The New York Times ran an old recipe in its magazine Sunday, for something called Teddie’s Apple Cake, c. 1973. I looked at the picture and thought, Mmm, might have to try that one. I left the magazine open on the kitchen table, and when Alan stumbled in, exhausted from a day spent doing battle on the Field of Mars, he took one look at it and said, “I want that cake.”

“OK, I’ll make it,” I said. Later, he said again, “I really want that cake.” I took this as a mandate. So when he called in sick the following day, having been felled by a Force 5 head cold, I decided to make Teddie’s Apple Cake as part of his therapy.

Readers, I’ll cut to the chase: Teddie’s Apple Cake is one fine cake, and very therapeutic. Next time I make it, I’m going to follow the lead of the Wednesday Chef, who cut the sugar a bit and substituted dried fresh cranberries for raisins; my sole criticism is that it’s a tad too sweet, and the cranberries will be a nice contrast. My contribution: The recipe calls for an angel-food cake pan, but I’d guess you could substitute a bundt pan in a pinch. It’s a big, chunky cake, so it may not unmold from a bundt perfectly, but you could take that chance.

What I want to talk about today is the counter-narrative in the Sunday NYT story, seen here:

Boris Portnoy, the pastry chef at Campton Place in San Francisco, says that the cake’s texture reminds him of Black Magic Cake, a moist oil-based chocolate cake, the recipe for which could be found on the back of a Hershey’s Cocoa tin.

But like most chefs who try out the old recipes for this column, Portnoy was frustrated by its simplicity. ‘‘It’s just good and normal, but kind of one-dimensional,’’ he says. We agreed to disagree, and then he had his chance to make something multidimensional — and vastly better.

Portnoy came up with a number of modern desserts inspired by the flavors and ideas in Teddie’s apple cake — one involved walnuts, olives, an almond mousse and roasted quince; another black walnuts, dulce de leche and olive oil.

Friends, this is one reason people are afraid to cook these days. The hours and hours of cooking shows, the time spent watching the “Top Chef” contenders sweat out the arrangement of one sprig of watercress, an artful smear of sauce and a single scallop on a triangular white plate has terrified way too many people who are perfectly capable of claiming their place at the stove. Just look at the phrase in that first quoted paragraph: “frustrated by its simplicity.” Most people are delighted to discover something that looks complicated isn’t. And look at those alternative takes on the recipe — olives, roasted quince, dulce de leche, mmm yummy, just what I’m looking for in an apple cake. Olives. I ask you.

I’d be happy to eat Boris Portnoy’s pastry, and I’m sure it’s wonderful. But I think even Boris would admit that the best food is peasant food, and peasants don’t have time for almond mousse. Give me a nice lumpy stew over a perfectly pureed root vegetable melange with a little dab of creme fraiche any day.

(And how many people have watched Padma Lakshmi take a bite of some contestant’s creation on “Top Chef” and thought, “I bet she’s going to run offstage and puke it all up in five, four, three, two…”)

If you keep reading that story, you’ll learn that Boris rejected the olives in favor of something, er, simpler. At least flavor-wise. You still have to pick some thyme and do some gymnastics with egg whites. I might try that recipe. But I bet Teddie beats it hands-down.

I’ve been sent so many YouTube gems of late I was thinking of doing an all-video post, but instead we’ll make it all-video bloggage:

Who has time to put these things together? Crank that soulja boy, Barney.

Christianity is certainly, um, strange these days.

And finally, this is my godson, the next Ginger Baker.

Happy baking.

Happy day after Halloween. This is not a premonition of the passing of any member of our household — I hope. (Anyway, that member of the household is licking himself at my feet as we speak.) However, when he does go, I’ll already have his calaca ready.

Today we have our bi-annual flirtation with divorce boat-hauling chore. Back later, if I survive.

On Christmas last year, my brother got, well, drunk. Which, I hasten to add, is OK, because he hardly ever does that, and because he let me drive him home, and that led us to the strange night in Obetz where we met the dog sitting at the bar.

Anyway, my Christmas present to my brother that year included a couple of CDs. One was a Robert Goulet collection, selected for one song — “Come Back to Me,” one of those Broadway B-sides I remember hearing a thousand different singers performing on the Merv Griffin Show. And part of being a happy drunk that Christmas night included him playing that song over and over. So now, with Goulet’s obituaries in the papers and the tributes pouring in, I’m not thinking of “If Ever I Would Leave You.” I’ve got three or four lines stuck in my head:

Don’t get lost in Korvette’s
Don’t get signed by the Mets
Take a train, take a plane,
Don’t give up cigarettes,
Come back to me…

There’s nothing like a great baritone, is there? Sigh.

