All of the recipes from my microbakery days are written down in mixed units of measure. How did this happen? My then-boyfriend had created a program where I could input all the ingredients in order to find the ideal price. Whenever I’d make chocolate-chip cookies in the aftermath of the bakery and the relationship, I’d add three more ounces than he would’ve advised me. The spite used to bring joy to my heart, put a pep in my kitchen step. 

But the measurements, the grams versus ounces of it all, don’t make any sense now; I don’t know how they came to make sense then. I thought of flour in grams but chocolate in ounces. Sugar, grams; butter, ounces. Was all of this about spite? The bakery and the relationship go hand in hand in my head, and I had to grapple with it more than I ever had while writing On Eating. I stopped baking while I was writing the book. The only other time I stopped baking was right after we broke up and the bakery went with it, because I decided to finally have a good time in the way that other people have defined “a good time”: drinking, dancing, yada yada yada. There was something broken in my relationship to baking that I’d never dealt with, because I’d rolled out of that long relationship as well as the microbakery business and into a queen-size mattress on the floor in Bushwick.

Now the copyedits are in and I felt the urge to bake an olive oil cake. Carambola are in their peak season, so I sliced a couple on the mandoline, removed the seeds, and layered them with brown sugar on the parchment before pouring in the batter. I love to use abundant in-season fruit as my frosting; this is what baking in San Juan has taught me. Why fiddle with a buttercream that will melt when I can use what’s around?

Now I want to make muffins again and correct the recipe record. I used to drop off muffins by the dozen to a natural grocer in Massapequa each week. This is the recipe: