Cardamom-Pistachio Moguls; or, How Pastry Can Strain A Relationship

I call these cakelets, measuring an inch and a half in diametre, Little Moguls. Only slightly adapted from a cupcake recipe by Vanilla Garlic–by “adapted” you are to understand “ignored half of recipe and purchased rice pudding”–it’s denser than your average cupcake and closer to a madeleine. Why “mogul”? Substitute ground pistachios for almonds and flavour with cardamom, and you have what is essentially an Indian financier without the egg white.

It was bitterly cold yesterday in New York, and so I bought a cheeseburger-sized pistachio macaron (a macaron is not a macaroon) from Tisserie instead of my customary macaron slider. For fuel, I told myself. It wasn’t very good. I’ve never tasted one of Ladurée’s legendary macarons, but I feel certain that in Paris they are light and collapsible as a meringue should be; the two halves just kissing, and not mortared together with frangipane thick as buttercream.

The macaron left my hair and coat flecked with crushed pistachio. Shaking myself clean, I remembered that night’s birthday party, and the honoree’s singular passion for the little green nut. (I hardly know him, but this is the sort of detail I hang onto: I can precision-map my grandfather’s palate even though I can barely sit through a meal with him.) I know that the musician-schoolteacher likes pistachios because he happily took over my dessert during a recent (so-so) meal at Flatbush Farm: a pistachio sponge layered with mascarpone, served with pistachio ice cream.

I baked these cupcakes small because I don’t think it’s possible to eat a traditionally-sized cupcake and not feel sick (one exception: you are eight years old). The sound of nuts pulsing in a blender is an ungodly one, to which my roommate’s two ruined phonecalls will attest, but even he agrees that the scent of cardamom is divine. I used a melon-baller to scoop out tiny hemispheres of cake, which I filled in with store-bought rice pudding, just as moist but only an eighth as sickly as the standard buttercream topping. Finally, a sprinkle of crushed pistachios to decorate.

I packed nine or ten of the little cakes into a distinctly unseasonal, red-confetti-lined poinsettia tin, bought to hold the Christmas cookies I got far too drunk to bake, and made my way to the Lower East Side.

I saw my boyfriend just as I was leaving the subway station, and called out his name. How nice to run into him here, so I could walk the eight slushy blocks to the restaurant with my arm in his. We arrive: kisses all around, congratulations, “Oh, how very sweet of you to bake these!” We settle in at the long table and the tin is passed around. I decline my own pastries, noting, quite truthfully, that I’ve been gorging on them all afternoon. But then my boyfriend declines, too, passing along the tin without a word.

He won’t even try one.

“Have you been eating them all afternoon, too?” asks Birthday Boy’s fiancée. (It’s petty, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that someone other than me has noticed the slight.)

“No, but I want to order dinner.”

And just like that, my heart falls. It doesn’t get back on its feet, either, even through glasses of wine and champagne.

Question: who’s assigning the more preposterous quality to these little cakes? He who insists that a tablespoon of cake will swallow his appetite (a magical snack in the fantastic tradition of Roald Dahl), or I who have heaped upon that same spoonful all my values and aspirations, seeing in my boyfriend’s rejection of it a complete dismissal of me?

Don’t let my heartache colour your perception of this recipe, which is an unusual, delicate and very grown-up one. Poured into a tart pan, it also makes an exemplary, if rather rich, teacake.