What a Cook Wants, 9

To Smell Like Cake?
Since I'm on a baking streak, who doesn't want to smell like a delicious vanilla cake in the shower? The Jaqua sisters up in Santa Barbara have made a Pink Buttercream Frosting soap with shea butter, palm oil and glycerin that has such an enticing fragrance the package comes with a warning label: Do not eat!
Often I don't have time to bake a cake, but it's somehow comforting to smell like one.
$10 for a bar of fragrant, delectable pink soap!

What a Cook Wants, VII

Real F***in' Vanilla
I am not a baker. Not even close. I can bake a chocolate cake with milk chocolate frosting for your birthday, the family brownie recipe, passable banana bread and this past Thanksgiving, God help us all, fancy pants biscuits that were nearly tender. But I am not a baker.
However there was a time in my life when I made crème brûlée once a week, during that Nantucket summer of love. I encountered a *real* vanilla bean during that first terrifying custard experience. It was weird. It looked like a shriveled up monkey finger a witch would throw into a smoky cauldron, but the scent! Totally different from my mom's small bottles of alcohol-drenched vanilla extract. The fragrance was creamy and rich, with a slight green vegetal note at the back and whispers of jasmine. I was shocked such a creepy object could smell suspiciously like the love of God. When I cut one open and scraped out the itsy bitsy flecks with the tip of a knife, I finally understood the value of the speckles in the "fancy" Breyer's French vanilla ice cream of my youth. Ahhhh.
So if you love a baker, spend the $7 for three beans at Penzeys (check out all their spices while you're there, they rock). Tahitian beans are on the fruity/spicy side, Madagasgar beans have creamy, orchid notes and Mexican vanilla beans are darker, woody and very mysterious. You really can't go wrong, and you might be rewarded with ambrosial delights!
$7 for 3 beans, or $27 for 15 beans. Be sure to take a sniff before you hand them over!

She Wore Red Velvet?

I will never understand Red Velvet Cake. Maybe you have to be from the South to get it, or maybe you just have to like cake more than I do. I was out with my friend Alessandra tonight at Fred 62, a hipster enclave on the edge of Silverbake. We worked together at the magazine; though I have an excellent palate, she has a highly developed sweet tooth and isn't afraid to use it. I had to ask her if the cake was quality, all it did was annoy me. She said it was a good one; I defer to her wisdom.
For those of you who haven't encountered it before, this is a Southern treat the Devil could call his own. I was 23 the first time I witnessed its electric cherry-bomb interior, and was terrified my Yankee eyes might burn out of my head. It scared the bejeezus out of me. Nothing should be that color-- there's a reason they recalled those red M&M's in the 70's. Sweet Lord.
And all it tastes like is sugar. It is tooth-achingly sweet, without much else going on. Tonight's version was very moist, but I swear I could taste the chemical edge of that red dye. Yikes!
Also, it turned my lips red. As I blotted the napkin, I left bright juicy lip marks. If I pay $11 for a tube of gloss to do that, it's ok. But in my cake? Somehow that ain't natural.
Though I did like the cream cheese frosting. To be fair.