Before dinner but after my shower the other night, when the sun hadn’t begun to set but the heat outside was starting to loosen its grip on the day, I put on pajamas and lay flat on my back on the bedroom floor. I didn’t move for minutes. I just stared up through the picture windows and noticed a plane—its tiny wings looking toy-like from a distance.
I was reeling from the day: the constant pick-up-put-down, the sudden shift to parenting alone for days at a time. I wasn’t tired, at least not in any sense that I’ve known before, but almost the opposite: my pulse accelerated to some dizzying pace, my mind ticking through tasks call propane company call insurance edit sustainability statement prep bagel content plan try second batch of ciabatta dough remember to add more salt fold the laundry do more laundry fold that laundry straighten closet find beach towels mouse traps buy more baby shampoo thank you notes finish sourdough chapter read your novel before bed text your sister text your friend call your grandmother meditate ice your right ankle.
You know. That kind of tired.
As I watched the plane carve a line through the bluebird sky, the words “flight path” came to me unbidden and I thought about my own. I imagined myself as a red dot on one of those laminated pages in the seat pouch on an airplane. Imagined the dot moving from place to place, as if looking down upon myself from a very great height. I closed my eyes and saw it all in slow motion as time unspooled behind me. Saw the pathways I etch inside this clapboard house: padding around the cool slate floor of the kitchen to the living room, all airy and whitewashed, to the bedroom upstairs with its tall windows and the gallery wall with the black scripted GOOD VIBES ONLY print and the framed seed catalog clippings and the oversized world map in shades of sherbet and gold.
Then I zoomed out slightly to see the lines of motion from the past strange year: at first, just around and around my block and down to the dock and back. Then slightly further, as I tentatively tried a run in the morning to the beach a mile away, then two, then three. Walking the single block to the pizza bar every Friday night for meatballs and the weekly special.
If I picture this in color, the lines trace the same paths over and over, thickening them from pencil thin to Crayola-marker thick. A single line extends across the Long Island Sound, through Massachusetts, and up to the rocky Maine coast. Another juts down south, through Manhattan and New Jersey and Delaware, ending at my family’s farm in northern Maryland, the three ponds just beyond our house looking in my mind’s eye like three tiny wet dots of blue paint.
And then, like a sweeping cinematic move in the opening credits of a film, it all zooms out even more: Now it’s my whole life. The whole world. It speeds up in reverse, those same thin lines scribbling frenzied circles and shapes as I moved through the years: in same places, hundreds upon thousands of lines pile on top of each other (the narrow, tangled streets of the West Village / the woods between the ponds and the old oak tree by the lane on the farm / the walkways past ivy-covered limestone dormitories and the expansive, sprawling buildings that house the nighttime beer-fueled parties of my college years).
In other places, the lines are attenuated and fine, but colored more richly than the others, single, exceptional events that stand out by memory if not by repetition: shimmering gold lines that trace up mountains and down them again. Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa. Mount Moosilauke and the South Peak Loop. Mount Washington. The Eiger Trail, gazing down upon Grindewalk and the Jungfrau region of the Bernese Oberland—all Swiss chalets and quietly grazing cows and edelweiss strewn like confetti across the green alpine hills.
Like a tourist map, mine is dotted with little signposts: Food! Lodging! Sight-Seeing! Your First Kiss! That Tiny Falafel Place With the Warm Pita! The Beach Where You Went Night Swimming Through the Phosphorescence in Your Underwear After Four Spicy Margaritas at a Wedding! Your Sister’s Old Apartment in Boston with The Big Farmhouse Sink!
I picture cheerful badges in a jaunty blue, like a Rick Steves layout of my life: an ice cream cone indicates the sleepy village in the Cotswolds where I first tasted vanilla ice cream topped with a dollop of freshly-made clotted cream. There’s a pizza slice over Venice Beach, because I love the version at Gjelina with squash blossoms and burrata. A bride + groom icon over the Seychelles—the islands picked out like green stitches in the blue ocean—shows my honeymoon. A running shoe for half-marathons in Philadelphia and Bar Harbor. A miniature tent in every place I’ve ever camped. Tangerine-orange Aperol spritzes drawn over all the bars where I’ve ever sat outside drinking in the syrupy summer sun. A beach umbrella on Block Island’s sloped coast. A teeny cake on the southernmost tip of downtown Manhattan marks the coffee shop where each espresso comes with a tawny, straw-colored rectangle of moist almond cake the size of your thumb.
