Wine for Bundt-Cake Madness

I know, I know, I was supposed to write this post yesterday. I know! I don't know what happened. I am having a consistency issue at the moment, and I apologize. Maybe I'm adding too much water...

Anyway, I recently returned from a visit with my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew in Los Angeles. The visit happened to be over that wonderful ode to candy, Halloween. I love a holiday that is all about getting and eating as much chocolate as possible.

Of course, the whole costume thing is fun, too, I suppose, especially if you are one of those people who is super creative and able to come up with a really original and unusual costume. I alas, am not one of those people. The most I ever managed in the way of a costume was wearing a full set of scrubs and doctor's mask, simply because my father used to bring loads of scrubs home for all of us to wear as pajamas.

This year I told my sister I was going to be going as "woman in very old pair of jeans". That's about as good as it gets on my end, I'm afraid. My niece went as a pink fairy, complete with wings, and my nephew wore one of the Halloween costumes my mother made me when I was young, a black and white cat costume with a pin-on tail and hood with ears. The costume is essentially a dress made of striped fabric, but with the hood up and black nose and whiskers on his face, he looked adorable. People on the street, however, thought he was supposed to be a zebra.

Trick or Treating in Santa Monica is not what I grew up with. For starters, it starts at about 4pm, in blinding daylight, and takes place on the business street, Montana Avenue, which is full of shops and restaurants. Kids and their families walk in and out of these stores, and are given candy, just like they would be at a house. This trick-or-treating is obviously geared toward younger kids who go to bed early, but for me, it's still a bit odd.

My trick-or-treating memories all involve dark streets, cold, crisp New England air, the shuffle of dried leaves underfoot, and knocking on the doors of people's homes, never quite sure what they would be giving out. And always, in every neighborhood, the one or two houses of people who were felt to be either mean or crazy; houses that were often dark and uninviting, houses at which we were uncertain whether or not to knock at all.

There were always the houses that were known, every year, for passing out the best candy, and then there was also....the raisin house. You know the house I mean. The house that handed out those little red boxes of Sun Maid raisins. Myself and everyone around me would watch those raisins fall into our bags in slow-motion, expressions of frozen horror on our faces. It was like watching someone throw a flaming turd in there, such were our expressions.

Did anyone ever actually eat those raisins? Mine were the only thing that ever lasted longer than a week, and they would sit, forgotten, at the bottom of my trick-or-treat bag until the following year, when out of curiosity, I would open the box to see that they had shriveled even more than normal and were now as hard as if they had been actual rabbit turds left out to dry for a year.

The best part of this Montana Ave store halloween were the bakeries who, instead of handing out candy, gave samples of their wares. There must be at least 85 bakeries and cupcake stores on Montana, many of which are new and trying to lure new customers. One such shop was a new bundt-cake store, and they had set up tables outside the shop with plates and plates of cake samples. Beautiful, neat squares of cake with swirly dollops of frosting on top.

These cakes were delicious: red velvet, pumpkin spice, chocolate, and white chocolate raspberry. I'm not exaggerating when I say there was a small stampede of adults charging forward to get at these cakes. I don't know what it is, but free cake samples seem to turn grown men and women into animals, pushing, shoving, stuffing their faces like they've never seen food before.

By the end of the day, that cake stand was in shambles, trodden chunks of cake ground into the sidewalk, frosting smeared in the hair of the poor woman cutting the samples, those neat squares of cake giving way to large chunks hastily cut with what must have been a spoon. I think eventually, that woman just gave up and threw whole cakes into the crowd, letting people just stick their faces into the cake-pans and fight it out for themselves. It was like a scene from Quest For Fire. It was cake-madness.

I could go on and on about this, but I will stop myself now because I do, in fact, have a wine recommendation for you! This is another wine for which I wrote tasting notes on TheWineSpies.com, and which happens to be on sale today only, on their website.

Let me say before I go any further, that although I write tasting notes for The Wine Spies, I do not make any money off of their wine sales, so when I suggest a wine to you that they happen to be selling, it is genuinely because I think the wine is terrific and the price, for you, is right.

Today's wine is a Summers Estate 2006 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley. This is a really lovely wine, and again, Peter, it fits the bill as far as being fruity and full-bodied without being bitter or overly tannic or acidic.

