Cup cake trials

On any given day I take cooking pretty seriously, and baking even more so. But ever since I was entrusted with whipping up cup cakes for a landmark double birthday next month, I have become a cook on a mission.

Cup cakes are undergoing a bit of a renaissance in London. To be fair, I think it all started across the pond, when in a Sex and The City episode the girls ate the pastel delicacies from the Magnolia Bakery on Bleeker Street in Soho. In London, cup cake mecca is the Hummingbird Cafe, so that's the standard I'm measuring myself against. Nothing inferior shall do.

In the past few days I have scoured the Internet far and wide for the prettiest edible rice flowers, pastel-colored muffins cups and elaborate sugarcraft decorations. I have mulled color schemes, weighed the merits of buttercream icing versus instant royal icing, and finally, this morning, made my first practice batch.

I turned to Nigella for a starting-point recipe because, as anyone who's ever baked under her guidance knows, the woman is a genius. She doesn't send you to specialist stores for exotic-yet-superfluous ingredient and deals out just the right amount of advice without unnecessary handholding. Most important of all, we share the same countertop philosophy: pursue maximum effect with minimum effort.


The practice run went well. The recipe for the batter was very easy and yielded excellent results. The cakes, a cross of a pound cake and a victoria sponge, came out moist inside and just crunchy on the edges. I thought the burnt butter buttercream icing I went for a bit too sweet, even though I had only used half of the recommended amount of sugar. Then came the fun bit: the deco. I had silver stars, purple violets and tiny silver sugar drops and tried many different combinations. I don't think I have hit the perfect match just yet though.

I hope to make the icing just a bit zingier in the next batch, perhaps using a drop of lemon juice, or cream cheese instead of butter.

Then perhaps I can start selling them at a stall on Sunday morning at the Columbia Flower Market. Cup cakes, surely, are impervious to the credit crunch.

For cup-cake supplies:

http://http://www.cakescookiesandcraftsshop.co.uk/

The New York Times ran a piece today about "the moment" when newcomers to the big apple suddently realize, after a few weeks, months or even years, that they are becoming New Yorkers, sometimes against their will.

It can be an unexpected, momentous epiphany or take the form of a a series of smaller revelations, but in the end, the article argued, every newcomer experiences that moment where they feel an almost indestructible bond to the city. Sooner or later, the writer concluded, NYC metabolizes the new arrivals, who start acting like true New Yorkers: walking faster, laughing louder, arguing with waiters and generally behaving rather more assertively than they might have where they came from.

http://http//www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/nyregion/27arrival.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin

The article got me thinking about my own moment. Was there a time, I asked myself, when I suddenly realized that London, despite its perpetually cloudy summers, unhealthy drinking habits and overheated transport system, struck me as home?

I came to the conclusion that in my case there was a series of moments. And they certainly didn't happen in my first year, when disorientated half the time I fumbled my way around new neighborhoods, new friends, a new workplace but also a new home and a new marriage and found it hard to get into the groove of things. But it came anyway. The first time was when, on vacation on the Italian island of Sardinia, in the Mediterranean, I woke up to a warm, cloudless and windless day, with nothing else to do than lay on an uncrowded beach for hours with a good novel, and thought not 'I am lucky to be alive' but 'i can't believe it's the second week in a row I won't get to read my Sunday Times.'

I know. Sad.

In the months that followed I can recall many small moments and gradual changes that would now make me a stranger in my hometown, Paris, if I ever were to go back. For a while, I developed an inexplicable addiction to Starbucks' cheese and marmite --the yeasty brown stuff in a jar-- toasted sandwich. I did try to rein in my unsatiable hunger for this evil sarny, but still had it as a treat about once a week. Worse, I fantasized about it the way French women are only ever supposed to fantasize about miniature La Duree macaroons. At my desk, at 9 a.m., on the tube on my way home, in the bath before dinner.

Another moment happened during my second spring here, lulled into a false sense of optimism by a unseasonably warm summer the year before, Alessandro and I bought a portable BBQ for our balcony. Then started monitoring the weather forecast the way the FBI keeps tabs on the health of a U.S. president.

Since then, my condition has irremediably worsened. I now queue at the bus stop (behavior unheard of among French citizens), buy silly cards to accompany birthday gifts, eat root vegetables from struggling UK farms, carry a foldeable umbrella everywhere I go and say 'fab' and 'lovely' to everything. I put my luggage in the boot, complain when my plans go pear shaped and take out the rubbish.

Still I'll never forget my four years in NYC. Those were awsome.

Theaterland

I have become one of these people whose life is planned so long in advance that they can never tell you whether they are free on a particular night without consulting their diary first.