The cake was a financier—so named because the original ones made by 17th century Visitandine nuns resembled gold ingots. Side by side with sugar-dusted croissants and burnished whorls of kouign amman and pâte à choux spilling over with silky praline crème mousseline, you wouldn’t think a 2-inch almond cake would stand out. But it did!
It was both so ordinary as to be slipped alongside your morning espresso like an afterthought, but so meticulously crafted: everything in balance as a perfect dessert should be. Not at all sweet but yet sweet enough. Dense but not leaden, the crumb close-grained but not fine, tender but not airy.
And, of course, there’s the flavor: doubly nutty because it uses almond meal and browned butter. A traditional financier has egg whites instead of whole eggs—this is largely why the cake is moist and sturdy but not overly heavy or rich, even though it has no gluten (which you usually rely on to create structure and rise).
I’ve made a lot of financiers over the years. They’re very simple and easy to shape any way you like—my favorite is to spoon the batter into muffin cups to make individual rounds. You can top them with raspberries or add chocolate or cacao nibs. They’re very nice with chopped pistachios or orange zest or a bit of instant coffee.
But…I’ve been thinking that the combination would lend itself well to a pound cake or Bundt cake: tender, sturdy, not-too-sweet. So here we are today with a Bundt cake lightly inspired by a financier.
I use a combination of almond meal and all-purpose flour (all almond meal works well for a smaller cake but a Bundt cake is large enough that it benefits from the added gluten + structure of AP flour). I add almond extract and browned butter. I tested this out with almond butter, as a QUADRUPLE almond cake, but I can’t say it added much and I took a beat and said to myself slow your roll, lady, three kinds of almond is plenty (it’s very chatty in the kitchen when it’s just me). However you can, and totally should, add one more extra: I recommend either unsweetened shredded coconut or finely chopped and toasted blanched almonds.
**Note: You need to start this recipe a few hours ahead of time, because the brown butter needs to fully cool and solidify. Also, while financiers use egg whites instead of whole eggs, you really need whole eggs here for structure in a Bundt.
Triple Almond Brown Butter Cake [A Giant Financier]
Makes one 10-cup Bundt cake
1 cup (226g) unsalted butter
2 cups (240g) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups (247g) granulated sugar
3/4 cup milk, at room temperature
3 eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup almond paste, grated or crumbled into small chunks
First, brown the butter by melting it in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Continue to cook, swirling the pan occasionally, until the butter begins to foam. Keep cooking as the foam subsides; you’ll start to notice brown flecks forming in the bottom of the pan and the liquid will start to darken into a deep golden brown. Remove from the heat as soon as this starts to happen and pour immediately into a heatproof bowl.
Let the butter cool slightly then refrigerate until solid—it will be softer than regular chilled butter, but shouldn’t be liquidy.
While the butter is chilling, whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
When the butter is almost chilled enough, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease (very thoroughly!) a 10-cup Bundt pan, making sure to get into all the crevasses. Sprinkle granulated sugar into the interior of the pan and tap out the excess.
Once the butter is chilled, cream it together with the sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes on medium speed in a stand mixer).
Whisk together the milk, eggs, vanilla extract, and almond extract.
Add the flour mixture and the milk mixture to the creamed butter/sugar mixture, alternating between both (I usually do this in 3 additions).
Mix until the batter just comes together and looks smooth.
Stir in the almond paste.
Scrape the batter into your prepared pan. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes (the timing for Bundt cakes can really vary so start checking at 50 minutes but know that it could take up to 75 even). The cake is ready when it’s golden and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.
Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool in the pan for 15 minutes. Do NOT try to remove it any sooner or it will fall apart, and do not wait too much longer or it can cling to the edges of the pan. As soon as I take it out of the oven, I like to run a thin knife or flexible spatula around the top edges wherever possible just to encourage the cake to begin to loosen. After 15 minutes, flip it over onto a plate or rack.