vegan baker

I know I ranted against Slow Food only a few months ago, but I am terribly excited about Slow Food Nation. This is the first big meeting of the Slow Food organization in the US.  I attended the first big meeting of Slow Food in the world, in Turin, Italy, in 2004. I didn’t go out of my way to be there, but rather accidentally was exposed to an amazing culture of food-obsession.

Yes, I think Slow Food has a lot of goals that are opposite to ours, and it bothers me to hear about bringing back an heirloom chicken in the face of all those overbred, beakless wonders whose lives are only pain, and Slow Food people are generally big jerks about veganism. Yes, yes. There are tons of reasons why I shouldn’t be excited about this.

But they have a youth convention intended to start a dialogue about the future of food culture in the US, and I think there should be a vegan there. A vegan who loves good food, old techniques, and new science. (Me!) If this is about starting a discussion, we weirdos should be at the table, and we should be searching the Ark of Taste booths for delicious heirloom foods which even we can eat. While there is clearly a natural tension between their old-worldiness and our new-fangled morals, I still want to be there to glean whatever I can and act like a good example of what I am… vegan and food-loving.

For Memorial Day, I wanted to express a leftist’s frustration with our complete lack of attention to the war, and I wanted to do it via pastry. I am undecided on whether the medium is offensive to the message (as it certainly isn’t the message here), but my attempt was only moderately successful, so the point might be moot.

I was going to do the POW/MIA logo on a cake. Unfortunately, I realized about two minutes into decorating that most of my piping tips were in storage, so the detail work was going to be impossible. My father thinks the resulting cake still looks like the logo (he’s an ex-Marine), but I think it looks more like a strangely pointy penny.

This one goes on the list of my all-time worst icing jobs, but I have to put it on the internet because I spent all kinds of time thinking about making it. My stepmother gave me a glass cake stand with a grape cluster motif stamped into it, and I made a cake tribute to its cartoony pattern.

I spent all my cooking time today making surprisingly labor-intensive Myanmarese tofu, so when it was time to actually assemble cake, frosting, leaves, stems and millions of grapes, I was well down the road from Meticulous, near the turn-off for Throwing-It-All-Away-Right-Now. I had intended to transfer the cake to the stand itself, but when I made my attempt, the cake threatened suicide at the end of the spatula. So be it. You can see the stand in the bottom bit of the photo. The cake is white with grape jelly filling (of course), and the frosting is thoroughly mediocre. Which isn’t stopping me from eating it right now.

This is exceedingly obvious (to nerds), but I know how I want to do both the Fig Newton and the Liebniz cookies: differences in notation!

The simplified history lesson here is that Newton and Liebniz developed calculus simultaneously, in opposite directions (one dealt with the infinity that is constant growth, one dealt with the infinity which is increasing tininess.) They each developed a system of notation for their new science. Liebniz pretty much ended up winning, since we use d’s and lowercase Greek deltas to talk about calculus these days. But Newton has his own notation, the cornerstones of which are “dot x” and “dot y”, x’s and y’s with little round hats. I am going to make a delicious fig-filled Italian cookie dot x style, and I am going to do it with nerdy pizzazz!