I liked him in “Atlantic City,” m’self.

Off to carve pumpkins. Come back for pictures.

Why I will never stop reading newspapers: Because blogs will never greet me over my morning coffee with a headline like this:

Police: Drunken dad called drunken mom to pick up son

YPSILANTI — Police detained a Northville couple after a wife who drove to pick up her young son when her husband was stopped for drunken driving showed up even more intoxicated than he was, police alleged.

Given that no one was injured, I can enjoy this story guilt-free. Every part of it tickles me, from the Ypsilanti dateline — as funny place names go, Ypsi is pretty good, although run-of-the-mill compared to, say, Rancho Cucamonga — to the dry, pro-forma “police alleged” at the end. [Pause.] You say there’s nothing funny about two children being driven around by drunken parents? You say the rest of the world doesn’t exist for my entertainment?

Way to rain on my parade.

Things I learned while looking up links: There’s a video online called “Living the Dream in Rancho Cucamonga” — Windows Media Player and broadband connection recommended. (If I were writing a novel set there, I’d call it “East of Pomona.”) Also, Ypsilanti was named for Demetrius Ypsilanti, hero of the Greek war of independence. A bust of him stands at the base of the Brick Dick.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by?

My plan today was to bitch about Alice Waters. She is promoting a new book, and getting on my last nerve. Farhad Manjoo in Salon sums up my objections in a nutshell:

Though I have eaten some of the best food I’ve ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she’s become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us — of me! — and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It’s got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you’d spend many of your weekends.

As frequently happens to journalists when they fall under Waters’ spell, though, he’s quickly changing his tune, even after the kitchen goddess says things like, oh, “I am disappointed because (none of the presidential candidates) is talking about food and agriculture,” and then adds that food is:

…the No. 1 issue. Not one of 10. This is No. 1. It’s what we all have in common, what we all do every day, and it has consequences that affect everybody’s lives. It’s not like this is the same thing as crime in the streets — no, this is more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security — this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.

In case you people who don’t live in the market basket of America are wondering how you’re supposed to eat in the winter if you’re confined to local produce, the answer is: Root vegetables. Although Waters makes it sound so wonderful: There are turnips of every color and shape!

Yes, well.

We ate from the “100-mile menu” in Stratford last weekend, and lo it was good. But it was also harvest season. I don’t care how many shapes and colors turnips come in. They’re still turnips. I’m not giving up my supermarket just yet.

OK, this isn’t going well. Let’s cut to the bloggage:

It sounds silly, but I’ve read of this happening at least twice before: Hunter shot by dog.

I’m going to Kate’s school Halloween parade tomorrow. I’ll let you know whether the Baby Ho-bag costume story is manufactured for your holiday horror or dead-on. I suspect the former.

More to come later. When I’m awake.

There’s a new series of TV ads for the iPhone running lately, in which ordinary folks stand up in front of a piece of black seamless paper and tell stories about how much they love their you-know-whats, sometimes supported with anecdotes. One features an airline pilot, who talks about how one of his flights had been condemned to a three-hour delay because of weather. “Three hours for a flight that would take one hour and 40 minutes,” he said, knowingly. Oh, man. We’ve all been there.

So, bored, he turned on the iPhone and checked weather.com, where he discovered the weather was actually clearing at the flight’s destination. He called the tower, told them the good news, and whaddaya know, they were cleared for takeoff p.d.q. Go buy an iPhone!

I didn’t greet this news with optimism, as it evidently informs us that a U.S. airport has fewer weather-prognostication tools than the Weather Channel, proprietors of weather.com. I think if most of us realized, on a daily basis, how much all the rest of us are flying by the seat of our pants, so to speak, we’d never leave the house. And yet the world soldiers on.

But the ad was on my mind when I read a non-irritating David Brooks column today, “The Outsourced Brain.” Brooks is at his best on this sort of neutral ground, and he makes an interesting observation — that the beauty of this new information age isn’t how it adds to our store of knowledge, but subtracts from it, by freeing us of having to remember a bunch of stupid crap. After noting his increasing reliance on his car’s GPS system, he writes:

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

I suspect he’s correct. I’ve already noticed the dulling of some of my once-ninja skills in some of these areas. I never used to forget a phone number; I could probably still tell you the numbers of my best friends in junior high school. Nowadays I know my own, and that’s about it, but it’s OK, because they’re all in my phone’s memory, and I don’t need to. I worry more about the loss of geographic knowledge, as geography is more important than any of us think, and not just in the is-Maple-north-or-south-of-Twelve-Mile sense, either. People evolved to be connected to the earth, their own particular patch of it, and being able to delegate it to a GPS unit doesn’t strike me as a huge improvement. Plus, jeez people, do we really need another electronic device to get distracted by?

