Chapter 7 - 3
Kitty’s Medovik, Lina’s Eight-Layer Honey Cloud Cake
3 / 4 cup granulated sugar
1 / 4 cup honey
2 tablespoons unsalted butter 3 large eggs, at room temperature, beaten with a fork 1 teaspoon baking soda 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more to roll out the dough 1 cup heavy whipping cream 32 ounces sour cream 2 cups powdered sugar Whole strawberries for decoration
Preheat the oven to 350?F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. In a medium saucepan, heat the granulated sugar, honey, and butter over medium-low heat, whisking occasionally, until the sugar is melted, 5to 7minutes. Don’t use high heat or the mixture may scorch on the bottom.
As soon as the sugar is dissolved, remove the mixture from the heat, and while it’s still hot, add the beaten eggs in a slow, steady stream while whisking vigorously until all the eggs are incorporated (whisk constantly so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs). Whisk in the baking soda until no lumps remain, then fold in the flour 1 / 2 cup at a time with a spatula until the dough reaches a clay consistency and doesn’t stick to your hands.
Cut the dough into 8equal pieces. On a well-floured surface, roll each piece out into a thin 9-inch circle about 1 / 8 inch thick. Sprinkle the top with a little flour to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin. Place a 9-inch plate or the base from a springform pan over the rolled-out dough and trace around it with a knife to make perfect circles. Keep the scraps for later.
Transfer 2 rounds of the dough to the prepared baking sheet and bake for 4to 5minutes, until golden. Transfer the rounds to a wire rack and let cool completely. Repeat with the remaining rounds.
Once the rounds are baked, place the dough scraps on the same baking sheet and bake for 4to 5minutes, until golden. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely, then crush the scraps with a rolling pin until you have fine crumbs.
To make the frosting, beat the heavy cream in a medium bowl until fluffy and stiff peaks form. In a large bowl, whisk together the sour cream and the powdered sugar. Fold the whipped cream into the sour cream mixture and refrigerate the frosting until ready to use.
To assemble the cake, spread about 1 / 3 cup frosting on one cake round, then top with another round, alternating frosting and cake layers until all the cake rounds are used up. Don’t skimp on the frosting since the cake needs to absorb some of the cream to become ultra soft and press the cake layers down gently as you go to keep the layers from having air gaps. Frost the top and sides with the remaining frosting.
Dust the top and sides with the cake crumbs, then cover the cake with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. The cake needs time to absorb some of the cream and soften, so be patient.
Decorate with whole strawberries and eat with friends of any nation, while listening to “Rags to Riches”
by Tony Bennett.
American summers spun the whole year like a kaleidoscope, Grace thought. Sunshine and lengthening days tumbling every month into a new pattern, the bright jewel-like pieces that were the Briar Club women falling with every spin into fresh shapes.
May. The last petals of the famous D.C. cherry blossoms had long winnowed away over the Tidal Basin like rosy snow, tourists winnowing away with them. The Decoration Day picnic that had now become a tradition, Harland with an arm around Bea’s waist as he flipped hamburgers on the grill, telling them he’d gotten feelers from the International Organizations Division. “What on earth is that?”
Bea asked, popping the top on a Coca-Cola bottle.
“Sounds like the dullest thing in the world,”
Grace said, wandering up with a Schlitz in hand. She gave Harland a reassuring smile, in case he was worried about her saying anything to Bea about that one time in March.
“If it sounds dull, that means it’s CIA,”
Harland said, somewhat glumly. “I don’t know if I’m a fit for the intelligence bums—they’re looser than the FBI, all Yale and Harvard types. The kind who wear loud ties and write novels in their spare time. Lefties and loonies, Mr.Hoover used to call ’em.”
But his face was thoughtful, and Grace decided to break her rule about not nudging.
“You didn’t like the atmosphere with the feds. Maybe try the lefties and loonies?”
