Sex and Bacon (16 page)

Once your chocolate has turned from molten liquid into light, nougaty solid and you’ve added boozy deliciousness (or not), stop stirring it and refrigerate your truffle mix for four hours.

Watch the snow, pet the kitties, and drink more icy champagne.

After your chocolate has fully chilled through, take it out and quickly roll it into balls, using your fingers. Refrigerate the chocolate balls. Try not to eat them all—that’s like polishing off all the cookie dough without baking a single batch, decadent but ultimately disappointing.

Now: Make your double-boiler again using a clean, dry bowl on top. Pour in the second package of chocolate morsels, and melt them the way you melted the first portion. Stir till your chocolate shines like patent leather.

Now take your chilled chocolate balls out of the fridge and use two forks to dip them in the warm liquid chocolate until evenly coated, one at a time. Remove the coated truffles to a baking sheet lined with wax paper, if you have it (but I never do—a naked baking sheet is fine). Return them to the fridge until the chocolate coatings are firm and solid.

By this time it is night, and the snow has muffled all street sounds, and you’re safe and warm and a little buzzed, wrapped in a quilt on the couch with your girl. She kisses you and her tongue is surprisingly cold from the icy champagne, like a finger running down your spine. Your own mouth tastes of cream and chocolate.

Sweets for the sweet.

SUGARTOOTH 2

IT WAS TOO MUCH.

It was too much sweetness, too much care. Too much love. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like a rangy alley cat, scooped up and groomed into humiliated misery—a pretty bow and a tinkly bell around my neck proclaiming my fealty. I felt conquered. I lapped up her cream, but I couldn’t get comfortable sleeping at her feet.

Also, it was complicated: I’d been seeing a man in Seattle. It had been casual and my girl had known all about it—until all of a sudden it
wasn’t
casual, and I had to do the right thing, which was the most horrible thing I could possibly do to someone who had trusted me to do no harm.

I broke her heart into approximately ten million tiny pieces. It was a clumsy murder, and I was ashamed. Insipid words dribbled down my chin like warm milk as I extricated myself from something most people would have killed for: a good woman, a warm hearth, a
home
. All of that was offered to me, and I turned it down. I could have had a different kind of vinaigrette for my salad every night of the week.

Then I took my strappy heels and slunk back to Seattle, dazed and culpable, secretly relieved to leave the wintry Midwest to its own bluster.

AT HOME I
baked white Betty Crocker cake and frosted it with canned chocolate icing. I ate chunks of it from my hands, licking my fingers.

I drank champagne, but it wasn’t the same. There was something unpleasantly fey about champagne refrigerated to a civilized chill, instead of barbarically semi-frozen. I drank half the bottle and poured the rest out.

WHEN YOU NEED
to feel busy—creative, instead of destructive —

—when you need to get your hands dirty—

—when you need to feel scoured clean after a blundering slaughter—

—and, when you need the cracked-out mood elevation that only a large amount of sugar can provide—

—that’s when you make yourself a big stack of cor ncakes for breakfast.

Well, that’s what / do, anyway. It beats starting a lonely morning with last night’s champagne.

THIS RECIPE LIVES
in my scrapbook, annotated “Noah—January 1993.” Noah was my best friend in high school. We cooked together constantly, when we weren’t dropping acid and listening to Pink Floyd. 1993 was a year of good food and lots of glassy-eyed giggling, till Noah set his parents’ kitchen on fire melting saltpeter into sugar to make a low-tech smoke bomb. At that point we stuck to dropping acid. It seemed safer.

I believe Noah adapted this recipe from his copy of
The Joy of Cooking
, but I can’t swear to it. So many recipes are like playing Telephone—one person whispers his or her recipe to the next person, who whispers his or her version to the next person, and so on down the line. I don’t want to look this recipe up because I like the Telephone version I’ve got.

Some days it’s good to remember that somebody loved you enough to whisper in your ear.

START WITH ONE
cup of cornmeal, a quarter cup of sugar, and a dash of salt in a small mixing bowl. Boil water and pour one cup of hot water over the cornmeal. Stir it, cover the bowl with a plate, and set aside for ten minutes.

In another small bowl, beat one
egg
and a half cup of half-and-half or cream. Add about a quarter stick of melted butter or a few tablespoons of bacon fat. If you don’t have either on hand, use canola or any other mild oil—melted Crisco is fine. Beat the
egg
, the cream, and the butter or bacon fat, then add the mixture to the dry ingredients in the other bowl and blend.

Add a half cup of white flour and two teaspoons baking powder. Mix with very few strokes. The batter should be barely blended and lumpy. Resist the urge to beat the hell out of it. This will not make you feel better.

Heat a skillet on medium, or a little hotter, until a few drops of water flicked from your fingertips appear to skip across the base of the pan. Toss a chunk of butter and a little bacon fat into the skillet and allow them to melt together (or just use canola, or Crisco—a good game of Telephone is always open to interpretation).

Use a measuring cup or ladle to spoon pancake-size circles of batter into the hot pan. Let your corncakes rest until their visible surfaces are covered in air bubbles. Don’t poke or molest them. Don’t squash them. Don’t flip them too early. Wait for the bubbles. They mean the baking powder’s working to give your cakes an airy, crispy texture.

When they’re all covered with air bubbles, use a heat-safe spatula to flip them over. The second sides should cook faster than the first sides. Don’t let your babies burn.

