It's My Birthday and I'll Bake Something Healthful If I Want To

Today I am 45 years old and damned happy about it.  As is my wont, I made myself a little cake.

My true love, devoted servant of that slut Little Debbie, disdains my birthday cake.  He says it takes too much chewing, and that it reminds him of the scrubby sponges I buy for use around the kitchen and bathroom.  He has even gone so far as to say that he might rather eat one of those because at least they have no calories.

My true love does not have my memories.  When I was a child, my fabulous older sister (a high-powered financial guru who dropped everything in her Northern California life to come to Massachusetts and be my surrogate mom for a week while I was having brain surgery two weeks ago) used to take me everywhere she went in Southern California.  Okay, maybe not quite everywhere, but to all the beaches and all the little health food stores and snack stands sprinkled along their edges, places run by hippies that sold things like homemade whole grain fruit bars and date shakes.  This cake, which is based as usual on a recipe my mother left me but converted into something that might actually be good for you, is a nostalgic tribute to those excursions, and those treats.

It is not for people who prefer refined white sugar and light, fluffy, factory-produced cakes of even texture that require nothing of the devourer but a willing pancreas.

It is also not for cats.  Sam, here doing his best impression of a Steinlen painting while watching hopefully for rodents, wishes I had made it out of beef.  Or filled it with live mice that ran out when I cut into it.

Tough luck, guys.  And yay, more for me.

Malibu Summer Memory Date-Nut Loaf Cake

(all ingredients organically grown, of course, where they are the kind that are grown at all)

2 C whole wheat flour
1 T sodium-free baking powder
1 C pitted dates
grated peel of one whole orange or lime
½ C honey, molasses, and maple syrup in roughly equal portions (because I didn't have a full ½ C of any one of them, but drips and drabs of all three)
½ C rapadura sugar
2 jumbo eggs
two big handfuls of pecans, crumbled in your fists
1 t cinnamon
1 t allspice
1 t cardamom
½ sea salt
1/3 C unsaturated, no-trans-fat, all-vegetable shortening
scraped out guts of one whole vanilla bean
¾ C original flavor soy milk

1.  Preheat oven to 325°F.

2.  Grease a loaf-shaped baking dish with that same non-threatening shortening, and line the bottom with some lovely brown parchment made of recycled paper.

3.  Measure flour, baking powder, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, and salt into a small bowl and whisk together until they are evenly blended.

4.  Chop dates and, in another small bowl, mix with crumbled nuts and grated citrus peel until everything is evenly distributed throughout, and set aside.

5.  In a big bowl,  cream rapadura and shortening.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Stir in fruit-nut-peel mixture, vanilla and honey-molasses-maple syrup mixture until everything is pretty evenly blended.

6.  Stir in dry ingredients, alternating with soy milk, blending until evenly mixed.

7.  Pour into loaf dish and bake for 90 minutes or until tester shows dry.  (Check at 1 hour.)

Friday evening, when I was denied my follow-up appointment with my brain surgeon because of an insurance mix-up (more on that tomorrow, after I have gone to my replacement appointment and finally found out what the heck that thing was), we went to the mall and bought an ice cream maker.  I was going to make my first batch of vanilla ice cream last night, but my true love was cold, so we had Mexican hot cocoa instead.  (Incidentally, we consumed this while watching a foreign movie with subtitles, something I couldn't do a month ago.)  If I am very, very virtuous, my first frozen dessert, just to complement this delicious, moist, dense, healthful -- and yes, highly textured -- cake, will be nonfat frozen maple vanilla yogurt.  If I'm not feeling so virtuous, it will be vanilla ice cream made with naughty, naughty whole cream.

Honestly, I could go either way.

Comments

[Jana]

Happy Birthday!!!!
(I don't think I can even wait for my birthday to try your recipe--do you think I could substitute butter for the shortening? I don't care for shortening, but I lurves butter).

