Snow. Hazelnut cake. Letting go.

Travel

26 Dec

Snow came on Christmas Eve, like drawing in reverse: the white background came down and laced itself between the forms. It erased all extraneous lines and marks. The vineyard especially becomes its own abstract sheet music—a stave of trellis wire, the cursive and curlicues of the vines against white parchment. Little flecks of ink are really small birds and blackened seed heads of Queen Anne’s Lace.

I made Nigel Slater’s Hazelnut cake (sans coffee).

Hazelnuts

Toast gently in a low oven or dry pan. Rub away any loose papery brown skin in a clean tea towel. Grind half course, half like fine sand.

Butter and sugar

Cream together butter and sugar. Take the butter out a few hours ahead. It should still be cool, not sweaty or translucent, but soft enough for a butter knife to ease through without resistance.

Eggs

Farm eggs make the cake a beautiful golden color. Break them into the butter sugar mixture one at a time alternately with a spoonful of the following flour mixture.

Self-raising flour

To every cup of flour add one and a half teaspoons baking powder and a half teaspoon salt.

Thoroughly, but gently, fold in the flour mixture and nuts and turn out into a buttered springform pan. Bake at 325 until the center no longer wobbles and the cake is golden brown.

Organic hazels are hard to find. The chemically managed orchards of the Willamette Valley are black with death: the ground below the trees is scorched with weed killer, it’s dark and empty under the unnaturally high canopy.

The irony is hazels grow wild in Oregon. Requiring no herbicides, and untroubled by disease, they are beautiful little shrubs about ten feet high, multi-stemmed and bearing tiny catkins that come in shades from corn-gold to mauve. The catkins loosen around February, unlocking their scales, they become flexible tassels that shake and shimmy, dusting yellow pollen on the early spring winds. The nuts inevitably go to the squirrels and are so small that harvesting them would be arduous anyway. But it means cultivated varieties do well here. I planted hazelnut ten year ago which is now a tree that shades my house.

The hazel is a tree associated with the realm of Faerie. Along with oak and hawthorn it is meant to mark a portal, a liminal space between worlds, a space of magic which can sometimes be dark or threatening. But more often, Faerie is mischievous.* The hazels that grow around the farm are collaborative plants. They weave in amongst other trees, they are content with a little shade. They are the classic coppice tree, being happy to be cut to the ground on a seven year cycle, throwing up multiple new shoots that grow to a good size to be harvested for poles. Counterintuitively, the cutting of the tree in this manner prolongs its life. That’s rather magical. And the nuts are full of nutrition and delicate, fragrant oil.

I think I love baking because once you put it in the oven there’s nothing else you can do. You await the results. This is really how life works. And all creative endeavor. You envision an outcome then you start inquiring into the material world — you look for the right nuts, you toast them — you burn them, you start over… Eventually you drive the thing toward ‘cake-ness’ but at many points along the way you have to let go —- Pay attention to your materials: the ingredients, equipment, timing, and the transformation of the oven. But don’t push too hard, trust that vision of cake.