I apologize to all of you who have grown weary with my incessant prattling about chard and red beet greens and chicken and potatoes (there was a red raspberry dessert thrown in there, too, but come on, it had a fruit) and have grown desperate for something purely frivolous, like, say, ice cream.

How about it? Are you up for some creamy peanut-buttery ice cream, thickly studded with chopped-up peanut butter cups? Yes?

Okay, but first I’m going to tell you a story.

Once there was a little girl who didn’t get store-bought ice cream very often. Her parents made fine homemade ice cream, but, like white bread and celery, ice cream was a rare treat. The girl grew up and went to college where there was lots of ice cream in the cafeteria, and she ate it frequently, especially the soft serve. But then she got married, and because for the first time she had a fair amount of extra cash, a car, and easy access to the grocery store, she discovered the endless varieties of Ben and Jerry’s and thought she had finally died and gone to heaven (part of that floaty feeling might have had something to do with having just married the most gorgeous man alive). But then she and her husband left their comfortable middle-class existence with easy access to chain groceries that sold Ben and Jerry’s and flew to sweaty-hot Nicaragua where there was no decent ice cream to be found, though there was some fabulous Guanabana yogurt. When they came back to the states three years later they had a little boy and no money, and then the handsome husband caught cancer, found a job, and got cured, and the girl, who was now a young woman, caught another baby in her tummy and developed a fearsome sweet tooth, and then Ben and Jerry’s ice cream went on sale and because they had some money again thanks to the husband’s new job, the young woman brought cartons and cartons of the ice cream home from the store and she ate them every single night and gained forty pounds. After which she pushed out a little girl, rested for a few weeks, and then plunked the little boy and the baby girl into a clunky stroller and pushed them around their hilly neighborhood in an effort to shrink her buns and belly (she stopped eating Ben and Jerry’s, too). Years passed and not only did they acquire two more children and a vasectomy, they also purchased a used hand crank ice cream churn from a yard sale, a country house (not from a yard sale), and some milk shares from a local farm. Today, the young woman, who isn’t so young anymore, though she isn’t quite middle-aged either, has taught herself how to make thick, rich, creamy ice creams that taste just like Ben and Jerry’s, if not better, and even though they have more money than they ever had before and the chain grocery store is just ten minutes away, they hardly ever, maybe even never, buy Ben and Jerry’s. The end.

Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream
Adapted from… oh dear, I don’t know where! Some place on the net, I guess. Sorry.

Do not use the miniature peanut butter cups; use the full-size cups, okay?

And I tell you to reserve part of the chopped candy because I’ve discovered that they don’t mix in evenly—often the ice cream at the bottom of the churn has only a few bits of candy while the ice cream at the top is loaded. Reserving some of the candy allows you to add it at the end when you’re serving the ice cream, or transferring it into freezer containers, creating an ice cream with even candy distribution.

1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
3 ½ cups cream, divided
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
12-16 peanut butter cups, roughly chopped and divided

Put the sugar and eggs in a mixing bowl and beat with a handheld mixer for about three minutes.

Heat the milk and one cup of the cream in a saucepan. Once hot, slowly add the milk and cream to the egg-sugar mixture, beating on low speed all the while. Then, dump the tempered eggs and milk back into the saucepan and stir over medium-high heat until the mixture has thickened slightly (do not boil). Remove the saucepan from the heat and pour the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer.

Whisk the peanut butter into the egg-milk mixture. Add the remaining cream and the vanilla. Chill the ice cream base in the refrigerator for 6 hours or overnight.

Churn the ice cream. When it is almost done, add three-quarters of the chopped peanut butter cups and finish churning. When transferring the ice cream to freezer containers (or eating it), stir the remaining bits of candy into the parts of the ice cream that are candy deprived.

One year ago: Apricot Pandowdy. And a year and a day ago: Grace’s Vanilla Pudding and Baked Oatmeal. I was a blogging fiend, back in the day.

I don’t know how those kitchen-tester, experimenter-type people do it. You know who I’m talking about, right? I’m talking about the cooks that are behind the scenes of cookbooks and culinary magazines, but specifically (for the next few paragraphs anyways) about those people who work for the magazine Cook’s Illustrated. Those Dudes and Dudettes slave away in the magazine’s test kitchen for hours at a time tweaking and tasting and tasting and tweaking till they find The Perfect Whatever It Is They Are Searching For. And then they tell you what they’ve learned.

No, that’s not quite right. They tell you every little detail of how they learned what they learned, so that you can be sure to appreciate the fact—the fact!—that they have fairly outdone themselves bringing you The Best There Is. They try to be generous and gracious, but you can’t help but hear their behind-the-scenes self-righteous sniffing.