She didn’t ask about the mission, but he told them anyway, waving his burger flipper. Something about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, setting up artistic and intellectual projects with Agency funding. “A different way of fighting the Communist spread, maybe. Show those Moscow types there’s a different way over here, better art and a freer exchange of ideas...”
Grace blinked. “Modern artists getting CIA funding?”
“Why not? At least it’s building something with government funds, rather than tearing something down.”
Grace supposed he had a point. Hadn’t all those artists of the Renaissance taken money from popes and princes to paint their ceilings and frescoes? Who cared now about where the money had come from, as long as you could admire the genius?
“It could be a different kind of war. A war of the arts instead of an arms race.”
Harland sounded more thoughtful now, flipping burger patties from grill to plate. “Promote America over Moscow through culture instead of bombs...”
“My idea of culture is Casey at the Bat ,”
Bea said with a laugh, slinging her lanky arm around Harland’s neck.
Which is better than most Soviet poetry , Grace thought, carrying the plate of burger patties in toward the hungry crowd in the kitchen. Soviet art in general; ugh . All that cement-heavy poetic verse about the glory of hard work, all those dreadful State-approved landscapes studded with heroic factory welders. If Grace had tried to paint her flowered wall vine on an apartment wall in Leningrad, her nearest neighbor would probably have reported her for anti-Soviet sentimentality. My little Petrykivka daubings aren’t hurting anyone here , Mama had shouted when Papa objected to the the wall vine she’d recreated from her Kharkiv home, but she’d still had to paint it out, her mouth bitter. Who’s going to remember how to do these things when all our artists have been starved or shot? she’d mumbled, wiping her eyes. Grace wondered what she’d think of her daughter’s wall vine half a world away... “I say jump over to the Agency, G-man,”
Grace advised Harland over one shoulder. “And then we’ll find you a new nickname!”
Summer’s kaleidoscope spun again, almost before the Decoration Day picnic napkins were tossed away, or so it seemed to Grace, and it was June and she found herself glued to the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. Watching that dark-haired, half-shaven, sweaty-looking thug bluster and threaten, wondering how on earth he’d ever conceived such a bee in his bonnet about the Red Menace when he could have been kissing cousins with Joe Stalin. If there was ever a man who would have thrived in a police state, it was McCarthy. “He looks like a hairy old p?cs ,”
Reka grunted, watching the trials at Grace’s side as they smoked their way through a pack of Lucky Strikes, and later she invited Grace to see the portrait she’d done: McCarthy in savage abstract strokes of black and red, more ape than man, teeth nearly bared across the table. “I’m calling it Decency ,”
Reka said with her feral Hungarian grin, and Grace grinned back—that moment during the hearings when they’d both cheered, when the lawyer opposite Tail Gunner Joe lost his temper and snapped, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
McCarthy is done , Grace had thought in that shocked, televised moment. He’s done, and it was on television for the whole world to see. He was done, or soon would be—and maybe she’d be safe here.
Another kaleidoscope spin into July, summer heat and Fourth of July sparklers and Bea—victorious from signing a nineteen-year-old southpaw pitcher to the Senators—corralling them all onto the sandlot for another game as the Briarwood Belles. “We don’t have Mrs.Sutherland to play center this year,”
Bea complained. “Where’d she go off to, anyway?”
Claire replying with a white, set face, “Last fall her husband unexpectedly decided to move the family back to Virginia to focus on the home county in his run-up to the election. They haven’t been back since.”
Grace looking at Claire’s immobile face, remembering the way she’d gone to her room for a while sometime around Halloween, and not come out for days. Maybe, Grace thought, she should break her rule about never nudging and apply another nudge here.
“Any word from the lovely Mrs.Sutherland?”
she murmured to Claire, helping her do up her borrowed catcher’s chest protector. “I do hope she didn’t have any recurrence of the injuries of last fall.”
