things i saw today

the cake that got dorie fired

Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking From My Home to Yours, got fired from her first job working in a professional kitchen for being too creative. -The culprit: a devilish chocolate almond cake, allied with some whisky-soaked raisins.

Dorie, bored from months of making the same exact cake the same exact way, decided to mix things up a bit. She swapped the whiskey-soaked raisins for some prunes flambéed in Armagnac. The result was a desert fit for paradise; Dorie's boss even said so, just before she fired her.... The problem was, her boss explained, Dorie had changed one of the top menu items without asking permission and without even giving a head's-up to the serving staff, who ended up having to deal with some very confused customers who were wondering why their chocolate cake, which was supposed to have whiskey-soaked raisins in it, had Armagnac-soaked prunes instead?

Dorie, her boss informed her, was being fired for excessive use of creativity, and Dorie, fired so soon from a job she was counting on to set career in motion, was crushed.

She recovered (thank God!), and courageously put herself back out there. She went on to a couple more kitchen jobs, started writing about cooking, and soon the day came when she was being asked by Julia Child herself to write Baking with Julia, the companion recipe book to Julia's PBS television show.

Best of all, Dorie Greenspan kept a sense of humor about her traumatic experience. In her book, Baking From My Home to Yours, she lovingly renamed the chocolate raisin cake as the "Chocolate Armagnac Cake," aka "The Cake That Got Me Fired." And the thing I like best about Dorie's baking book is that her recipes are so creative -the very trait that once got her in trouble. On the sides of most of Dorie's recipes are tips and ideas for "playing around," and she inspires you to have fun with your baking with encouraging suggestions. Her notes will say, Why not add some coconut to those cookies while you're at it? And I'll think, "Okay, Dorie. Alright, why not?"

I can thank Dorie for being a much braver cook, which is a good thing because she's a good teacher. That said, if there's one thing I'd like to offer those tempted to try Dorie's recipes for themselves, it would be to tell them to be sure to follow her instructions to the letter. When she tells to you to beat the eggs after each addition for one minute, she means exactly one minute. And when she tells you to heat the chocolate only until it just begins to melt and to make sure the butter added to it doesn't begin to separate, she means it. I learned this the hard way when I started trying to make my own homemade brownies from Dorie's recipes. After a couple failed attempts, I began to think I needed to go back to making brownies out of a box, when it finally clicked (and thank goodness it did), and I realized that cooking, as much as it is an art, is also a science, and foods react chemically to heat and mixing.

But I didn't share this story to try to convince you to give homemade brownies another shot (although I really hope you do), but to, hopefully, lend you some inspiration. Once again, we have a woman who suffered setbacks, and maybe veered a little off coarse, but eventually came back stronger and wiser than ever. [If I can add even more weight to this argument, it might be helpful to add that Dorie didn't decide to go into the culinary arts until after she had already earned a PhD in Gerontology, and then, she had to start all over.] I hope this story encourages you, if you have back-burner dreams and ideas, to keep giving yourself a chance. Because it may not happen the first, second, or even tenth time you try, but eventually, if you don't give up, it may just work out in the end.

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