Once your cakes are all browned, put them on a plate and layer them with fruit preserves or honey or molasses. You can butter the layers if you want. You can top the whole stack with a blob of plain whole-milk yogurt, like whipped cream on a corn sundae. You can be fancy and just sprinkle your cakes with a little powdered sugar and lemon juice. Remember what you like best, because someday you may want to whisper it into someone’s ear.

This recipe yields enough for two people, but if your heart needs repair and you’re eating corncakes all by yourself, you may find that the entire batch is only barely enough.

MEN LOVE THE AROMA OF PUMPKIN PIE THE WAY RICH
ladies adore the scent of Chanel No. 5.

They’re drawn to it—it magnetizes them, braces them, gets their dicks hard. Don’it believe me? Seriously: Ask Dr. Alan Hirsch, who studied scent and arousal in the late ‘90s as the director of Chicago’s Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation. He determined that out of all the fragrances tested, men became most aroused by the spicy sweet scent of pumpkin pie combined with lavender.
¹
He figured this out by measuring—ahem—"penile blood flow.” (I hope he wore latex gloves.)

The lavender part makes a certain amount of sense—after all, lavender is a relaxing scent, and you usually have to be relaxed in order to be turned on. If you’re smelling lavender you’re probably in a clean, safe, homelike environment—like Bed Bath & Beyond, or an upscale lingerie boutique. It’s understandable to draw a big arrow from feeling safe and relaxed to feeling randy. I tend to get turned on in shopping malls more than I’d like to admit, especially when high school is out and all the surlyyoung men lean against the Orange Julius stand like a jailbait chorus line.

But lavender mixed with the scent of pumpkin pie —I just don’t know about that. Maybe there’s some crucial genetic information on the Y chromosome, positing that women adept at pie baking also tend toward success in the equally time-consuming and messy arenas of gestation and childbirth. Or maybe men are just pigs for pie of all kinds, as evinced by two of my favorite lip-smacking, elbow-nudging terms used primarily by men of a certain sort to describe the female pudendum:
cherry pie
and
hair pie
. Pumpkin pie no longer seems like such a stretch.

Frankly, if I thought it would get me laid, I’d roll myself in coconut, dip my ass in chocolate, and call myself a macaroon.

IF Y0U WANT
to know the truth, I adore smelling like pretty much anything edible (with the exception offish and cheese, which usually means I’ve skipped a shower). In my bathroom cabinet right now are the following products:

• Neapolitan Shea Body Butter, in Chocolate Souffle
  
• Desert Kssence Organics Hand and Body Lotion, in Vanilla Chai
  
• Skintimates Shave Gel, in Raspberry Ram
  
• The Body Shop Body Butter, in Blueberry
  
• Jaqua Foaming Caramel Cappuccino Hydrating Sho’wer Syrup (’which wins the prize for tempting dessert-loving buyers with a trifecta of deliciousness—caramel, cappuccino, and, in a brilliant stroke of advertising genius,
  syrup)
  

I’m not even mentioning the specific products I use for their fragrances alone (Vanilla Fantasy Fragrance Body Spray Luxe Pink Grapefruit Body Mist, and Demeter Sugar Cookie Cologne Spray). Basically, my bathroom smells like a confectionary: If I took more than one bath a day, I’d probably give myself diabetes.

But the product I love the most—out of all of my sugary-sweet lotions and potions—is my Philosophy 3-m-l Shampoo, Conditioner, and Shower Gel. Why? Because it gets me laid. Wliy? Because its scent is Pumpkin Pie.

Not just Pumpkin, mind you. Pumpkin
Pie
.

Yes,
that
scent. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and pureed pumpkin, baked together in a golden crust. That’s the product I make sure to use (in combination with a little lavender oil sprinkled on my pillow)when I’m trying to get lucky and my intended purveyor of sexual bliss carries both X and Y chromosomes.
²

Which brings me to one of the many charms of my pumpkin-pie-scented Philosophy 3-in-l Shampoo, Conditioner, and Shower Gel: the recipe on the bottle.

One of the tastiest conceits of Philosophy—an expensive brand with deceptively simple packaging—is that its food-scented products nearly always have recipes on them, for whatever food it is that the shampoo or bubble bath or hair conditioner or body lotion smells like. The recipes pretty much sell the products: You may not have time to make an angel food cake but you can sure as hell take a shower and smell like one, and isn’t that almost as good? Plus, taking a shower won’t add unwanted angel food poundage. Thus, you can have your cake and (not) eat it, too. Sheer marketing inspiration, using recipes women will never follow to sell products they’ll use to smell like the delectable foods they shun! It makes my head spin (or maybe that’s hunger, because Lord knows I smell like an Italian bakery, though I haven’t had a piece of angel food cake in months).

Because I was offended at the idea of a recipe
not meant to be followed
, under the assumption that most women would rather smell like a pie than eat one,
³
I determined to make pumpkin pie from the recipe on my Philosophy 3-m-l bottle. I’d discover whether the recipe was merely window dressing, meaningless text designed solely to sell the shampoo inside the bottle, or whether some pie-loving bigwig at Philosophy actually took care to make sure that the recipe resulted in a firm, creamy, spiced pumpkin custard, snug in a flaky casing of crust. Kvery time I used my Pumpkin Pie 3-in-l, I wondered. I had to find out.

And if my sudden pie-baking frenzy got me laid, even better. I had to admit the fringe benefits were potentially excellent: a scrumptious dessert
and
a few toe-curling orgasms? Even a mediocre pie and a mild, vibrator-fueled spasm were better than
no
pie and
no
sex. I couldn’t
not
find out.