Confection of the Future, now in the present

How many of you intrepid readers guessed "fruit sauce"? You're right! Fruit sauce... slow-cooked plums (in one casserole) and slow-cooked blackberries (in another casserole), overnight in the Aga and then whirred to a pulp (for the plums) and strained to remove seeds (for the berries)... then stirred together in some inexact proportion, et voila! Fruit sauce.

Besides the fruit itself, the sauce contains a little bit of caster ("baker's") sugar, a little bit of blackcurrant jelly -- I don't go for über-sweet sauce because it's going to end up spilled all over much sweeter stuff anyway, so let's preserve the natural tartness.

In the pix below you can see just the sort of sweet stuff it's going to be spilled over: cake and ice cream (there ought to be a law). I made the humble ginger-citron-chocolate chip-sour cream cake yesterday -- this is a tremendously obliging cake, in fact I think the mixer and the Aga know how to do it themselves by now because I have made it so many times; and if you want to know more about it you must write to me, because I'm embarrassed to say how simple it is for then you will know exactly how basic my baking skills are.

I think this fruit sauce is a very happy color! Be happy, eat cake, and watch for the next mysterious confection to come down the pike...
xo, Trix {very full now after eating the photo props, well yeah Dustin helped... he's full now too}

Who's Who, or, solving the tiniest of mysteries

Yeah, I know it's not a big deal, and you may not even have noticed, but I wrote earlier that Dustin would be the one reviewing Katharine Weber's True Confections. Just want to clarify: Dustin had the book, I nicked it, found it too good to hand back, and now I'm going to write the review... just as soon as I'm good 'n' ready.

So you won't have any of the plot divulged before you're ready, I advise you to run to the book store or library and read it for yourself (which, I suppose, gives you a clue about the cheerfulness of my future report).

Please do yourself one teensy favor: before you even begin to read page one, have a healthy stash of your favorite sweet things right next to your hand (the hand that isn't going to be holding the book)... you will need to be able to reach them without breaking your reading rhythm. When you are done, gather your friends and go out for more sweets! Oh yes I will, too...

Stickler for details (except when I'm not),
cheers, Trixie

Confection of the Future, seen today in draft form

As if looking into a crystal ball, we glimpse our confectionery future... just take a look at these gorgeous organically-grown, dry-farmed plums and berries (of course we mean that we don't bother to water or fertilize, but it sounds so much better the other way). What will these beauties become? Stay tuned...

In the meantime I want to tell you how much I am enjoying Katharine Weber's latest book, True Confections -- a droll, inventive, truly good read, which we rarely stumble across these days despite tromping through dozens of books every year. Available at your library (that's where I found the copy I'm reading now) and all of the usual places. Still in the early chapters, I won't divulge plot points but I will emphasize how clean and forward-propelled her writing is (from me this is HIGH praise). And when you have a mo, read her weblog, which combines many of our favorite human traits into one easy-to-digest module. Brilliant! I am well on my way to becoming her biggest fan. Golly.

Back to the adorable grindstone of recipe searching,
cheers,
Trix

Swiss (non)Chocolate

Basler Laekerli -- Have you tried these? Not very easy to find in the USA... in fact, one usually needs a Swiss friend who goes home to Basel from time to time, waits in the shop queue (preferably at Laekerli Huus, the mecca of laekerli emporia) with 1000 other people vying for souvenir sweets, and sneaks a box of these delicious little cookies home through Customs.

They look quite simple, just a thin, not-too-sweet gingerbread sort of cake-like cookie (does that make sense?) with a mottled white sugar glaze, and when you first open a new box they are actually not at their peak. Patience is rewarded if you can bear to wait a few days, with your laekerli box tucked into a larger tin (plastic outer wrap removed), because the cookies will acclimate and -- absolutely! -- become softer and more aromatic. When you bite into one and can taste the citron peel along with the mild spiciness, THEN you have yourself a box of supreme Swiss excellence. And hey, it isn't even chocolate (you can get chocolate-covered laekerli but that's just gilding the lily).

Of course the intrepid can learn to make them by hand... here again it helps to either BE Swiss or to KNOW someone from The Old Country who can guide you through the process -- luckily we fall into the latter group (can't help not being in the first group, alas). Handling the dough is the hardest part of the prep because it is very, very sticky; but once you get the hang of that it's all smooth sailing and delicious eating from here on out.

