I made this cake.

I call it “girl cake” because only the female half of the family liked it. The male half turned up their noses and pushed their plates away. (Not really—Mr. Handsome finished his piece like a real man before thumbing his nose in the cake’s general direction.)

I wasn’t too surprised that they didn’t like the cake. “It’s kind of complex,” I admitted. (Please note: it’s highly unusual for me to sympathize with family members over their food hang-ups.)

“And nutty,” Mr. Handsome added.

“Like women, huh,” I said with a snicker. (Please note: I do not condone sexist comments. That said, I occasionally make them.)

I started feeling a little doubtful about the cake after watching the boys turn up their snozzes. Was the cake really any good, or was I just enchanted with it because it involved unique prep methods? Were my tastebuds going all haywire on me?

But then I served it to my sister-in-law and she claimed to like it. I fed it to one of my girlfriends—she smacked her lips appreciatively and then tucked away a second piece. That settled it. This cake was clearly a girl thing.

You know how some cakes, like some girls, are all glitz and glamour? These are the easy cakes: easy on the eye with their thick, glossy swirls of frosting and easy on the tongue with their copious amounts of butter, chocolate, and sugar. These babes are fun to hang with—they know how to whoop it up good—and nearly everyone falls for them at one point or another; but, after courting them, the ones indulging begin to feel a little empty and maybe even slightly ill, off-kilter from too much sweet and too little substance. When they eventually crash and burn, the fallout can be pretty ugly and the rebound even worse.

This cake is like another type of girl all together, one that is at first glance modest and maybe even a little homely, but when gently encouraged, she reveals her true nature—complex, nuanced, and … deep. She doesn’t have gaggles of friends, but the few she does have (oh, the luckies!) will remain her friends for life. This cake is like that type of girl, my kind of girl, sweet, wholesome, and exciting in an understated sort of way.

So maybe the analogy is a little over-the-top, yes? Even illogical? Riddled with weak sentence structure? Ah, well. Seeing as I’m a little over-the-top about this cake, I guess it’s only fitting. I’m not even going to apologize.

Instead, I’ll offer you a challenge: take this girl cake for a little spin and see if you don’t end up falling in love with her yourself. I have a hunch you might.

Molly’s Marmalade Cake
Adapted from Molly Wizenberg’s blog

The only change I made was to use half whole wheat flour and, in retrospect, I think all of the white flour could be subbed out for whole wheat. And then, except for the sugar, this could be counted as a nutritious cake, what with the fruit, nuts, and olive oil.

I pulled this cake out of the oven a little too soon. I thought it was burning and got worried. I needn’t have—the edges were just fine—and it sank a little, but even so, it was still delicious and didn’t taste underdone at all. Which leads me to believe that it doesn’t require a full sixty minutes in the oven, but a bit more than the forty-five minutes I gave it. Fifty to fifty-five minutes should be perfect.

1 orange
1 lemon
6 ounces raw almonds
½ cup whole wheat pastry flour
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
4 large eggs
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups sugar
2/3 cup olive oil
confectioner’s sugar, for dusting

Spread the almonds on a cookie sheet and toast them in the oven at 300 degrees for about twenty minutes, stirring them every three minutes or so until they are dark golden brown. After the nuts have cooled a bit, put them into a food processor and pulse until they are the texture of sand. Dump them into a bowl and set aside.

Put the lemon and orange in a kettle and cover with water (they will float, but never mind that). Bring the water to a boil, reduce the heat a bit, top the pan with a lid, and simmer the fruit for thirty minutes. Drain the fruit and cool.

Cut the lemon in half, remove the pulp, and cut off the tough stem ends. Put the lemon rind into the (still-dirty) food processor bowl. Cut the orange in half, remove any seeds, chop each half into several more pieces, and dump the bits of orange in with the lemon rind. Pulse till the fruit is thoroughly chopped up. The resulting mixture will be partly pebbly and partly pasty. It doesn’t need to be completely smooth. Set aside.

Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them for a couple minutes with a handheld mixer till they are frothy. Beat in the sugar and then add the flours, salt, and baking powder. Add the olive oil, nuts, and fruit puree and beat briefly.

Pour the batter into a greased nine- or ten-inch springform pan and bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes (see above note). Cool completely. Sprinkle liberally with confectioner’s sugar immediately before serving. (The cake improves with age, so make it a day or two ahead of when you plan to serve it.)

About one year ago: Caramel Popcorn. I’ve made this two times in the past couple weeks. We’ve taken to calling it crack. One day I even made Mr. Handsome hide it from me before he left for work.

The best part—and there are many—about going to the library is the morning after.

When I arrive home from my evening trip to town with my gigantic canvas tote brimming over with books, magazines, and videos, the kids are usually already asleep, and Mr. Handsome and I get to sort through the loot together.

The videos and educational books (ie, ones that the kids aren’t allowed to look through because I plan to read them out loud later) are stored up on a high shelf. (Not that they can’t get up there, but still.)

