01.13.08
Como Espresso Para Chocolate
(Yo-Yo Ma’s Obrigado Brazil brews in the background)
Mama requested that I bake The chocolate cake once again. It is coincidentally odd that she should choose January 15 of all days, for it is after all The cake that I once concocted for he
who must cease to be addressed You in my ink-shedding (whose birthday is on the 15th and whose own mother
did delight in the same cake).
Believing in what I christen “culinary jazz,” Mama and I are barely and rarely obedient to a cookbook. We are not classical musicians in the kitchen – it is there that we improvise, maintaining our rhythm and beat with the whisk and spatula, the flavours and aroma.
The chocolate cake has two major improvisations. You have to become part
of our family in order to learn the other underlying harmony, and the other secret shall no longer be for I am about to divulge it here. The major key is E – Espresso.
It is the primal process of this recipe. Before the silky oil is poured, before the delicate egg shells are cracked, before the flour is sifted, before I even don my apron, the full-bodied ooze of the espresso should be ready.
The espresso enriches the savour of the chocolate, but it never overpowers it. Both flavours are too symbiotic that when baked, the taster hardly recognizes that there are two… and the procedure takes hours in preparation but only seconds in consumption… and they who consume it will hail the deliciousness and commend the “expensive” chocolate but they do not credit the espresso that enhances this particular chocolate cake to stand out… simply because they are not even aware of its presence. Thus the cake shall remain The extraordinary chocolate cake (with espresso in its soul but not in its name).
…and I shall bake it. Not in celebration for him, knowing that he is celebrated enough in who I am. I shall bake it, simply because the chocolate cake must continue to exist.
Rest assured, my resolution is intact, no tears for secret ingredients there… but surely one is not forbidden to remember him who made life richer – like espresso for chocolate.
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