A minor multitude of ten-year-old boys will descend upon my house tomorrow. They will run around with sticks and yell and knock each other over. (Don’t worry, we’ll try our best to keep them far away from the more dangerous farm implements.)

They will camp out and have a bonfire and eat lots of hotdogs and candy.

They will stay for 17 hours. It’s supposed to rain the entire time.

They will sleep outside in the fort, no matter what.

I’m in denial about the rain.

I’m also in flat-out party panic mode.

I’ve been coaching Mr. Handsome on his part in this affair: You will be with the boys the entire time. You will play with them, sleep with them, eat with them, talk to them. You will not sit down once. Do you hear?

As for me? I will be hiding in the house with the girls (they are each having a little girlfriend over to keep them company during the entire pubescent testosterone hoopla) and The Baby Nickel. I will pat out the burgers and put candles on the cake (another one!) and stand guard at the door so that no errant muddy boy can sneak inside. Not even for a minute. Not even to pee.

Well, I might let them pee.

I’ll make buttermilk pancakes for breakfast, too.

Yo-Yo better love this party cause I don’t think I’ll be able to pull off another one for a very, very, very long time.

About One Year Ago: Yo-Yo’s birth story.

…I might as well give you the recipe for Mr. Handsome’s birthday cheesecake.

Maybe once I get all the cakes off my chest, I’ll be able to clear my mind of cake and move on to something different, like the soup I made the other day—a rich creamy cheesy chicken-and-cheese chili, not that it’s much different from a cheesecake, considering I use the same adjectives to describe both of them.

Oh well, when I get in a rut (in any rut, be it culinary or otherwise) I spin around helplessly for a while till someone offers to come hoist me out. In this current rut, I’m churning up lots of crumbs and cream and nobody has extended a hand (or recipe) to help pull me out, I’ve noticed. So I’ll keep cake-making my way into a big fat hole.

At least it’s sweet down here.

Classic Cheesecake
Slightly adapted from Aunt Valerie’s recipe

I have yet to eat a better cheesecake. (Feb. 4, 2011: Except, er, I have another recipe here called “The Perfect Classic Cheesecake.” I think it’s better.)

Notes:
*Don’t you dare use reduced-fat anything.
*Farm eggs make the cake look yellowish. If it’s a white cheesecake you are after, use anemic store-bought eggs. (I used farm eggs for this cake.)
*You must, absolutely must, put a pan of boiling water on the bottom rack of the oven. It’s the key to making a moist, creamy cheesecake.
*The topping is not optional.
*Make the cake the day before you eat it. Those few extra hours in the fridge make it that much better.

For the crust:
2 ½ cups graham cracker crumbs
1/3 cup sugar
½ cup butter, melted

Stir together the cracker crumbs and sugar. Add the butter and stir to combine. Press the moist crumbs into the bottom and (three-quarters of the way) up the sides of a 10-inch springform pan. Bake the crust at 350 degrees for five minutes. Remove the crust from the oven and reduce the oven temperature to 325 degrees.

For the cake:
3 8-ounce packages of cream cheese, at room temperature
1 ½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs, separated

Beat the egg whites till stiff peaks form. Set aside.

Using the egg-white-y beaters, cream together the cream cheese and sugar. Add the vanilla and the egg yolks and beat thoroughly. Fold in the egg whites.

Bring a couple quarts of water to a rolling boil. Pour the boiling water into a 9 x 13 metal pan and set the pan on the bottom rack of the oven.

Pour the cake batter into the pre-baked crust. Put the cake in the oven, on the rack above the pan of water.

Bake the cake at 325 degrees for 50-60 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and starting to crack around the edges and the center is almost set (it will still jiggle a little). Remove the cake and cool to room temperature. It will sink as it cools.

For the topping:
1/3 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla
½ cup heavy whipping cream

Whip the heavy cream till peaks form. Set aside.

Stir together the sour cream, sugar, and vanilla. Fold in the whipped cream.

Spread the topping on the cooled cake, the whole way out to the edges.

Cover the cake with plastic and refrigerate overnight.

Serve plain, or with fresh fruit or a fruit sauce.

About One Year Ago: Apple Tart with Cider-Rosemary Glaze.

It’s Sunday afternoon, cold and blustery outside, but warm and toasty inside by the fire. Mr. Handsome is upstairs resting with The Baby Nickel, Sweetsie is in her room (sleeping, hopefully), and the three older kids (Yo-Yo has a friend over) are outside doing who-knows-what (I don’t really care as long as they’re quiet and leaving me well enough alone).

