The Love Song of R. Anica Dewdrop

I. One secret is to keep the butter as cold as possible. Cold butter releases steam in the oven, and the best way to keep it cold is to dice your sticks of butter and place back into the fridge until ready to use. Limit the time you handle the dough with your bare hands. Use ice milk or ice water when needed. In the oven, the steam from the solid butter relaxes out of the dough and gives you a flaky crust. The perfect flaky crust.

 II. The only thing better than baking is eating. Baked-good eating. B-eating.

 III. Always bake from scratch. For me, the importance is (like a) multi-layered (cake). People who bake usually have cute tin or glass canisters that say FLOUR or SUGAR in floppy script hanging out on a shelf in their kitchen. Be one of those people. Feel like you have the best kitchen in the world. You may even feel better than anyone without canisters. Also, I totally judge a person by their kitchen. If food is my religion, then I look for sacrilege. Do you have a rolling pin? No? Hm.

 IV. When one bakes, there is nothing but the individual and the ingredients. No other thing else. I like to take my time; meditation, with tasty results. Or, sashay to music, open a bottle of wine, get flour in my hair. These are the things I know how to bake: almond raspberry torte, blueberry pie, angel food cake with buttercream, strawberry shortcake. My best, the blueberry pie. It is tart, gooey, flaky, always. For these reasons, I thought I would someday master my favorite dessertmeal[i], but I was terribly wrong.

 V. In German, cherry pie is kirschkuchen. As my favorite dessertmeal, this was my second German word[ii] learned. So, finally, after months of wanting to conquer the kirschen, this last weekend, I drove up to Topanga Canyon, where the 1234länder[iii] is staying, and we decided to pretend like we were a million miles away from the rest of the world. We went for a scenic drive up the mountain, where we did not envy the congregation of clouds below. When you’re that high above sea level, it’s like you’re on a tilted plane, and if you reach your arm out you can touch the blue that is all of the Pacific Ocean. Then we came back down the mountain, bought two pounds of fresh cherries from the back of a truck, and I ran 3 miles of shoreline, barefoot.

In certain areas of Malibu, the sand is more powdery and pebbley, with tangles of seaweed and shell and misfortuned crustaceans alongside, than Santa Monica, all of which was a great source of entertainment for me. I asked 1234länder to pocket the rocks which amused me the most. Before we made it home, we meandered a market, looking for dog food, barefoot. Back in the car, I promised myself to start taking mental notes of the bohemian enclave that is Topanga, and this is what I observed: some addresses were marked by numbers on surfboards; the types of people who live here also like to dress down their mailboxes with scrap metal; instead of yellow pedestrian-crossing signs there are horseback-rider-crossings and prancing-deer crossings; the foliage for the most part is low to the ground; a pine tree next to a palm tree always makes me smile. Back home, we jumped in the pool, where I took advantage of the fact that I hate tan lines and we were in the middle of nowhere! Later, 1234länder took a nap as I sat outside, reading, writing, and sipping the citron pressé he made and some vino blanco. Here, this is a view: 

Which brings me to the point of the story. When the sun started to set, we went down the mountain to get the ingredients for kirschkuchen. Late evening sun here takes on a particular kind of resplendence, which we soaked in as we took an alternate route home. We drove past a high school with a football field; here, we decided 1234länder could take a moment to learn a little bit about American culture. We pulled over, walked around the field, and watched what looked to be the end of football tryouts or the beginning of little league football.

In the kitchen, I prepared the dough as 1234länder pitted the cherries. We listened to music, counted numbers back and forth to each other in German and Spanish, and air-kissed the dog. When the flame of the day started burning out, we grabbed our pitcher of fresh limonata, the rest of the cherries, and dashed outside for the last of the light. 1234länder read aloud an essay about Dostoevsky by David Foster Wallace as the juice from the cherries stained my fingertips.  

An hour and a half later, we were pulling the pie out from the oven. “It’s super brown,” 1234länder said. It was more like black in some parts.

“Lemme see. What happened.”

“Is it supposed to be so watery?” We decided to serve it warm, like this, with vanilla bean ice cream.

“This is actually very good,” he said, eventually. “No, no, really.”

“It is so very ugly.”

“This is great cherry soup!”

The end of the story is that I learned the word for soup in German. It is suppe. Kirschsuppe.

[i] Dessert that should be an entrée, but somehow ISN’T.

[ii] My first word was tautropfen. One guess as to what it means! You’re right!

[iii] Previously referred to in this supposed-to-be-microblog as c.vorlaender and hömeboy and hömey. These monikers are no longer effective.