Butter and Brioche
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A blog featuring decadent, honest and traditional recipes, in particular, those of french baking. The blog features a collection of sweet recipes that weave tales of truth, of happiness, and love.
Butter and Brioche
4M ago
Love came to me and said:
What do you want of me?
Save me I said, Save me.
Love knelt down beside me
and love said:
If you knew the price
of coming to you,
you would ask nothing
but would give.
- Henry Dumas, Thought
I have a second manuscript that’s due in four months. I’ve held it for three years, but really, I’ve been writing it for the last twenty. I often get asked about the crux. Sweet still yes, that’s the salve, but then again, when has this ever been about hunger? And yet.
It is possible to return to the scene of love, or crime. For being a writer is to commit the whole of it to word ..read more
Butter and Brioche
1y ago
“You can put your strength down. I’m sitting here with you at your kitchen table. You don’t need to say anything.” - Eden Robinson, from Writing Prompts for the Broken-hearted.
The earthiness of pumpkin works well in sweet applications. I like to enliven rather than temper it; with savory-driven spices, darkened sugars, and warm undertones that augment the domesticated vegetable. I’m going to ask you to roast a whole pumpkin down, then purée the flesh to a silky-smooth form of itself, instead of relying on the canned kind for this recipe. It makes the taste richer, stronger, and more pure. It ..read more
Butter and Brioche
1y ago
“I love October when the veil between worlds is thinnest. I love how at any moment I could forgive someone from the past.” - Alex Dimitrov, from Love.
This is an uncomplicated thing. Some, call it a snack cake, others, picnic, but the climatic point is that it must hold well for travel or departure, and be straightforward enough that it comes together within a short period of time - but without sacrificing on taste. I make mine with roasted walnuts, tahini and banana, as well as a wealth of spices like ras el hanout, that omit a dusted-warmth that fades out like a sunset.
For the cake
70 g ..read more
Butter and Brioche
1y ago
“He was thinking of her, of her oddity and composure. Wondering what she was doing on this long hot evening at the end of her wild-rose lane. Did she still have callers, was she still busy solving the problems of people's lives? Or did she go out and sit on the swing, and creak back and forth, with no company but the rising moon?” - Alice Munro, from “Powers,” Runaway: Stories.
I will always love things I no longer desire to look at. Time, they say, heals it. But I don’t think so, I rather think time exposes it. It itches and scratches and peels the surface back. I see myself as the proud own ..read more
Butter and Brioche
1y ago
There are few things now that make me feel sacred.
I won’t go on to list them but we know what they are. Honey, my connection to honey is one of the strongest senses that I have. It’s source. For the taste of my heritage is honey, also, buckwheat, sour cream, and hard liquor. We suffered for it all, our women, and we still do.
This is a grandmother’s cake. It is also one that is completely technique-driven. Untraditional, by my own standards, but I took all the components that I loved from my childhood and put them into this. There is limited overt sugar in the cake, so the reliance on sweetn ..read more
Butter and Brioche
1y ago
THE WATER ENRICHES
MY BODY, AND
THE BREEZE BRUSHING
ACROSS MY CHEEK
IS REFRESHING.
THE SUN WARMS ME,
AND
THE EARTH GENTLY
EMBRACES MY BODY.
I DO NOT WANT TO
LOSE THIS.
WHAT IS IT THAT
I SHOULD PROTECT?
– Commes des Garcons, Poem Pants (2002), Junya Watanbe
I can chart the trauma of my body like a sailor charts the sea. Here, there’s a freckle and that means an entrance and to the right of it - a rip, and that has to be navigated carefully. That inky word and the discoloration that surrounds it, he wrote that. And down, south, to the soft part, well that’s the end and we don’t go there we don ..read more
Butter and Brioche
1y ago
“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” – Toni Morrison, from Jazz.
I talk so much of roses that I also must spit the thorns. “But darling,” she said, “even your sonnets are thorned.” My palate, too. The hue of this rose smothered gelée, ruby-red and blooded, like the jaded heart on a one-dimensional playing card. ‘Queen of Hearts! That’s my title, it’s slicked on my tongue – address me as such.
At some point, I had to create a system to remember all the men in my writings because there were too many of them. I became afraid that I’d forget wh ..read more
Butter and Brioche
2y ago
“Your body that includes everything
you have done, you have had done
to you and goes beyond it
This is not what I want
But I want this also.”
/ Margaret Atwood, from Circe / Mud Poems in You are Happy.
The art of loss isn’t hard to master. I’m rather fluent in it, you could call it my fourth language. Or, first. I can wrap my mother tongue around all the licks and curls in the hierarchies of pain, and sometimes, I get lost, slovenly, even, and confuse it with pleasure. And then I taste all kinds of truths and torments that the body knows but the mouth won’t speak of – can’t. The same g ..read more
Butter and Brioche
2y ago
“A sparrow, mating with its echo, bred
a fledgling music. I was no one’s bride.
Who knows why summer broke my heart that year?”
- Melissa Green, an excerpt from “The Housewright’s Mercy” The Squanicook Eclogues.
It is well-known that I know what you look like when you sleep. All defenceless. This is not well-known to the world or anyone else in it, naive, perhaps, but well-known to me because I still live with it and see it, even softly, sometimes. And this knowledge does not exist to be remembered. Like so many other things that breathe for a short time that get lost, forgotten, that d ..read more
Butter and Brioche
3y ago
“If you could do it all again
A little fairy dust
Thousand tiny birds singing
If you must, you must
Please let me know
When you've had enough
Of the white light
Of the dawn chorus.”
– Dawn Chorus, Thom Yorke.
We leave parts of ourselves all over the place, even on people. Someone very smart told me that once and I’ve continued to hold it since. Not that knowing makes a difference, not that knowing heals. Knowledge can be a useless thing sometimes. Nineteen years of education to come to that realisation. I didn’t know that it would take so little for me to become so undone, like how it wa ..read more