I'm going to ask my friend if it's OK to post her recipe for homemade laekerli, and, when I get her to say yes, will post it here, with how-to pictures, and we can explore this beautiful non-chocolate member of the Swiss confectionery pantheon together. Did I mention how perfectly they go with tea? You knew that.

xo, Trix

It's good to have friends who can bake

Isn't it just? Yum yum... we feel very lucky today {burp}. Made this morning by *****, and here accompanied by some cold-infused tea (in regulation jam jar!), this wholly wonderful thin-crust fruit tart gives us wonderful energy for weblog posting and other important pursuits. No mystery to this confection, really -- it's peach+blueberry tart! The mystery is how our friend made it soooooo good, because we think it has magic in it. Maybe the fruit came from her garden... that would do it. As we try to solve the puzzle, we keep taking bite after bite, and soon the tart has disappeared into...?

Jolly good. I wish every one of you the same degree of excellence today,
cheers, Trixie

Wacky film, yummy-looking wagashi

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu)
directed by Shohei Imamura, 2001; available on DVD in the USA

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is a film for grownups, dealing as it does with what is known in the parlance as mature subject matter (sex, ooh!). That hurdle passed, let me tell you about the wagashi (traditional Japanese tea sweets) in this film: the female protagonist Saeko (played by Misa Shimizu) has taken over wagashi-making duties in her aging grandmother's shop, and during the course of the film we have occasion to see a little bit of what goes on in a small-town wagashi-ya, including glimpses of some cool tools of the trade -- hand-carved wooden molds or kashigata (pictured above), bean paste and other ingredients, and traditional packaging. I suppose one might need some background in Japanese confectionery to catch the nice details woven into the main story (and the film, while certainly not for everyone, is unusual, delightful, beautifully made, and also stars the ever-watchable Koji Yakusho), but even without prior knowledge you know there is something traditional happening before your eyes, and it's compellingly esoteric.

I wish I had some wagashi with me when I watched this movie... it's like Tampopo: don't watch the movie when you're hungry (side note: Koji Yakusho is in Tampopo, too, wow).

{kashigata image courtesy of the Etsy seller Products From Japan With Love, whom we thank for letting us borrow it}

More sweetness very soon,
Trixie

Who is Alynn Ross?

Over the next several posts we will introduce you to some of our favorite people, and those folks, in turn, will occasionally drop in to post special messages to you. Peachy!

It wouldn't be a very mysterious weblog if we didn't toss in a mystery now and again, would it? Here's one: Who is Alynn Ross? Can you guess? Stay tuned for clues.

Golly! Another mystery weblog launches into the cosy blogosphere!

How could we possibly resist? It's a natural progression from our other weblog and website, after all... resistance being futile (and not being the resisting sort), here we are.

WELCOME to our rest stop (or final resting place?) for meanderings about mystery novels that have a confectionery connection -- by main story, or by character predilections or back-story, or by the simple fact of having some sort of confection tossed into them -- also for discussion of literature in general, films, music, photography, design, printing and publishing, tea, travel, jeepers ANYthing that could in any way be tangentially or directly associated with mysteries or confections.
Thank you for coming over!

For starters, please allow me to introduce myself and my best friend and 'blogging companion: I am Trixie (so named by one totally-famous writer James Norwood Pratt of San Francisco and the universe), and my pal is Dustin, and we love few things in life more than a good read, good tea, and a really good piece of something sweet to chew on.

In the coming posts we shall regale you with such tales as the ongoing real-life mystery of the Glico-Morinaga Kidnapping (Tokyo 1984, still unsolved), a character study of the granddaughter-confectioner in Shohei Imamura's film Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, Dustin's gleeful review of Katharine Weber's 2010 masterpiece True Confections, compare-&-contrasts of mystery novel how-to guides, and, without a doubt, confectionery musings of the highest order.

As we pull out our press passes to attend chocolate tastings, tea conferences, mystery festivals, and more, we look forward to your presence and participation back here in blogland. Onward!
~ Sweets to the sweet, Trix

p.s. The image above is of a Chocolate Mikasa, a simple, elegant, playful chocolate-inside-and-out version of the classic Japanese tea sweet called a dorayaki made by Minamoto Kitchoan -- about which you can read more here... it's a confection, it goes with tea, and we eat them while reading and writing mysteries... need I say more?