I’m reading Summer Solstice, a book by Nina MacLaughlin.
“What is summer made of?”, she asks. “The smell of cut grass behind a gasoline of a lawn mower. Pounds, lakes and oceans. Fat red tomatoes, sliced thin and salted.”
It’s making me think. What are my summers made of?
A walk from the outskirts of Belgrade after a tennis practice... a thick formation of red clay where the ankle meets my Stan Smiths. The clay is mixed with sweat and feels like a second skin, crusty and vaguely itchy. It’s a long walk, amidst the pulsating heat, three strawberry popsicles long. Rumenko. One at the Cemetery, one at the Vuk Monument, and one at the Beogradjanka Tower.
A tent on the beach, at the edge of woods. There are no lights at night except for the fireflies and the starlight canopy, and nothing to hear but the breathing of the ocean, the rambling of the pines, and a guitar.
A pilgrimage to the Union Square market to search for peaches, because a peach here has yet to match the one I shared with Mr. Stan at the Kalenić Market.
It all makes me wonder... This anchoring in the summers of one’s youth, is it a blessing, a curse, or simply a defining moment? Am I who I am because of those summers -- unrestricted, unbroken, uncharted? Is it why I am fated to yearn, seek, and question?
My summers have changed over the years; they’ve became less childish and more somber. (I suppose I have too.) One may think that they even shrunk a little. Became less ambitious. A pond upstate versus a beach in Cyclades; a page of a book with an espresso stolen before a meeting versus a day in bed with a box of chocolate wafers and a heap of reads: The Rains Came, Memoirs of Hadrian, Confessions of a Mask, Daddy Long Legs, and Modesty Blaise, of course. There are comparisons to be made. But at the end, it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.
My summers have come in many flavors. There were the summers of travel and adventure. Filled with exuberant joy of discovery, one would think them a blueprint for what a summer should be. But there were so many other flavors too. There were summers of hardships. Summers of service. Lessons learned. Summers of loss.
I baked this cake last week, many times over. It is a poetry of fragrant white peaches amidst perfumed cloud-like dough: one would think it a custard or frangipane. My daughter and husband could not get enough of it. I kept baking because they kept asking for more and because I enjoyed the solitude of building the circle of petals, and the feeling of my hands sticky with fruit slices; because the heat of the oven mixed with the merciless heat of New York City’s July was purifying; and because I had found a peach that was just right. It was entirely different from what I thought it would be, but it was special, in a new kind of way that made the old special even better. It made me think how all the flavors and all the feelings would eventually fade into ourselves, supplanted by the special moments like the ones that signified a day, a week, a summer, to carry on further into the lifetime.
St-Germain Lattice Cake
This cake is a showstopper in every sense of the word. You may think that it’s about the lattice, but the real star is the dough. The dough is fragrant with almonds, St-Germain, and vanilla, with hints of a lemon. It is baked quite gently so that it practically melts in your mouth and tastes like frangipane -- a perfect partner to the floral taste of white donut peaches. It looks like a flower and tastes like a flower. Red plums are also sensational in this, the taste will be that of explosive redness, like an overripe dahlia.
100 grams cake flour
80 grams almond flour
180 grams sugar
1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
50 grams Greek yogurt
113 grams butter
1 1/4 tablespoon St-Germain luquor
2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
grated zest of 1/4 lemon
2 teaspoons lemon juice
8 – 10 firm white donut peaches or red plums
hardware:
Preheat the oven to 350F. Oil and flour the pan.
On the stovetop, over low to medium heat melt the butter.
Cut the fruit into slices, about 1/8-inch thick.
In a medium mixing bowl stir together the flour, almond flour, sugar, and baking powder, until fully combined.
In a smaller bowl, the whisk eggs. Add the yogurt, St-Germain, vanilla extract, lemon zest, lemon juice, and butter. Mix well and incorporate into the flour mix.
Pour the batter in the pan, starting from the center of the pan. The batter will be fairly thick, so it might a moment to spread by itself to the edges of the pan.
Layer the fruit slices on top of the batter, cut side down, in circles, to form the lattice. Start from the edge of the pan. Once you complete the circle, start another, putting the slices close by, so that no gaps between the circles remain. Push the slices into the batter, gently, but not too much, otherwise as the batter rises, they will disappear.
Bake on the middle rack of the oven until just about done, about 45 minutes. The cake should be lightly golden and beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan.
Let cool in the pan before serving.
