Black Sesame Cake

Oh no, not black! said Beau’s mother disapprovingly, back when he showed her the bathroom he’d renovated a decade ago, before we were a thing. The towels were black. The rest of the bathroom was beautifully done, by the way, but the towels were definitely black. Beau’s mom preferred beige, white or lavender. Maybe the occasional pastel blue. The dramatic elegance of black was not in her color wheelhouse. She's Scottish.

I like the black towels, although by now they’ve faded to the point where they’ve lost their drama. Wouldn’t have thought to buy them myself, but I like them. Now that the kids have grown up and the house is ridiculously spacious, I’ve taken over their bathroom and left the master bath to Beau. It’s glorious to have your own bathroom. Little by little I am working on removing the Santa sticker that one of the kids stuck to the end of the counter decades ago, on that little bit of marble tile that forms the edge.

Sure, I know I could get some Goo Gone and remove the rest of the sticker right now. We have Goo Gone in the garage, and I even know where it is. But I like the idea of removing the Santa sticker a little at a time, using the edge of my thumbnail. Shush.

When Max was in middle school, we drove across the state to Fresno to choose a cockapoo puppy, a story worthy in itself. On the way we stopped for lunch, where we discussed how we’d choose the puppy. Health and personality, we agreed. Any color but black.

The dog we chose, Percy, is black. We’ve had him for twelve years now, and he’s the best dog on the face of the planet. If there are any dogs inside the planet, he’s better than them, too. He’s the sweetest and the funniest and the cutest. The only thing that makes him less than god is that he’s hard to photograph well. And that's because he’s black. You can get a good photograph, but you have to work at it. If you’re not careful, he looks like a furry black oval, free from details, impossible to distinguish nose from tail.

Sidebar: Percy has a secret weapon. You’ll not see it unless you fail to pay enough attention to him while you’re supposed to be petting him. First he sends telepathic signals saying, Hey! I’m a pet! It’s what I’m for! If you still don’t pet him, he’ll roll onto his side and lift his front leg and reveal a narrow, white stripe, his secret weapon. No one can resist the white stripe. No one with a heart, anyway. End of sidebar.

Just before the one-year anniversary of my layoff-slash-retirement-commencement day, last November fifth, I came across a recipe on the King Arthur* website called Black Sesame Cake. [Note to self: Get more serious about figuring out how to use links on this limited template that your essential indolence compelled you to use. Note to others: I’ve tried to figure it out, at least I’ve tried a little. But I could try harder.]

Here’s what captured my attention in the recipe:

1. Sesame. I love sesame in all its forms. Seeds, yum! Oil, yum! Tahini, yum! Those tiny, sticky, bar-shaped candies, yum! Red bean cakes with sesame, yum!

2. Novelty. Never had a sesame cake, black or otherwise.

3. Black. The same quirk of morbid curiosity that makes me enjoy the movie Harold and Maude and the recent series The End of the Fxxxing World (Netflix) draws me to a black cake. Bee and Lee: You won’t like that series. You might like the cake.

I’ll grant you that Reason 3 is related to Reason 2, but black cake goes beyond novelty. In the food realm, black color indicates spoilage, mold or mildew. Black spots on bread, for example. Or tells you not-so-subtly that you’ve cooked it far too long. Black chicken remnants on the grill, after Beau’s timer malfunctioned, so he says. Fly specks—nuff said. In short, black says, You do not want this. Do not eat.

Like black food, a layoff is supposed to be bad. I think it truly is bad for most people, and I don’t mean to minimize that. I was surprised and taken aback and annoyed that I didn’t get a rose gold iWatch for my twenty-plus years of service at MNC. But I didn’t feel bad, not in the moment, and not in the months since. You see, I’d been intending to retire at the end of 2021 anyway. The layoff accelerated the timetable by a few months, and did me the favor of removing my responsibility for figuring out how to distribute my workload onto the already-overloaded shoulders of my team. Shifted that responsibility onto the plate of the new boss. I imagine she re-allocated the load easily, not burdened by a heart.

