Comments

• shady180 on damage control
• Keith on damage control
• JadedBeauty on damage control
• OhNo789 on sometimes I hate my wife (aka my kingdom for a chocolate bar)
• e on Tarbaby
• Keith on Elbows
• Keith on Paul Volcker Makes A Deposit
• shady180 on Word to the wise...
• e on Bob is haunted by guilt
• e on Paul Volcker Makes A Deposit

Related Stash

    TAGS: 500

The man-Friday stood sweating heavily and breathing like a hard-ridden horse, his mind spinning out of control on its own flashbacks and tangents as his benefactor—the master-baker who was wearing her new, crisp, starched-and-ironed, strawberry-print apron she’d received from a secret admirer/Internet correspondent (who was really the man-Friday himself pretending to be a 300-pound Samoan man living in his mother’s basement not-too-successfully pretending to be a teenage lesbian nymphomanic blogger by the AOL IM name of “hotJessica15”), droned on and on about possible ingredients (cinnamon from Madagascar—where once the man had made a two-year expedition seeking undiscovered orchids, only to nearly die from a rare form of dengue fever that left him weak and feverish in a bush hospital run by an Australian doctor and his defrocked priest lover; nutmeg from Indonesia—he’d lost months of his life there, nursed slowly back to health by seventeen Buddhist monks who treated him with noxious jungle herbs and 24-hour-a-day chanting to cure the rabies he’d contracted from a monkey bite—another orchid-related accident—he really was unlucky in his search for those accursed flowers; vanilla from the island of Taha’a in French Polynesia - he’d never been there, but he’d have to put it on his list, since where vanilla (which is a form of orchid) grows there should be other orchids to discover; 147 other spices and aromatics carefully arranged in alphabetical order by the man, and labeled in impeccable calligraphy which he drew using an antique Chinese camel-hair brush; and, at the end of the 14-or-so feet of spice-shelf, the baker’s very favorite ingredient, black cocoa from King Arthur Flour Company—which when brought off the shelf always triggered a lively discussion not only about the relative merits of dutch-process cocoa, regular cocoa and that king of cocoa, King Arthur black, but also inevitably led to stories of the Baker’s training at King Arthur where she’d first learned the secrets of ganache, eggs, gluten and so much more), recipes which she was forever talking about, scribbling on milk-stained post-it pads, tweaking and rushing off to try, and most important— suddenly piercing his molasses-and-rum-raisin soaked consciousness—the critical subject of the day:  What they were going to bake this very afternoon, when and if they managed to break their respective food- and orchid-based reveries, and then the Baker made her pronouncement, “Tollhouse chocolate-chip cookies, but not just any Tollhouse cookies, these are going to be made from 1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, gently pliant to the touch, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 3/4 cup light brown sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 large eggs, 1 teaspoon almond extract, 1 teaspoon instant espresso powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 1 teaspoon hot water, 2 cups (measured by dip-and-sweep method, about 11 ounces) all-purpose flour, 1/4 cup (about 2 ounces) Dutch-processed cocoa powder (or better, 2 tablespoons “plain” Dutch cocoa and 2 tablespoons black cocoa from King Arthur Flour, and 1 pound of cappuccino chips, which you, man-Friday, (and you, dear-reader), shall make and enjoy with a cup of fresh-pressed espresso-roast, Kona-bean cappuccino.”