She still thought about the shoe marks on that long torso... Grace hadn’t thought she could be surprised by the idea of husbands hitting their wives (Russian men tended to have heavy hands; even her good-tempered papa hadn’t been above dealing out a smack when Mama got even vaguely critical of the latest Party directive, and Kirill had certainly been free with his slaps behind the scenes) but Sydney Sutherland’s black-bruised body had shocked her profoundly.
“No,”
Claire said in set tones. “She’s— She’s all right, she just can’t get away right now. Her in-laws swept in for a surprise visit on Halloween and by morning everyone was urging a trip back to Loudon County. And then they just stayed . There’s a whole clan of Sutherlands there. A Klan with a K ,”
she muttered, face looking bleak, and Grace made a mental note to look for newspaper mentions of the young Mr.Sutherland who was so favorably tipped, him and his white teeth and his Bronze Star, for a House seat. He deserved to lose his wife to a redheaded con artist who cooked potato pancakes. (It hadn’t remotely surprised Grace, learning Claire had those particular inclinations. Her training had stressed that you had to be willing to flirt with anyone of any sex if it got you the answers you wanted. American women are perverts , Kirill had huffed, personally offended that a woman might respond more to Grace’s smiles than his. Grace had rolled her eyes on the inside. Kirill could turn any female off men for good.)
August, baking summer heat bringing a new addition to the house, because Fliss’s husband was finally home. “It’s been so long,”
Fliss kept saying, eyes welling. Nearly a year after the end of the conflict in Korea before her Dan was finally demobbed or cut loose or whatever the army called it, one of the last doctors to be sent home from Japan to San Diego; Fliss had met him there with Angela in tow but come back alone: “He’s been retasked to Balboa to fill in for another doctor injured in a car crash.”
She had sighed, passing English shortbread around Grace’s green-walled room. “ Another month or two apart, but supposedly it’s the last delay.”
She dashed away tears but at least they were frustrated tears, angry tears, not those terrible leaden sobs that had torn out of her when Angela was younger. Better angry than despairing.
“Are you two moving right away, Bubble and Squeak?”
Grace had asked, already dreading her loss, but Fliss looked almost shy.
“Well—I have this hope that he could stay with me here until we figure out where we’re headed next. I just don’t want to leave yet... Do you think you could help me talk Mrs.Nilsson around?”
And Grace extolled the virtues of having a doctor in the house until Doilies rethought her position on no men , and it felt like no time at all before the entire Briar Club was watching Dr.Dan’s cab pull up at the curb, his lanky limbs unfolding from the back seat. He seemed slightly bemused to be embraced by so many women he’d never met before, but he rallied to grill some Japanese yakitori on Grace’s hot plate while Fliss slung Angela over one hip and talked about the future. “Once Angela’s in kindergarten I’m starting back at least part-time as a nurse—”
Grace wondered idly if the English girl ever thought about that night over the border at the Chickland Club, the riot where Grace had stabbed a man under the jaw when he came at them. Had Fliss seen the gleam of the little steel spike in her fist?—a blade hardly bigger than a toothpick, which Grace kept in an innocent lipstick tube in her pocket. She was no assassin who could crush skulls with her bare hands, but she’d had training in hand-to-hand fighting; she knew how to keep weapons about you hidden and innocuous. Grace could feel the little spike in its tube in her pocket now as she took her plate of yakitori skewers from Dr.Dan—sharp enough to puncture an eye or tear open a jugular or push a drop of poison through a shirtsleeve. Not that she planned to use it for any of those things, but did it ever hurt to be prepared? She still had her old pistol, too, oiled and loaded, taped under one of her dresser drawers...
September, Lina’s shriek splitting the entire house: “I got in, I got in —”
Her glasses fogging up as she got off the telephone, flinging her arms around Pete. “I’m in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, I’m invited to New York!”
Pete swung her so high her saddle shoes practically scraped the ceiling, Grace got the next hug, Bea leaped around whooping, and Mrs.Nilsson came out to see what all the ruckus was about.