I’m feeling pensive and muse-ful and gentle inside. If I could purr, I would. I’m not sure why I’m feeling so calmly pleasant, but I have a couple good guesses: first, I had some good conversations at church this morning and I laughed a lot; second, I’m wearing leggings and a flow-y gray dress that makes me feel like a cross between a hip hippie and a damsel from the Elizabethan period; third, I’m drinking coffee and eating (have eaten, rather) a piece of Italian Cream Cake; fourth, I have a number of creative projects and ideas that are inspiring me rather than overwhelming and frustrating me (though that is susceptible to change at the drop of a hat); fifth, a bottle of homemade elderberry wine, gifted to Mr. Handsome by the owner of the house where he’s been working lately, is sitting on the kitchen counter, calling to me (all hippie damsels drink homemade elderberry wine, right?); sixth, my girlfriend and her kids are coming over tomorrow morning and we’re going to play One Room Schoolhouse which will be fun and productive and will hopefully counteract the Monday morning blues that have been plaguing us these past few weeks; seventh, the house smells like apples because we’re drying them by the bushel.

But back to the cake.

We’ve been eating a lot of cake recently, if you haven’t already figured that out. There was the birthday cake that my mother made for me and then two weeks later Mr. Handsome’s birthday cake, a cheesecake. Yo-Yo has requested a chocolate cake with mint icing for his birthday this coming Friday. As if the birthday cakes haven’t been sufficient, I’ve been experimenting with other cakes—apple cake (one was a keeper; two were chicken food) and an Italian Cream Cake, another keeper for sure. That’s a lot of cake.

Italian cream cake is coconut cake with cream cheese pecan frosting. It’s delicious fresh, and it’s even better chilled (I’m keeping it in the fridge because of the cream cheese frosting). It has, after only two pieces (and a number of not-so-discreet snitches), positioned itself on the sacred list of My Favorite Cakes, right up there with cheesecake and chocolate cake. That’s saying a lot.

Mr. Handsome (he finished putting The Baby Nickel down) came to sit beside me on the sofa to eat his slice of cake. As he forked the last bite into his mouth he turned to me and said in a puzzled, pleasantly surprised sort of way, “That is really good cake.” It was almost offensive the way he said it, though I know exactly where he’s coming from, seeing as he’s sampled a greater number of chicken cakes than is normal.

Of this cake, though, the chickens will not be getting a crumb.*

Italian Cream Cake
Slightly adapted from Sarah’s blog

The original recipe called for half butter and half shortening, but I used three-quarters butter and one-quarter shortening (because that was all the shortening I had on hand). I think next time I will use all butter, or I may experiment and sub a little of the butter with coconut oil.

Also, I didn’t have buttermilk, so I put a couple tablespoons of plain yogurt in the bottom of a one-cup measure, topped it off with milk, stirred to combine, and voila, made buttermilk.

1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
5 eggs, separated
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup sweetened coconut
1 recipe cream cheese pecan frosting (see below)

In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Set aside. (I do this part first so that I don’t have to wash the beaters more than once.)

In a large mixing bowl (and with your egg white-y beaters), cream the butter with the sugar. Add the vanilla and egg yolks and beat some more. Add the dry ingredients (the flour and baking soda) alternately with the buttermilk. Stir in the coconut. Fold in the egg whites.

Divide the batter between three eight-inch cake pans (well-greased and lined with wax paper). Bake the cakes at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack and remove the wax paper. Cool completely before icing.

Cream Cheese Pecan Frosting

Thanks to the nuts, this icing is a cinch to spread; you needn’t worry about bits of cake and coconut flecking the creamy icing since it is already pebbled with the golden crunchy pecans. And the textured icing lends itself to artful swirls and swoops.

1 cup chopped pecans, toasted
1 8-ounce package cream cheese
½ cup butter
16 ounces powdered sugar, sifted
1 tablespoon vanilla

Beat together the cream cheese and butter. Add the vanilla and beat some more. Beat in the sugar. Add the pecans and mix well.

*Which is not totally true because there were a few scraps left on certain children’s plates that ended up getting dumped into the compost bucket. I did contemplate eating the abandoned morsels but decided that I needed to exercise some control.

About One Year Ago: The Stash, a list (and pictures) of all the food we stockpiled. Seeing all our hard labor consolidated into one list is deeply satisfying…and totally exhausting, even to me.