Apple Spice Cake

Most of the time, cake is just not as tasty as pie. Cake is too cakey. It is often too dry, too sugary, too dense, too buttery, and too-too. Pie, on the other hand, is perfection in my world. It has a perfect balance of crust and filling, flaky and sweet, and it just gets better with age. My ratio of pie to cake baking is probably three to one. It takes a special cake to win my heart over a pie and with this apple cake, I just might have one.

Therefore, I wish to prove that all that cake discrimination is mere stereotype. Enter this exquisitely balanced apple spice cake and caramel sauce. An old family recipe, this cake was adapted and edited by my mom over the many years that she baked this for her family. I remember this cake in both cake pan and Bundt pan form, with and without nuts, with and without caramel. Many apple cakes and many tests on just the right amount of fat, sugar, and spice finally coalesce into the wonderful recipe that I share today.

Glühwein

Today, in the spirit of traversing half of this country in under 6 hours, having breakfast in North Carolina and supper in Arkansas, recovering from an incense-filled midnight service (complete with Victoria's O Magnum Mysterium and Sweelinck's Hodie Christus natus est, no less), little sleep but plenty of bourbon, I bring to the table - literally and figuratively - Glühwein.

I also recently read a sentence in The New Yorker that was about twenty lines long. It was very crass, grammatically inappropriate, but my excuse for the convoluted statement above. To put it more succinctly: I sang a service at midnight, hopped on a plane to Arkansas, and started thinking about this Glühwein that I made a couple of weeks ago. 

Rugelach

The first time I made rugelach was a couple of years ago during an intense Christmas cookie baking bug. I made several different types of cookies over the span of just a few days. The spread was pretty resplendent: snickerdoodles, cardamom crescents, cookie pralines, gingerbread, peanut butter fudge, and almond bark pretzels all showed up at one point or another over one Christmas week. It makes me weary (and a little sick) to think about it now. The experience was definitely interesting, but I've never had that kind of cookie baking bug since.

My favorite cookie to materialize during this week was rugelach, a twisty, croissant-like cookie flecked with raisins and nuts, and sweet with apricot jam. Rugelach first appeared in Jewish baking traditions in Central Europe sometime in the 18th or 19th century. The cookie evolved out of the viennoiserie of baked goods that flourished throughout the 19th century in Vienna. Of course I can't resist viennoiserie almost just as much as I can't resist typing it out or thinking about incorporating the concept into my dissertation. Croissants, pain au chocolat, and other twisty, braided sweet goods also fall under the category of viennoiserie. It's a French concept that is derived from Vienna coffeehouse fare that I love so well. Rugelach belongs to the category of viennoiserie because of its croissant-like shape and delicate appeal. Modern rugelach cookies are mostly baked, but some Jewish traditions opt to fry theirs in oil, thereby appropriating this delicious cookie to the season of Hanukkah.