Whinny
Connie WHINNIED at me today.*
Jenny’s own horses live in their own little row of stables at the furthest end of the yard, and Connie is at the further end of that row (next to the chickens).** I don’t know what her normal schedule is, but she may be used to clattery leather riding bootsteps coming through the main barn toward her in the mornings being for her. But she came to the front of her stall, put her head over the door, pointed her ears at me–there wasn’t anybody else around to choose from–and whinnied. It wasn’t a ohmigod-there-was-a-tiger-just-through-here-a-minute-ago-come-and-protect-me whinny, nor a I’m-hungry-and-they’ve-shortchanged-me-again-and-a-grass-belly-is-quite-attractive-in-a-mare-of-my-mature-years whinny. It was a hi-how-are-ya whinny, and it might even have been a hi-are-we-going-to-Do-Stuff? whinny. I admit I’m not perfectly sure that she’s learnt yet that I’m the Mean One and she only gets carrots after the ride with me . . . but she did hang around to be petted and put her head through the halter without being bribed.
One of her not so negligible virtues is that she likes being groomed and fussed over. For those of us who like horses better than we like riding***, a horse who does not enjoy being fussed over is tragic, although my experience is that usually these poor sad creatures have merely been fussed over wrong and you need to figure out what they like.† Thoroughbreds are notoriously thin-skinned but a soft brush–or even a chamois–and a light touch usually go a long way. (They have to go a long way, because it takes you forever to clean one of these animals.) Connie is much more relaxed and tolerant than this, but over the weeks, while she’s been perfectly polite from the beginning, she’s obviously settling more and more comfortably into the particular fuss I make. I’m always very careful to let her know where I am when I’m working on her†† but if I look forward her ears are always watching me.††† She puts her head right down so you can get all the itchy places where the bridle straps run‡ and you can do anything to her ears. Most horses in my experience, even the ones who love a fuss so much they almost lie down and present their bellies to be rubbed, will limit the mauling of their ears.
Connie seems to have found a particularly satisfying dust bath in her paddock. Mud is easier to get off; once it dries, it brushes straight out. Dust works its way into the hair and then sets so an ordinary mud-removing brush skates right off again. She goes out in a fly sheet, so the damage is limited, but her ears are available. About a fortnight ago I noticed that the ears at the end of the neck I was learning to know and love were remarkably grimy which aside from questions of proper horse care and stable management was ruining my view. But I forgot once I was on the ground again. Last Saturday I had my first serious go at an ear–the grimier one–with a well-wrung out sponge. But dirt, as I say, is adhesive, and after a minute or two of delicate daubing I found myself with the ear flattened against the palm of one hand while I scrubbed it like it was a floor with the other. And Connie was still standing there with her head down for easy reach, and one hind leg slack. Okay, last Saturday she might have been suffering general collapse as a result of a (hot) two and a half hour hack, but today I did the other ear and she still stood there with a faint smile on her face of ‘well this one at least cares about the complete picture.‘
Now if we could only do something about our canter transitions.
* * *
* I am so in love. This is cute in a 9 year old. I’m not sure it works in a 56 year old.^
^ And if anyone is counting, no, I’m not quite 56 yet. But I always start calling myself the next year early so that by the time the birthday arrives I’m used to it and can luxuriate and enjoy myself. I don’t do parties, but I do fabulous food and fabulous presents and Peter would hear about it if they were not forthcoming.
** The chickens are also friendly. They burble at you if you come near their fence. I have been thinking that they just equate two-legged moving upright = food, and are ever hopeful, but I saw Jenny’s husband bringing them a big gardening basket of freshly-cut grass and they went mental. I asked Jenny and she said oh, yes, they’re just friendly, as if I’d just asked if horses are good to ride. Oh. I know there are pet chickens–I have a friend who has three layers, and one of them has made herself a pet with a well-judged charm offensive–and Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hen-Chicken-Maintenance-Martin-Gurdon/dp/1843304147
is entirely friendly and funny and adorable, but I’m still not expecting companionable burbling from chickens I’ve never been properly introduced to.
I had this exchange with Jenny while Clover had done her fling-and-upend trick at me and I was rubbing her belly and murmuring, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, to go with her–I’m not sure what you call it in a dog: it’s sort of halfway between purring and squeaking–and Jenny said, half-disgustedly, You soft dog. You’re supposed to be patrolling the yard and being fierce and upholding the honour of the Jack Russell. –Oh thank the gods you’re not, say I.
*** This is a comment on HOW MUCH I LIKE HORSES, you know, not a casual remark about my indifference to riding.^
^ Indifference to riding?!!???!?
† A pocketful of carrots is usually a good beginning.
†† If there’s a way to be perfectly safe working around a horse, I don’t know what it is. And there’s no good way to deal with the insides of the hind legs except by leaning across the other one. So you stay as close as possible, so any accidental kick doesn’t have space to develop any momentum, and I try to have a hand or a shoulder or something in contact with the side I’m on as I reach across. And I don’t deal with tricky horses. Life is short and I like my limbs in their present configuration.
††† You know what I mean
‡ And because of the grass belly–and a tendency to colic–she has to be turned out in a Hannibal-Lector contraption so she can’t eat much, so that’s more straps
Sealey Head
When I posted about Maren’s librarything for robinmckinleysblog I told you how, when I started the blog*, and viewed the glass mountain of blogging stretching up before me into the clouds, I thought wistfully that something I would really like, that might making climbing a glass mountain worthwhile**, is some kind of Book Thing. About other people’s books, I mean, about what people liked, and what they were reading, and why they liked it. I’ve always been a sucker for a good recommendation and even when my taste diverges from the recommender I will enjoy the enthusiasm.***
But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Because there are so many conversations about books on the web already.
Except that it did.
So as Pollyanna’s booklist got longer and longer, and especially since Maren took on the monumental task of wrestling it all into organised and findable form on librarything, I’ve further been thinking that it’s ridiculous to be a writer with a blog and not talk about books that I like and recommend. I keep telling you I’m a very harsh reader, and I am, but there are still an awful lot of books on my shelves that I’ve loved or been blown away by, or wallowed in, or disappeared into, or all of the above. And there are a lot more out there that I would–or, in some fortunate cases, will–love, waiting for me. And here I am with a blog.
The real problem is that I get weirdly inarticulate–that’s i n a r t i c u l a t e–when I try to talk about why I’ve liked something I’ve read. Any of you who were reading this blog at its beginning may remember my just dumping Michael Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION and Markus Zuzak’s THE BOOK THIEF on you: here, I said, read these, they’re wonderful. And ran away.
Oh the shame.
So I’m going to try to do better. I’ve been telling myself, while Maren struggled and strove, that once the librarything list went public, I would start blogging occasionally about the books I’m reading.† Thumbs, left feet, and total desertion of vocabulary optional.
And so where better to begin than with Patricia A. McKillip’s THE BELL AT SEALEY HEAD which the kind and thoughtful editor we share recently sent me in galleys.††
I’ve been reading Pat’s books from the beginning–THE HOUSE ON PARCHMENT STREET, THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD–and I know BEASTS won the World Fantasy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_McKillip , but the way I remember it is that it was THE RIDDLEMASTER OF HED that suddenly put her out there and made her a name to conjure with.
I’ve always loved her work for the obvious things, the things that everybody else who writes about her loves her books for too: her sense of style, her deep understanding of the ancient story-myths that all of us story-tellers build on, the humanity, which is also to say the unpredictability, of her (human!) characters, who are and are not what they appear to be, and who often surprise us for both good and ill–just the way people out here in the real world do. Her characters have substance, which means that when she writes about characters who do not have substance, you the reader pick it up at once: uh oh. Something wrong here. . . .
Sealey Head is a small town on the shore of an unnamed ocean, where nothing much happens, except for the invisible bell that dongs every night at sunset. No one knows where or what the bell is, or why or how it sounds. Those who live there are accustomed to it. Judd Cauley, who runs the Inn at Sealey Head, for example, is surprised, one evening, by the arrival of an eccentric new lodger, very well laden with books, who, in answer to Judd’s puzzled question, answers: ‘ “There is magic in this place. I want to find it.”
‘ “I’ve never recognized anything magic around here.”
‘ “You live in it.”
‘ “People say the bell’s just an echo of something that happened a long time ago. Live here long enough, you don’t hear it anymore.”
‘ “Did you? Stop hearing it?”
‘ “No. I always wondered . . . It’s just a sound, though. . . . It comes out of nowhere. How do you go about finding nowhere?” ‘
But there is more magic in Sealey Head than Judd–who is in fact far more imaginative than a good innkeeper needs to be–knows. Up at the local big house, Aislinn House, where Lady Eglantyne is dying, her young maidservant Emma sometimes opens the door to the linen cupboard, or possibly the stillroom, or even Lady Eglantyne’s bedroom, and finds a castle instead, a castle where the princess Ysabo, who has become Emma’s friend, is trapped by a ritual magic she does not understand, but increasingly fears.