CatGirl says that Sam is looking positively plump these days, btw. :)

[laurie]

Happy, happy, happiest birthday (belatedly)! My emails to you have been bouncing back so please don't think I'm ignoring yours!
Thinking of you today and keeping everything crossed.
And the healthy cake? I would eat it with you. If you let me. It might cancel out all the bad chocolate I ate yesterday. ;-)

[leslie]

Happy Birthday! Your cake looks yummy to me - what's not to like with that mix of spices and sweetener!

Annoying that you have to wait another day to find out what's what.

[Sara]

Ladies, thank you!

Jana -- You know, I don't know. The original recipe called for shortening, which to my mother meant old school Crisco, it of the congealed, saturated, and hydrogenated fat. Nasty stuff. But this is already a very dense cake, and every time I have substituted butter for shortening in a cake or quick bread recipe, the results have been heavier and drier than when I used shortening or vegetable (esp. soy) margarine. I do not know why this is; must be something about the particular molecular structure of each kind of fat. Or something.

Also, though, I was aiming this time for a truly healthful product, just for kicks. Butter, as wonderful as it is (especially compared to shortening, which ideally neither adds nor subtracts flavor, only creates texture), is not as easy on the bloodstream as the particular shortening I use, the one made by Spectrum Organics exclusively out of non-hydrogenated, organically grown, pressed palm oil.

But hey, all that said, do let me know how it comes out if you decide to try it.

Naughty. It will come out naughty. ;)

About Sam, yes! Thank you, CatGirl, for appreciating his weight gain! He is not a big kitty, and he will probably never be a fat kitty, but he has gained a third of his weight since his treatment and is now capable of making himself round, as pictured. Before he was all points and lines, even in this same pose. :)

Laurie -- Hey, c'mon over! There's plenty left! hahahahaha

I am perturbed to hear about people having difficulty with my e-mail server. I did, however, get your note yesterday, and thank you for it. Unfortunately, I am still quite behind on correspondence -- and blog reading! -- and now that I'm off decadron, I actually get tired, too, like a real surgical patient. So I keep dropping into these six-hour naps which are definitely putting a crimp on my productivity.

I still have one more conversation about the findings and future plans to have with my surgeon, but I did find out what that thing was this morning. It was not a nice little meningioma, as many expected and all of us hoped. No. It was in fact a big fat melanoma met.

But, shoot, it was on the outside, they really do think they got it all, and for the moment, there don't appear to be any more in my brain. So things don't completely suck, even though this is some scary-ass sh*t.

Like how good my vocabulary got after I had my brain tumor removed? Nothing but eloquence here, all right... ;)

And incidentally, except for the stuff grown by slave labor, particularly child slave labor, there is no such thing as bad chocolate, only bad chocolatiers. Also, it has more antioxidants than anything on the planet, so it is medically necessary for metastatic cancer patients to eat as much chocolate as possible, the darker the better.

Feel free to come to me for all your rationalization needs. ;)

Leslie -- Thanks for your good wishes, and for appreciating my cooking if only pictorially! (The cardamom was my idea. I also plan to make cardamom ice cream at some point. Mmmmm.)

The wait was tolerable. Whatever it was it was still going to have been today, and there wasn't a thing we could have done about it that minute anyway, if ever. Besides, as it turned out, going to buy an ice cream maker was way more fun than sitting in a doctor's office getting bad news.

I will write more about this after I have spoken to the surgeon, but seriously, I am still the luckiest woman alive. As melanoma mets in the brain go...

Pardon me while I don't complete that sentence.

[patry francis]

The cake sounds marvelous. It reminds me of the wonderful muffins you brought to my reading. So thrilled to hear that you are at home baking, celebrating, and altogether thriving.

Happy, happy birthday!

[Sara]

Thank you, Patry! I hope you are, too. I'll visit your blog tomorrow when I spend the day reading other people.

xoxo

[The Goldfish]

Happy Birthday Sara!

