Marmalade Pantry Cake
Picture it: Vicenza, 2017.
I’m in my kitchen, days before my infamous Kentucky Derby party*, making modjeskas. Candymaking is a house-wrecking process. No matter how many times I do it, a fine layer of sugary mist somehow covers everything. I go to pee: candy. I walk in my closet: candy. Front door: candy. Candy everywhere. It’s gross. What I’m trying to explain is that my home is as dirty as I will ever allow it to become. But no matter, because I’m going to clean it very, very well the following morning because my new in-laws are coming to visit. I have met them just three times prior to this, and I desperately want them to like me.
So anyway, I’m standing in my kitchen and the phone rings and it’s my mother-in-law (truly one of the world’s loveliest women, I mean that sincerely).
Her: “Hey! We’re at the Venice airport!”
Me: “Oh, great! I thought you were leaving out of LAX, but safe travels!”
Her: “No, we’re in the Venice airport.”
Time, in this moment, comes to a full stop. I’m covered in still-liquid caramel, and just panicked. I stammer out something to the effect of “be there in an hour” (generous, considering that implies everything goes just precisely right since it’s 75 kilometers), and hang up.
I scream, (prophetically I now realize), “we are getting a divorce” and throw the spatula down. “Great,” I think. Now I have to clean that up., too.”
I call my then-partner, who is several hundred miles away on a work trip, and seethe. He had gotten the dates wrong and, yep, his parents are here. Here-here. Halfway around the world here. He apologizes, but I am unreachable in my anger and terror. I call my own mother, who I assume will have some solutions. At this juncture, I am absolutely hyperventilating, crying that now that my house is so disgusting, they’ll never like me and and and and and— she broke in, probably frustrated, which is understandable in this situation.
“Okay, do you have two friends?”
No, I wailed. I am friendless and alone.
“You’re hysterical. Take a shower and call me back.”
I am nothing if not a diligent rule follower, so I scrape the detritus of amateur confectionary off my arms and legs, then redial Louisville.
“What you’re going to do is call two friends. Have one come over and clean your house just a little bit. Have her lower the lights and give everything a once over. Have the other one go to the store and get the things for a cheese plate plus a bottle or two of wine. Ask her to set it out. Go get them from the airport.”
It is well and truly embarrassing to call your only* two friends, an award-winning photojournalist and an optometrist, to clean your house and do your grocery shopping, but you know what? I did. And they did. And it was not a huge deal. My in-laws, to my knowledge, were never aware that my pantry was bare and the house a pigsty, and it all worked out fine. But still.
When I confronted my then-partner about how humiliated I was to ask this of my friends because of his scheduling mistake, he said something that transformed every relationship in my life.
“Kirsten, what the fuck do you think the point of having friends is? If you can’t ask them a favor when you’re in a tight spot, they aren’t your friends. It’s fine. Friends aren’t just people you go to dinner with.”
This, as the kids say, hit different. I’ve always wanted to ask for as little as possible from other people; it’s impossible to be disappointed in others when your expectations are very low. I worry constantly about being a burden or nuisance to nearly everyone in my life (this includes you, yes, you).
So when, three years later, he unilaterally took a sledgehammer to our life, it was somewhere well beyond the bounds of irony that his wisdom brought me the most solace. As I was moving out, I couldn’t bear to actually do the last part of it, the part where you put your toothbrush in your duffel bag and strip the sheets off the bed and put your key in the mailbox. The part where you’ve well and truly done everything you possibly could and failed.
From Charlotte’s porch on her birthday.
When my friend Charlotte called and offered to drive the eight hours to Kansas City between shifts as a nurse during a global pandemic to help me close the door and lock it behind me, my impulse was to wave her away. Then I heard his voice reminding me the actual point of having friends and said yes.