One of the things I feel Pat hasn’t received enough attention for is her wonderfully low key humour. How can you resist a book that contains a line like this: “Fitch was writing a list, and Mrs Haw, involved in a seemingly endless comment about life that was interspersed with items to be purchased, broke off mid-mutton at the sight of Emma.” Or a scene like this:
‘. . . “Come, child. We’ll go and teach the parrot some new words.”
‘Phoebe opened her mouth, closed it, watching their slow amble down the hall toward the parlour . . . “Toland.”
‘ “Yes, Phoebe.”
‘ “The parrot is stuffed.”
‘ “Fortunately, don’t you think, knowing the twins?” ‘
And I mentioned that Pat does three-dimensional human characters so well that you notice at once when someone is two-dimensional. You’re already wondering what is up with Ysabo’s castle when she receives a proposal of marriage from one of the knights, whose name, she realises, she does not know: and she dares to ask him Why? Why should they marry? And he strikes her across the face. He has done so, her mother tells her, because there is no place in the ritual for her question. At which point you begin to see the enchantment Ysabo’s castle lies under, and perhaps you even begin to suspect what the bell is saying.
* * *
* Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away
** Fortunately Converse All Stars have rubber soles
*** Rather depressedly I suppose I should post something about caveats: enthusiasm is not an excuse for, for example, cruelty, big or little, to the planet or anything that lives on her. And I personally am not a big fan of a subgenre of SF&F that sets up a really horrible world or society chiefly in order to talk extensively about how horrible it is.
† Including rereading. If I’m going to do this at all, I’m certainly going to haul a few old favourites on stage.
†† Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, and you who were jealous that I was reading Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK in galleys? You were right to be jealous. Maybe I’ll blog about that too.
Librarian confessions
This from Maren, our librarything OH!:
When I was a lowly undergrad, I took a general History of theater class and decided that for my final paper I would read Le Malade imaginaire in the original. I checked it out from the college library and took it home only to find that it was heavily censored. It was a 1905 edition which was designed for classroom use, so they’d taken out every reference to enemas and indigestion in the entire play. Since most of the title character’s imaginary maladies involve one or both of these things, that was a lot of play.
I found the full text online and penciled in all the missing lines. At the time I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a librarian, but I’d already been a shelver for 6 years and thus had spent a lot of time erasing pencil marks from library books, so I was well aware of the seriousness of my transgression.
When I confessed to this (the first time) in a librarian LJ group a few years ago, I was berated by a fellow member for defacing library materials-and what’s more, old library materials. (The only reason it was so old was that I was the first student since 1905 weird enough to read French when it wasn’t required, so they hadn’t bothered to get a newer copy; it was not rare or valuable.) Hmmm…pencil marks in a book…CENSORSHIP. Which one is worse? I think Molière would have something to say on the matter.
I’ve been having a conversation in my head about this since she posted it a few days ago. This is obviously absurd (well it’s obvious to me: and very funny in an awful way) but where do the lines run? All of us (I’m assuming: readers of a writer’s blog are probably . . . readers) were raised to wash our hands before we read a library book (and some of us were furthermore taught to wash them again afterward in case the person who had it before us was not so meticulous) and that to deface it in any way, by writing in it, or dog-earing* a page, either of which was so heinous a crime the mind could barely encompass it, or by crumbs in the gutter, would sentence you to forty years’ hard labour, if you were caught–forty years’ hard labour and nothing to read. I had to learn to write in the margins of my own books–and it took me years before I could dog-ear a page. But bookmarks fall out**. (I might never have learnt, if I had a better memory, and didn’t need all the help I could get.) And books are tools–of information or entertainment or both***–as well as your friends; writing a note in a margin or folding a page corner may be like wrapping the handle of your hammer with old-fashioned insulation tape to make it more comfortable to use, even though the result may not enhance the appearance of the hammer. †
You can’t do that with a shared tool, a library book. But you still have to agree on rules of behaviour with the other users. Maren’s accuser is locked on Thou Shalt Not Make Marks in a Library Book†† . . . but, you know, duh, and this is what makes the story funny and awful, what about the marks the original censors had used? And what about censorship?††† And–hey–what about errata pages? I don’t much like errata pages either–they fall out, like bookmarks. I’d much rather have neat corrections in the book itself.‡
Or maybe it’s the age of the censor’s marks that becomes an issue. Maybe Maren’s accuser was just back from reading Viking graffiti on Orkney and was still in a daze of sacred historicity. ‘Call Gudrun for a good time’ becomes a valuable historical artefact after a few hundred years. I don’t myself think that a mere century is sufficient excuse for clinging to the destruction of a Moliere play, but then Moliere makes me laugh, and censorship does not. I wouldn’t have liked the Vikings either.