It all happened quite recently and I blame London's theaterland. During my first three years in the city I rarely went to plays or concerts. There was so much excitement in my life and so many new rhythms to adapt to that I didn't feel like I had the energy. Money was also a deterrent as good tickets to a top play usually set you back at least 40 pounds (more if it's a musical) and I was still getting over the fact that lunch --namely a sandwich and a bottle of water-- cost as much as a decent bottle of wine at a supermarket in France. Still, Alessandro and I made it to two shows in our first year: A Scottish play at the Donmar and a Berlioz requiem at the Royal Albert Hall. We didn't understand 20% of the former and walked out from the latter on a rainy, grey and windy Sunday afternoon, nearly suicidal. That's when I understood that there is something to be said in favor of light-hearted entertainment. The performance arts are like relationships in some ways, you see . Yes you have to work at it a bit, and yes you sometimes have to close your eyes on the annoying stuff to appreciate the luminous bits. But if it is THAT painful, well, it's not working.

While these poor choices put us off for a while, I still felt a longing to watch a play at times and finally decided to go without my other half on another dreary winter afternoon last year. I bought discounted tickets to Frost-Nixon, a political play warmly recommended by my friend Abby. And just like that, I was hoooked again. I came home and started avidly reading reviews of plays currently showing, made a small selection and got on the various theater Web sites full of hope and anticipation. How naive.

I couldn't get a ticket to a single one of the plays I had set my heart on. Never mind I thought, I shall be more organized. Next time I read a review about a great play, I shall waste no time and book right away.

More disappointment follows.

I couldn't for the life of me understand how other theater fans in the city could consistently beat me to the reservation game. I wasn't trying to snare two pit seats to a U2 concert in 2020 for god's sake. Only when I studied the question more carefully and discussed it with Abby, an old hand at the game, did I uncover the rather prosaic explanation: membership.

The deal goes like this. You pay a small, or in the case of some organizations not-so-small, fee to become a member of your favorite production company. In exchange, booking opens to you about two weeks ahead of the general public. What this means, however, is that you can NEVER wait until the press reviews to book a play at one of the big London theater institutions, such as the National Theater and the Donmar.

The other issue I have with this system is that it creates a two-tier society, to borrow European politicians' favorite expression. On one side you get the theater equivalent of Apple devotees, committed enough to spend hours researching the upcoming season, subscribe to a flurry of industry newsletters, and affluent enough to afford membership fees at half a dozen insitutions. These guys see everything and get the best seats at the lowest price. On the other side you have normal folks with a busy job, a family and no inclination to plan their social life like a spinster. These are the guys that must be won over. Yet their life is made impossible by the reservation system.

I don't know that there is a miracle solution. But perhaps opening only half of the performances to members could be a start. In the meantime I shall be the one sending emails informing (girl)friends that Jude Law will be Hamlet at the Donmar next summer and well, sorry, it's sold out already.

What's hot in the next few months then:

Oedipus with Ralph Fiennes at the National

Ivanov directed by Kenneth Brannagh at the Donmar

Madame de Sade with Judie Dench at the Donmar

Gethsemane, a thinfully disguised play about the Blair years at the National (You can't book that yet unless you're a member.)

More to come later.

In praise of the audio guide

London is in the throes of Hadrien mania.

The exhibit arrived at the British museum about a month ago and you'd have to live in a parallel universe not to have heard about it. The reviews were unanimously flattering. The Sunday Times called the show "an exemplary piece of storytelling, achieved with exactly the right mix of telling objects and great art." Now, I do place quite a bit of faith in the Sunday Times, which Alessandro often teases me about, so it was my intention to drag us there this weekend, until good friends and ardent museum lovers discouraged us during dinner at their home on Friday. To their mind, the show was a huge disappointment, little more than a long series of busts -- the sight of which left them unmoved and unimpressed. Their lack of excitement, one of them ventured, could perhaps be traced to their nationality -- as Italians they were used to being surrounded by such wonders in piazzas, churches and inside every town hall or public building in the country. Seeing them lined up inside a museum, deprived of their environment, seemed to have stripped them of their extraordinary beauty.

Their comments brought me back to a conclusion I have often drawn at the end of an exhibit for which I decided to skimp and not rent the audio guide. Yes, the bulky walkie-talkie look-alike makes you look silly. Yes, it means you grind to a halt in front of exactly the same 20 paintings or sculptures as your fellow audio-guide zombies. And yes they are expensive (about 3.50 pounds in London on top of 8 to 10 pounds for access to a show). But when they are well conceived, as was the case for instance for the Tate Modern's Louise Bourgeois show six months ago, they are truly enlightening, adding historical context, linking the art work to events in the life of the artist at the time, stressing its preoccupations, delving on technique etc...In some cases these bijoux even include excerpts from a conversation with the artist himself or herself.