I keep a compass on my kitchen table’s lazy susan, to remind me which way is north. Every house I’ve lived in until now was oriented square — north out the back door, south out the front, etc. Everything in GP is at an angle. Drives. Me. Nuts.

Bloggage? I got no bloggage for you today, people. Let’s play a game — you leave the bloggage for me to be amused by. And have a great weekend.

Hour Detroit, the magazine I work for most regularly these days, doesn’t put its content online, so I have to find other links to tell you about a short piece I have in the current issue, about this office at the GM Tech Center in Warren.

Go ahead, click. Marvel. Then come back.

It was designed by one legend, Eero Saarinen, for another, Harley Earl, GM’s first vice president of design, the man generally acknowledged to have brought real style to the product line for the first time. It was the crown jewel in the Tech Center campus, completed after World War II and also designed by Eero Saarinen, along with his father, Eliel. The press materials GM gave me described it as “the most luxurious and romantic office ever built,” and in 1956, it probably was. It has doubtless been usurped by some Nouveau Gilded Age bozo’s realm, but it still looks totally cool and utterly modern.

Partly it’s because mid-century modern is back in a big way, but also because someone had half a brain and declined to do any major modifications over the years. The furniture’s been reupholstered here and there and carpet and drapes replaced, but otherwise that’s the same undulating wall of cherry strips and aluminum extrusions, the same built-in sofas and credenzas, and perhaps best of all, the same high-tech gadgetry.

Note the dials and gizmos behind the desk. They can do everything from open the door remotely — a big power play when the big boss remains seated behind the desk, very “show yourself out, then” — to control the lights and sound system. Just behind the pen set in this picture is the desk lamp, tucked away flush in the desktop. Press a button and it rises, unfolds and turns on. The current occupant of the office, GM VP/design Ed Welburn, demonstrated it, and it’s so mechanical — it rises and descends on what looks like bicycle chain. There’s a TV across the room that can be revealed the same way.

Needless to say, it’s huge. Earl was a big man with a big job, and he needed a big space. Welburn’s more average-size, and said you can get a sense of his predecessor’s outlines from the scale of everything — even the concept cars that Earl showed off at car shows were made for a big man with big feet. Of course, everything was bigger, then, including the future. It’s hard not to pick up that sense of IGY-type optimism from just spending a little time in this way-cool space.

My story was pegged to a major Saarinen exhibit that opens next month at Cranbrook. The PR guys who showed me around the Tech Center said the place had recently had Pentagon-level security, but was easing up a bit (although employees are still forbidden to carry camera phones in certain parts of the complex). I felt lucky to see it — the VP’s office was only one of the many design delights of the place.

Oh, and back to the first link: Make sure you scroll down to see the black-and-white photo of the then-Masters of the Universe out on a hunting expedition in northern Michigan. The picture includes not only Earl and Bill Boyer, another GM heavyweight of the time, but also Arthur Godfrey and ol’ blood-and-guts Gen. Curtis LeMay. One look at this crew and you know that whatever their flaws, they probably got those two deer the old-fashioned way, and no one got shot in the face.

Now, if you can, buy the magazine. Old media supports new media, you know.

Bloggage:

Attack of the giant turkeys. Really.

OK, here’s some good stuff:

If you are tired of family-values Republicans being exposed as vile hypocrites you’re not going to want to read the WashPost’s detailing of Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce woes. If, however, you agree with me that this sort of thing never, ever gets tiresome, well, you’re going to lap it up like sweet, sweet cream. Sex! Money! Six pairs of sterling-silver asparagus tongs! A Lab named Beauregard!

HT to Lawyers, Guns and Money, who also claims to have turned up another reason to hate the Yankees — Derek Jeter, aka Herpes Harry.

(Herpes is making a real comeback, it would seem. All those who are free of this scourge, kiss your faithful partner, and make a note to talk to your kids about it. Valtrex or not, ewwww.)

Department of Looking on the Bright Side: At least the hand-wringing about Chief Wahoo is over for at least another year. In the meantime, for those of you who can’t leave the Cleveland Indians’ mascot alone, a modest proposal for a makeover. (Note: I have no idea how long the modest proposal’s been out there, so this may be older than dirt. I just like the idea of a ballpark with vindaloo available at the concession stand.)

Ellen DeGeneres, serial dog dumper?