Our other librarian news is much more cheerful. This from librarykat:
Apropos of nothing here, but might be of interest:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comic book series by Joss Whedon and Brian K. Vaughan has won the 2008 Eisner Award for Best New Series. ‡‡ It was announced Friday evening at the Eisner Awards program at the San Diego Comic-Con International.
This was one of the few categories for which I voted for the winner; this was the first year I was eligible to vote for the Eisners.
Since 2005, the Eisner Awards coordinator, the lovely Jackie Estrada, has made sure librarians are included as Eisner judges (the panel of 5 judges selects the nominees and the comics industry professionals vote on the winners from those nominees – pretty much like the Oscars). I was the first librarian Eisner judge. Since then, two of my colleagues (who also happen to be my friends ^_^) have been judges, and we think one more will be selected for the 2009 Eisners. We in the library world have been making an increasingly substantial impression upon the comics industry – we comprise perhaps 10-13% of the market right now. And we’re growing, despite budget cuts all over the place. This has been building for more than a quarter century – I’ve been actively promoting comics and graphic novels in the libraries since 1983.‡‡‡
This is the sort of story that gives me hope for the future–for librarians, readers, the glorious variety of ways for stories to get told, and probably for people who write in the margins of their own books, although I’ll have to think about that one to figure out why. I hereby declare librarykat a heroine, for kicking butt, slaying vampires,§ being out there in a choosable fashion and getting chosen to do something that involves standing up and being counted, and being the kind of librarian who gets books into people’s hands. You’ll have to pardon me for drinking your health in second-day champagne, but it’s lasted very well.
* * *
* Very confusing to the owners of prick-eared dogs. Or spaniels. As a whippet-lurcher person to me that is dog-earing a page.
** Well, dog ears unfold themselves sometimes too. But if you look very closely at the top edge you may be still able to see the little wrinkle. . . .
^This actually works with, um, dogs too. The hellhounds let their ears turn inside out in a reprehensibly careless fashion, and I wouldn’t want to refold them on the wrong line.
*** Or admittedly sometimes neither one
† Yes. But I’m in trouble if I ever have to do it again, because modern insulation tape, according to Peter, is plastic. This old stuff was fabric-y, and conformed to your squeeze.
†† I don’t remember if I’ve told you any of my Limb of Satan stories, but I too have been censored for the protection of innocent children.
††† He/she would probably be one of those librarians who forbid children like those that many of us were from reading out of the children’s department too.
‡ As I’ve been telling all of you to do with your bats to your DRAGONHAVENs.
‡‡ http://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/Previews/14-111?page=0
Keep clicking. You get five pages of preview. Okay, I’m ordering. This is probably old news to most of the rest of you, but I still haven’t got to grips with the new boom in graphic novels. Which is embarrassing, because I was there for The Dark Knight Returns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Dark_Knight_Returns
and it was amazing.
‡‡‡ Erm. So what was out in 1983? Dark Knight was 1986 and I remember it as being kind of a desert. Swamp Thing was busy starting a new genre, and having kind of a hard time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing
§ Only the right vampires of course.
Hacking and hewing
I went on a TWO AND A HALF HOUR hack with Connie today and . . . lived. I know two and a half hours in the saddle isn’t a lot for a proper horsewoman, or for a professional (Jenny, who runs the yard and teaches riding, may also be schooling horses for three hours a day), but it’s a lot for me. Toward the end, when we approached the gate with the half-fallen tree hanging over it which took some of the top of my shoulder off last Saturday*, the woman I’ve been going out with this week and last got off her horse and walked him through. But then her horse is a trifle more temperamental than Connie, and I also thought it quite possible that if I got off I wouldn’t be able to get back on again. (She generously pointed out that her horse is shorter than mine. True. But not that much shorter.) So I hung down beside Connie’s neck like the cowboy act in the circus and made the famous riding-101 bridge with the reins and held onto her mane and she went through like a star and didn’t even gallop off down the slope on the far side, which she could have because I was in no position to stop her. She is such a nice horse. Have I mentioned this lately? Like in the last fifteen minutes? I try not to raven on about her every time I ride her because I realise that not everyone who reads this blog is still nine years old and horse mad at heart. But it’s difficult not to. She’s one of those horses that other people like going out with because you know she’ll always give you a lead if you need one.** Today we did a very pretty bit of opening and shutting a gate and when my companion complimented me on it I said, Nothing to do with me! That’s all Connie! –She knows what a gate is and she suddenly gets totally alert to your legs, so you can move her around like a chess piece.
It’s very hot and dry here and I’m conservative about horse legs anyway, and she’s ten years old and her background is open jumping which means a lot of stress on the joints and she’s not my horse, but we did manage to have one canter, on one of those stretches of ground locally known as ‘the gallops’.*** As we approached the end, a little group of three women emerged from behind the hedgerow and stood watching us. As a pedestrian with no horse access who has not infrequently wistfully contemplated horses thundering up and down the gallops I wondered what they were thinking: ‘Ooooooh’, or, ‘Better them than me’.
And when we did get back to the barn, and I did slide off, I kept a very firm grip on the pommel and her mane, which is a good thing because she broke training enough to start walking toward home, hay, carrots, and some cool water on her hot back, and for the first half dozen steps I was dangling by my bell-ringing shoulders while I sent frantic messages to my lower limbs about, you know, walking. . . .
And for those of you who are not nine years old and horse mad, here’s a new FAQ answer soon to appear on the renovated web site:
What does nuraddin, the web site’s email address, mean?
The Nur-ad-Din room is in the Islamic art wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/09/wae/ho_1970.170.htm
According to the web site it was a gift in 1970 which I assume means when they put it up. I saw it for the first time a few years later (in New York City alone for the first time, having been living in Maine for several years and feeling very much the country girl, both thrilled and overwhelmed) and have been making pilgrimages there ever since. It was immediately recognisable as a place where stories lived. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know that you go through a little door from the museum hall into the room itself, but there’s only a tiny space roped off where you can stand and look–and listen: one of its charms is the small fountain a little way in front of your feet, which is off the bottom border of this photo–but even stopped at the gate like that I’ve always found the atmosphere very powerful. The door is slightly narrower than the roped-off area, so you can lean against the wall inside and let your mind drift. I’ve stood there half an hour sometimes (wishing all these tourists would go look at something else and stop disturbing me) in a very nearly out-of-body experience. THE BLUE SWORD was born there, I think, even though Damar is more India–specifically Kipling’s India–than Syria. Someone who has read more of my web site than is good for them may remember that I wrote BEAUTY, my first published novel, as a break from what would become Damar and BLUE SWORD and THE HERO AND THE CROWN. The Nur-ad-Din room is one of the places where all that fuzzy stuff just out of imaginative reach came together with a bang and a clatter and a dazzling flash of light that illuminated the Damarian landscape perfectly just before it blinded me, and said, Yes, I am a story, I am your story. Write me. Go on, I dare you.
They closed the Islamic Wing a few years ago for renovations. I haven’t seen it since it reopened. I hope they haven’t messed with the Nur-ad-Din room.
* * *
* Which shoulder is a beautiful melange of yellow and purple and itches like crazy
** Or if you’re out with someone prone to seeing tigers in the shrubbery and feeling that the only safe haven is BACK THERE SOMEWHERE! I THINK IT’S IN CORNWALL! –and the best thing to do is to go there now, what you might call an anti-lead. As previously observed, Connie has quite a shy on her, but she keeps going forward.
*** Although the ratbag farmer has ploughed up half of it and put it down to some stupid crop this summer. Where’s his sense of priorities?
Celebratory Food
Anyone who just conceivably might be feeling a trifle dry and sardonic about my poor neglected web site . . . we’re working on it. Blogmom–Sitemom?–only got the CHALICE cover art jpeg today because I only got it today so you see Blog/sitemom has been faster than a speeding dangerous laser ray getting the thumbnail changed here. And the site . . . well there have been various obstacles, not least trying to find a site design that is plain in the right way.* This too as of today has been accomplished. So keep watching this space.
Meanwhile, I think what we need is some Celebratory Food.
Vikkik has sent us:
White Choc and Apricot Brownies
2oz white choc (1)
2 eggs
3oz flour
2&1/2oz butter/margarine
8oz sugar
1/2 level tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
4oz dried apricots (chopped)
Heat oven to 350F/Gas Mark 4/ 180C.
Grease and flour an 8inch square cake tin
Melt choc and butter together
Whisk eggs and sugar together until light
Add the choc mixture
Sift in flour, baking powder and salt (2)and stir in
Add the apricots
Pour into cake tin and bake for around 30 mins (3)
(1) This is one case where I’d advise against using Green and Blacks – The only time I’ve ever had a disaster with this recipe (and this is my standard brownie recipe with white choc substituted for dark and apricots substituted for raisins) was earlier this year when I used C&B white choc, and it came out as a complete flat failure which I had to throw away…
(2) or just throw in without sifting, this works too ;-)
(3) my oven is fan assisted and they generally cook in about 20 mins
I do use Green and Blacks when I want white chocolate but I think white chocolate is tricky stuff anyway and maybe that day the weather was really heavy and humid and the chocolate was sulking and didn’t mix with the butter right, or maybe it took exception to your stirring, which in my experience needs to be very gentle and very thorough–far more of either than you need bother with with good old mellow black chocolate. I don’t know if anyone out there has more experience of white chocolate, or can recommend a reliably good-natured brand of the stuff.
Anyway this put me in mind of my white chocolate brownie . . . er . . . chocolate whiteys recipe. The original is from a cookbook you’ve heard from before: Rosie’s All Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed No Holds Barred Baking Book by Judy Rosenberg. I am, however, shameless, and I wanted even more chocolate in mine, so that’s what I did. These aren’t even cake any more: they’re very squodgy.
8 T (1 stick) slightly salted butter
8 oz white chocolate
2 large eggs at room temperature
1 c sugar
1 tsp vanilla (maybe a scrap more. This does vary with your brand of chocolate, but you don’t know till you’ve tried. With Green and Blacks I use about 1 ¼ tsp)
1 c all-purpose white flour
Butter and flour a 9 inch square pan.
Melt butter in the top of a double boiler over simmering water. Break up the chocolate in small pieces and add gradually as the butter melts. Stir gently and thoroughly. It should be perfectly homogenous when you take it off the heat. If it shows signs of separating, stir it some more (gently).
Beat eggs vigorously. You can do it by hand but this is one of those cases where an electric mixer is probably better. Beat till frothy and then add sugar in a slow stream, beating like mad the whole time. Scrape down the sides of your bowl a lot too. Rosie says the whole process should take about two minutes. I never count, but it takes a while. But the result should ‘ribbon’ if you pour it off a spoon. Add the chocolate mixture in a very slow stream, with your electric mixer on low, if you’re using one. Once it’s all incorporated I take the mixer out and use a spoon for about ten seconds to sort of reassure myself it’s all gone together neatly.
Then mix in the flour. I stick to the spoon. You can use your electric mixer if you want.
Pour into the pan. 350° for about half an hour. The original recipe calls for 325°, which I find too low, but you certainly don’t want it more than 350°, so if you have an iffy oven, err on the low side. It’s not going to rise a lot, and it’ll probably be slightly hollow in the middle, but it will set and look done, and it shouldn’t be a solidified puddle in the bottom of the pan either. On the other hand, maybe I’m just strange, and I really like heavy dense things. Well, yes, I do, since you mention it. But feel free to experiment, and maybe raise the flour and lower the chocolate and make it a cake again.
And since I didn’t use it last time, and for any of the rest of you who saw the original, frowned in puzzlement, finally said ‘oops’ and passed on:
Melanie
I can’t believe it, but Jennie pointed out that my recipe for Pine nut rosemary shortbread that I posted under “Let them eat cake” didn’t include either pine nuts or rosemary. So fussy. ** So here’s the corrected ingredients list:
My Family Nearly Lynched Me For Making Something Fattening They Can’t Resist Pine Nut Rosemary Shortbread
1 3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter (the good stuff)
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup toasted pine nuts
2 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary
zest of one lemon
I was originally going to post my chocolate-layer shortbread too, as additionally celebratory, but I’ve decided I’m fat enough for one evening. I’ll post it some other day. . . .
* Who invented the virtual dog-eared page corner as a cute design feature?
** Gods help you if you misidentify a plant. They send out the army, these guys.