Sunday, September 26, 2010

Crisp Weather

or

Why I Baked Apple Cake

We were talking about it being autumn and what that meant. (Frankly, even at 53 years old, I still think I need to buy new saddle shoes in September.)

Heir 1 brightened up and said excitedly, "Fall is crisp weather!"

I felt a tinge of guilt. He wasn't talking about the cool autumn temperatures. He was referring to apple crisp.

Heir 1 loves crisp -- any crisp: peach crisp, blueberry crisp, cherry crisp...even the time I made a strawberry crisp that everyone else was rather ambivalent over. Heir 1 would rather have crisp than pie. He was ecstatic one year when, as a Christmas gift, I gave him a "Crisp-A-Month" for his very own -- Dirtman was not permitted to hijack Heir 1's crisps for breakfast.

Alas, Heir 1 has watched season after season go by this year and nary a crisp in sight. He has even had to endure The Promise of Crisp, only to find that the next day I had neither the energy nor inclination to bake one. To make matters worse, it was left to him to comfort me as I lamented the fact that I was such a loser of a mother that I couldn't even manifest a crisp for my first born child.

So last week I made a huge apple crisp with apples from our local and beloved Rinker Orchard, picked that day. And I would show you that crisp, only it came and went very quickly.

So this weekend rolled around and I was going to make another apple crisp when I remembered that each year I go through apple season making crisp after crisp and, when the local season is over, remember I've been wanting to make an apple walnut cake for myself.


That's right. For ME. I made a totally selfish dessert in spite of the fact that I had abused my first born with promises of Crisp Abundance while languishing in my pajamas watching TCM -- for month after month.

I suppose my punishment was that for the first time in a long time I attempted to take a photo was the first time in a long time that the sky over Shenandoah County clouded over with the threat of rain. The photos stink, but the cake was good and even Heir 1 was not too disappointed that it was not, in fact, crisp.

Only Humpty Dumpty looks like he has evil plans for the apple cake; but, then, he's been a disapproving Dumpty my entire life...

...but it finally rained!...

5 comments:

Darkgarden said...

OH! OHHHH!!!!

WHOAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There's that friggin' cookie thing again!!! Will you just give it to the ART FOUNDATION already! It'll fit in over there. Right next to his sugar bowl!

Sisiggy said...

I love the Dumptster -- only it's missing something. Do you remember what it is?

Darkgarden said...

NO!!!

WHAT?!!!

WHAT COULD IT WANT?!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MY FUCKING SOUL MAYBE?!!!

DOES IT WANT THAT?!!!

(hunkered in corner crying quietly)

Darkgarden said...

Oh wait!!

Perhaps that messed up little vial of god-knows-what that always sat within "The Dumpster"... Had all those granules in it.

It was like those silicone packets of modern day... but... back in the 50's or farther back!

The horror!

The horror of what that vial must have done.... What it has done to us all!!!

Darkgarden said...

That vial... It haunts me now...as my house grows darker and colder as the night matures.

Did that vial contain the concentrated bits of damned dead; those not yet transported across the river? Perhaps those rotting/rotted on the river side... Making a stench and curing in the summer's beloved sun, but cursing the baked preparations of winter?!!!

I hear them, you know?
I hear the granules!!!
I fear they are in my basement and come hither...