My reading material gets stored on a lower shelf, and we fill up the book baskets with the remaining picture books.

The next morning the children come downstairs, groggy and tousled, and I whisper, There are new library books in the baskets. It’s like I switched a magical button. They scurry wordlessly to the baskets, drag them over by the fire, switch on the lamps, grab the ratty old throw blankets, and disappear into the world of pictures and words. There is no fussing. There is no begging for breakfast. There is no bickering.

I let them lay around longer than normal, mornings after library trips, and I read to them more, too. This last time around I pulled out the stack of read-aloud books and showed them to Yo-Yo and Miss Beccaboo. They were, understandably, impatient to get started, so after our Bible reading (Joshua is a earth-shattering book for my kids; Yo-Yo has decided that the Bible is not a good book after all and that Joshua’s God is not our God) and chemistry element (nickel), I read to them about the history of ice cream, the first seeing eye dogs, how to draw faces in profile, and some prayers and rhymes. Next week we’ll delve into Greek mythology and world religions.

Tonight Yo-Yo is going out with his mentor to see a play, so I will not be able to read from our evening read-aloud, All Creatures Great and Small. Instead, I’ll be reading the library picture books, something I don’t do all that much anymore. I plan to read until my voice gives out, and then Mr. Handsome can take it from there.

If we read fast enough, I might be able to justify another trip to the library as soon as next week.

I have got to get these muffins off my brain. They’re taking up valuable cerebral real estate in the space back there behind my eyeballs. I can’t tell you where exactly, since my eyeballs don’t do complete one-eighties or three-sixties or whatever, but all I know is that ever since I made them, I’ve been saying to myself, “Self, you have got to blog about those muffins.”

And I say back to myself, “Yes, Master Self, you’re right. I do.” And then I go do other incredibly important things like chronicle all the food I’ve never chronicled before and experiment with pancakes (I love pancakes) and scour the toilet.

Until suddenly I get a zinging pain up my back and it’s Master Self again, pulling me up by my boot straps (though I am wearing strapless slippers), trying to get me to walk in the path of righteousness and muffins.

“WRITE ABOUT THOSE MUFFINS!” Master Self bellows. “If you don’t, you might forget about them and then where would we be? Huh? Besides, it’s not fair to keep them all to yourself!”

“Enough already,” I whine, rolling my shoulders in an effort to slacken the taut reins. And then I get a little mouthy. “Have you ever thought that maybe everyone already has their favorite muffin recipe? Or that just maybe, if someone really wanted this particular recipe, they could find it themselves? I—I mean, we—found it, so they could too, right?”

For my backtalk, I’m rewarded with a throbbing headache.

And so it goes—guilt and multiple selves don’t make for an easy life—until Master Self wears down Underling Self, and here I am (though I’m not sure which one of me, exactly), writing about muffins. Or at least I will be writing about muffins once I start writing about them.

I think I might be writing about them now. Yes?

The muffins being written about are Blueberry-Cornmeal Muffins. When I made them, I put blueberries in six of the twelve muffins; the other six I left plain. We loved both kinds, but the blueberry ones got eaten first—that’s how I know we like them best. (I’m good at connecting the dots, see?) It’s also the reason that some of these pictures are of muffins without blueberries—by the time I got around to taking the pictures, the blueberry muffins were well on their way to our tummies.

Cornmeal and blueberries were meant to go together. Did you know that? Together they warm the cockles of your heart. Like blue bathrooms with yellow highlights, so cozy and right.

These muffins are like that. Not like a bathroom, no, but like a yellow and blue bathroom looks, cozy and right. Rightly cozy.

Or something like that.

Blueberry-Cornmeal Muffins
Adapted from The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

I make my own yellow cornmeal from popcorn. Just toss the kernels in the grain mill and flick the switch. Yo-Yo watched me do it today and calls the resulting meal “popcorn flour.”

You can use all whole wheat flour, if you like. And feel free to use two-thirds cup of either plain yogurt or sour cream—I did half of each because I ran out of sour cream. The yogurt gives the muffins a deliciously tangy flavor.

½ cup cornmeal
1/4 cup whole wheat pastry four
1/4 cup white flour, slightly rounded
2 tablespoons, plus 2 teaspoons, sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 large egg
1/3 cup plain yogurt
1/3 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons butter, melted
2/3 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen

Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, mix together the egg, yogurt, sour cream, and butter. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir briefly. Fold in the blueberries.

Divide the batter into 12 well-greased muffin tins. Bake the muffins at 400 degrees for 15-18 minutes.

About one year ago: I must have been on sabbatical or something because I wasn’t saying a peep. So I’ll just fill you in on cornmeal previously. Let’s see, there’s cornmeal whole wheat waffles, sweet onion corn bake, and Happy Pappy-style cornbread. One of those ought to float your boat. And if it doesn’t? Well then sink. See if I care.