She rolled up the next day in her little Honda Fit and jammed the things the movers left behind into the trunk at increasingly baroque angles. She didn’t flinch when I scream-cried in the street outside my house, sobbing that I couldn’t bear to be thrown away like so much garbage. Charlotte just bundled me and my dogs into my car and told me to meet her in Saint Louis because we were going to meet our friend Amy and I needed to be calmed down by then because I would frighten Amy’s baby. Somehow, somehow, this worked. She never mentioned that she had worked a full shift before she drove to my house, nor that she had a full shift the next day.
When it was her birthday a few weeks later, I wanted to make her a cake, which is an offer I will always make to anyone I love. I had barely moved into my new home. I didn’t have a lot of groceries yet, but I wanted to try and give her some small token of appreciation. I asked her what kind of cake she wanted, and she shrugged. “I like everything. Maybe chocolate?”
I made her this chocolate-orange pantry cake and, like Nigella promises in her book, she asked for the recipe immediately. I’ve made it again since, and lo, those people wanted the recipe, too.
It’s low and flat and humble, a friendly and approachable cake that asks little of you but gives much in return. You probably have all the things you need for it in your house right this minute. It took me exactly one pot (that’s right, not even a bowl) and it’s so, so good. Much like the coffee-walnut cookies from Monday, it’s not really that sweet, and you can dress it up or down as much as you like. I did not read the instructions very well on this recipe, but it’s incredibly forgiving, so small errors like using a ten-inch springform pan ended up being just fine. In the future, I might try this with lemon marmalade and lemon zest, or throw in a tiny bit of ground ginger and cloves. Truly, it’s really elastic, and unlike candy, makes no mess at all.
*It’s an absolute banger. Someone vomits every year. Might it be you in 2022?
*I loved Italy so much, and I had more than two friends, but I was pretty lonely and will probably detail that at length at some other time.
Marmalade Pantry Cake
barely adapted from How to Be a Domestic Goddess
serves 6-8
Ingredients
1/2 cup/one stick/110g unsalted butter
4 ounces/110g of bittersweet chocolate (about a 1/2 cup if you have tiny little chips or something; in any event, I recommend breaking your chocolate up a bit so it melts evenly and quickly)
1 1/3 cups of orange marmalade (I had a homemade jar of unknown origin, but I think the Bonne Maman one would do the trick; don’t substitute jam or jelly because you want this to be a nice, thin texture and that’ll be too dense. This came to 420g, but I think you’d be fine with it being just…about? that?)
1/2 cup/100g white sugar
pinch of salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup/70g all-purpose flour
powdered sugar
orange zest (totally optional)
creme fraiche or whipped cream (also totally optional)
To Do:
Preheat the oven to 350F/175C.
Get a medium-large pot and put it on your stove at low heat. Let the butter melt slowly while you gather up everything else. Once it’s liquid but not yet browning, pull it off the heat and stir in the chocolate. In the order listed above, stir in the marmalade, sugar, salt, and eggs. Even as it cools, you risk scrambling the eggs if you don’t add more room temperature items. If you’re REALLY anxious about this, take about a tablespoon of the butter/chocolate/marmalade/sugar/salt mixture and stir it into the eggs to temper them before adding the eggs to the rest of it. I didn’t and it was fine, but hey, maybe your risk tolerance is lower than mine. Last, mix in the flour a little at a time.
Pour this into a buttered and floured eight-inch springform pan and bake. Start checking in on it at the 45 minute mark. My oven is a little slow and it took close to an hour for a toothpick to come out clean. Let it sit for ten minutes before you release it from the bonds of its pan to cool on a wire rack. Now comes the fun part. Since this cake is not really much to look at, you get to dress it up. I got a sieve and shook powdered sugar on it like a little blanket of snow, but you could also lay a stencil on there and make a pattern. Somewhere in one of the boxes I had not yet unpacked, I have some of these from Israel that say יום הולדת שמח (HAPPY BIRTHDAY), but as I covered previously, I had not yet unpacked. You can serve this warm or cold, but either way, I like it with a dollop of creme fraiche or unsweetened whipped cream, then a bit of orange zest to finish.