This wine has a beautiful purple berry color, an amazingly layered nose and palate of fresh and stewed blackberries, ripe black cherry, currant, dried cherry, sandalwood, cinnamon and chocolate. It's got a wonderfully smooth mouthfeel, a nice juicy acidity with very subtle tannins. It's a nicely balanced wine, too, with a medium/long finish of fruit, wood and spice. The wine retails for $59 but Wine Spies are selling it today for $39. It's a great holiday wine, with all that stewed fruit and spice.

Let me know if you try it!

Wine for Chocolate

Like many people, I have a sweet tooth; and, like many people, my sweet tooth focuses on chocolate. I love chocolate: milk chocolate, dark chocolate, filled chocolate, flavored chocolate, chocolate cakes, cream pies, Nutella spread, brownies, cookies, you name it, I love it.

My love for sweets and chocolate goes way, way back: when I was young and got lost in the grocery store, all my parents had to do was look in the check-out aisle where I could always be found sniffing the candy and gum; at night, when I was very young and supposed to be asleep, I could just feel that my parents and siblings were eating chocolate downstairs, and I came down, crying "I'm missing all the fun".

As you can imagine, Halloween was a dream come true for me, and I would get weepy with joy looking at my bag full of candy, and feeling anger and resentment toward anyone who had been crap enough to give me one of those teeny boxes of raisins. I mean, come on, raisins? Who are you trying to kid? You may as well just have taken your five bucks and thrown it in the trash, because I guarantee, that's where your raisins went. The biggest problem I had was not eating all of my candy in one night. Unlike my sister, who kept her candy in a pillowcase in her closet, and would still have candy in it the following Halloween, I struggled to have any candy remaining a few days after the holiday.

One unfortunate Halloween when I was about 7 or 8 years old, my parents went out of town and my grandparents were staying with us. Not knowing that they really needed to take the candy away from me, my grandparents left me alone with my loot, and I must have eaten it all in one sitting, because I woke up in the middle of the night pulling a Linda Blair, which my poor sister then had to clean up.

By far the best chocolate story from my youth is the chocolate-covered cherry story. My father used to be the chocolate-master: he kept chocolate hidden in various places and would bring it out and give some to us whenever he saw fit. I didn't have to be too old or too bright to realize that he always kept the chocolate in the small bar in our den where he kept the booze. One day when I was about nine or ten years old, I was alone at home, and fell victim to a chocolate craving of biblical proportions. Unable to control myself, I went to the bar where there was a box of recently opened chocolate covered cherries. Carefully, I removed one of the cherries from its tray and ate it, putting the box back exactly where it had been.

That first one was so delicious, with the smooth milk chocolate and that sweet syrupy cherry middle, that I just had to have another one. And another one after that, and another and another, until, with horror, I realized that there were only four chocolate covered cherries left in the box. Frantically, I rearranged them in a few different ways until I found the configuration that I felt best made the four chocolates look like many, many more, and put the box back in the bar.

A day or so later, we were all in the den watching television, when my father got up from his chair and asked the question that usually filled me with glee: "Is it time for a treat?". I blanched, I froze, I panicked, I decided this was a good moment to make my exit while still keeping my cool. So I jumped up from the couch with a frenzied "I have to go to the bathroom", ran from the room, got into my bed and hid under the covers. After a few minutes, during which time I just knew my family had discovered the missing chocolates, I heard my father call my name. It was said with a kind of accusing, yet coaxing tone, the kind you might use with a puppy who is hiding after peeing on the floor. He called my name, and I decided to maintain my cover and throw him off the scent by shrieking back: "I didn't eat them!!!"

To this day, no one in my family can look at a chocolate covered cherry without remembering that day. So to commemorate the demise of those chocolate cherries, I suggest we have a taste of one of Steve's and my favorite ports, Heitz Cellars Ink Grade Port Napa Valley. This fortified, sweet wine is a blend of many lush Portuguese grapes, and smells richly of dark cherries, blueberries, raspberries, coffee and yes, chocolate. It is delicious on its own, but also complements strong blue cheese and yup, you guessed it, chocolate. A bottle of this rarely lasts longer than 2 weeks in our house. It would appear that nothing sweet is safe with me...just ask the cherries.