This Time of Year

Autumn has a certain heft to it - you can smell the change in the air when true fall weather sets in, you want to dress a little warmer and wear coats, and in my house, the food starts to change a little too. I love certain dishes that I just find too heavy for warmer weather, but now that it's cooling down at night, they are reappearing in my kitchen. There are also smells and flavors intimately tied to this season in my mind. One of those is maple. In the last weeks, I've been enjoying a couple of maple treats. One was just for my house, and one was for sharing with family and friends.

A few weeks ago, I got a hankering for having some compound butters around the house. I certainly didn't need them, and if I really needed them I am sure I could find somewhere to buy them, but there was an underlying current of wanting to do it myself - so I made some maple butter. It was ridiculously simple, and we've eaten it all. It is phenomenal on corn muffins for a weekend breakfast, served with coffee, and some bacon if you like. In fact, corn muffins were the primary vehicle for almost all of the maple butter I made.

I simply softened a cup (two sticks) of salted butter (I wanted the slight saltiness to counter the sweetness of the syrup - you could use unsalted). When it was completely softened, after about an hour or so, I put it in the food processor with a quarter cup of real maple syrup and let it whir. This is no time for artificial maple syrup - it won't have the same depth or consistency. After about 30 seconds, I stopped the processor and tasted it. If you'd like it sweeter, add more syrup and process more; if you like it, stop now. It will be very liquid, which is okay. Scrape/pour it into a container - I used a pyrex dish with a lid - and stick it in the fridge. That's it, but boy was it a wonderful way to enjoy buttered biscuits or muffins.

The other maple treat I've recently enjoyed reminded me so much of the maple butter, but it was not at all the same. I found a recipe in How to Be a Domestic Goddess, one of my Nigella Lawson cookbooks, for an "Autumnal Birthday Cake" that featured maple. It sounded so lovely, I wanted to try it. She had adapted it from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, which I also have thanks to my sister-in-law, so I was able to compare and see which recipe sounded better. I went with Nigella for the cake, because she did not use the ginger. As the cake baked, the house began to smell like waffles and pancakes.

This cake calls for a cooked frosting, which is supposed to be beaten as it cooks over a double boiler. While I know how to jerry-rig a double boiler easily, I don't have a hand-held mixer! I used my heartiest whisk and went to town as it cooked. It fluffed up, turned white, and came along as it should! It took longer, and did not thicken quite as much as it would or could have with a mixer, but it worked well. I put together the cake on its cake stand, and took it out for a drive.


Traveling with a whole layer cake can be an adventure. Here I was fortunate to have a driver (a.k.a. my husband) so I could hold the cake. 80 miles later, we arrived at our destination to share the cake with an office of people I'd never met, but who knew me. They had said they didn't mind being guinea pigs for my baking, and this was put to the test. However, at the end of the day, they said I could come back any time and only one meager piece of cake remained. It must have tasted okay, and it certainly tasted and smelled like this time of year.