You’re not familiar with the magazine? Okay, let’s take, for example, the question of prepeeled garlic. You didn’t know there was a question about prepeeled garlic? Well, there is, or rather, there was. See, somebody (the editor, perhaps?) wondered what the difference was, if any, between jarred, prechopped garlic and fresh garlic. The question (probably written in beautiful calligraphy on a parchment scroll and bound with a satin ribbon) was delivered (by a thirteen-year-old boy in purple tights) to the Dudes and Dudettes in the magazine’s kitchen. Of course the D and D’s didn’t do a simple taste test, oh no-no-no-no-no! They, the dear souls, got down and dirty in their quest to answer the all-important question set forth before them. As a stringed quartet played Vivaldi over in the corner by the industrial stoves, they spun and twirled around the kitchen making aioli sauce (two batches, of course), sauteed garlic with spaghetti (again, two batches), and stuffed rolled flank steaks (yep, two batches). The tasters (seated in a red-carpeted dinning room) gave mixed reviews, and the final verdict (written on another, slightly larger scroll) stated that prechopped garlic would not store as well as the fresh raw cloves, but that there was not much difference in taste (and with that, the music soared gloriously, and the kitchen staff bowed and curtseyed as we gratefully applauded). The end.

Um, hello? I’m pretty sure I already knew that fresh garlic lasts longer than the prechopped stuff (though I never thought to thunk it), and I can guarantee that it didn’t take multiple batches of flank steak and spaghetti for me to figure that out. (That I don’t even know how to cook flank steak is irrelevant.) However, I do understand that documented—and published!—scientific evidence is worth more than my practical, day-in-and-day-out kitchen wisdom. And so I bow my head in meek submission.

Okay, okay. I’ll stop now. The magazine does hold helpful information (I did check it out of the library, after all), and I enjoy flipping through its pages, gleaning tidbits. But there is something off-putting about the magazine, not because they have a goal to obtain the perfect Whatever It Is because all cooks strive for this, but because they claim that they have. Cooking is such a personal thing and everyone has different preferences, so for them to assume that they hold the Golden Answer strikes me as being a little presumptuous.

But maybe that’s just because I can’t stand to see anyone else carting around more than their fair share of the gold.

Anyway, my point to all this was that just thinking of all that excessive food prepping and testing makes me bone weary. (And besides, who eats all that food? I worry over things like that; I can’t help myself.) As for me, I’m feeling pretty whipped after playing around with a raspberry-lemon buttermilk cake, doing my darndest to grab hold of some of that flashy culinary gold. I made it three times. Three times is about all I can handle, so it’s a pretty good thing that I struck pay dirt on the third try. Or maybe I just gave up and decided it was easier to be content.

I unwittingly started my cake marathon when I made Deb’s Raspberry Buttermilk Cake. To start with, I only made a couple practical changes—I doubled it, and I used frozen raspberries instead of the fresh, plus, I sprinkled one cake with plain white sugar and the other pan with Demerara sugar. Some daring changes, huh? But then we tasted it and Mr. Handsome thought it needed more lemon, so back to the drawling board I went. (And right there is when I started hearing little Cook’s Illustrated voices in my head: “I’m going to make this cake perfect, I tell you, simply perfect.”)

The second time around I reduced the buttermilk by a quarter cup and added a quarter cup of fresh lemon juice instead. I also upped the lemon zest, three times over. The resulting cake was definitely more lemony, but all the berries sank to the bottom and the cake had a more sponge-like texture. (“Drat this cake! Don’t tell me I’m going to have to do something crazy like beat the egg whites. This is supposed to be a simple cake. A simply perfect cake.”)

Round three involved two parts buttermilk, one part yogurt and one part milk (because I ran out of buttermilk, not because I was intentionally trying to be complex), no lemon juice, three-plus times the amount of zest, and fresh berries because they are now in season and I had just picked a bowlful.

I pulled the cake from the oven. I looked at it. I sniffed it. I tasted it. And then I smiled.

And now (drum roll, please) I present you with, a la The Cook’s Illustrated Testing Method (sniff, sniff), the perfect, absolutely perfect, Raspberry-Lemon Buttermilk Cake.

Actually, I think this cake would also be good as muffins, maybe with a layer of streusel hidden in their middles, or with blueberries in place of the raspberries (blueberries and lemon, oh my). See, I’m not really Cook’s Illustrated material—there’s just too many good options out there. Besides, I haven’t the endurance or the ego.