Which brings me to the National Gallery's Radical Light show that Alessandro and I attended at the weekend, on the recommendation of the Hadrien critics. It only runs until the first week of September and occupies a mere five room at the museum but is well worth a visit, if only to learn of the political turmoil that haunted the north of Italy at the turn of the century. Italy, which only became a nation in 1861, was behind neighbors like France, Germany and the U.K. in terms of industrialization at the time. Even the north of the country, where industrial wealth is concentrated today, was still deeply agrarian. The work and life conditions of its poor left much to be desired.

One the most moving paintings of the exhibit showed young Italian women bent over as they picked rice, ankle-deep in stagnant water contaminated with a wealth of diseases, including malaria. Their life expectancy, the audio guide helpfully noted, was no more than 25 years old.

Many of the painters whose work was shown (including Plinio Nomellini and Emilio Longoni) devoted much of their career to the depiction of the growing social injustices gripping the country. To bring about change, they employed new, modern artistic techniques, focused mainly on the use of light. The result: some works of fascinating beauty and airiness, reminiscent in some ways of the impressionists. How do I know-- and more surprisingly --remember all this? Ask the audio guide.

The show is at the National Gallery until September 7
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/radicallight/default.htm

Upon leaving the National Gallery in search of a hasty Sunday lunch, we stumbled upon the Olympics handover celebrations in Trafalgar Square. The crowds weren't huge yet and we easily
made our way back to our faithful No. 15 bus, but not before briefly considering joining the celebrations (something unheard of given Alessandro's hatred of crowds), perhaps being handed a ridiculously small flag ornate with the horrendous, fit-inducing logo London selected for the 2012 Olympics...Despite the throngs, despite the logo and despite artificiality of the celebration, we were oddly moved, and proud too, that the Olympics should come to our adoptive home in four years. And to our part of town too!

Back home, eating a plate of steaming gnocchi and home-made pesto, we watched our new mayor Boris Johnson, clumsily taking hold of, and later waving the enormous Olympic flag. It was uncomfortable television as Boris looked oddly out of place, his shapeless suit flapping in sync with his blond hair as Chinese officials watched in disarray...But you know what, we beamed anyway.

Life in London can be daunting.

I moved to the city in June of 2004 from Manhattan, NYC and it is only now, more than four years after I first turned the key into a small flat in the heart of East London, that I am starting to feel at home. There is an expression in English for which we have no equivalent in French and which brilliantly captures my feelings about the British capital: It grows on you.

But it certainly wasn’t love at first sight. Architecturally, it initially struck me as a rather haphazard mix of grand old buildings and terrifyingly ugly newer ones, with no perceivable theme threading the various neighborhoods together.

Among the constructions that most offended my sensibility at first were the concrete residential tower blocks omnipresent in the poorer parts of town and a flurry of dreary-looking, bulky, multi-level art complexes like the Barbican.

Later on I learned that these visual warts are actually cherished examples of “Brutalist” architecture, and that in Tower Hamlets, the rather looked-down-upon borough where I live, some residents have filed petitions to safeguard the eye sores from demolition. I say bring on the bulldozers.

So you see where I’m going here. London is no Rome or Paris (and I say this as someone who hasn’t lived in the French capital for close to a decade now and entertains no return fantasy.)

But there are beautiful, ambitious and sometimes whimsical edifices sprinkled around town too. I would argue, however, that it’s not these individual landmark buildings, such as St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London or the Tate Modern, that eventually win you over to the city. Instead, as my sister put it when she came to visit for her birthday last weekend, it’s the “feeling of space.”

This feeling of space is difficult to convey in writing, but it is a very special attribute of London and makes it entirely different from New York, Hong-Kong, Singapore or even European capitals like Paris and Milan.

On reflection, I think two features of London help make it seem breezier than other big cities: the size of its buildings and the parks.

In most London neighborhoods, the tallest constructions are often only two stories high. Even in East London, which has received more than its fair share of brutalist gems, neat rows of stocky and humble-looking Victorian houses have survived the bombings of WWII and, more recently, the assault of hungry developers. Their fighting spirit it still palpable today, as they stand tightly together, a meager but tenacious barrier to the tide of luxury high rises spreading from Canary Wharf.

The result is that there, and in many other parts of London, you can see the sky without risking a torticollis.

And then there are the parks. And please, don’t try to argue with me that Hyde Park rules. It may be big, it may be central and it may be loved by tourists but it has always seemed a bit soulless to me.

So next time you’re in London, try visiting Hampstead Heath and its wonderful bathing ponds to the north west or take a stroll in Victoria Park, to the east. And if you insist on remaining in central London then explore Regent’s Park, its rose garden, ponds and zoo. Have coffee at the tennis club and forget about the traffic humming in the distance. From the northern extremity of the park you can actually bike along the Regents Canal all the way to the Limehouse marina, only about a mile from Canary Wharf, where many of the big banks have set up shop over the past five years.

Once you get there you will see what I mean about the importance of being able to see the sky from the sidewalk.