Bad news about the melanoma met, but yeah, to have had that in there and got it out is very fortunate indeed. Unrefutable proof of the benefits of a diet rich in chocolate. ;-)

I like the way that whenever you post a recipe I have to look up at least one ingredient to find out what it is.

[Sara]

hee hee hee -- Which did you have to look up this time? Were my links helpful?

Yes, seriously lucky about the melanoma, which not only was growing on the outside of my chocolate-fortified brain, not deep inside, but also had no snakey bits, had a definite self-containing sort of skin of its own, and came out pretty much as my true love described it, "like a muffin out of a pan," with just a tiny bit sticking to the pan which the doctor feels confident he completely eradicated with fire (but the term he used was "coagulated" and the process is sort of like cautery, not like the torch one uses for crème brulée).

Most people with melanoma find out they have tumors in their brains and it's their death sentence, and it's a very quickly looming one. No one working on my case believes that this is going to be my story at this time.

I think I feel like someone who's just walked through a minefield without knowing it and then been told.

[Michelle]

I hope you got the birthday card from Luna and Stella; I had to send it to True Love's address b/c my messages to you keep coming back. Sniff sniff.

Hope you enjoyed that cake. I sure would have.

[The Goldfish]

Today was rapadura sugar and yes, your links are always helpful.

I really enjoyed your true love's "Muffin from a Teflon pan" description. Quite the wordsmith, isn't he? :-)

[Sugared Harpy]

Happy Birthday Darling!!!

[Penny Richards]

Oooh, belated happy birthday--that cake looks spectacular to me. Little Debbie, bah, no comparison. They're like cakes from different planets--yours from the much nicer planet.

[Amorette]

Happy birthday :) I didn't know our birthdays were so close together.

Mexican hot chocolate is the best stuff ever. Have you tried it with three or four pequin chilies thrown in? Excellent.

Cardamom ice cream is great, too. One of my favorite desserts is rasmalai, which is brimming with cardamom. Have you tried it?

[Sara]

Thank you, ladies!

Michelle (Bleeding Espresso) -- Thanks in part to you, all systems are go again! As you know, my e-mail has been switched over to GMail for its POP server, so everybody should get through just fine again. Couldn't have even known to do this without your help and patience.

Goldfish -- Yes. You can see why Harvard Extension wanted him. ;) My latest post publishes all those notes, with his permission. I really think the world needs to know how great he is.

Melissa (Sugared Harpy) -- Thank you, sweetie! I am really, really glad to be here! (And soon I will be in UR blog, makin' comments back to U. heh heh)

Penny -- Thank you! I think my planet is way better than Little Debbie's, too. Little Debbie and her dance Hostess cousin oughta be ashamed of themselves, leading the pancreases of America astray like that. ;)

We will not speak of the manufacturers of chocolate bunnies who obviously have someone in this house (cough cough) in their thrall. We will not.

Amorette -- Because of drugs I was on and my true love's sleep disorder (which disagrees with alcohol), we didn't do it this way, but my favorite way to serve Mexican hot chocolate (for two) is as follows:

First melt one circular tablet of your favorite brand into two big mugs' worth of milk. Then throw it in the blender and beat for 10 seconds, or until it's good and foamy and well mixed. Pour one shot of Kahlua into each of two big mugs, then pour the blended cocoa over that. Top with whipped cream. Sprinkle cinnamon and bitter cocoa to taste over the whipped cream.

So good. So freakin' good. I'll bet cardamom would work in nicely, too.

Sadly, we have middle-aged tummies which are rebelling against any even slightly hot peppers we introduce them to. But the pequins sound delicious.

As for rasmali, I have eaten it and agree that it is awesome. I usually go for the gulabjamun, though, only partly because my middle-aged tummy has let me know that it is now also kind of done with cheese. (sigh) There's something irresistible about those little sponge balls squishing syrup all over your tongue.

(No, that is NOT intended a double entendre. No. Really.)