Well, it might just be the endurance part I’m missing.

Seriously, though, this cake is good. It’s simple and elegant, but not too showy. It’s just the thing to have on hand, like at all times. (I tried serving the cake with seedless raspberry sauce and some whipped cream, but I think I like it just as well, and maybe better, all by itself. Sweet and simple, and perfect. Sniff.)

Raspberry-Lemon Buttermilk Cake
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Deb’s recipe made one round, 9-inch cake, but I doubled it. The way I see it, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to measure, mix, and bake you might as well make a fair amount. Besides, the cake freezes well, so I doubt you’ll regret the extra (we whipped through the six cakes I made in less than a week). But if you’re feeling conservative, go ahead and halve the recipe. It will still be sniffably perfect.

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup butter
1 1/3 cups sugar, plus 3 tablespoons for sprinkling
1 teaspoon vanilla
the zest from one lemon, or a minimum of 3 ample teaspoons
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk (or ½ cup buttermilk, 1/4 cup plain yogurt, and 1/4 cup milk)
2 cups raspberries, fresh or frozen

Grease two 9-inch cake pans and line them with wax paper circles. (To make my wax paper circles, I set the cake pan on the wax paper, trace around it with a pencil, and then cut out the circle and press it into the bottom of the greased pan.)

Cream together the sugar and butter. Add the vanilla, eggs, and zest and beat some more.

Measure the dry ingredients into a separate bowl.

Add the dry ingredients to the creamed butter alternately with the buttermilk.

Divide the batter between the two pans. Sprinkle the raspberries evenly over the cakes, and then sprinkle over the sugar.

Bake the cakes at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes. Allow them to cool for ten minutes before inverting the cakes onto a cooling rack and peeling off the wax paper. To freeze, wait till they have cooled to room temperature before wrapping well in plastic wrap and transferring to the freezer.

One year ago: Angel Bread.

So, how about another chard recipe?

The thing about chard is that it keeps growing and growing and growing. Barbara Kingsolver said (in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) that if she had to move to a retirement village and could only grow one vegetable (or maybe it was only one plant), she would choose Rainbow Swiss Chard. I think she might be on to something (actually, I think she’s on to a lot of things, but I won’t go into that right now): it’s pretty in a leafy, green way, it produces excessively and continuously, and it is downright infested with nutrients.

The other day (there’s that phrase again) I clicked on Epicurious and skimmed through the chard recipes, searching for new flavor combinations. It appeared that golden raisins and chard are a standard configuration, and nuts—pine nuts and almonds, especially—are often in attendance.

First, I attempted a pie with chard, pine nuts, golden raisins, and orange zest, and, right before serving, a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. It was good (Mr. Handsome said he though I was on to something) but seemed lacking—I think it might be improved by some ricotta and caramelized onions. Maybe I’ll try it again later.

The second recipe I made was much better, I thought. It was a spin on the chard-golden raisin-nut trio, with some caramelized onions and Parmesan cheese thrown in for excitement. I served it over spaghetti, and the following day the leftovers were eaten atop soba noodles, but it would be equally great over brown rice.

Spaghetti with Swiss Chard, Raisins, and Almonds
Adapted from a recipe on Epicurious that originally came from the February 2008 issue of Gourmet.

The original recipe called for a quarter teaspoon of Spanish smoked paprika. I didn’t have any, so I left it out (and sprinkled in a little regular paprika which did pretty much nothing). If you have the smoked paprika and give it a try, let me know how it turns out. If it’s good, I might have to go out and buy some.

I never weigh my chard; I simply fix a large bowl of the chopped leaves and call it good. If I were forced to measure, I would guess I used about a heaping gallon of leaves, loosely packed.

1 onion, peeled and sliced into thin rings
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds Swiss chard, center ribs discarded and leaves roughly chopped
½ cup golden raisins
½ cup water
1/4 cup chopped raw almonds
1 teaspoon butter
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
salt and pepper, to taste
1 pound spaghetti

Melt the butter in a small skillet and add the almonds. Stir them around until they are golden brown—it should only take a couple minutes. Set them aside.

In a large soup pot, saute the onions in the olive oil for about ten minutes, or until they are starting to brown. Add the chard and toss gently until it has wilted. Add the raisins and the water, put the lid on the kettle, and cook for 7 to 10 minutes over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Season with the salt and pepper.

While the chard is simmering, cook the spaghetti according to package instructions.

To serve, pile a scoop of chard on top of some spaghetti and sprinkle it with cheese and nuts.

Variation: In place of the spaghetti, use cooked brown rice.

About one year ago: Homemade Yogurt.