. I was intrigued because you make the cake all in one saucepan and I hadn't tried sour cream frosting before. Hesser claims, "For the icing, you melt Nestlé's semisweet-chocolate chips and swirl them together with sour cream. It sounds as if it's straight from the Pillsbury Bake-Off, but it tastes as if it's straight from Payard. Everyone loves it." She wasn't kidding--the icing was remarkable. It's substantial (unlike occasionally whimpy buttercream), smooth, and has a creamy chocolate depth.

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Ode to Amanda Hesser

Ode to Amanda Hesser

You know where to find Grains of Paradise (or even what they are) and smoked paprika. You love beets, fatty fish, and biscotti. You use the word "tangle" to describe salads, judge people for their restaurant choices, and hate doing dishes in the morning. You are Amanda Hesser--or, at least, share some of her endearing, neurotic traits. A food writer for The New York Times, Hesser's writing is luminous, visual, and snappy. Good food writing literally picks you up and draws you into a tactile world in which you're literally sitting at a country table alone at dusk, at a busy wedding banquet, or on the floor of a bare apartment listening to an ambulance drive by. In short, you're not at home holding a book thinking about laundry or work deadlines. With Hesser, I was transported to a summer afternoon in Maine or her back balcony in Brooklyn Heights. I read "Cooking For Mr. Latte" in a day and a half; I lay in bed drinking it all in, mentally cataloging all of the recipes I'd try and becoming immersed in the back story of dating Mr. Latte (later we learn, Tad), eventually getting married, moving to Brooklyn, and coming to terms with family/friends/changing relationships. Essentially: the pedestrian elements of daily life that we all experience. Yet most of us don't draw it out in such a sensuous, affable way.

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