What would better symbolize the first anniversary of my layoff than a black sesame cake? Its black insides, the cake part, the crumb as it’s known among those of us who obsessively watch The Great British Baking Show—generate fear in the limbic system. Fear the cake! Fear the layoff.

But once you put your fork into it, and taste its novel, rich sweetness, well. You just can’t get enough. It’s a spectacular cake. You feel so proud of yourself for pushing through, baking it and then summoning the courage to consume it. Every morsel.

The layoff cake. Revealing its mysteries, releasing its sweet newness. Opening you to something unknown and delicious.

Any good storyteller would stop the story right there, but I’m not constrained by an editor. If you want to stop now, I admire you.

Reasons why I didn’t make the black sesame cake for my November fifth celebration:

1. I didn’t have the Japanese black sesame powder nor the black tahini that the recipe calls for. You can rightly roll your eyes at me because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where nothing you need is more than a short drive away. But, indolence.

2. The recipe wasn’t gluten-free. You can read about my adventures in gluten-freedom in the story Gluten-Free Nonetheless. [Wouldn't a link be nice?]

I still wanted to make the black sesame cake at some point, though. I addressed Reason One by taking a trip to Ranch 99, a large Asian grocery store nearby. Got black sesame powder, no problem. Black tahini, nope! But I already had black sesame seeds at home (because, who doesn’t?), so I could make that myself. In my powerful Vitamix Professional Grade 5200 Blender.

While I was there I bought a hand of ginger much larger than my hand. As I went by the bin of durians, I texted Beau, How many durians do you want?

He said, Forty-five. He gets my sense of humor. They look like brown spiky watermelons, durians do, and the bin held maybe a dozen. I didn’t get any durians, because their main feature is smelling like rotten feet. If you take the metro line in Singapore, you see signs everywhere that say, No Durians Allowed. Anything you can’t carry on public transportation in Singapore also doesn’t go in my shopping cart at Ranch 99. However, when I pulled into the garage, I texted Beau, Please help carry the durians upstairs. Just to scare him a little.

Regarding Reason Two, I sent King Arthur a question, right there below the recipe. You can find it if you look for my secret King Arthur name, Bex. I asked if they had worked on a gluten-free version of the black sesame cake recipe. I knew what they would say, and they did.

Just substitute Measure-For-Measure gluten-free flour for the all-purpose flour, said Arthur himself. That means, no, they didn’t try it. Substituting Measure-For-Measure flour, a multi-ingredient King Arthur product, doesn’t work. And that’s based on my extensive experience of trying it once in a cornbread recipe.

For the record, my celiac kid had the same recommendation. She likes Measure-For-Measure flour. We have agreed to disagree. I should accede to her greater expertise, but so far I haven’t.

At this point, I’ve baked enough GF cakes that I could probably figure out how to make a good GF black sesame cake, and I will, one of these days. But success will take two or three tries, and on December thirtieth I decided to make the cake for New Year’s Eve. So I made a gluten-full version, true to KA’s recipe, eyes-open and trusting that the result would be worth the gluteny consequences, which for me are temporary and mildish.

Holy avocado tree, it is a spectacular cake.

What better way to ring out a year smeared with covid and republican crazies and racial injustice and global climate change, while graced with bike rides along the Bay with Lee and pickleball with friends and family and hikes through the redwoods with Beau and reunitings with Max and getting to hug all of my kids and great phone and FaceTime conversations than a black sesame cake?

Frightening and sweet, both at once. That’s life right now.

*****

*King Arthur doesn’t have to sponsor me, because I sponsor them by buying their products frequently and in quantity, except Measure-For-Measure flour, which I bought only once. I love their products so much that I will give them free ad space on indolenceindustries.com, should they ask. They might get several dollars’ worth of business from this website, plus shipping.

[Photo creds: Me. Black sesame cake on top, bin of durians on bottom. $13.99 a pound, so pick a big one.]