Bow your heads for the Malibu Castle Kashan, destroyed by fire yesterday. And let’s all send good thoughts to L.A. Mary, Danny and our other SoCal readers who may be in harm’s way.

I don’t go to Halloween parties anymore, but if I did, I know who I’d be. Woo, scary.

Lately I’ve been collecting short passages of unbearable poignance. I think this is the saddest widdle two-sentence paragraph in the whole, sad world:

(“Miami Vice” actor Philip Michael) Thomas also invented the phrase “EGOT”, meaning “Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony”, in reference to his plans for winning all four. Thomas achieved a People’s Choice Award and a Golden Globe nomination but lacked even a nomination for any of the aforementioned awards.

Here’s the runner-up:

Jon-Erik Hexum (November 5, 1957–October 18, 1984) was an American actor and model, best known for accidentally killing himself on a television set. …Hexum died after shooting himself in the head with a prop gun loaded with blanks on the set of the CBS series Cover Up, a program about a pair of fashion photographers/models who were actually secret agents.

On October 12, 1984, after finishing a scene in which he fired several blank rounds from a .44 Magnum revolver, Hexum’s character was supposed to unload the gun and reload it with inert dummy rounds, which was required for the next scene in the script — a procedure that Jon-Erik was not familiar with, and which was usually done by the prop masters. The shooting of the next scene was delayed several times. While waiting for the prop masters to unload the blanks from the gun, Hexum jokingly put the gun up to his temple and allegedly said, “Let’s see if I get myself with this one.”

Hexum apparently did not realize that blanks use paper or plastic wadding to seal gun powder into the shell, and that this wadding is propelled out of the barrel of the gun with enough force to cause severe injury or death if the weapon is fired at point-blank range, especially if pointed at a particularly vulnerable spot, such as the temple or the eye.

No, I think I found the saddest part:

The same month that Hexum died, an issue of Playgirl magazine came out, featuring a photo shoot that Hexum had done shortly before his demise.

Stay away from Wikipedia when you’re depressed, man. You’ll start drinking at noon.

On the other hand, there’s something about the phrase “a pair of fashion photographers/models who were actually secret agents” that is just too ’80s for words.

I didn’t have a TV that functioned properly for much of the ’80s, so I missed “Cover Up.” I did watch “Miami Vice,” though. Everybody did. Friday night Vice, then out for an evening of fun. There was a copy editor in Fort Wayne who hosted MV parties, and one of the earliest clues to what I’d just moved from the big city for came when the wife of his boss fretted that these parties were “a bad influence” on the young, single people on staff. And there weren’t even any drugs! Fort Wayne in those days was truly the land that time forgot.

Eh. Been thinking about that place too much lately. Let’s turn our gaze forward for a change:

Came across this photo of Flickr; it’s an aerial photo of Windmill Point, the terminus of many of my bike rides. You can always tell when you’re approaching the Detroit border, because the trees thin out so quickly. Detroit hasn’t had the resources to properly care for its arboreal resources in some time, and it shows in this photo, where you can pretty much trace the Grosse Pointe/Detroit border by where the greenery deepens. The tidy little marina at lower right is Windmill Point Park, in GP; the rectangular patch immediately to its left is Mariner’s Park in Detroit, where I usually turn around. The next photo in the series shows an area south of there; I added a note. Those twin canals are where I learned to row (and decided rowing wasn’t for me, at least not at 5 a.m. on summer mornings). The Fisher Mansion is now owned by Hare Krishnas. A previous owner of the mansion filled in the water garage where Fisher kept his yacht; during Prohibition, he and his guests would climb aboard, motor out and drink legally on the Canadian side.

Guess who bought the house for the Hare Krishnas? Alfred Ford, Henry’s great-grandson, and Elizabeth Reuther, Walter’s daughter. Both were Hare Krishnas. Will children ever stop disappointing their parents? Not bloody likely.

Oh, on the peninsula in the middle of those two canals is an upscale new housing development — gated, of course — called Grayhaven. Every house has water access; go out your back door and you’re on the Great Lakes. Parts of this city are a well-kept secret indeed.

Do we have bloggage? Not bloody much, but let’s see how we can do:

Does the world really need another take on Caligula? Well, we can’t let Bob Guccione have the last word, can we?

Why the internet ROOOLZ: Men who look like old lesbians. Found via Simon Doonan, who gives us a few amusing new sobriquets for power dykes: “the Muffia,” who live in “Carpet Village.”

Well, that oughta keep you folks busy. If you haven’t died of boredom already. I have an interview in eight minutes, so I best be outta here.

It’s just that some of us…

…have different influences than others: