I have a number of things in common with the Greensteins in The Tin Horse. Like Barbara and Elaine, I’m into modern dance. Like Elaine, I’ve always been a reader. One thing I didn’t expect to share, however, was Mama’s special apple cake. I like to cook, but I do not bake. In that, I’m like my mom, who went for months not realizing that her oven didn’t work.

Then, last year, my mom’s 90th birthday fell during Passover. My brothers and I were throwing a party, and I couldn’t find anyone in Milwaukee from whom I could buy a Passover cake (which can’t have regular flour or leavening). I tried a caterer and kosher delis. Cost was irrelevant. But no luck. As someone who does not bake, the last thing I wanted to experiment with was my mother’s cake. I considered offering guests a plate of festive Passover macaroons, the kind you buy in cans. What kind of daughter would do that for her mother’s 90th birthday? Finally, in desperation, I found this recipe by Nigella Lawson. I learned what a springform pan was, bought one from Amazon, then put socks inside it, and packed it in my suitcase. The cake was such a hit at my mom’s party that I made it for my seder Monday.

If I can make this cake, anyone can.

A few notes: Nigella recommends Braeburn apples, but I originally found her recipe someplace else (the NY Times) and it suggested Granny Smiths. I prefer the Granny Smiths. And “superfine sugar” is also called caster sugar or baking sugar.

Damp Apple and Almond Cake

Nigella Lawson

Ingredients

3 apples eating apples, such as Braeburns

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 teaspoons sugar

8 eggs

1 3/4 quarters cup superfine sugar

3 1/4 cups ground almonds

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 cup flaked almonds

1 teaspoon confectioners’ sugar

Preparation

Peel, core and chop the apples roughly. Put them in a saucepan with one T. lemon juice and sugar, and bring the pan to a boil over a medium heat. You may need a wee bit of water to keep things moist. Cover the pan and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes or until you can mash the apple to a rough puree with a wooden spoon or fork. (You should have about one heaped cup of puree.) Leave to get cool.

Preheat the oven to 350°F; and oil a 10” springform pan with almond oil or a flavourless vegetable oil and line the bottom with parchment paper.

Put the cooled puree in the processor with the eggs, ground almonds, superfine sugar and a tablespoonful — or generous squeeze — of lemon juice and blitz to a puree. Pour and scrape, with a rubber spatula for ease, into the prepared pan, sprinkle the flaked almonds on top and bake for about 45 minutes. It’s worth checking after 35 minutes, as ovens do vary, and you might well find it’s cooked earlier — or indeed you may need to give it a few minutes longer.

Put on a wire rack to cool slightly, then remove the sides of the pan. This cake is best served slightly warm, though still good cold. As you bring it to the table, push a teaspoon of confectioners’ sugar through a fine sieve to give a light dusting.

Serves 12 (or serves about 25, if they have appetites like my mom’s 90-year-old cronies)

 

My last blog was about Rule #1: Go toward what scares you. The second of my 7 Rules to Write By has to do with the Muse.

 Some people wait for the Muse to show up. Albert Brooks, for instance, in the film The Muse. He’s a film writer who’s lost his edge, but fortunately a friend happens to know the Muse, and she’s available. In this clip, he gets a call from the Muse (Sharon Stone), who happens to be a very high-maintenance source of inspiration.

Maybe you already know better than to wait for inspiration. You know you have to put your butt in the chair. But do you still engage in Muse-ical thinking? I did. I used to believe I couldn’t do the kind of sustained work required for a novel unless the time ahead of me was like the shots of the prairie in Days of Heaven: immense, stretching forever, plus it wouldn’t hurt to have Richard Gere around. (This Muse thing is putting me in a filmic mood.)

In prosaic terms, I figured I needed four hours a day for, say, three years. But, at the time I was contemplating doing the project that scared me, I was juggling newspaper assignments and teaching gigs-all with deadlines, so clearly they were important and non-negotiable. I’d just have to wait till my schedule got less clogged, I thought with relief. Then my friend Sara Lewis Murre said that was b.s. Sara is the author of warm, funny novels, and, in recent years, she’s also become a hypnotherapist and creativity coach, a job she was born to do. Sara pushed me to start working on the novel, and she made a suggestion so simple I was sure it couldn’t work: Use a timer, and try to write for just an hour a day.

I doubted I could do more than warm up my engines in only an hour, but what the heck-I had a timer, a basic West Bend kitchen variety. I set it for an hour, two hours if I could, but sometimes just for 20 minutes. Like a factory worker, I was on the clock. If I got up to use the bathroom, I stopped the timer. If I checked e-mail, I stopped the timer. I found out that, for the way I work, I needed to do my novel-writing first thing in the morning. If I used that time for a newspaper article and told myself I’d work on the novel later, it didn’t happen. But the timer trick worked. With the continuity of working on the book almost daily, I did write page after page-or, at the glacial rate at which I produce, at least word after word. And the words finally added up to a 120,000-word novel.

Your best writing time may be after midnight. Or maybe it works for you to produce x number of pages a day. The crucial thing is to consciously carve out the time to write, instead of waiting for the Muse.

            RULE 2: Do the work. Do it now, in the midst of your full, messy, wonderful life.

Hi, writers. This blog post is for you-or really, for anyone who takes the risk of following their artistic vision and putting it out into the world. I recently gave a talk at the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego that I called 7 Rules to Write By. Here’s Rule 1. I’ll cover the rest in subsequent posts.

I described my talk as part memoir, part how-to, and part fairy tale, and this rule (like most of them) starts with memoir. Every writer has rejection stories. But I have one of the worst. Seriously. After having five paperback mystery novels published in the 1990s, I wrote my breakthrough book, a thriller. My agent loved it so much that when she sent it to editors, she immediately scheduled an auction. That means she set a date on which they all had to tell her what a whopping big advance they were going to offer, and then she’d go back and forth among them and see who’d ultimately come up with the most whopping of all. On the day of the auction, I got up early- when it’s 6 a.m. in San Diego, New York editors are already at work. I even dressed up a bit to go into my office next to the bedroom. You can tell what’s coming, right? We held an auction, and nobody bid. Nor, over the next several months, as she took the book to a number of other publishers, was she able to sell it.

This is where I’m supposed to say how plucky I was, that I picked myself right up and started a new novel. Uh-uh. I was so heartbroken I decided to stop being a novelist.  I got into dance journalism and into teaching writing, both of which I genuinely enjoyed. Ah, but after a few years, I missed the total immersion that comes with working on a novel. And I’d had an idea simmering in my mind. I’d been fascinated by a minor character in The Big Sleep, and I wanted to tell her story. There was only one problem. I saw this book as a departure from the genre fiction I’d done in the past, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. As I wrote in a note to myself at the time: This feels to me like a potentially BIG book. Way too big for me even to risk.

Which leads to…

RULE 1: Go toward what scares you.

It’s what will challenge you and make you grow as a writer (and probably as a person, too), and it will bring out your most meaningful work.